Slovaks in Czechia – Czechs in Slovakia

Czech and Slovak are two closely related languages which together form the Czecho-Slovak sub-group of the West Slavonic languages, to which there belong two further subgroups, the Lusatian and the Lechitic. In spite of their similarity and a nearly complete mutual intelligibility (see below), the literary languages are clearly differentiated, which is among other things due to the fact that they were standardized on the basis of different dialects of the Czecho-Slovak dialectal continuum (Czech on the basis of the Central Bohemian dialects in the Prague area, Slovak on the basis of the Central Slovak dialects in the area of the town Martin). Although Czechs and Slovaks lived together in one state for the relatively short period of 68 years (1918–1938 and 1945–1992), compared to their long literary tradition (the first Czech texts were written in the second half of the 13th century), their linguistic relations have been very close since the middle ages. Most of the time, however, it was an asymmetrical relationship: Czech was used as a written language in the territory of contemporary Slovakia (at that time Upper Hungary) since the early 15th century, and even when slovakized varieties of Czech began to emerge (since the 16th century) and eventually a Slovak literary language was introduced (since the late 18th century), the Slovak literary tradition always developed in opposition to and in permanent contact with the Czech literary language. For some time Slovak was used to a larger extent by the catholic part of the population, whereas the protestants continued to write in Czech, the language in which their Bible was written. After a period during which the use of the Czech language had been weakened, mainly due the centralist reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph I., strengthening the importance of German as the language of the Empire, the Czech National Movement was successful in developing a new literary norm in the first half of the 19th century. This new norm was based on the language of the so-called “Golden Era” at the end of the 16th century and was quite different from the language as it was really spoken. From the 1850s, the National Movement managed to strengthen their influence on the educational system, and soon Czech was used in schools