The Slovak National Awakening: An Essay in the Intellectual History of East Central Europe

The Slovaks lived under Hungarian rule for centuries, with no clear sense of political separateness, preserving Slovak as their spoken language, but using Czech as their written language. In the last decades of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, the efforts made by clerical intellectuals to develop a language more closely attuned to Slovak needs led to the rise of Slovak nationalism.

The Slovak National Awakening describes the three major stages in the development of national...