ABSTRACT
One of the deepest layers of identity that many people feel strongly about, particularly in Europe, is national identity. Germany only became a political entity, in the sense that we know it today, when many of the German-speaking territories in central Europe were united following the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, forming a sovereign state based on the idea of a German nation: a nation-state. The relationship between language and national identity in Germany and Austria is constructed solely in terms of the German language, which involves the erasure or blocking out of certain aspects of the multilingual reality in these countries. Luxembourg and Switzerland not only formally acknowledge the co-existence of several different languages, they also effectively define themselves as multilingual states. The de facto, if not de jure, division of Switzerland into discrete 'language areas' inevitably highlights both the presence of different ethnolinguistic groups and the considerable differences in their size.
