ABSTRACT
During the past two centuries the concept of “a language” (Einzelsprache) has been a highly politicized category of thinking about politics and societies in Central Europe. Today, the region is divided among nation-states. The founding and existence of practically all these polities has been justified with the ethnolinguistic strain of nationalist ideology. Nationalism proposes that a legitimate state (that is, nation-state) should be for one nation only. Typically, the population in an already extant non-national (pre-national) polity is announced to be a nation, thus making this non-national polity into a nation-state. However, in the case of ethnolinguistic nationalism, the nation is believed to be primary, not the state. The nation precedes its state. But without the prop of a state, another element of the social reality must be employed for defining what the nation is. Since the early nineteenth century the Einzelsprache has been employed in Central Europe in this function.
