A quote about European polyglot polities by Benedict Anderson

"As observed earlier, the major states of nineteenth-century Europe were vast polyglot polities, of which the boundaries almost never coincided with language-communities. Most of their literate members had inherited from mediaeval times the habit of thinking of certain languages -- if no longer Latin, then French, English Spanish or German -- as languages of civilization. Rich eighteenth-century Dutch burghers were proud to speak only French at home; German was the language of cultivation in much of the western Czarist [Russian] empire, no less than in 'Czech' Bohemia. Until late in the eighteenth century no one thought of these languages as belonging to any territorially defined group." [Imagined Communities, p. 196]