The Czech Alphabet, háček and čárka

Czech uses the same Latin alphabet you already know from English, with one big difference: it adds little marks above some letters to squeeze out far more sounds than 26 plain letters could ever carry. There are two of these marks, and learning what each one does is the single most useful thing you can do at the very start. Get them right and Czech spelling becomes almost completely predictable — you will be able to read words you have never seen and pronounce them correctly.

The first mark is the háček (pronounced HAH-check, literally "little hook"). It looks like a tiny check mark or wedge: ˇ. The second is the čárka (CHAAR-ka, "little line" or "stroke"). It looks exactly like the acute accent in café: ´. They do completely different jobs, and the most common beginner mistake is mixing them up. The háček changes what a consonant sounds like; the čárka only makes a vowel longer. That distinction is the whole foundation of Czech reading.

A crucial warning for English, Spanish, and French speakers up front: neither mark has anything to do with stress. In Spanish, the accent on está tells you where to put the emphasis. Czech accents never do that. Czech stress is always on the first syllable, full stop — the marks are about sound quality and vowel length only. Forget everything your previous languages taught you about accents indicating loudness.

The two diacritics at a glance

There is also a third, much rarer mark — the kroužek (ring) — which appears only on ů. It marks a long u in the middle and at the end of words, and it is covered on its own page.

The háček: it changes the sound, not the length

When you put a háček on a consonant, you get a genuinely different sound. The plain letter and the háček letter are not variants of one sound — they are two separate letters that happen to look related.

Notice how reading č as if it were plain c would turn čaj ("chai/tea") into something like tsai — wrong word, wrong sound. The háček is not decoration; it is the difference between two words. The sound ř is the most famous and hardest of these and gets its own page.

The háček also appears on three "soft" consonants — ď, ť, ň — which palatalise the d, t, n (a bit like the d in British "dew"), and on the special vowel sign ě, which we will meet in a moment.

The čárka: it only makes the vowel longer

The čárka does exactly one thing: it tells you to hold the vowel about twice as long. The vowel's colour stays the same — a and á are the same vowel, just short and long.

The long vowel ó is rare and shows up almost only in loanwords (móda, gól, tón). The long u is special: it is written ú at the start of a word and ů in the middle or at the end — a quirk explained on the ů versus ú page.

The whole alphabet, and the strange case of ch

Counting the diacritic letters as separate letters, the Czech alphabet has 42 letters. Most matter to you only when you use a dictionary, because Czech alphabetises differently from English.

The most important oddity: ch is a single letter. Even though it is written with two keys on the keyboard, Czech treats ch as one indivisible letter with its own place in the alphabet — it is sorted after h, not under c. So in a dictionary, chléb (bread) comes after hudba (music), not near café.

The sound of ch is a raspy back-of-the-throat sound, like the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach — never the English "ch" of church (that sound is spelled č). The contrast between h and ch is important enough to have its own page.

Two more vowel signs deserve a special mention because they look unusual:

• ě ("e s háčkem") — a special e that softens the consonant in front of it (in děti, něco, věc). What it does to neighbouring sounds is a topic of its own.
• ů ("u s kroužkem") — the long u with a ring, used inside and at the end of words: dům (house), můj (my), domů (home/homeward).

Czech spelling is phonemic — and that is great news

Here is the payoff for learning the diacritics. Czech spelling is highly phonemic: with very few exceptions, each letter (including each háček and čárka letter) maps to one sound, and that sound is the same every time. There is no English-style chaos where ough is read five different ways in though, through, cough, rough, and bought.

Once you have memorised the values in the two tables above, you can read essentially any Czech word aloud correctly the first time you see it. This is a huge advantage and a real motivator early on. The flip side is that you have to read every mark — skipping a háček or a čárka is not a small slip, it produces a different word. The full set of reading rules is laid out on the reading-rules page.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• The háček (ˇ) changes a consonant's sound (c→č, s→š, z→ž, r→ř); the čárka (´) only makes a vowel longer (a→á, i→í).
• Neither mark shows stress. Czech stress is always on the first syllable.
• ch is one letter, sorted after h, and sounds like Scottish loch — never like English church.
• Read every mark: a missing háček or čárka usually spells a different word.
• Because spelling is phonemic, mastering these letter values lets you read almost any Czech word correctly on sight.