Czech Language Translation

• Number of Czech native speakers globally: 12 million
• Number of countries where Czech is an official language: 2

Czech is a West Slavic language which is the language of the majority in the Czech Republic and is spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as “Bohemian” in English until the late 19th Century. In medieval times, Czech was one of the most important international languages, in the way that English is today. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Czech and Slovak, primarily because the languages lived side by side in the former Czechoslovakia. Czech is more loosely related to the languages forming the east Slavic group (Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Russian) and Slovak to the the southern Slavic group (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene, Serbian, and Croatian). There are more Czech loanwords in English than you may realise, including pistol, polka, semtex and robot. Several tens of thousands of Czechs have continued to live in the Slovak Republic after the break-up of Czechoslovakia at the end of 1992 and many Czech speakers can be found in Austria, Poland, Germany, Ukraine and Croatia. However, the largest group of Czech speakers outside the Czech Republic lives in the United States, in cities like New York, Chicago or Cleveland. According to the US Census, more than 90,000 Czech speakers lived in the United States in 1990. We offer professional Czech to English and English to Czech translations – and other language combinations including Czech.