Petr Kaderka

English in the Czech Republic: linguists' perspectives

English as a global language and the most common lingua franca in Europe is becoming increasingly visible in many European countries. The Czech Republic (CR) is no exception to this. Even though there is insufficient evidence to support the statement that English is “omnipresent” (Seidlhofer et al. 2006) in the CR, as its distribution and use does not comprise all areas of communication and social groups, there is no doubt that English does currently have a significant influence on the overall language situation in the CR. The presence of English in the CR has been researched to varying extent and with the use of various methods in the following areas: law, education, multinational companies, and the mass media. Significant attention has also been devoted to research on the influence of English on Czech. In this article, we will attempt to synthesize this previous research and then contribute several new empirical findings from another perspective – that of linguists. We will begin by posing the question of whether any overt (officially formulated) language policy is applied to English in the previously researched areas, or whether covert language policy (manifested at the practical level only) is applied (Schiffman 1996: 2). Then, in the empirical part of the article, we will present the findings of our research on the perspectives of the linguists working at a national language institute, the Czech Language Institute (CLI) of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Digitisation and automatic alignment of the dialog corpus: a prosodically annotated corpus of Czech television debates

This article describes the development and automatic processing of the audio-visual DIALOG corpus. The DIALOG corpus is a prosodically annotated corpus of Czech television debates that has been recorded and annotated at the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It has recently grown to more than 400 VHS 4-hour tapes and 375 transcribed TV debates. The described digitisation process and automatic alignment enable an easily accessible and user-friendly research environment, supporting the exploration of Czech prosody and its analysis and modelling. This project has been carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague. Currently the first version of the DIALOG corpus is available to the public (version 0.1, http://ujc.dialogy.cz). It includes 10 selected and revised hour-long talk shows.