Slovak, it sometimes seems a wonder the nation ever succeeded.

According to the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics, there are three major dialects in Slovakia: western, central, and eastern, and these can then be broken up into 28 smaller groups. After this, the number becomes more subjective as some even limit dialects to individual villages.

The western Trnava dialect is one of the most vilified in the country. It is characterised by sounds much harder than those in standard (spisovný) Slovak language. It is said that even Trnava's cats say mnau, with a hard "n" sound, instead of the purring mňau of pure-speaking felines.

This is hard for non-native ears to catch. After living here for months I realised that I was turning subtly soft Slovak words into crunchy, chunky monsters. This was humbling, as I had once accused the language of being a rough mountain range of consonants.

In an example of how local an idiom can be, there is one specific to the Dúbravka (or should I say Dúbrafka?) neighbourhood of the capital in which people tend to use "f" instead of "v", usually when the following letter is a "k", as in pifko instead of pivko (beer).

Moving into central Slovakia, the soft consonants of the standard language is overemphasised. And in the Turiec dialect, from the very middle of Slovakia, adjectives are given the ending ô, as in peknô and krásnô instead of pekný (pretty) and krásny (beautiful). Moreover, the old generation also replaces the "l" at the end of words with a "u". An example is povedau som instead of povedal som (I said).

Slovaks from the west of the country think this is ridiculous. In the far east (yes, it is exotic as it sounds), Slovak does not become softer. My regional expert, raised with the Abov dialect (abovské nárečie) around Košice, says that where she grew up the soft consonants heard in central regions are underused to the point that people from the east have problems spelling Slovak words - they never know where the mäkčen accent marks should go.

People in villages around the country, moreover, use a special village dialect (dedinské nárečie) making the nation's proper speech less lovely sounding (ľubozvučný) and melodious (spevavý), dominated by the sounds "dz" (like in "heads") and "c" (which sounds like "ts"). To combine the two, deti (children) becomes dzeci. The last example shows how Slovak words can be almost completely changed just through pronunciation.

So can Slovaks actually understand each other? When folks from different parts meet and speak their dialects fully, the answer is probably not. In response, some Slovaks speak harshly of those who refuse to speak proper Slovak, calling them peasants (sedliaci or sedláci in the western dialect). On the other hand, most love the special language they were raised with, even if they do not use it every day.

By Eric Smillie,

The Slovak Spectator