Czech

According to the 12th-century chronicler Cosmas of Prague, a chief named Čech led his tribe out of Croatia into a fertile valley that became Bohemia. Cosmas recorded this origin myth in his Chronica Boëmorum around 1120, one of the oldest written accounts of Czech identity. The legend gave a people a name: descendants of Čech, the Čechové, later the Češi. Whether or not the chieftain existed, the story shaped how Bohemians understood themselves for centuries.

Linguists trace Čech to a Proto-Slavic root that may have meant a person belonging to one's own clan, though the derivation remains uncertain. Related Slavic ethnonyms follow similar patterns of self-designation based on kin membership. The place name Čechy, the plural meaning Bohemia as a territory, appears in medieval Latin as Bohemia, a name the Romans derived from the Boii, a Celtic tribe who occupied the region before the Slavic migration.

English speakers used Bohemian for centuries, borrowing the Roman designation. The shift came with the 19th-century Czech National Revival, when scholars including Josef Jungmann and František Palacký worked to restore the language and cultural identity against the dominant German culture of the Habsburg court. German writers had already been using Tscheche as a borrowing from the Czech autonym, and English adopted a spelling closer to the original Čech as Czech nationalism grew through the mid-19th century.

The 1919 formation of Czechoslovakia established Czech as the standard English term for both the people and their Slavic language. When Czechoslovakia dissolved peacefully in 1993, Czech became the sole adjective and noun for the new Czech Republic, which adopted the shorter name Czechia in 2016. The word now names a language spoken by about 10 million people, a national identity, and a literary tradition that produced Jaroslav Hašek and Milan Kundera.