On the problem of the inflection of non-derived surnames of women with the ending a in Czech. – The codification of Standard Czech requests a morphological derivation of most surnames of women according to the feminine gender, typically masculine Novák (nominal type) >> feminine Nováková (with suffix -ová and adjectival inflection), masculine Malý (adjectival type) >> feminine Malá (adjectival inflection). However, for some time the legislation of the Czech Republic has allowed the use of the non-derived surnames of women. When used in texts, in most cases they are indeclinable, especially when ending in a consonant (cf. Novák). However, a number of Czech surnames end in -a (e.g., Smetana, Svoboda), which is a typical ending of feminine nouns in Czech. By a corpus analysis we show that in written Czech there is (besides the use of uninflected forms) a certain tendency to inflect the surname of a woman like a feminine noun in such cases, not only when it is motivated by a homonymous feminine appellative such as smetana “cream” or svoboda “freedom”. In some cases, the inflected forms predominate. Surnames in -a also arise from the integration of derived surnames of women from other Slavic languages (e.g., Gladkova), these surnames oscillate sometimes between nominal and adjectival declension in Czech.

This article is written in German.

Keywords: surnames; Czech; declension; feminine gender