ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

History of the Slovak language

Hello there! Today, I'm going to tell you all about the history of the Slovak language, but I'll explain it as if you were only 5 years old!

Slovak is a language that people speak in Slovakia. That's a country in Europe, next to Poland and Hungary. People in Slovakia have been speaking Slovak for a really long time, but the language has changed a lot over the years.

Many, many years ago, people in what is now Slovakia didn't speak Slovak. They spoke a language called Proto-Slavic. That was a long time ago though - it was over 1,500 years ago! Proto-Slavic was the language that all Slavic people spoke. The Slavs were a group of people who lived in Eastern Europe.

Over time, the Proto-Slavic language started to change. It became different from one region to another. Eventually, different languages developed from Proto-Slavic. Slovak was one of those languages.

The oldest written records of Slovak date back to the 15th century. That's when people started writing things down in Slovak. Before that, they used other languages to write - like Latin and German. But as more and more people started speaking Slovak, they wanted to write in their own language.

There were some really smart people who helped make Slovak what it is today. They worked hard to standardize the language, which means they made rules for how words are spelled and how the language is used. These people are called linguists - they're like scientists who study language.

Nowadays, people in Slovakia speak Slovak, but the language is still changing. New words are added all the time, and some old words fall out of use. But that's okay - it's pretty normal for languages to change over time.

So that's the history of the Slovak language, in a nutshell! It's changed a lot over the years, but it's still spoken by lots of people today.