Instrumentál plurálu - pádový kámen úrazu“?

In 1981, four Czech language scholars published a significant paper entitled “The current state and future prospects of Standard Czech codification” in the journal Slovo a slovesnost. The paper contained, among others, a list of non-standard morphological variants that – according to the authors – could or should be included in the Standard Czech codification. In the meantime, some of these proposals have actually been realized. However, according to the authors’ statement, the non-standard -ma variant in the plural of the instrumental case still retained a certain degree of stylistic markedness, even though it was no longer distinctively non-standard. Today, forty years later, we aim to answer the question of to what extent we can still agree with this statement, particularly in spoken journalism.