Essay
Nárečja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaňja v tomto nárečí
Not translated into English
Ľudovít Štúr · 1846
Synopsis
The treatise defends a written Slovak language based on the speech of the centre of the country, with a phonetic orthography, and answers the thesis of Ján Kollár, who counted only four Slavic tribes. It maintains that the Slavic peoples must develop their culture from their living languages, and makes of this language, closer to speech than the Czech biblical language of the Protestants, a language independent of any Czech or Czechoslovak project.
Context
The treatise appeared in Bratislava (Presbourg) in 1846 together with Nauka reči slovenskej, the grammar of the new language, three years after the agreement of Hlboké, concluded in July 1843 between the author, Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodža. The codification follows spoken usage, which assures it a wide audience; in 1851, Catholics and Lutherans agreed on a compromise between the norm of Štúr and that of Bernolák. The Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe sees in it a means of resisting Magyarisation without merging into Pan-Slavism.
Who it is for
A brief, oratorical treatise, to be read with the quarrel over the written language among the nineteenth-century Slovaks in mind.
Prizes and reception
The founding text, together with the grammar published the same year, of the written norm of modern Slovak.