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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Broader Linguistic and Cultural Context of Central Europe

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Central Europe is an extremely malleable concept. It denotes a region whose political shape has been changing dramatically throughout the last millennium since the emergence of the first polities. This work focuses on the rise and political uses of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. But this would mean tearing away the roots of the sociolinguistic reality that surrounds and has deeply interacted with the everyday realities of Slovak-, Polish-, Magyar- and Czech-speakers. The resulting picture would agree with the predominant ethnonational thinking about Central Europe as an area neatly divided among the nation-states that contain the corresponding nations speaking exclusively in their own languages. But despite the gigantic and tragic 20th-century feats of social engineering to this end, such an ideal has never been achieved. What is more, this tight overlapping of nation, nation-state, and language as proposed by Central European nationalists would baffle most of the Central European rulers, elites, and the population at large prior to the mid-19th century.