Czech orthography

Czech orthography is a system of rules for correct writing (orthography) in the Czech language.

The Czech orthographic system is diacritic. The caron is added to standard Latin letters for expressing sounds which are foreign to the Latin language (but some digraphs have been kept - ch, dž). The acute accent is used for long vowels.

The Czech orthography is considered the model for many other Balto-Slavic languages using the Latin alphabet; the Slovenian and Slovak orthographies as well as Gaj's Latin Alphabet are all based on the Czech.

The Czech alphabet consists of 42 letters.

The letters Q and W are used exclusively in foreign words, and are replaced with Kv and V once the word becomes "naturalized"; the digraphs dz and dž are also used mostly for foreign words and do not have a separate place in the alphabet.

Czech orthography is primarily phonemic (rather than phonetic) because an individual grapheme usually corresponds to an individual phoneme (rather than a sound). However, some graphemes and letter groups are remnants of historical phonemes which were used in the past but have since merged with other phonemes. Some changes in the phonology have not been reflected in the orthography.

All the obstruent consonants are subject to voicing (before voiced obstruents except ⟨v⟩) or devoicing (before voiceless consonants and at the end of words); spelling in these cases is morphophonemic (i.e. the morpheme has the same spelling as before a vowel). An exception is the cluster ⟨sh⟩, in which the /s/ is voiced to /z/ only in Moravian dialects, while in Bohemia the /ɦ/ is devoiced to /x/ instead (e.g. shodit /sxoɟɪt/, in Moravia /zɦoɟɪt/). Devoicing /ɦ/ changes its articulation place: it becomes [x]. After unvoiced consonants ⟨ř⟩ is devoiced. Written voiced / voiceless counterparts are kept according to the etymology of the word, e.g. odpadnout [ˈotpadnoʊ̯t] (to fall away) - od- is a prefix; written /d/ is devoiced here because of the following voiceless /p/.

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