Slovak Matters: If it looks like Slovak and sounds like Slovak, it still may be Czech

While Slovaks seem to naturally understand Czech, for foreigners who have learned Slovak, Czech is often unintelligible.

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The woman from the Prague embassy was getting cross with me. She had called to place an order of some kind, but after asking her three times to repeat her request, I still had no clue what she wanted.

"I would have thought your paper would have people answering phones who at least spoke Slovak," she snapped.

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"I do," I replied, "but you're speaking Czech. It's a different language."

If there's anything that gets my dander up, it's a Czech who thinks that all Slovak speakers should automatically understand the lingo spoken west of the Morava river. For people who grew up in the former Czechoslovakia this may be a reasonable assumption, but for younger Czechs and Slovaks, and particularly for expats, the other's language might as well be Finnish.

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Alright, that's an exaggeration, but the differences between Czech and Slovak for a foreigner can be a real handicap, and one that is underestimated by the natives. Movies, television programmes, and much world literature are often translated into Czech rather than Slovak. For those of us living a largely non-English existence, it's frustrating to have learned the local language but find Czech used so often in preference to Slovak.

For those Slovaks who maintain that Czech and Slovak are virtually the same tongue, here are a few reminders.

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