Slovak - Slovakian (English spelling)

It is the national language of the Slovak Republic. It belongs to the West Slavic group. It has a speaker population of about 4.6 million in the country and about 5.62 million worldwide. The dialects are divided into three major groups: Western, Central, and Eastern. The foundations of the modern standard written language were established in the 1940s on the basis of the culturally neutral Central dialect. It is structurally closest to Czech, but has unique features that differ from Czech, such as the presence of the consonant affricates dz and dž, and the "rhythmic rules" that do not allow syllables with long vowels to be joined in a word. The writing is Latin, but it uses a series of auxiliary symbols and digraphs such as ch, resulting in a total of 46 letters. There is a distinction between long and short vowels, such as á-a, and long and short liquids, such as ŕ-r. As for the morphological structure, like Czech, there is a high degree of regularity in the inflections (declensions and conjugations) of nouns and verbs. However, there are differences with Czech in the disappearance of the vocative case of nouns, the disappearance of short adjective endings (noun forms), and the preservation of the past perfect tense of verbs.

[Kurihara Shigeru]

Source: Shogakukan Encyclopedia Nipponica About Encyclopedia Nipponica Information | Legend

スロバキア共和国の国語。西スラブ語群に属する。国内で約460万、世界中で約562万の言語人口をもつ。方言は西部、中部、東部の三つに大別され、現代標準文章語の基礎は、文化的に中立な中部方言を土台として、19世紀の40年代に築かれた。構造上チェコ語にもっとも近いが、子音の破擦音dz、džの存在、語中で長母音のある音節が連接することを許さない「リズムの法則」など、チェコ語とは異なる独自の特徴をもつ。文字はラテン文字であるが、一連の補助記号とchのような二重字を用いるので、字母の数は46個となる。母音にはá―aのように長短の区別があり、流音にもŕ―rのように長短がある。形態構造は、チェコ語と同様に、名詞類と動詞の語形変化（曲用と活用）の規則性の度合いが高い。しかし、名詞の呼格の消失、形容詞の短語尾形（名詞形）の消失、動詞の大過去の時制の保存などにおいてチェコ語との差異がみられる。

［栗原成郎］

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