Impersonal periphrastic passive

This pattern is the signature style of Czech academic reporting, legal documents, and official notices. While action passives sound highly unnatural in casual conversation, state passives (like je dobojováno) are perfectly normal in everyday speech.

Formation:

• Auxiliary verb být in the appropriate tense, always conjugated in the 3rd person singular (e.g., je, bylo, bude).
• Short passive participle strictly in the neuter singular (ending in -no, -eno, or -to).

Key Rules:

• Intransitive Verbs: Many traditional textbooks claim the passive voice only works with transitive verbs (verbs taking a direct accusative object). The impersonal passive proves this wrong. It attaches to verbs with prepositional or oblique objects (e.g., diskutovat o něčem (to discuss something) → bylo o tom diskutováno (it was discussed)), as well as pure intransitive verbs that take no object at all (e.g., pracovat (to work) → bylo pracováno (work was done)).
• Case Preservation: Oblique objects retain their original case and do not become the nominative subject. For example, a dative object stays dative: Pomohli mu. (They helped him.) → Bylo mu pomoženo. (He was helped.).
• Reflexive Verbs: The impersonal periphrastic passive cannot be formed from reflexive verbs (verbs that inherently take se or si, such as dívat se or smát se). Constructions like *Bylo se díváno or *Je se smáno are strictly ungrammatical.
• No Dummy Subjects: Because English translations naturally use "it" (e.g., "It was discussed"), learners often try to translate it using to or ono. Czech strictly forbids dummy pronouns in this specific intransitive construction. The sentence is entirely subjectless.

While grammatically possible to express the agent using the instrumental case, stylistic manuals warn against it. The purpose of this construction is deagentivization. If you need to explicitly name the agent, you should almost always revert to the active voice (e.g., Vláda o tom rozhodla. (The government decided on it.)). Note that pure verbs of motion (like jít or jet) generally cannot form the periphrastic passive (e.g., *je jito or *bylo jeto are ungrammatical, though they can form the reflexive passive, e.g., jelo se).

Register Contrast:
Do not use the action passive in everyday speech! For casual conversation, Czechs use the impersonal reflexive construction with se (e.g., Rozhodlo se o tom. (It was decided.)). The periphrastic version (Bylo o tom rozhodnuto. (It was decided.)) is for formal contexts (both written and spoken). However, note that impersonal state passives (like Je dobojováno. (The fight is over.) or Je rozhodnuto. (It is decided.)) are a major exception and are used constantly in casual speech. While imperfective verbs only form action passives, perfective verbs can express both an action and a resulting state depending on tense and context (e.g., Včera o tom bylo rozhodnuto (It was decided yesterday) expresses a past action, while Už je o tom rozhodnuto (It has already been decided) expresses a present resulting state).