The Slovak Language – just a quick peek

Now that we’ve been in Žilina, Slovakia for a full month, our Me-Tarzan-You-Jane language skills are starting to widen to include some short phrases. The next big step is to take a look at the grammar of the Slovakian language, so fasten your seatbelts, here we go!

Endings and agreement are elements that make phrases slightly more understandable to a language’s listeners, and there are plenty of inflectional endings in Slovak. I’m still trying to work out what they all do, but here are some of the basics. I have a very helpful website, which is giving me most of this info, but if you notice I’ve gotten anything wrong, please let me know.

Gender – There are three, masculine, feminine and neuter. Many languages classify nouns according to gender, and it’s usually pretty arbitrary. There is also a distinction in the masculine gender between animate and inanimate nouns, but not in the female gender…doesn’t seem entirely fair somehow.

Case – There are six that are commonly used. Case is a way to show how the word functions in the sentence, and this function is indicated by changing the ending. In languages without case, we figure this out from the order of the words. In languages with case, word order becomes less important, and therefore there is more freedom to use word order to emphasize certain words. In Slovak, case endings are even applied to proper names. See the example below.

nominative: Who? Peter and Anne. - Peter a Anna.
genitive: Without who? Without Peter and Anne. - Bez Petra a Anny.
dative: To whom? To Peter and Anne. - Petrovi a Anne.
accusative: Who do you see? Peter and Anne.- Petra a Annu.
locative: About who? About Peter and Anne. - O Petrovi a Anne.
instrumental: Who with? With Peter and Anne. - S Petrom a Annou.

Number – In addition to differentiating between singular and plural, in some cases there are different endings if there is two of something (known as dual). This is used for things that consist of two things or a pair, such as: nohavice - trousers, dvere - door, okuliare – glasses. I have also been told that the ending sometimes changes if there are 5 or more of something, for example: jedno pivo – one beer, dve piva – two beers (same for three and four), and then päť pív (sounds like pet peeve ;) ) – five beers. You can see where that conversation took place!

Does your head hurt yet? Reading this is one thing, but remembering it and knowing how to use it in context is quite another – something we have not achieved by any means. However, being a linguist, I like having a general idea how things are working, and hopefully this gives you a little more insight into it too.

Karen