Distinguishing between the Czech and Slovak Languages

The Czech and Slovak languages are closely related and bear great resemblance to one another on the printed page. For this reason, persons who are unfamiliar with these languages run the risk of confusing them. However, it is possible to distinguish between the written forms of the two languages, even if one does not have reading knowledge of them. This chapter discusses the simplest way of doing so.

1. Differential letter-plus-diacritic combinations.

The easiest and surest way to differentiate between Czech and Slovak is to take note of the characters used in the text. Each of the two languages has certain combinations of letter plus diacritic that the other lacks and so are diagnostic of its identity. By noting the presence (or absence) of these combinations in a given text, the cataloger can readily identify whether it is Czech or Slovak.

Following is a list of the distinctive character-plus-diacritic combinations for Czech and Slovak.

Letter-plus-diacritic combinations found only in Czech

* The letter U with a small circle above it – ů.

* The letter E with a háček above it – ě

* The letter R with a háček above it – ř

Letter-plus-diacritic combinations found only in Slovak

* The letter A with an umlaut above it – ä

* The letter L followed by a caron – l’

* The letter L with the acute accent above it – ĺ

* The letter R with the acute accent above it – ŕ

* The letter O with a circumflex above it – ô

Example of distinguishing between Czech and Slovak through letter-plus-diacritic combinations

Having considered the letter-and-diacritic combinations specific to Czech and Slovak, we shall now consider a concrete example of how they can be used as diagnostic criteria. Here is a short passage from a narrative given in both Czech and Slovak versions:

Source: Text from Michael Heim, Zlata Meyerstein, and Dean Worth, Readings in Czech. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1985, p. 68.

A number of words in the text of the lefthand column contain the letter-plus-diacritic combinations ř and ě, the occurrences of which are marked in boldface type. The presence of these combinations indicates that the text is written in Czech. By contrast, the text in the righthand column has two occurrences of the letter-plus-diacritic combination l’, marked in boldface, which is characteristic of Slovak. Furthermore, in contrast to the Czech text, it contains absolutely no examples of the letter-plus-diacritic combinations ř and ě, despite the fact that, for the most part, it uses words that are directly cognate to those words in the Czech version that have them. The systematic absence of two letter-plus-diacritic combinations very common in Czech, coupled with the presence of a letter-plus-diacritic combination characteristic of Slovak, indicates that the language of the text is Slovak.

2. Place of publication: an extralinguistic clue to the linguistic identity of text

With regard to Czech and Slovak books, the language of a resource often correlates with the place in which it has been published. Thus, if a resource has been published in a Czech city, its language most likely will be Czech and, by the same token, if a resource has been published in a Slovak city, its language most probably will be Slovak.

Major Czech cities (and publishing centers) include: České Budějovice, Brno, Hradec Králové, Jihlava, Liberec, Olomouc, Ostrava, Plzeň, Pardubice, Praha (Prague), Ústí nad Labem, Zlín.

Major Slovak cities (and publishing centers) include: Banská Bystrica, Bratislava, Košice, Martin, Nitra, Prešov, Ružomberok, Trenčín, Trnava, Žilina.

Note, however, that the correlation between place and language does not always hold. This is especially true of books and serials consisting of collections of articles, that is to say aggregate works, which are especially common in academic publishing. In such books, one will frequently find that articles written by Czech authors are written in Czech and those written by Slovak authors are written in Slovak, regardless of whether the book in question has been published in the Czech Republic or Slovakia. (Note that this also held good for Czechoslovakia.) Thus, whenever you deal with such an aggregate work, it is good to examine briefly each component article (or at least the title of the article in the table of contents) to ascertain the language in which it has been written: if the book in question contains text written in both languages, this should be indicated in a note (RDA 7.12.1.3 and the LC-PCC PS thereto).

Revised: May 17, 2015; March 26, 2019.