Ethnicity, Language, & Religion of Slovakia
Ethnicity
The majority of people living in Slovakia are ethnic Slovaks, although near the Hungarian border there is a significant Hungarian minority. Slovaks are related to the western Slavic people, a group that also includes the Poles and Czechs. The Hungarians have no close ethnic relatives as they are distantly related to Turkic and Uralic people from Central Asia, as well as to many nearby European ethnic groups.
Language
Most ethnic Slovaks speak Slovak, which is a western Slavic language similar to both Czech and Polish. Like those languages, Slovak is written in the Latin script.
Hungarian is also commonly spoken among ethnic Hungarians. Czech, Russian, and English are common second languages as Slovakia was united with the Czech Republic for years (Czechoslovakia) and under communism Russian was taught. Today, the fluency of Czech and Russian are slowly being replaced with fluency in English, which is now the most commonly studied second language. Despite this, most people who grew up in Czechoslovakia still speak or understand some Czech or Russian, while they rarely speak English.