By Alan Charlish

WARSAW, July 12 (Reuters) -Central European currencies were mainly moving sideways in thin trade on Friday, with investors keeping an eye on global factors including reports of a possible intervention to prop up the Japanese yen.

The yen swung between losses and gains in volatile trade, reflecting investors' skittishness after Tokyo was thought to have intervened to support the currency in the wake of a cooler-than-expected U.S. inflation report.

Piotr Poplawski, senior economist at ING in Warsaw, said uncertainty over yen interventions was potentially feeding into a cautious approach for investors in central Europe.

"Essentially people are not sure what is going to happen with euro/dollar because dollar/yen plays a significant part in the movement of euro/dollar," he said.

"For quite some time the yen has been relatively weaker against the dollar and investors expected interventions. This would normally result in some move for CEE currencies because a weaker dollar is positive for CEE in most cases."

The Polish zloty EURPLN= and Czech crown EURCZK= were slightly weaker against the euro at 4.257 and 25.362 respectively.

A Czech trader said the crown was moving into range trading, but that markets could become more nervous ahead of a central bank meeting next month.

The Hungarian forint EURHUF= was 0.24% firmer at 392.90.

"We see some strengthening ... I would say it's probably on the back of euro/dollar moving a bit higher but there is nothing really specific or HUF-based," said Miklos Kolba, senior corporate sales dealer at ING in Hungary.

The Romanian leu EURRON=, which is tightly controlled by the central bank, was stable at 4.9734.

Romania's consumer price inflation ROCPI=ECI dropped to 4.94% on the year in June from 5.12% in the previous month, slightly above expectations, data from the National Statistics Board showed on Thursday.

Reporting by Alan Charlish in Warsaw, Jason Hovet in Prague and Boldizsar Gyori in Budapest;
Editing by Helen Popper

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