Slovak language

Slovak, is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. It is part of the Indo-European language family, and is one of the Slavic languages, which are part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch. Spoken by approximately five million people as a native language, primarily ethnic Slovaks, it serves as the official language of Slovakia and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union.
Slovak is closely related to Czech, to the point of very high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish. Like other Slavic languages, Slovak is a fusional language with a complex system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German, as well as other Slavic languages.

History

The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in the high medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later mid-19th century, the modern Slovak alphabet and written standard became codified by Ľudovít Štúr and reformed by Martin Hattala. The Moravian dialects spoken in the western part of the country along the border with the Czech Republic are also sometimes classified as Slovak, although some of their western variants are closer to Czech; they nonetheless form the bridge dialects between the two languages.

Geographic distribution and status

Slovak language is primarily spoken in Slovakia. The country's constitution declared it the official language of the state :
Constitution of Slovakia, Article 6.
Beside that, national minorities and ethnic groups also have explicit permission to use their distinct languages. Slovakia is a country with established Language policy concerning its official language.

Regulation

Standard Slovak is defined by an Act of Parliament on the State Language of the Slovak Republic. According to this law, the Ministry of Culture approves and publishes the codified form of Slovak based on the judgment of specialised Slovak linguistic institutes and specialists in the area of the state language. This is traditionally the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics, which is part of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In practice, the Ministry of Culture publishes a document that specifies authoritative reference books for standard Slovak usage, which is called the codification handbook. The current regulations were published on 15 March 2021. There are four such publications:

'Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu', 2013;
'Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka', 2020;
'Pravidlá slovenskej výslovnosti', 2009;
'Morfológia slovenského jazyka', 1966;

Slovak speakers are also found in the Slovak diaspora in the United States, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Serbia, Ireland, Romania, Poland, Canada, Hungary, Germany, Croatia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia, Austria, Ukraine, Norway, and other countries to a lesser extent.
Slovak language is one of the official languages of Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.

Slovak language high schools abroad

Budapest, 'Szlovák Tanítási Nyelvű Óvoda, Általános Iskola, Gimnázium és Kollégium'
Békéscsaba, 'Szlovák Gimnázium, Általános Iskola, Óvoda és Kollégium'
Bački Petrovac, 'Ján Kollár Gymnasium and Students' Home'
Kovačica, 'Gimnazija Mihailo Pupin'
Nădlac, 'Liceul Teoretic Jozef Gregor Tajovský'
Dialects

There are many Slovak dialects, which are divided into the following four basic groups:

Western Slovak dialects
Central Slovak dialects
Eastern Slovak dialects
Lowland Slovak dialects

The fourth group of dialects is often not considered a separate group, but a subgroup of Central and Western Slovak dialects, but it is currently undergoing changes due to contact with surrounding languages and long-time geographical separation from Slovakia.
The dialect groups differ mostly in phonology, vocabulary, and tonal inflection. Syntactic differences are minor. Central Slovak forms the basis of the present-day standard language. Not all dialects are fully mutually intelligible. It may be difficult for an inhabitant of the western Slovakia to understand a dialect from eastern Slovakia and the other way around.
The dialects are fragmented geographically, separated by numerous mountain ranges. The first three groups already existed in the 10th century. All of them are spoken by the Slovaks outside Slovakia, and central and western dialects form the basis of the lowland dialects.
The western dialects contain features common with the Moravian dialects in the Czech Republic, the southern central dialects contain a few features common with South Slavic languages, and the eastern dialects a few features common with Polish and the East Slavonic languages. Lowland dialects share some words and areal features with the languages surrounding them.

Phonology

Slovak contains 15 vowel phonemes and 29 consonants.
The phoneme /æ/ is marginal and often merges with /e/; the two are normally only distinguished in higher registers.
Vowel length is phonemic in Slovak and both short and long vowels have the same quality. In addition, Slovak, unlike Czech, employs a "rhythmic law" which forbids two long vowels from following one another within the same word. In such cases the second vowel is shortened. For example, adding the locative plural ending -ách to the root vín- creates vínach, not *vínách. This law also applies to diphthongs; for example, the adjective meaning "white" is biely, not *bielý.
Slovak has final devoicing; when a voiced consonant is at the end of a word before a pause, it is devoiced to its voiceless counterpart. For example, pohyb is pronounced and prípad is pronounced.
Consonant clusters containing both voiced and voiceless elements are entirely voiced if the last consonant is a voiced one, or voiceless if the last consonant is voiceless. For example, otázka is pronounced and vzchopiť sa is pronounced. This rule applies also over the word boundary. For example, prísť domov and viac jahôd . The voiced counterpart of "ch" is, and the unvoiced counterpart of "h" is.

Orthography

Slovak uses the Latin script with small modifications that include the four diacritics placed above certain letters
Italic letters are used in loanwords and foreign names.
The primary principle of Slovak spelling is the phonemic principle. The secondary principle is the morphological principle: forms derived from the same stem are written in the same way even if they are pronounced differently. An example of this principle is the assimilation rule. The tertiary principle is the etymological principle, which can be seen in the use of i after certain consonants and of y after other consonants, although both i and y are usually pronounced the same way.
Finally, the rarely applied grammatical principle occurs when, for example, the basic singular form and plural form of masculine adjectives are written differently with no difference in pronunciation. Such spellings are most often remnants of differences in pronunciation that were present in Proto-Slavic.
Most loanwords from foreign languages are respelt using Slovak principles either immediately or later. For example, "weekend" is spelled víkend, "software" – softvér, "gay" – gej, and "quality" is spelled kvalita. Personal and geographical names from other languages using Latin alphabets keep their original spelling unless a Slovak exonym exists.
Slovak features some heterophonic homographs, the most common examples being krásne versus krásne .

Grammar

Syntax

The main features of Slovak syntax are as follows:

The verb agrees in person and number with its subject.

Some examples include the following:

Adjectives, pronouns and numerals agree in person, gender and case with the noun to which they refer.
Adjectives precede their noun. Botanic or zoological terms are exceptions as is the naming of Holy Spirit in a majority of churches.

Word order in Slovak is relatively free, since strong inflection enables the identification of grammatical roles regardless of word placement. This relatively free word order allows the use of word order to convey topic and emphasis.
Some examples are as follows:
The unmarked order is subject–verb–object. Variation in word order is generally possible, but word order is not completely free.
In the above example, the noun phrase ten veľký muž cannot be split up, so that the following combinations are not possible:
And the following sentence is stylistically infelicitous:
The regular variants are as follows:

Morphology

Articles

Slovak, like every major Slavic language other than Bulgarian and Macedonian, does not have articles. The demonstrative pronoun in masculine form ten or tá in feminine and to in neuter respectively, may be used in front of the noun in situations where definiteness must be made explicit.

Nouns, adjectives, pronouns

Slovak nouns are inflected for case and number. There are six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, and instrumental. The vocative is purely optional and most of the time unmarked. It is used mainly in spoken language and in some fixed expressions: mama mum vs. mami mum!, tato, oco dad vs. tati, oci dad!, pán Mr., sir vs. pane sir. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Nouns have inherent gender. There are three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Adjectives and pronouns must agree with nouns in case, number, and gender.

Numerals

The numerals 0–10 have unique forms, with numerals 1–4 requiring specific gendered representations. Numerals 11–19 are formed by adding násť to the end of each numeral. The suffix dsať is used to create numerals 20, 30 and 40; for numerals 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90, desiat is used. Compound numerals are combinations of these words formed in the same order as their mathematical symbol is written.
The numerals are as follows:

1–10		11–20		10–100
1	jeden, jedno	11	jedenásť	10	desať
2	dva, dve, dvaja	12	dvanásť	20	dvadsať
3	tri, traja	13	trinásť	30	tridsať
4	štyri, štyria	14	štrnásť	40	štyridsať
5	päť	15	pätnásť	50	päťdesiat
6	šesť	16	šestnásť	60	šesťdesiat
7	sedem	17	sedemnásť	70	sedemdesiat
8	osem	18	osemnásť	80	osemdesiat
9	deväť	19	devätnásť	90	deväťdesiat
10	desať	20	dvadsať	100	sto

Some higher numbers: dvesto, tristo, štyristo, deväťsto, tisíc, tisícsto, dvetisíc, stotisíc, dvestotisíc, milión, miliarda.
Counted nouns have two forms. The most common form is the plural genitive, while the plural form of the noun when counting the amounts of 2–4, etc., is usually the nominative form without counting but gender rules do apply in many cases.