Slovak survival kit

About this kit

Slovak (slovenčina) is spoken by around 5.5 million people, mostly in Slovakia. Very close to Czech (mutually intelligible), it belongs to the West Slavic family. With this kit, you have the bare essentials for Bratislava, the High Tatras and the Carpathian villages.

Slovak (slovenčina) has been the official language of Slovakia since independence in 1993, following the peaceful split from the Czech Republic. With its 5.5 million speakers, it is a West Slavic language that enjoys mutual intelligibility with Czech but possesses its own spelling, pronunciation and literature. The Latin alphabet enriched with hacek diacritics (š, č, ž, ť, ď, ň, ľ) and long accents (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý) accurately captures the richness of Slavic phonetics: palatalised consonants, long vowels, liquid syllables r and l. The country offers a fascinating travel destination: Bratislava and its castle overlooking the Danube, the High Tatras with their two-thousand-metre peaks, the wooden Carpathian villages listed by UNESCO, castles like Spis and Bojnice, and a generous cuisine built around bryndza, halusky and slivovica. This kit gathers the bare essentials to handle an arrival at M.R. Stefanik airport in Bratislava, a train or taxi ride, an order at a typical kolkarna or reštaurácia, a medical emergency and a smooth departure. You will find greetings adapted to formal Slovak address, phrases for finding your way around a city or a mountain path, key words for eating and sleeping, plus cultural tips to distinguish Slovakia from its Czech cousin. Memorise these expressions before leaving and you will gain confidence from your arrival in Bratislava or Kosice.