Literary Excerpt: Hašek's Švejk (Common Czech)

Open Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka — Jaroslav Hašek's unfinished comic epic of the First World War — and something strange happens to your Czech. The narrator writes in clean, textbook spisovná čeština (standard Czech), but the moment a character opens his mouth, the language shifts. Švejk and the drinkers of U Kalicha do not speak the language of grammar books; they speak obecná čeština — the "Common Czech" that millions of Bohemians actually use at home, in the pub, on the tram. Hašek was one of the first to render it faithfully on the page, and the gap between his narrator's standard and his characters' colloquial is the whole engine of the book's voice. This page reads one line of Švejk closely to show you exactly what that gap is made of — because it is the single most important thing an English speaker misunderstands about spoken Czech.

The two Czechs

Before the text, the big picture. Czech is a textbook case of diglossia: two varieties coexist, each with its own turf.

• Spisovná čeština — the codified standard. This is what you learn, what newsreaders read, what appears in print. It is nobody's fully native everyday speech in Bohemia.
• Obecná čeština — the everyday spoken vernacular of Bohemia (and Prague especially). It is not "slang" and not "bad Czech"; it is a stable, rule-governed variety with its own regular sound-changes, used by educated and uneducated speakers alike in relaxed situations.

English has nothing quite like this. We have register (formal vs. casual word choice) and we have accents, but we do not have two parallel grammars where the everyday spoken one systematically swaps whole endings. A Czech child grows up bilingual in these two, and literature exploits the seam between them for characterisation.

The text

Švejk is explaining, in one of his rambling anecdotes, why an old employer threw him out. It is a single sentence, and it is pure obecná čeština:

To byl náramnej podivín, a když jsem mu jednou vomylem ve sklepě zapálil sud benzínu a von vyhořel, tak mne vyhnal... takže jsem se kvůli pitomýmu sudu benzínu nemoh doučit.

(Verbatim from Jaroslav Hašek, Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, Part I; public domain — Hašek died in 1923.)

Every word of this is comprehensible to any Czech, yet almost every content word is spelled differently from how a schoolbook would spell it. Let us line up the four signature features.

Feature 1: -ej for standard -ý — náramnej not náramný

The most audible marker of obecná čeština is the ending on hard masculine adjectives. Where the standard has -ý, the vernacular has -ej.

• standard náramný → common náramnej ("enormous, terrific")
• standard mladý → common mladej ("young")
• standard dobrý → common dobrej ("good")
• standard starý → common starej ("old")

This is not random; it reflects a real historical vowel-shift (the diphthongisation of long ý to ej) that the standard language chose not to adopt. The same shift shows up inside words too — standard být stays put, but standard mýt "to wash" is heard as mejt, bejt for být in casual speech.

Feature 2: prothetic v- — vomylem not omylem, von not on

The second giveaway is a v that grows onto the front of words beginning with o-. Bohemian speech dislikes a bare word-initial o- and prepends v-, a phenomenon called prothesis (protetické v). Švejk's sentence has two of them:

• standard omylem → common vomylem ("by mistake")
• standard on → common von ("he")

This is completely regular before o-: okno → vokno (window), oba → voba, obou → vobou (both), ona → vona (she), ono → vono (it), odpoledne → vodpoledne (afternoon). Elsewhere in the novel Švejk says exactly these: Vobou není žádná škoda ("neither of the two is any loss") and Vono to táhne ("there's a draught").

Feature 3: dropped final -l in the masculine past — nemoh not nemohl

Standard Czech builds the past tense on an l-participle: dělal "did," mohl "could," nesl "carried." In obecná čeština, when that -l would sit awkwardly after a consonant in the masculine singular, it is simply dropped. Švejk's nemoh is the standard nemohl ("(I) could not") with its final -l gone.

• standard mohl → common moh ("(he) could")
• standard nesl → common nes ("(he) carried")
• standard řekl → common řek ("(he) said")
• standard pekl → common pek ("(he) baked")

The feminine and neuter keep the -l, because there the participle ends in a vowel and the -l is easy to say: mohla, nesla, řekla stay intact. So this is a masculine-singular-only simplification.

The mechanics of which participles lose the -l and which keep it are on the dropped masculine -l.

Feature 4: the unified instrumental plural -ma

The fourth great marker does not appear in this particular sentence, but it is so characteristic of Švejk's speech that no reading of him is complete without it. Standard Czech has three different instrumental-plural endings depending on gender and type (-y, -i, -ami, -mi, -emi...). Obecná čeština bulldozes them all into a single, easy ending: -ma.

• standard s kluky → common s klukama ("with the boys")
• standard rukama is already the dual-derived standard form for hands, but the vernacular extends the pattern everywhere: nohama (legs), s penězma ("with money," standard s penězi), s lidma ("with people," standard s lidmi), vočima ("with eyes," with prothetic v- on top of očima).

Švejk's Prague is full of this: s těma klukama, před vočima, s penězma. It is the single most efficient tell that a speaker has dropped fully into the vernacular.

Why the narrator stays standard

Here is the literary point that makes Hašek's technique so sharp. Read the surrounding narration and you find impeccable spisovná čeština — full -ý adjectives, on not von, complete -l participles, textbook instrumental plurals. The frame is standard; the voices are common. That contrast does two things at once: it locates Švejk socially and geographically (a Prague working man) without a word of explicit description, and it lets the reader hear the ironic distance between the "official" language of the war and the earthy human language of the people caught in it. When Švejk answers an officer's formal question in dense obecná čeština, the clash of registers is the joke.

The whole system of when Czechs reach for one variety or the other is mapped on the standard–colloquial–common overview, and the feature-by-feature inventory lives on obecná čeština features and the obecná čeština page.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Czech is diglossic: standard spisovná čeština (writing, formal) coexists with everyday spoken obecná čeština (Bohemia). Hašek writes the narration in the former and the dialogue in the latter.
• -ej replaces standard adjectival -ý: náramný → náramnej, dobrý → dobrej.
• Prothetic v- grows onto word-initial o-: omylem → vomylem, on → von, okno → vokno. Only before o-.
• The masculine-singular past drops a final -l after a consonant: nemohl → nemoh, řekl → řek. Feminine/neuter keep it.
• The instrumental plural collapses to one ending -ma, spreading onto adjectives and demonstratives: s těma dobrejma klukama.
• These are spoken-only features. Recognise them everywhere; produce them only when the situation is genuinely casual.