Studies in Czech Sociolinguistics

Varieties of Czech is a collection of eighteen articles dealing with various sociolinguistic questions relating primarily to contemporary written and spoken Czech, including dialects spoken both within the present-day Czech Republic and in a number of Czech emigre communities beyond its borders. The editor, Eva Eckert, in addition to being a contributor to the collection, has provided a comparatively lengthy 24-page introduction to the articles. Here she generally sheds light on the current state of Czech sociolinguistics and demarcates the major areas in which the views expressed by the contributors to this collection both converge and diverge. Here, too, Eckert defines varieties as individual subcodes making up a (p. 5). The average length of the ensuing articles is just under fourteen and a half pages. The articles have been arranged thematically into four consecutive categories: I. Language Norm and Codification (five articles); II. Varieties of Czech in Literature Case Studies (four articles); III. Common Czech and Czech Dialects (three articles); and IV. Czech in Contact with Other Languages (six articles). All articles have either originally been written in or translated into English. Most, if not all, of the Czech language samples contained in the articles are glossed. Among North American Slavists who embark upon a study of Czech after a normally mandatory period of Russian-language training, it is frequently observed that Czech-language acquisition is unusually complicated by a readily perceptible gap between written and spoken forms of the language. As the late A.V. Isacenko and others have pointed out, however, this observation actually represents a Russocentric preconception of Slavic languages in general. In fact, among today's Slavic peoples, it is actually the Russians who, from a sociolinguistic perspective, are distinguished by their use of a relatively undifferentiated literary language (Contemporary Standard Russian) for both writing and speaking. Nevertheless, the difference between written and spoken codes is perhaps more marked among the Czechs than among other Slavic peoples. This difference between codes is complicated in Czech by what M. SaSkova-Pierce (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln, personal communication) calls degrees of colloquialness that exist among various morphophonemic

Czech · Émigré · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociolinguistics · Gender Studies in Language · History · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy