150th anniversary of the codification of the Slovak language

200 Sk commemorative silver coin

Under the influence of difficult social conditions, national oppression of the Slovaks and the general European tendency towards national emancipation movements, a strong revolutionary patriotic movement has been formed in the 1830s. It was headed by: Ľudovít Štúr, Jozef Miloslav Hurban and Michal Miloslav Hodža. They significantly advanced the process of constituting the Slovaks as a modern nation, which began to demand its own constitutional position. The codification of written Slovak language was an important step in this process. The principles of the new written language were adopted at a meeting of Štúr, Hurban and Hodža at Hlboké in 1843, and later developed by Štúr in his work “Náuka reči slovenskej” (Instruction in the Slovak Language). Although there had been attempts to codify Slovak in the preceding period, Štúr’s Slovak proved to be the most advantageous and most viable. Therefore, it was acceptable to the nation as a whole.