Languages: The official language is Czech and it is used by about 96% of the population. However there is no special language law.
Co-offical Languages: None. German, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Romani, Slovak and Croatian are spoken in the Czech Republic, though only the first four are recognized as official minority languages. The second-largest language by number of speakers (after Czech) is the Slovak language; followed by Polish, German and Romani. Article 25 of the Charter (on minorities) provides for education in minority languages and the Minority Act guarantees the right to be educated in the minority language from nursery school level through to secondary schools.
Language Strategies: The Constitution does not include any specific mention of an official or state language. The official status of the Czech language is however implicit in certain legal regulations.German, Polish, Hungarian and Ukrainian are recognized as official minority languages. There is no institution specializing in the propagation of Czech, comparable to the Goethe Institut for German or Polonicum for Polish. Due to the fact that the Czech Republic has attracted tens of thousands of foreigners as economic migrants from within the EU and from external migration, the teaching of Czech as a foreign language has become a significant pedagogical challenge, for which resources are needed.
Language Technologies: The CR language technology community is “cautiously optimistic” about the current state of language technology support. There is a viable LT research community in the Czech Republic, which has been supported in the past by various national and EU research programmes; a small number of resources and technologies have been produced for Czech. However, these resources and tools are still very limited when compared to the resources and tools for languages with much larger speaker populations.
Czech LR Stakeholders (LTO Directory)
Czech LR Policy Makers (LTO Directory)
Other Relevant Organisations:
Institute of the Czech Language (of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic):Ústav pro jazyk český (Akademie věd České republiky) - is widely accepted as the regulatory body of the Czech language.
Most of the government-sourced funding programmes are maintained by the: Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) and focused on basic research.
