Slovak — Lingualia

01. Data about the language

Language group

Indo-European / Slavic

Area

Approximately one third of this group continues to commute on a weekly basis, the remainder have definitively settled in Vienna. The Burgenland Croats in Vienna are Approximately one third of the ethnic group lives in Lower Austria. The majority lives in Vienna. The rest of the ethnic group lives is dispersed all over Austria, although there is a tendency to congregate in the states of Upper Austria and Styria.

Slovak presence in theses villages goes back to Thirty Years War (1618-48), when numerous Slovaks worked as seasonal workers in farms, and afterwards in industry. At the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867), Slovakia was part of the Hungarian part of the empire, and was Magyarised a lot, which induced an important migration from Slovaks.

Updated, sourced data, checked on 14 October 2026 · scope : Autriche (Vienne, Basse-Autriche)

Numerical strength

The last census to record the language of everyday use ("Umgangssprache") was in 2001: 3,343 Austrian citizens then declared Slovak¹. Register-based censuses, since 2011, no longer collect this information¹.

Status

In Austria, the language is protected by Part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages¹. Federal support for the ethnic groups was doubled from 2021 and reached €7.6 million in 2023 for the Federal Chancellery alone¹.

Education

In Vienna, the private Komenský school, whose teachers' salaries are paid by the Land of Vienna and the Ministry of Education, offered Slovak teaching to 190 pupils in 2023–24 (157 in 2020–21)¹. Slovak is also offered in first-language teaching by the Vienna education directorate, in adult education centres and at the University of Vienna, which trains secondary teachers¹.

Media

Since September 2022 the ORF has produced the fortnightly TV magazine "WIR | Češi, Hrvati, Magyarok, Roma, Slováci, Slovenci", broadcast on ORF 2 and ORF III in the ethnic-group languages with German subtitles; in 2024, ORF Burgenland and ORF Carinthia produced about 100 hours of television and over 4,000 hours of radio in these languages¹. Since 2021 one "lead medium" per ethnic group has received specific federal funding¹. For the Slovaks, this lead medium is the quarterly Pohľady; ORF Burgenland broadcasts the TV magazine Slovenské Ozveny six times a year, and the weekly radio magazine Radio Dia:Tón can be received in and around Vienna¹.

Sources

6. Bericht der Republik Österreich gemäß Artikel 15 Absatz 1 der Europäischen Charta der Regional- oder Minderheitensprachen (état au 1er octobre 2025), Bundeskanzleramt (Chancellerie fédérale d'Autriche), 2025.

02. Linguistic description

Slovak, a West Slavic language, uses a single word, ruka, for both 'hand' and 'arm'¹. Like Czech or Russian, it calls tea čaj, from Chinese cha, transmitted overland^1,2.

Sources

The 2003 CD had no description of this language: this text was written for the site from the sources below.

WALS Online – Slovak, World Atlas of Language Structures, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013 (v2026).
Ö. Dahl, « Tea », chapitre 138 du WALS, World Atlas of Language Structures, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 2013.

03. Cartoon

Video hosted on YouTube and published by the channel shown; its author may remove it at any time.