Lingualia LingualiaEurope’s regional and minority languages

Languages · Slavic languages

Czech

Spoken in : Austria

01. Data about the language

Language group

Indo-European / Slavic

Area

Vienna and in the Lower Austrian (Niederösterreich) regions of Marchfeld and Tullner Feld.

Czech presence in Vienna goes back to the XIIIth century but the total number of people established there increased mainly after the XVIIth century: in 1612 administration and archives from the empire were transferred from Prague to Vienna.

Czech, as a language, was culturally pushed forward after the 1848 revolution. Over more, there were noticeable migrations from Czech workers in between 1880-90 (more than 230 000 people in less than a decade). After the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 more than 100 000 returned to their own country.

Between WWI and WWII, Czechoslovakia from Vienna created an important private educational system in their language. After 1945, only 15000-20000 of them decided to return to Czechoslovakia.

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

Numerical strength

The last census to record the language of everyday use ("Umgangssprache") was in 2001: 11,035 Austrian citizens then declared Czech1. 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 offered Czech teaching to 347 pupils in 2023–24 (381 in 2020–21), 102 of them at primary level1. Czech is also offered in first-language teaching by the Vienna education directorate1.

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 Czechs, this lead medium is the fortnightly Videňské svobodné listy; ORF Burgenland broadcasts the TV magazine České Ozveny six times a year, and the weekly radio magazine Radio Dráťak1.

02. Linguistic description

Czech, a West Slavic language, has no articles1. Negation is a prefix attached to the verb, and questions are formed through word order1. A single word, ruka, means both 'hand' and 'arm', and tea is čaj, from Chinese cha1,2.

Sources

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

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

03. Cartoon

Bob & Bobek - Králíci z klobouku - V supermarketu
Cartoon · 5 min 59 s · channel: Bonton · YouTube

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