Czech FAQs

Where is Czech spoken?

Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic. It is also spoken in the historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and southwestern Silesia.

There are Czech expat communities in the USA, the UK, Canada, Israel, Slovakia, Romania, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

How many people speak Czech?

Around 11 million people speak Czech in the Czech Republic where it is the official language.

There are Czech immigrants living in several European countries, the USA, Canada and Australia, but the communities are either very small or very dispersed; no estimates of how many people speak Czech outside the Czech Republic are available.

Czech is a fairly popular language among language learners with hundreds of thousands of learners on various language learning apps.

What makes Czech difficult to learn?

Like other languages, the difficulty of learning Czech is rather subjective. Czech is a Slavic language, and speakers of other Slavic languages may find it easier to learn than speakers of other languages because of the shared similarities.

Here are some of the things that can make Czech difficult for foreign language learners: complex inflection system with 7 cases, 2 numbers, 4 genders, 8 different verb classes; several sounds that may be challenging to pronounce; complex syntax and orthography.

There are upsides too. For instance, pronunciation rules are fairly regular: there is usually one sound per letter, with only a few extra rules.

Is Czech a Slavic language?

Czech is a West Slavic language, a sub-group of the Slavic languages, a group in the Indo-European language family. Other West Slavic languages are: Polish, Silesian, Kashubian, Sorbian and Slovak.

Other Slavic languages include Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Rusyn (East Slavic), Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (South Slavic).

Are Czech and Slovak the same language?

Czech and Slovak may get mixed up because of their joint history. Czechoslovakia used to be one country, which in 1992 was divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Czech and Slovak are two related languages; they are both West Slavic languages. Although Slovak is similar to the literary version of the Czech language and the two languages are mutually intelligible to some degree, they are two distinct languages, not dialects or varieties of one another.