About the Department of Czech Language
Department in numbers
Teaching
The Department of Czech Language provides the linguistic part of Bohemistic education in the following programs:
- Czech Language and Literature (bachelor's and follow-up master's studies)
- Teaching Czech Language and Literature for Secondary Schools (follow-up master's study)
- Computational Linguistics (bachelor's and follow-up master's studies)
- Czech Language (doctoral study)
The department is closely linked to the Department of Czech for Foreigners at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, in which it partly participates in teaching activities.
More information about study programs
Research
Research at the Department of Czech Language is currently focused on several main directions:
- Synchronic linguistics (nanosyntax, phonology, grammar, and lexicon of Czech)
- Diachronic linguistics (onomastics, history of Czech, historical syntax, source editing)
- Corpus and computational linguistics (creation and exploitation of specialized corpora, automatic morphological analysis of Czech)
The Department has been a research workplace for several team projects, the outputs of which have become recognized reference publications in the field: Příruční mluvnice češtiny (1995), Encyklopedický slovník češtiny (2002), Kapitoly z dějin jazykovědné bohemistiky (2007). In 2017, under the auspices of the Department, the Nový encyklopedický slovník češtiny was published, an extensive collective work involving around 150 domestic and 40 foreign linguists.
The Department is regularly involved in various other international research activities, for example, within the framework of the Phonological Theory Agora: international network project (2015–2018; http://pta.cnrs.fr). It has also been the organizer of prestigious international conferences and workshops: in the past, for example, five editions of the conference Čeština – univerzália a specifika (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004), more recently, several editions of the Slavicist conference Formal Description of Slavic Languages (2009, 2014), and the 9th and 12th editions of the international conference SinFonIJA (2016, 2019); the last two mentioned conferences were organized in cooperation with the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University.
Research areas Grants and projects Conferences and workshops publications
History of the department
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The beginning of the 1990s
The Division of the Department of Czech Language, Slavic, Indo-European, and General Linguistics
The department split into three separate units: Indo-European Studies and General Linguistics formed the Department of Linguistics, Slavic Studies joined the newly established Department of Slavic Studies, and the independent Bohemistics became today's Department of Czech Language.
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The mid-1960s
The Division of the Department of Czech Language and Literature
The department further split into literary and linguistic sections; the linguistic section was named the Department of Czech Language, Slavic, Indo-European, and General Linguistics.
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The year 1951
The Division of the Seminar for Slavic Philology
The seminar divided into three separate departments, one of which was the Department of Czech Language and Literature.
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The academic year 1921/1922
The establishment of the institution
Bohemistics has been represented at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University since the inception of the faculty. At that time, it was part of the Seminar for Slavic Philology.
Collaborations
The Department of Czech Language has extensive contacts with domestic and international academic institutions.
Of the domestic institutions, particularly significant is the collaboration lasting more than sixty years with the Institute of the Czech Language of the Czech Academy of Sciences, whose dialectological and etymological department is based in Brno.
The Computational Linguistics program is linked through research and educational activities with the Natural Language Processing Centre at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. It also develops cooperation with a local network of specialized computer-oriented institutions and companies (see Computational Linguistics – Partners for more information).
The Department also collaborates with philological departments at foreign universities (e.g., in Regensburg, Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Tübingen, Kiel, Vienna, Salzburg, Nice, Naples, Udine, Sheffield, Wrocław, Tromsø, etc.), both at the research and teaching levels (invited lectures, co-organizing workshops and conferences, collaboration on grant projects), as well as at the student level (see Study Abroad for more information).
An important event in international cooperation is the repeated organization of the Eastern Generative Grammar (EGG) summer school.
Personalities
A number of outstanding personalities have shaped linguistic Bohemistics at the Faculty of Arts in Brno, whose significance has transcended the boundaries of the local environment.
The following profiles are based on the work of R. Večerka in Biografickobibliografické medailonky českých lingvistů: bohemistů a slavistů (2nd edition, edited by A. Bičan and V. Boček, in Linguistica online, August 2008), and on the profiles prepared by doctoral students of the Department of Czech Language for the Alumni Day 2019.
