Czech spoken in Bohemia and Moravia

Abstract

As a western Slavic language of the Indo-European family, Czech is closest to Slovak and Polish. It is spoken as a native language by nearly 10 million people in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office n.d.). About two million people living abroad, mostly in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the UK, claim Czech heritage (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic 2009). However, it is not known how many of them are native speakers of Czech.

Spectral and temporal characteristics of Czech vowels in spontaneous speech

“…The results showed that the high front vowel pair is reliably distinguished by F1: the long /iː/ has a smaller F1 than the short /ɪ/, by 2 ERB, a difference which by far exceeds the just noticeable difference for formants (which is 0.2 ERB for [ɪ]-like vowels, Kewley-Port, 1995).The significant lowering of the short /ɪ/ in the vowel space is further documented by this vowel being, in terms of F1, four times closer to the short mid back /o/ than the long /i:/ is to the long mid /o:/. This F1 distinction between /ɪ/ and /iː/ is in line with previous acoustic measurements of vowels from read speech (Skarnitzl & Volín, 2012;Šimáčková et al, 2012;Paillereau, 2016) and matches the impressionistic observations of spontaneous speech from the 20th century (Frinta, 1909(Frinta, , 1924Beneš, 1943;Chlumský, 1928;Hála, 1955; note that Hála, 1941Hála, , 1962 noticed an openess not only of the short but also of the long front high vowel).…”

“…Frinta, 1909;Hála, 1962) who, however, did not consider it significant enough to be captured in the transcription (Frinta, 1925). The spectral differentiation of /iː/-/ɪ/ has been objectively confirmed by a number of recent acoustic measurements (Skarnitzl & Volín, 2012;Šimáčková et al, 2012;Paillereau, 2016;Chládková et al, 2019). Spectral differentiation of a phonological length contrast, comparable to that attested in /iː/-/ɪ/, has not (yet) been found for the high back vowels, although some note a potential trend in that respect (either explicitly as Skarnitzl & Volín, 2012, or implicitly by transcribing the vowels as /uː/ /ʊ/ in Duběda, 2005).…”

“…Czech has been described as contrasting 5 monophthongal vowel qualities, namely, [i]-like, [e]-like, [a]-like, [o]-like, and [u]-like, each of which occurs as short and long. To capture both the spectral and durational properties of the Czech vowels, the 10 monophthongal phonemes are by many recent authors transcribed as /iː ɪ ɛː ɛ aː a oː o uː u/ (Dankovičová, 1997;Podlipský et al, 2009;Chládková et al, 2009;Šimáčková et al, 2012;Paillereau, 2016;Skarnitzl et al, 2016;Chládková et al, 2019).…”

“…Although the monophthongal vowel inventory of Czech is symmetrical phonologically by differentiating the high front /iː ɪ/ from the high back /uː u/, and the mid front /ɛː ɛ/ from the mid back /oː o/, phonetically the mid front vowels are consistently realized with much higher F1 values than the mid back vowels (Skarnitzl & Volín, 2012;Šimáčková et al, 2012;Paillereau, 2016;Chládková et al, 2019). Besides the phonetic 'lowness' of the front mid vowel, what is perhaps the most intriguing feature of the Czech vowel system is the realization of vowel quantity contrasts.…”

Foreign Language Learners Acquire L2 Phonetic Detail: Goose and Foot Fronting in Non-Native English

“…Czech is a vowel-length language contrasting the monophthongs /iː, ɪ, ɛː, ɛ, aː, a, oː, o, uː, u/ (Šimáčková, Podlipský & Chládková 2012). Native Czechs are highly sensitive to vowel duration in speech even when listening to non-Czech vowels (Chládková, Escudero & Lipski 2013).…”