Czech/Slovak Special Characters Cheatsheet

Czech and Slovak share most of their diacritics but not all of them, and the differences are a reliable way to tell the two languages apart at a glance. Both use the háček, the small v-shaped caron on č, š, ž, ř, ť, ď and ň, which changes the consonant's sound rather than decorating it. Both use the čárka, the acute, to mark a long vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý. Czech alone has the kroužek, the ring on ů, and the ř. Slovak alone has ľ and ĺ with the dĺžeň, plus ä and ô.

The Czech ř is famous for being one of the hardest sounds in any European language — a raised alveolar trill made nowhere else — and it appears in the name of the composer Dvořák, which is why English speakers reliably mangle it. It is a full letter of the Czech alphabet, not an r with a mark, and Slovak does not have it at all. If a text contains ř it is Czech; if it contains ľ or ô it is Slovak.

The two Czech long u letters, ú and ů, are pronounced identically but are not interchangeable. The rule is positional: ú appears at the start of a word or after a prefix, as in úterý and neúplný, while ů appears everywhere else, as in dům and stůl. The ring is a historical trace of an older diphthong. Czech schoolchildren learn this as a spelling rule, and getting it wrong is one of the more visible errors a foreign writer makes.

The háček also has a typographic quirk. On tall lowercase letters — ď, ť and the Slovak ľ — the caron is drawn as an apostrophe-like stroke rather than a v, purely for vertical space. It is the same mark and the same character; only the glyph shape changes. This is a font rendering behaviour, so do not substitute a real apostrophe when you see it, and do not assume the character is wrong when it looks different from the č in the same word.

For typing, the practical answer in both languages is a native layout rather than Alt codes. The Czech and Slovak QWERTZ layouts put the accented vowels along the number row, so writing flows without modifier gymnastics. If you need occasional characters only, Windows Alt codes work with Num Lock on — č is Alt+0232 in the Central European codepage, š is Alt+0154, ž is Alt+0158 — though codepage dependence makes them less dependable than on Western European characters. On macOS, hold the base letter to open the accent picker, or use Option+E for the acute. On Linux, Compose then v then the letter produces the háček and Compose then apostrophe then the vowel produces the acute.