The paper focuses on linguistic politeness and its changes in contemporary Czech. The emphasis is on politeness in intercultural communication, Czech politeness forms are analysed in contrast with French. The paper will describe the most common politeness formulas in basic speech acts and outline the possibilities of translating them. The data source is the Czech and French part of the InterCorp digital parallel corpus. The research includes a questionnaire survey conducted in the Czech Republic and France, the results of which represent the evaluation of the studied phenomena by native speakers of Czech and French and are compared with the results of the corpus analysis. The paper also outline the possibilities of subsequent comparisons with other languages, in particular English or other Slavic languages.