The non-standard language has become, in the course of the twentieth century, an important and legitimate component of Czech literary texts, but the most widely used non-standard variety, the so-called common Czech, prevails. The Moravian (or Silesian) varieties appear much less. This article analyses the language of two prosaic works which operate to a significant extent with Silesian dialects, Obyčejné věci (Common Things) by Jan Vrak (1998) and Slezský román (The Silesian Novel) by Petr Čichoň (2011). The use of dialects is, in both pieces of prose, supported by the localization of some parts of the storyline to the territory of Silesia. The intricately composed experimental prose by Jan Vrak confronts the typically Silesian elements with the elements of other varieties and presents the emphasized language diversity as a part of the main character’s search for his personal and family identity. Slezský román works with language in an easier way and highlights primarily the language specificity of the Hlučínsko region, affected also by the influence of German.
The article focuses on the development of the labour market in the Czech Republic from the perspective of employment and unemployment between 1998 and 2004. Using data from the Czech Statistical Office, and within a reference framework of EU countries, the authors discuss and analyse the factors that determine unemployment and employment in Czech society. The authors use latent logistic regression to verify the assumption that the odds of unemployment are not evenly distributed across the entire Czech population and to identify three segments of the labour market in the Czech Republic. In each of these three segments the employment and unemployment odds differ, and the factors that determine these odds function differently in each segment.