Slovak orthography

Slovak orthography is the system of writing used for the Slovak language. It was first created by a Slovak Catholic priest, Anton Bernolák, in the late 1700s. His work laid the groundwork for how Slovak words would be written.

Today, the standard way of writing Slovak is based on a system developed by Ľudovít Štúr in 1844. It was later reformed by Martin Hattala in 1851. This system uses a version of the central Slovak dialect, which is spoken in the middle part of Slovakia.

Since these changes in the 1800s, Slovak orthography has stayed mostly the same. It helps all Slovak speakers write and read consistently, making it easier to share ideas and stories in written form. The Slovak language is used by millions of people in Slovakia and around the world.

Alphabet

The Slovak alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and includes 46 letters. It has four special marks called diacritics: ˇ(mäkčeň), ´(acute accent), and ¨(diaeresis/umlaut). This makes it the longest alphabet in the Slavic and European languages.

Some letter pairs, like ⟨ia⟩, ⟨ie⟩, and ⟨iu⟩, are used to represent specific sounds in Slovak words. These pairs act like diphthongs, which are combinations of vowel sounds made in one syllable. In words borrowed from other languages, these pairs can sometimes represent two separate vowel sounds.

Sound–spelling correspondences

Slovak spelling follows a few main rules. The most important is the phonemic principle, which means words are spelled based on how they sound. Another rule is the morphological principle, where words from the same root keep the same spelling even if they sound different. For example, forms that come from the same word root are spelled the same, even if their sounds change.

Foreign words often get Slovak spelling after some time. For instance, "weekend" becomes víkend, and "software" becomes softvér. Personal and place names keep their original spelling unless there is a Slovak version, like Londýn for "London".

Certain letters like e, i, í, ie, ia change the sounds of letters D, N, T, and L that come before them. There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as in foreign words or specific Slovak words like ten ("that") and jeden ("one").

Diacritics

The acute mark in Slovak, also called "dĺžeň" or "lengthener," shows that a vowel is long. For example, í means a long "i" sound. This mark can appear on many vowels but not on "ä." It can also be placed above the consonants "l" and "r" to show special long sounds.

Other marks include the circumflex, which only appears above the letter "o" and changes its sound. The umlaut, with two dots above the letter "a," makes a special diphthong sound. The caron, or "mäkčeň," changes certain consonants to softer or different sounds. In writing, it looks different depending on whether it is printed or handwritten.

Computer encoding

The Slovak alphabet can be found in the ISO/IEC 8859-2 "Latin-2" encoding, which is good for Eastern European languages. However, the "Latin-1" encoding, used for Western European languages, does not include some special Slovak letters.

Now, most people use Unicode, especially UTF-8, often with Windows systems like Windows-1250.