CZECH 

One of the nice things about my trip to the Czech Republic last week was being in a European country where I neither knew nor could guess any of the language. Which in turn meant that I had to work hard in order to be understood.

First up, somewhat surprisingly, was German rather than English. We were in the northern part of the country, close to the Polish border, in what was once called the Sudetenland. This was the German-speaking part of the former Czechoslovakia that Hitler annexed prior to the Second World War. After the war the Germans, both Nazi-sympathisers and not, were unceremoniously booted out, a decision which continues to affect German-Czech relations today. The German influence lingers on in the large number of tourists, and the fact that people in the service industries - waitresses, hotel staff - are more likely to speak German than English.

Thereafter, I could use the smattering of Czech words that I learned; hello, thank you, etc. It's amazing how much affect it has if you say something to another person in their own language, way beyond the literal meaning of the words themselves.

Slavic languages have not taken off in other countries in the same way that (say) Spanish has. One reason may be the difficult grammar. Russian, Polish and Czech all have lots of cases, just like Latin (Czech has seven). German still has four, but the fiddly things have died out in other Latin-derived languages, as well as in Scandinavian languages and English. Perhaps if the same thing had happened in Czech, then more foreigners would speak it.

Walter Blotscher