Czech Republic Languages

Languages of the Czech Republic

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Languages spoken in the Czech republic include:
  • Official languages:
    • Czech
  • Recognized minority languages:
    • German (Germanic)
    • Polish (Slavic)
    • Hungarian (Ugric)
    • Ukrainian (Slavic)
    • Vietnamese (Vietic)
    • Belarusian (Slavic)

German colonists came to Bohemia and Moravia in the 13th and 14th centuries[1], which likely is a reason German is a recognized minority language. The Czech Statistical Office[2] reports that there are more native German speakers than native Moravian speakers in the Moravian-Silesian Region, in the South Moravian Region however, this is quite the opposite (about 8 times as many native Moravian speakers as there are native German speakers). It does seem like the Moravian language is pretty tied to it's region and ethnic group, but Czech is still by far and away the most spoken language. Moravian is also the second most common ethnicity behind Czech, with approximately 61% Czech and 5.3% Moravian (notably though around 25% of people did not specify on the census), with most of their population in the South Moravian Region[2].

The Czech government guarantees national minorities the right education in their mother tongue, however this right seems to have gone largely unknown and thus, not many schools use other languages. Despite this, there are still schools run in other languages, most notably Polish being used in the Těšín region which has a large Polish minority community[3].

Outside of minority rights, the Czech government doesn't do much in the way of language control which allows for multiple dialects of Czech to exist such as Common Czech, a dialect that arose from the people's use of Czech. Learning a secondary language in school is required, however many schools struggle to provide quality teaching resulting in many people lacking competence in their second language of choice[3].

The Czech population generally defends their current homogenity in using the Czech language, and many multilingual people are seen as above others while speakers of minority languages are extepcted to learn Czech[4].


References:
[1] J. Cole, Ed., Ethnic groups of Europe: an encyclopedia. in Ethnic groups of the world. Santa Barbara, Calf: ABC-CLIO, 2011.

[2] Czech Statistical Office, “Statistics VDB.” Accessed: July 17, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://vdb.czso.cz/vdbvo2/faces/en/index.jsf?page=statistiky

[3] H. Srpova, “Forms of Language Planning and Policy in the Czech Republic,” in Language Planning in the Post-Communist Era: The Struggles for Language Control in the New Order in Eastern Europe, Eurasia and China, E. Andrews, Ed., Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018, pp. 287-308. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-70926-0_12.

[4] L. Cope and E. Eckert, “Multilingualism and minorities in the Czech sociolinguistic space: Introduction,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 2016, pp. 1-14, Feb. 2016, doi: 10.1515/ijsl-2015-0042.