The language from the centre of Europe

Slovak (Slovenčina) belongs to the West Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and is spoken by around five million native speakers. Sorbian and Czech also belong to the West Slavic branch. Furthermore, the Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages is divided into East Slavic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, and South Slavic languages such as Slovenian, Bulgarian and Macedonian.

There are many spoken dialects in the Slovak language, which can be divided mainly into three groups: Eastern Slovak, Central Slovak and Western Slovak dialects.

In Slovak there are some letters with diacritical marks, which determine the pronunciation or emphasis of the letter more precisely. For example, letters with an extension mark, a so-called Dĺžeň (acute) are pronounced long (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ĺ, ŕ), and letters with a soft mark, a so-called Mäkčeň (háček), are pronounced soft (ď, ň, ľ, ť). However, the háček is also used to mark sibilants (č, dž, š, ž).