The present-day situation of Czech

Abstract

The situation of a language comprises several components; it is dynamic and embedded in the global setting of a wider geographic and cultural sphere. The present vivid social mobility brings forth extensive contacts between cultures and languages or their varieties, leads to levelling differences and mixing of languages, and brings instability and variation into their structures. In the situation of Standard Czech, the traditional historical and nationalistic attitudes are receding, the attitudinal system as well as the value hierarchy is in a process of reconstruction, and the awareness of norms diminishes. There are three main motive powers of this movement: (1) the specific Czech diglossia, (2) a continuous process of detailed functional differentiation, (3) a massive impact of foreign languages, especially of English. Thus Standard Czech acquires some new dimensions and partly a new character. It gets decentralized, its boundaries become blurred and its structure less compact. The situation of languages of smaller nations in unifying Europe prompts several questions: how to resolve the dilemma of one lingua franca vs national mother tongues? English as a sole language of science? How far threatened are smaller languages, with their indisputable cultural values? A possible solution might be seen in a multicultural and multilingual Europe with one (or a few) lingua franca in a functional complementarity.