Why Switzerland? Jonathan Steinberg poses this beguilingly simple and provocative question in the title of his popular social history of the small alpine nation (Steinberg 1976, 1996). The choice of title was justified by the book's project, which was to explain two – later three – key questions: ‘why a place as idiosyncratic as Switzerland existed, and why non-Swiss should care’ (the third question, added in the second edition, was ‘why Switzerland should continue to exist’; Steinberg 1996: xi). Curiously though, in his preliminary discussion of these issues, the author places Switzerland ‘at the geographical centre of Europe’ (xii). While a case can be made for including the country in some conception of ‘central Europe’, the geographical centre of the continent surely lies significantly further east – although, as Stanisław Mucha's idiosyncratic search for this mythical place in the documentary film Die Mitte (2004) shows, there are many competing locations that lay claim to the title (Stevenson and Carl 2009: 1).

We raise these questions here because we were asked – and asked ourselves – similar questions in the course of the research on which this book is based. Why write about such a contentious and ill-defined space as central Europe? Why focus on the German language and its speakers? And why should anyone else care? We are, respectively, a British sociolinguist specialising in language ideologies and the politics of language in Germany, and a German social scientist with expertise in discourses on national and regional identity in the UK, so in exploring relationships between language and social change in what we should perhaps more properly call eastern central Europe we have both moved outside our familiar terrains.