This book, by one of the most prolific authors on nationalism in Central Europe, presents, as Peter Burke stresses in the foreword, “a magisterial study” (xi) of the interdependence of nationalism and language in Central Europe. More than a thousand pages, Kamusella's book mainly concentrates on the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the first few hundred pages are concerned with general linguistic context, offering brief overviews of languages spoken in the region, from Albanian through Turkish to Yiddish. The introduction also points toward parallel developments in other parts of the continent, in all cases listing important transitional points, including the emergence of a written language, its codification, standardization, its use in the ideology of (mono)linguistic ethnonational state, and finally its implementation as a state language.

Kamusella's study follows the process by which national states created ethnolinguistically homogenous territory—both through language standardization, as well as through population movements. Although the nineteenth century is largely presented as a time in which nationalism-driven cultural processes delineated Central Europe into languages, after 1918 and especially after 1945, forced migrations and the cloaking of cultural diversity largely ensured the cultural homogeneity of national states' territory. This political history retold through the perspective of language builds the main line of the narrative. Kamusella also draws an interesting picture of the interplay between nationalism and linguistic standardization, highlighting the role scholarship played in the political process and vice versa: Languages were used to justify the claims of ethnolinguisitic nationalism, and ideology in turn influenced codification of vocabularies and standardization of orthography.

This “linguistic engineering” (210) resulted in distancing the written language from the spoken vernacular—a process visible, for example, in the separation of literary spisovná čeština from spoken obecná čeština. As Kamusella argues, this process went hand in hand with the reduction of dialectical varieties of the spoken language, whose domains diminished not only through political pressure of literary language-driven nationalism, but also through the influence of media landscape, which uncritically favored unification. Varieties of speech are, however, not ignored. On the contrary, Kamusella stresses their extent and compositional particularities, painting a vivid picture of Central Europe as a continuously changing conglomerate of interdependent dialects, delineated by highly arbitrary linguistic-cum-political boundaries.

Importantly from the point of view of both historiography and historical linguistics, Kamusella convincingly stresses the politicization of the process of demarcation between dialects and languages, which rested (and, one could add, still rest) on highly normative statements, which not only define the composition of the nation and its territorial claims, but also are closely interwoven with the idealized version of the past. Kamusella links the transition of territorial into ethnolinguistic ideals of the nation and its practical implementation in forms of the state after 1945 to cultural unification, forced migration, social stratification according to language (e.g., in Czechoslovakia), or exclusion of parts of the society (most importantly Roma). The materials gathered in the second part of the book help to visualize the scale and effects of this process.

The marriage of language and nation, as Kamusella emphasizes, was not the only possibility. With reference to the bilingual Bohemian nation as imagined by Bernhard Bolzano and some of his contemporaries (496–99), the Pan-Slavic and Slavic Reciprocity-concepts of Ján Kollár (477–79) and Samuel Linde (381), or the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 (229), the existence of alternative concepts of language-nation-state interdependence is made clear. Similarly, the social and political changes after 1989, like new minority policies and migration movements, challenge the concept of ethnolinguistic unity of the state. Given the recent revival of nationalism-based populism, however, Kamusella objects to making a categorical statement about the future of the ethnolinguistic state.

The author supports his conceptualization of the history—outlined above only cursorily and superficially—with a broad range of examples, superbly researched statistics, and a comprehensive bibliography compiling works in several languages. In particular, the depth of information gathered on minorities and language varieties (e.g., Rusyns, Šokci, Sorbs, Szlonzoks, Slunzaks), often ignored in the traditional historiography, deserves mention. Kamusella's concentration on political and social history with the inclusion of the history of publishing, especially in the second part of the book, overshadows concepts that might have been important for the questions he poses in the introduction. For example, the philosophical conceptualization of languages according to Herder (Volkssprache) or Étienne Condillac (unity of grammar), crucial in coining the language-nation alliance, is only briefly mentioned. The absence of important publications on language and empire (e.g., the works of Hannelore Burger or Jan Fellerer) and—given the outlook of the study—linguistics, whose instruments or literature apart from the introduction can be rarely found, is also surprising.

There is also much to say about the narrative and editorial side of The Politics of Language. Kamusella's theoretical argument is too often lost in lengthy, dense empirical material and further clouded by the tendency of the author to deviate from the main argument while pursuing very interesting but tangential side stories. One has also to be consistently reminded of the main theoretic a suppositions outlined in the introduction in order not to lose sight of the processuality and complexity of described phenomena, as the book often drifts toward listing chronologically ordered historical occurrences. In light of the abundance of empirical material, the reference system is wholly inadequate—instead of classic footnotes or endnotes, most (but not all) paragraphs end with a list of literature used, consisting often of several books. This is a very unfortunate choice, as Kamusella compiled a stupefying amount of information, which is, however, hard to follow up.

With the reservations outlined above, The Politics of Language is a highly interesting and challenging book, presenting an interesting and novel approach to the Central European past and present. Compiling a variety of material mostly inaccessible even to specialists in this area, Kamusella not only considerably enlarges knowledge on the region, but also makes it accessible for nonspecialists. Simultaneously, he disenchants the myth of Central European exceptionality—one of the aims openly stated in the introduction.