Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest written traces of Czech language appeared in glosses and short notes from the 12th to 13th centuries. Before this period, the language existed only as spoken word within the West Slavic polity known as Great Moravia.
Jan Hus contributed significantly to standardizing Czech orthography while advocating for literacy among commoners. He made early efforts to model written Czech after the spoken language.
Strc prst skrz krk means stick your finger through your throat and uses no vowels. This phrase demonstrates how some consonants act as syllabic nuclei replacing vowels entirely.
Standard Czech derives from standardization efforts during the 1830s influenced heavily by Josef Jungmann's dictionary published between 1834 and 1839. This formal register appears in official documents literature newspapers education speeches.
About 10 million residents speak Czech primarily within the borders of the Czech Republic. A Eurobarometer survey conducted from January to March 2012 found 98 percent of citizens list Czech as their first language.