It
is divided into three dialect areas: west, central, and east. Slovak is
written in the Latin alphabet with diacritics (accent marks), and it is
most closely related to the Czech language,
under the cultural influence of which it has developed through most of
its history. Slovak has preserved many of the basic Slavic word roots and
sounds of Common Slavic, the original
language from which all the Slavic languages descended. Slovak developed
as a national language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, prompted
by a rise in the Slovak people's awareness of their national identity and
the accompanying need for education and literacy.
Slovak preserves the Common Slavic contrast between short and long vowels (referring to the length of the vowel's sound), with the long vowels represented in writing by an acute accent mark. Slovak also has developed a set of diphthongs (ia, ie, iu, ou, and uo) that function as long vowels. The sounds r and l function as either consonants or vowels; as vowels, they can be either long or short. Slovak shares with the Czech language the spelling of the consonants c', š, and z', pronounced [ch], [sh], and [zh], respectively. The Slovak language has gained the soft dental consonants t', d', l', and ñ, but it lacks a soft r existing also in Polish.
Compared with Czech, Slovak word structure has been simplified. Stress falls on the first syllable of a word. Slovak nouns have one of three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative). The vocative case has been virtually lost. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, number (singular and plural), and case. Verbs have two tenses (past and present) and two aspects (perfective and imperfective), the latter indicating the duration of the verb's activity. Many verbs have an iterative form, which expresses repeated action. Slovak has a complex numeral system and a well-developed system of indefinite pronouns and adverbs. Slovak word order generally places the most informative elements at the end of a sentence, often violating the language's basic subject-verb-object sentence structure.
