 to municipalities with more than 20% ethnic minority population (no such Czech municipalities are found in Slovakia). Since 1 September 2009 (due to an amendment to the State Language Act 270/1995 Z.z.) a language "fundamentally intelligible with the state language" (i.e. the Czech language) may be used in contact with state offices and bodies by its native speakers, and documents written in it and issued by bodies in the Czech Republic are officially accepted. Regardless of its official status, Czech is used commonly both in Slovak mass media and in daily communication by Czech natives as an equal language.
Czech and Slovak have a long history of interaction and mutual influence well before the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, a state which existed until 1993. Literary Slovak shares significant orthographic features with Czech, as well as technical and professional terminology dating from the Czechoslovak period, but phonetic, grammatical, and vocabulary differences do exist.
Slavic language varieties are relatively closely related, and have had a large degree of mutual influence, due to the complicated ethnopolitical history of their historic ranges. This is reflected in the many features Slovak shares with neighboring language varieties. Standard Slovak shares high degrees of mutual intelligibility with many Slavic varieties. Despite this closeness to other Slavic varieties, significant variation exists among Slovak dialects. In particular, eastern varieties differ significantly from the standard language, which is based on central and western varieties.
Eastern Slovak dialects have the greatest degree of mutual intelligibility with Polish of all the Slovak dialects, followed by Rusyn, but both Eastern Slovak and Rusyn lack familiar technical terminology and upper register expressions. Polish and Sorbian also differ quite considerably from Czech and Slovak in upper registers, but non-technical and lower register speech is readily intelligible. Some mutual intelligibility occurs with spoken Rusyn, Ukrainian, and even Russian (in this order), although their orthographies are based on the Cyrillic script.
|to buy||kupovať||kupovat||kupować||куповати (kupovaty)||купувати (kupuvaty)||купляць (kuplać)||kupovati||купува (kupuva)||kupovati|
|Welcome||Vitajte||Vítejte||Witajcie||Вітайте (vitajte)||Вітаю (vitaju)||Вітаю (vitaju)||Dobrodošli||добре дошли (dobre došli)||Dobrodošli|
|morning||ráno||ráno/jitro||rano/ranek||рано (rano)||рано/ранок (rano/ranok)||рана/ранак (rana/ranak)||jutro||утро (utro)||jutro|
|Thank you||Ďakujem||Děkuji||Dziękuję||Дякую (diakuju)||Дякую (diakuju)||Дзякуй (dziakuj)||Hvala||благодаря (blagodarja)||Hvala|
|How are you?||Ako sa máš?||Jak se máš?||Jak się masz?
(colloquially "jak leci?")
|Як ся маєш/маш?
(jak sia maješ/maš?)
|Як справи? (jak spravy?)||Як справы? (jak spravy?)||Kako si?||Как си? (Kak si?)||Kako se imaš?/Kako si?|
|Як ся маєш?
(jak sia maješ?)
Servus is commonly used as a greeting or upon parting in Slovak-speaking regions and some German-speaking regions, particularly Austria. Papa is also commonly used upon parting in these regions. Both servus and papa are used in colloquial, informal conversation.
Hungarians and Slovaks have had a language interaction ever since the settlement of Hungarians in the Carpathian area. Hungarians also adopted many words from various Slavic languages related to agriculture and administration, and a number of Hungarian loanwords are found in Slovak. Some examples are as follows:
There are many Slovak dialects, which are divided into the following four basic groups:
The fourth group of dialects is often not considered a separate group, but a subgroup of Central and Western Slovak dialects (see e.g. Štolc, 1968), but it is currently undergoing changes due to contact with surrounding languages (Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and Hungarian) and long-time geographical separation from Slovakia (see the studies in Zborník Spolku vojvodinských slovakistov, e.g. Dudok, 1993).
The dialect groups differ mostly in phonology, vocabulary, and tonal inflection. Syntactic 