Language in Central Europe's history and Politics: from the rule of cuius regio, eius religio to the national principle of cuius regio, eius lingua?

The author traces the development of Central European languages and the transition from religion-based self-determination to language-based national- ism. He explores the emergence of nation-states through linguistic compo- nent. He names ethnolinguistic groups and minorities existing in Central Europe and evaluates their influence within nation-state. There are many definitions of Central Europe. For the sake of this contribution it is the middle one-third of the continent or the zone bordered by Italy and the German- speaking polities of Germany and Austria in the west and the multilingual Russian Fed- eration in the East. I exclude Scandinavia from the purview for the sake of brevity (Ma- gocsi 2002: xi). The general linguistic shape of Central Europe as we know it today emerged be- tween the arrival in the 10 th century of the Hungarians (or rather a coalition of Finno- Ugric and Turkic ethnic groups) in the Danube basin and the 14 th -century founding of the Romance-speaking principalities of Walachia and Moldavia (that is, the predeces- sors of modern-day Romania and Moldova). In the middle of the region the East Ro- mance languages of Moldovan and Romanian alongside the Finno-Ugric one of Hungar- ian are spoken from the Black Sea to Austria which is part of the German-speaking zone. This multilingual belt separates the North and South Slavic dialect continua (that is, geo- graphically continuous zones within which language changes gradually from locality to locality; the cleavage of mutual incomprehensibility occurs where two continua meet). At present the former is identified with Polish, Czech, Slovak, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian, while the latter with Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Macedonian and Bulgarian (Schenker and Stankiewicz 1980). At Central Europe's southern end terminating in the Mediterranean and the Bosporus, the Indo-European isolates (mutually incomprehensible languages, with no cognates) of Albanian and Greek rub shoulders with Turkish which is part of the Turkic dialect continuum extending to Kazakhstan, Central Asia and eastern China. In the North the sole surviving Baltic languages of Lithuanian and Latvian are squeezed between the North Slavic dialect continuum and the Finno-Ugric language of Esto- nian. All the mentioned idioms belong to the Indo-European family of languages with the exception of the Finno-Ugric ones and Turkish (Plasseraud 2005).