Slovak alphabet

The standard orthography of the Slovak language is immediately based on the standard developed by Ľudovít Štúr in the 1840s. Directly influenced by Czech orthography as developed since the 16th century (Bible of Kralice), it uses the Latin script with small modifications that include the four diacritics (ˇ, ´, ¨, ˆ) placed above certain letters.

The first Slovak orthography was proposed by Anton Bernolák (1762-1813) in his Dissertatio philologico-critica de litteris Slavorum, used in the six-volume Slovak-Czech-Latin-German-Hungarian Dictionary (1825 –1927) and used primarily by Slovak Catholics.

Some additional notes includes the following (transcriptions in IPA unless otherwise stated):

The primary principle of Slovak spelling is the phonemic principle. The secondary principle is the morphological principle: forms derived from the same stem are written in the same way even if they are pronounced differently. An example of this principle is the assimilation rule (see below). The tertiary principle is the etymological principle, which can be seen in the use of i after certain consonants and of y after other consonants, although both i and y are pronounced the same way.

Finally, the rarely applied grammatical principle is present when, for example, the basic singular form and plural form of masculine adjectives are written differently with no difference in pronunciation (e.g. pekný = nice – singular versus pekní = nice – plural).

Most foreign words receive Slovak spelling immediately or after some time. For example, "weekend" is spelled víkend, "software" - softvér, "gay" - gej (both not exclusively), and "quality" is spelled kvalita (possibly from Italian qualità). Personal and geographical names from other languages using Latin alphabets keep their original spelling unless a fully Slovak form of the name exists (e.g. Londýn for "London").

To accelerate writing, a rule has been introduced that the frequent character combinations ďe, ťe, ňe, ľe, ďi, ťi, ňi, ľi, ďí, ťí, ňí, ľí, ďie, ťie, ňie, ľie, ďia, ťia, ňia, ľia are written without a caron de, te, ne, le, di, ti, ni, li, dí, tí, ní, lí, die, tie, nie, lie, dia, tia, nia, lia. These combinations are usually pronounced as if a caron were found above the consonant. Some exceptions are as follows:

...
Wikipedia