The Czech Writing System

Unlike its East Slavic relatives such as Russian and Serbian, the Czech language's writing system is based on the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic and contains a total of 42 letters.

The pivotal figure in the establishment of the Czech writing system, as well as the writing systems for Slovak and Sorbian, is the religious reformer Jan Hus, who lived from 1369 to 1415. According to Omniglot, Hus "created the system of having one grapheme (letter) for every phoneme (sound) in the language by adding accents to some of the letters."1 If you compare then the spelling conventions in Czech to those found in its Slavic cousin Polish (which was not impacted by Hus' innovations), you will notice a big difference. Omniglot points to the following example: "in Czech the sound ch, as in church, is written č, but the same sound is written cz in Polish."1 Thus the diacritic mark placed on the č makes it possible to represent a sound not found in any of the individual letters of the Latin alphabet.

Additional resources on the Czech writing system can be found on the Web at:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/Czech.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_alphabet

For information on The Czech Language, please see our Quick Facts Library.

1 "Czech alphabet (ตัวอักษรไทย)" Omniglot: A Guide to Writing Systems
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/Czech.htm
[Accessed December 17, 2004]

2"Czech language" Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9071900
[Accessed December 17, 2004]

3 "Czech alphabet" Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_alphabet
[Accessed December 16, 2004]

4 "Czech alphabet" Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_alphabet
[Accessed December 16, 2004]

5 "Czech alphabet" Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_alphabet
[Accessed December 16, 2004]