The reader may ask why I chose to deal first with the Poles and their language politics. In Chapter 2, I focused first on Czech out from the four Central European languages to which this book is devoted. I took as a guideline the fact that the initial documents written in Czech predate those jotted down in Hungarian (Magyar), Polish, or Slovak. Here, however, I decided that continuity of literary tradition and the use of an idiom as an official language allows me to concentrate on Polish first. With this approach I do not wish to rank these four languages along some imaginary scale of importance or quality; not at all. Simply, I stress the use of a language in public and political sphere as decisive for the rise of nationalism and the implementation of national policies — the very subject matter of this work.