The Slovak Republic is a state in Central Europe, formed in 1993 after the collapse of Czechoslovakia. Russian tourists more and more often go to Bratislava and to local ski resorts, and when preparing a trip, they are interested in what is the official language in Slovakia. The absolute majority of the country's inhabitants consider their native language to be Slovak. It is preferred as a means of communication by more than four million citizens of the republic, or 80% of the population.
Some statistics and facts
- The state language of Slovakia belongs to the Slavic group.
- Hungarian is also popular in the republic. More than 9% of the population, or about half a million people, prefer to communicate on it. In the regions of Slovakia, where Hungarians make up more than 20% of the population, their language is used as an official language along with Slovak.
- About 2.5% of the citizens of Slovakia are ethnic Gypsies who use their own dialect in everyday life.
- Slightly more than 1% of the republic's residents named Rusyn as their native language. Rusyns are a group of Eastern Slavs living not only in Slovakia, but also in western Ukraine, Serbia, Romania and Poland.
Slovak: history and modernity
The official language of Slovakia is close to Czech and together they form a subgroup in the West Slavic language group.
Back in the 10th century, part of the Slavs living on the territory of the Great Moravian state used Old Slavonic, but later on the territory of modern Slovakia, Czech and Latin were proclaimed as literary languages. Slovak began to take shape literary only in the middle of the 18th century and received due recognition in the 19th century. Today Slovaks use the Latin alphabet for writing.
The lexical fund of the state language of Slovakia contains many borrowings, mainly from Latin, German and Hungarian. The vocabulary of the inhabitants of the republic also contains Italian, Romanian and even Russian words.
Slovak is spoken by ethnic Slovaks in the USA and Canada, Australia and Romania, Croatia and Serbia. In total, there are at least 5.2 million native speakers of Slovak in the world.
Tourist notes
Slovaks are increasingly learning English as a foreign language, and therefore tourists usually do not have problems with understanding. All important information in tourist centers is provided in many languages, and for visiting attractions you can enlist the support of English-speaking and Russian-speaking guides.
