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Notes -
It's insightful to analyze Europe(an countries) by individual provinces; the nation states are mostly rather modern of course. Bavaria, Catalonia, Ile de France, Rhone-Alpes, Baden-Württemberg, Lombardy (cf. blue banana, four motors of Europe etc. and Europe of 100 Flags)
Sure, but it’s also ahistorical to suggest that these identities were fully invented recently, when they weren’t. Italy and Germany are only 150 years old (France is already 250, anyway), but bonds of language and culture are older in many cases. Even centuries ago, the gap between an Occitan and a Catalonian was obviously less than between either of them and a Pole or a Swede.
A perfect example of my point, they are the same language but were not unified etc. rather colonized and converted by other areas - and very recently. By 1860, 40% of Frenchmen still spoke Occitan with a literary history older than French and a Nobel prize in literature in 1904. Catalonia recently had an independence referendum. In 1792, 10% of modern France spoke French and it took 150 years to eliminate/kill off minority languages.
Not just Austria, but even Bavaria and the rest of Southern Germany had their own standard until the late 18th century. Some of the Northern dialects until today have maintained their own standard: Dutch, which Germany had to explicitly erradicate in its own areas.
Even today, no one speaks standard Italian without an accent. The "dialects" remain very strong and heavily color speech in colloquial use.
These are standards imposed over various dialects and often larger speakerships, but there's inherent cultural and linguistic bonds leading to the current clustering. The regional identities are far older (often the regions aren't conncted to current administrative boundaries). In a different world, a lattice of sovereign regions where people spoke e.g. a panromance or panslavic standard readily comprehensible to all speakers (indeed often easier to comprehend than many existing neighboring varieties) could have been possible.
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