SLOVAK LANGUAGE. The two languages of the former Czechoslovak republic, Czech and Slovak (for which the com bined designation Czechoslovak is in common use), are not identical, either in their literary form or in their dialects, in the same way as are Serb and Croat (to express which the compound Serbo-Croat is appropriately used). Slovak is, however, so closely allied to Czech that most scholars describe it as a dialect, although their view meets with many dissentient voices. In its early stages Czech presents great similarity with the sister language, which has retained with great fidelity the sound system of a past stage in the common development of the two languages, but Czech as written and spoken today in Bohemia diverges considerably from Slovak; the dialects spoken in Moravia, however, satisfactorily bridge over the differences, and only speakers of extreme dialects of Slovak are unintelligible to Czechs. The disagreement is least marked in vocabulary but appears prominently in the phonetics; in particular the itacism, so distinct a characteristic of Czech, is non-existent in Slovak, which has preserved the fuller diphthongs (ia, ie, in etc.) of the other Slavonic languages; a further smaller point is that dz, from Common Slav dj, is used (as in Polish) where Czech has z. In one point only is there a divergence which goes back beyond the time of the common ancestry of the two languages; Slovak has not developed the which is characteristic of Czech and in that language occurs since the beginning of its literature. The Slovak palatalization of n, d, t and 1 after e, which, does not occur in modern literary Czech, is a further point of dis agreement, although this would not be obvious from Slovak spell ing which does not find it necessary to distinguish by diacritics consonants which are always softened in this position.
The alphabet is founded on the Czech, the accent is always on the first syllable and long vowels are indicated by acute accents. There are usually reckoned to be three groups of dialects, West ern, Central and Eastern; the first being nearest to Czech, the last to Little Russian, while the Central dialects exhibit less decided features. The dialectical development shows some charac
teristics identical with those in South Slavonic and Russian. Not everywhere, for example, have C.S. is and i been confused, and instead of the e, which is the normal result in Slovak as in Czech, we find in Eastern dialects an o from the thus agreeing with Russian. An agreement with South Slavonic is the occurrence of raz- and la- as well as roz- and lo- from C.S. orz- and o/-. Because of these and other phonetic and morphological reasons the gram marian Czambel, a keen opponent of the identity of Czech and Slovak, has asserted that Slovak should rightly be associated with South Slavonic. His views, which were influenced by considera tions not wholly linguistic, did not find general acceptance.
Slovak books were rare before the World War, but during the union of the Czechs and the Slovaks in a single republic from 1918 to 1939, Slovak literature, which previously had only a local im portance, bid fair to take a worthy place alongside of that of its better known partner. The Survey of Modern Slovak Literature, by S. Kr6mery, in vol. vii., No. 19, pp. 16o-17o, of the Slavonic Review (London) gives useful literature statistics and a good account of the literature of the present century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Dictionaries—J. Loos, Worterbuch der slovakischen, ungarischen and magyarischen Sprache (Budapest, 1871) ; M. Kalal, Slovensky Slovnik etc. (1924), written for Czechs, is most valuable, as dialect words are included. Grammar—S. Czambel, kukoviit spisovnej reei slovenskej (1919). This Handbook of Literary Slovak is the standard work. Czambel's other works, e.g., Slovdci a ich red (Budapest, 1903) and Slovenska red a jej miesto v rodine slovan. jazykov (1906) are important for the dialects, but are biased; C. Dixon has written a Slovak Grammar for English speaking Students (Pitts burgh, 1896).