In IPA transcriptions of Slovak, [tʂ, dʐ, ʂ, ʐ] are often written with ⟨tʃ, dʒ, ʃ, ʒ⟩, i.e. as if they were palato-alveolar.
The palato-alveolar [tʃ, dʒ, ʃ, ʒ] exist in Slovak, but only as allophones of /tʂ, dʐ, ʂ, ʐ/, which are normally retroflex, as in Polish.
To accelerate writing, a rule has been introduced that the frequent sequences [ɟe], [ce], [ɲe], [ʎe], [ɟi], [ci], [ɲi], [ʎi], [ɟiː], [ciː], [ɲiː], [ʎiː], [ɟɪe], [cɪe], [ɲɪe], [ʎɪe] [ɟɪɐ], [cɪɐ], [ɲɪɐ], [ʎɪɐ] are written without a mäkčeň as de, te, ne, le, di, ti, ni, li, dí, tí, ní, lí, die, tie, nie, lie, dia, tia, nia, lia.
Some exceptions are as follows: When a voiced obstruent (b, d, ď, dz, dž, g, h, z, ž) is at the end of the word before a pause, it is pronounced as its voiceless counterpart (p, t, ť, c, č, k, ch, s, š, respectively).
For example, kov [kɔw] (metal), kravský [ˈkrawskiː] (cow - adjective), but povstať [ˈpɔfstac] (uprise), because the /v/ is morpheme-initial (po-vstať).
One of the most important changes in Slovak orthography in the 20th century was in 1953 when s began to be written as z where pronounced [z] in prefixes (e.g. smluva into zmluva [ˈzmluʋa] as well as sväz into zväz [zʋɛɐs]).
This rule has morphophonemic implications for declension (e.g. žen-ám [ˈʐenaːm] but tráv-am [ˈtraːʋam]) and conjugation (e.g. nos-ím [ˈnɔsiːm] but súd-im).
Not all "normal" consonants have a counterpart with mäkčeň: The Slovak alphabet is available within the ISO/IEC 8859-2 "Latin-2" encoding, which generally supports Eastern European languages.
All vowels, but none of the specific consonants (that is, no č, ď, ľ, ĺ, ň, ŕ, š, ť, ž) are available within the "Latin-1" encoding, which generally supports only Western European languages.