Czech

Czechia is a landlocked country in Central Europe, bordered by Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and Poland. Its capital, Prague, is known for its medieval architecture and historic landmarks. Czechia has a rich cultural history, including a strong tradition in literature and music. The country became independent in 1993 after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The landscape includes forests, mountains, and rivers.

Čeština

Czech is a West Slavic language, part of the larger Indo-European language family. Within Slavic, it belongs to the West Slavic branch alongside Slovak, Polish, Kashubian, and the Sorbian languages of eastern Germany. Among these, Czech is most closely related to Slovak, to the point that speakers of the two languages generally understand each other without much difficulty.

The language has a long written tradition, with some of the earliest Czech texts dating back to the 12th century. It uses the Latin alphabet, but with additional diacritical marks such as háček (ˇ) and čárka (´) that indicate specific sounds or vowel length. For example, “č” represents a “ch” sound like in chocolate, while “á” signals a long vowel.

Czech grammar is complex and highly inflected. Like other Slavic languages, it relies heavily on endings rather than word order to convey meaning. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined for seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental. Verbs mark not only tense and person but also aspect—whether an action is completed (perfective) or ongoing (imperfective). Word order is relatively flexible, though the neutral order is subject–verb–object.

The sound system of Czech is distinctive, containing a rich set of vowels and consonants. There are both short and long vowels, with length often changing meaning (e.g., rada “advice” vs. ráda “glad”). Czech is also known for the rare phoneme “ř,” written with an r and háček. It is a raised, fricative “r” sound unique to Czech and challenging for learners to master.

Vocabulary shows the Slavic core shared with related languages but has also absorbed words from German, given the long historical contact with German-speaking populations, as well as borrowings from Latin, French, and English in more recent times.

Today, Czech is spoken by around 10 million people, primarily in the Czech Republic. There are also Czech-speaking communities abroad, especially in countries such as the United States, Canada, Austria, and Australia, where waves of emigrants settled in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Asterix speaks Czech

Asterix first appeared in Czech in the magazine Sedmička pionýrů between 1977 and 1980. The first albums were published by Egmont CSFR, while Egmont Neografica in Bratislava, Slovakia, took over starting with Asterix the Gladiator. All albums have been translated into Czech. Asterix in Britain (Asterix v Británii), was released with a new translation.

Idefix also speaks Czech

A few adventures of Dogmatix (Idefix) and the Indomitables have been translated to Czech. The format of the albums is even a bit smaller than the French and Spanish versions.