Slovak is the official language of Slovakia (also known as the Slovak Republic). This landlocked country in central Europe is bordered by Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Austria, and Czechia. Slovak is spoken by approximately 7.4 million people in Slovakia and by the diaspora, one million of whom are in the USA.

The history of Slovakia

The Slavs arrived in what is present day Slovakia in the fifth and sixth centuries. During the tenth century the land became part of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the Slovaks were identified as inhabitants of Upper Hungary, or simply ‘the Highlands’ rather than by their Slavic language. By the turn of the eighteenth century most of Hungary, including the territories which today form Slovakia, came under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War One, the State of Czechoslovakia, incorporating the Slovaks and the Czechs, was formed after the fall of the empire.

In 1939 the first Slovak Republic was established, under the control of Nazi Germany, but after the war Czechoslovakia was re-established. From 1948 until 1989 this was a Communist state under Soviet rule, behind the Iron Curtain. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and Slovakia became an independent state in January 1993.

The Slovak language

The Slovak language has been influenced by Slovakia’s geographical position and history, as it is closely related to Czech and Polish, and also borrows words from Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, and Latin. The language uses the Latin alphabet with diacritical markings and includes words where consonants such as ‘r’ and ‘l’ act as syllabic vowels.

Christianity in Slovakia

Slovakia was originally pagan, but it became Roman Catholic until the arrival of Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius (known as ‘Apostles to the Slavs’) in the ninth century. These two brothers translated part of the Bible into Old Slavic, creating an alphabet in Glagolitic script (one of this script’s descendants is Cyrillic, which is used today by approximately 120 languages across the world).

In the 1500s many Hussite (followers of Jan Hus) Czech Protestants fled to Slovakia, resulting in Czech became the language of many of the Protestants in the region. During the Protestant Reformation many people in the area of present-day Slovakia became Protestant. However, during the seventeenth century the Counter-Reformation restored the Roman Catholic Church’s hold on the people. Today, nearly 60 per cent of Slovaks identify as Roman Catholic and less than two per cent as reformed.

Bibles in Slovak

Due to the historical situation, and the fact that many Protestants spoke Czech, the first vernacular Bibles in Slovakia were in Czech, and they were widely used among Slovak Protestants. Many people relied on the Czech Kralice translation of 1613, based on the Greek Received Text and Masoretic Hebrew Text, but this wasn’t ideal as it was not in the readers’ native language.

In 1756 a Roman Catholic Slovak Bible was published, called the Camaldolese Bible; this was translated from the Latin Vulgate and was written in a dialect rather than the form of Slovak used today. Another Roman Catholic Bible, translated by professor Juraj Palkovič, was published fully in 1832, but again this was translated from the Latin Vulgate.

In the early twentieth century a Lutheran pastor named Professor Jozef Roháček worked on a new translation, using both the Greek Received Text and the Greek Critical Text. The New Testament was published in 1913, and the whole Bible in 1936. This Bible, often known as the Old Slovak Bible, while good, strived to be more exact than comprehensible; it is a very literal translation using archaic text and borrowing many words from Czech. This was revised in 1969.

There have been other Bible translations more recently, but these are based on the Critical Text. Examples include the Evangelical Translation (which occasionally used the Received Text, but for the majority follows the Critical Text) and the 2008 Ecumenical Bible. There isn’t a good translation from the Biblical texts available to Slovak Christians to use today.

The TBS Slovak Project

The TBS Slovak project is a fairly young work, commencing in 2020. The first fruit of the project was the publication of the Gospel according to John and Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in 2024. This has been published both in print and on our Online Bible App at tbsonlinebible.com/#sk. The lead translator is currently translating the rest of the Gospels.

We would greatly appreciate your prayers for this project as we strive to provide sound Scriptures for people who speak Slovak.

First published in Quarterly Record 651. Last updated 26 May 2025.