Czech ethnicity

Czech ethnicity indicates genetic origins in Czechia, or as it is more widely known the Czech Republic. The Czechs are a West Slavic people who moved into Central Europe during the great migration period which occurred between the third and tenth centuries CE as waves of Germanic and Asiatic peoples arrived to Europe from Scandinavia and Asia. The Slavs settled in a vast range of territory from the Balkans north to Poland and Russia between the sixth and ninth centuries. Those which settled in Czechia were the westernmost Slavic settlers. The region they settled would be known for many centuries to come as Bohemia after the Boii Celtic tribe which had lived here in ancient times, while the Czechs themselves took their name from a semi-legendary tribal leader by the name of Čech. Approximately 84% of the population of Czechia is ethnically Czech, while 5% identify as Moravian, a closely related West Slavic group. The remainder of the population is made up of a range of different ethnic groups, primarily from adjoining countries, notably Germans and Slovaks, while there is also a growing Ukrainian community. There is also, perhaps somewhat anomalously, a large Vietnamese community in Czechia of over 80,000 ethnically Vietnamese people. This is because the Vietnamese government sent workers to Czechoslovakia to acquire industrial skills and education during the Cold War when both countries were communist. Many remained, while tens of thousands more have arrived in recent decades, and so Czechia boasts one of the largest Vietnamese diaspora communities in the world.

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Czech history

The Venus of Dolní Věstonice (c. 25,000 BCE)

The region corresponding to Czechia today has a unique position in human pre-history. It is here that the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, perhaps the world’s oldest ceramic dating to approximately to as much as 30,000 years ago, was found, along with similar ceramics and engraved mammoth tusks, indicating an advanced pre-historic culture here by 25,000 BCE. The region was inhabited many millennia later by the Boii, a Celtic tribe, amongst other groups, before being partially assimilated into the Roman Empire in the first century CE as one of the provinces along the northern frontier.

Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the region experienced incursions by the Slavs, a people who settled much of the Balkans and Eastern Europe between the sixth and ninth centuries. The particular group of Slavs involved in the Czech region took their name from a semi-legendary founder called Čech, though the realm they inhabited was known as Bohemia for centuries to come after the Boii Celts who had once lived here. The Czechs were soon organized into a coherent political state, first as the Duchy of Bohemia from the late ninth century onwards and then as the Kingdom of Bohemia after Ottokar I established himself as ruler thereof in 1198.

Bohemia played an important role in the history of late medieval Europe as the religious reformer Jan Hus attempted a series of religious reforms here in the early fifteenth century which presaged the later Protestant Reformation under Martin Luther in Germany. Dynastic changes saw the Austrian Habsburgs acquire the title of Kings of Bohemia from 1526 onwards. In 1618 unrest over efforts by the Habsburgs to impose Roman Catholicism across Bohemia was the spark which led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, the bloodiest conflict in early modern Europe.

Bohemia remained a part of the Austrian Empire for centuries to come and then the dual Empire of Austria-Hungary from 1867 onwards. However, as elsewhere in Europe, the nineteenth century saw an awakening of Czech nationalism and even before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War the Czechs had been agitating for regional autonomy or even their own state. Czechoslovakia emerged after the war, but it was soon subjugated again by a more powerful neighbor in the shape of Nazi Germany in 1939.

After the Second World War Czechoslovakia became part of the Soviet communist bloc, despite efforts to shake off Russian rule during the Prague Spring of 1968. Following the end of the Cold War Czechoslovakia separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on New Year’s Eve 1992. Today the Czech Republic, which officially changed its name to Czechia in 2016, is a prosperous member of the European Union, though one which like Hungary and Poland is increasingly at odds with the EU over a wide range of matters concerning migration and the rule of law in their countries.

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Czech culture

Franz Kafka, one of the great figures of 20th-century literature

The region around Czechia is home to some of the world’s earliest art, including the Venus Dolní Věstonice ceramics and mammoth engravings going back to the last Ice Age. In more recent times the anonymous Master of the Litoměřice Altarpiece, who was active in Bohemia in the late fifteenth century, was one of the first protagonists of Renaissance art outside of Italy. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the region was home to many prominent proponents of Mannerism, Cubism and Expressionism such as Bohumil Kubišta. In film Milos Forman is world acclaimed for director One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). Like its near neighbor Hungary, Czechia has a long tradition of achievement in sports beyond its population size. In football (admittedly while still joined with Slovakia) the country has finished runner-up twice at the FIFA World Cup, in 1934 and 1962, and won the European Championships in 1976. The country has also produced some of the world’s greatest tennis players, notably Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl. With 59 major titles Navratilova has won more combined singles and doubles grand slam titles than any player in history, male or female. In literature numerous individuals have emerged from the Czechia region over the past two centuries who have made a significant impact on modern literature, none more so than realist author, Franz Kafka.

Czech languages

Czech is the official language of Czechia. It is one of the most complex of European languages, being a morphological tongue which is primarily a West Slavic language, but one with a Latin script and a language that has been influenced in certain respects by both Latin and German. As such, it blends together many of the lingual traditions of Europe. While Czech is the predominant spoken language there are numerous other languages spoken here, many of which are officially recognized as minority languages. Slovak, which is very close to Czech, the two languages being mutually intelligible, is spoken by over 100,000 people here. Approximately 45% of the Czech population speak English, primarily as a second or third language. 8% of the population speak German, while there are also a significant number of Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Belarussian speakers. Unusually, Vietnamese is recognized as an official minority language in Czechia. This is owing to there being a large community of Vietnamese people in the country, some 80,000 strong, with 10,000 Vietnamese living in Prague alone.

Explore more about ethnicity estimates

• MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage
• Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
• What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
• Where's My Ethnicity?!: Why An Ethnicity Might Not Show Up In Your DNA (and How To Find Evidence Of It Anyway) at MyHeritage Knowledge Base

References

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