The national language is Czech which is spoken by 96 % of the population. However, English is widely spoken, followed by German and Russian. If you can learn and use a few Czech words, it will always be appreciated by the locals.
The Czech alphabet has 33 letters. Pronunciation and learning Czech can be quite hard for native English speakers. The Czech language belongs to Slavic languages and is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Serbian. Czech dates back to the 11th century. It belongs to the ‘synthetic’ language group, which means that unlike English and other ‘analytical’ languages, different grammatical aspects are expressed in one word by changing the structure of that word – adding an ending or prefix, modifying the core of the word, etc. In analytical languages such as English, the same is achieved by using separate auxiliary verbs, pronouns or adjectives while the actual word remains unchanged. In Czech, one word is often sufficient to express what English can only achieve by using multiple words.
