Czech

Seven cases, a consonant nobody else has, and words that manage to be words without a single vowel.

What sets it apart

• Strč prst skrz krk is a real Czech sentence, meaning stick a finger through your throat, and it contains no vowels at all. R and l can carry a syllable on their own.
• The letter ř is a rolled r and a zh pronounced at the same time. Very few languages have it and foreigners rarely get it right.
• Seven cases, including a vocative used every time you call someone by name.
• Czech and Slovak speakers understand each other without learning. Czechoslovak television broadcast in both and nobody translated.
• The accents on the letters were invented by Jan Hus in the fifteenth century, and the idea spread from here to half of eastern Europe.
• Something incomprehensible is španělská vesnice, a Spanish village. Czech does not blame the language, it blames a place nobody has been to.

What it opens

The language Kafka lived beside and Kundera wrote in, with a consonant system that makes every other pronunciation feel easy afterwards. Prague stops being a postcard. Prague beyond the postcard: beer culture with its own vocabulary, Hrabal in the original, and a country where speaking Czech makes you a minor celebrity.

Words with no translation

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Czech parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Czech vs Polish → Czech vs Slovak → Czech vs Russian →

Czech in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →