Czech

Last updated: 2020-06-26

Background

Language Family: Indo-European / Slavic / West / Czech-Slovak

• Speakers of Czech reside in a multitude of places included, but not limited to, the Czech Republic, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia.

Phonology

Consonants

• Harkins and Hnyková (1980) argue for /t/, /d/, and /n/ as dental consonants (p. 4); however, Šimáčková, Podlipský, and Chládková (2012) and Bičan (2011) do not (p. 226; p. 14).
• Bičan (2011) argues for /ɣ/ rather than /ɦ/ (p. 15).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d		c ɟ	k ɡ
Affricates		ts	tʃ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		x	ɦ
Nasals	m	n		ɲ
Trills		r r̝
Approximants		l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced. Both alveolar trills are voiced, but the phoneme on the right is pronounced with frication.

Vowels

• Vowel length is contrastive in Czech, although /oː/ only appears in loanwords. Long vowels are indicated by an acute accent (´). An overring (˚) atop ⟨u⟩ also indicates length (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 7).
  
• /eu/ and /au/ were introduced into the Czech language through loanwords; however, now days they are included in the vowel inventory (Bičan 2011, 21; Šimáčková, Podlipský, and Chládková 2012, 23).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ɛ		o
Low		a

Diphthongs
/ɛu/, /au/, /ou/

Alphabet

• Preceding /i/, ⟨ť⟩, ⟨ď⟩, and ⟨ň⟩ are written as ⟨t⟩, ⟨d⟩, and ⟨n⟩, respectively (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 6). This does not pose any ambiguity related to whether the alveolar or palatal consonants are underlying because ⟨t⟩, ⟨d⟩, and ⟨n⟩, representing /t/, /d/, and /n/, respectively (in native words), are never followed by ⟨i⟩ or ⟨í⟩ (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 12).
  • Also, preceding /ɛ/, ⟨ť⟩, ⟨ď⟩, and ⟨ň⟩ are written as ⟨t⟩, ⟨d⟩, and ⟨n⟩, respectively, + ⟨ě⟩ (ibid.). This also does not create ambiguity, given that ⟨t⟩, ⟨d⟩, and ⟨n⟩, representing /t/, /d/, and /n/, respectively (in native words), are never followed by ⟨ě⟩.
• ⟨ó⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨w⟩, and ⟨x⟩ appear in loanwords (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 2–3).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
á	/aː/
b	/b/
c	/ts/
č	/tʃ/
d	/d/
ď	/ɟ/	the uppercase form is ⟨Ď⟩
e	/ɛ/
é	/ɛː/
ě	/ɛ/; /jɛ/	/ɛ/ following palatal consonants; /jɛ/ elsewhere
f	/f/
g	/ɡ/
h	/ɦ/
i	/i/
í	/iː/
j	/j/
k	/k/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
ň	/ɲ/
o	/o/
p	/p/
r	/r/
ř	/r̝/
s	/s/
š	/ʃ/
t	/t/
ť	/c/	the uppercase form is ⟨Ť⟩
u	/u/
ú	/uː/
ů	/uː/
v	/v/
y	/i/
ý	/iː/
z	/z/
ž	/ʒ/
Digraph
ch	/x/
au	/au̯/
eu	/ɛu̯/
ou	/ou̯/

Lenition Rules

• Voiceless consonants become voiced if followed by voiced consonants (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 10).
  
• /j/ may delete word-initially if preceding a consonant (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 14).
  
• /ɦ/ is present in the language due to the lenition of /ɡ/, which is common within the Slavic languages (Sussex and Cubberley 2006, 143).
  
• Consonant gemination is typically avoided in Czech (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 9). Instances of it typically undergo degemination.
• /d/ may be realized intervocalically as a flap (Machač and Skarnitzl 2009 as cited in Šimáčková, Podlipský, and Chládková (2012), p. 226).
• /v/ may approximate to [ʋ] (Skarnitzl and Volín 2005 as cited in Šimáčková, Podlipský, and Chládková (2012), p. 226).

Misc. Rules

• Glottal epenthesis occurs preceding vowels in word-initial positions (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 13).
  
• The voiceless plosives are often aspirated, but it’s not contrastive to their non-aspirated counterparts (Harkins and Hnyková 1980, 5).
• /n/ assimilates in place preceding velar consonants and /m/ assimilates in place preceding labio-dental consonants (Šimáčková, Podlipský, and Chládková 2012, 226–27).

References

Bičan, Aleš. 2011. “Phonotactics of Czech.” PhD thesis, Brno, Czechia: Masaryk University.

Harkins, William E, and Marie Hnyková. 1980. A Modern Czech Grammar. New York: Kingʹs Crown Press.

Machač, Pavel, and Radek Skarnitzl. 2009. Principles of Phonetic Segmentation. Nakladatelství Epocha.

Šimáčková, Šárka, Václav Jonáš Podlipský, and Kateřina Chládková. 2012. “Czech Spoken in Bohemia and Moravia.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 42 (2): 225–32. doi:10.1017/S0025100312000102.

Skarnitzl, Radek, and Jan Volín. 2005. “Czech Voiced Labiodental Continuant Discrimination from Basic Acoustic Data.” In INTERSPEECH.

Sussex, Roland, and Paul V. Cubberley. 2006. The Slavic Languages. 1. publ. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.