A Slovak vernacular was first used for literary purposes in the 1780s when it replaced Czech among the Slovak Catholic intelligentsia.¹ Consciousness of separate identity, however, was much older. Divided from the Magyars and from the Germans of north Hungary by language and ethnic origin, from the Czechs by a political frontier, from the Poles by the physical barrier of the Carpathian range, and from the Ruthenians (Ukrainians) by religion, the Slovaks had long possessed at least a vague feeling that they were different from their neighbours. At the same time close ties existed tending to unite the Slovaks with...

We have seen how the Catholic intelligentsia among the Slovaks began to abandon Czech and to develop the principles of Slovak as a literary language in the latter part of the eighteenth century. They were the first to experience a sense of Slovak ethnic consciousness. Although the Slovak Protestant intelligentsia had felt an emotional attachment to the Czech language ever since Protestantism’s suppression in the Czech lands after 1620, they began also to absorb German ideas of linguistic and cultural nationalism during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Even at that time, however, the rising ethnic consciousness of the...

During the years immediately preceding the revolutionary upheaval of March 1848 Slovak nationalism underwent a radical transformation.¹ Its contours were redrawn and its design reframed on a new model. The change came from the efforts of a section of the Protestant intelligentsia. These men were mostly young, students of theology or pastors and schoolteachers just out of college. As a result of their work the nationalism of the Protestant intellectual elite changed from being predominantly Czechoslovak in form to specifically Slovak in both form and content.

The Catholic Bernolak and most of his disciples, though breaking the Czech connection, had...