MORPHOLOGY

Czech assigns to each noun either the feminine, masculine, or neuter gender. While this is not apparent when a noun stands by itself, we do have to take note of the grammatical gender when we conjugate verbs or modify the noun by an adjective. Svobodová explains that most English lexemes created by way of compounding (e.g., showbusiness, cashflow, know-how) will be assigned the masculine gender in Czech. However, some can become feminine, neuter, or they can be assigned to any one of the three genders.¹⁰ A very interesting phenomenon I observed while collecting my own data is that on social media, users will often take an English word, for instance possibility, and they will use it in a Czech sentence and assign it the feminine gender, because the Czech word for possibility (‘možnost’) is feminine. As such, we end up with words such as possibilita because in Czech, many feminine nouns end with the letter a.

In regard to derivational morphology, the root of the English word will be preserved in its more or less original form and a Czech derivational affix will be added to create new meaning (e.g., from surf we get surfař, meaning 'surfer'). Adjectives in Czech are usually formed by preserving the English noun and adding a Czech suffix to derive an adjective (e.g., interviewovaný, meaning ‘interviewed'). Each adjective must agree with the noun it is describing in gender and number. Finally, to derive new Czech verbs, the English verb will be preserved in its more or less original form and the Czech morpheme -t, which denotes the infinitive, will be added as a suffix (e.g., interviewovat, meaning ‘to interview').¹⁰

PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLING

As Rejzek mentions, it is important to emphasize that in writing, some words will retain their original English spelling and will only be enhanced by some of the aforementioned inflectional and derivational morphological processes. However, in some cases, the spelling will be altered to make the words easier to pronounce, especially for those who aren’t proficient in English (e.g., backhand may be written as bekhend, business as byznys, and paperback as pejprbek). The issues of pronunciation and spelling are, according to Rejzek, the main hurdle Czechs face when adopting English loanwords because there are significant differences between spelling and pronunciation in English. This is not the case in Czech where virtually all words are pronounced as they are spelled. While there are continuing debates about whether we should keep the English spelling or not, Rejzek contends that generally, the spelling of most English words will be altered to fit Czech phonotactics.¹¹

SYNTAX

According to Konvička, the traditional Czech syntax is undergoing rapid changes as well. One example is the new usage of the conjunction protože, meaning ‘because’. He explains that traditionally, we would expect to see a subordinate clause follow this conjunction. However, what we can observe is that particularly on Twitter, users often include just a single noun phrase after this conjunction. For instance, during my own data collection, I came across the sentence “Píšu, protože víno,” literally translated as ‘I write this because wine,’ implying that the speaker wrote something because they were under the influence of the alcohol found in wine. Konvička mentions that this construction is becoming more widespread, and we can even encounter it in political slogans and other official texts.¹²

Lastly, Prokšová argues that the influence of English is visible in the (prescriptively wrong) omittance of Czech auxiliary verbs. For instance, in English, we say “I thought that…,” but Czech grammar requires one to use the auxiliary verb být, meaning ‘to be’, in addition to the verb myslet, meaning ‘to think’. As such, “I thought that…” should correctly be translated into Czech as “Já jsem myslel, že…,” with jsem acting as the auxiliary verb conjugated for first person singular. However, as Prokšová explains, we observe that Czechs often omit the auxiliary verb, most likely due to the influence of English. This creates new, simpler constructions that are understandable but not entirely correct in terms of prescriptive grammar rules.²