Nationalism, a crucial component in the formation of the modern Slovak nation, was a process that involved the search for and definition of a national identity through which the non-dominant ethnic group could shed its linguistic, cultural, political and social inferiority. In Slovak historiography, the concept of a ‘national renascence or awakening’ is normally used to describe this process even if, at least from the viewpoint of the theory of national movements, it is not an entirely adequate one. These terms presuppose the existence of a subject entity that, for a certain period of time, lost its identity or fundamental characteristics. It was therefore the task of at least two generations of national ‘revivers’ to bring this community back to life once more.

At first glance, the situation in which the Slovaks found themselves in at the beginning of the modern era provided little evidence that they might possess the requisite attributes to be an ethnic group; a common language, a collective memory of a shared history or an institutionally anchored territory. The Slovak ethnic group was indistinctly defined through social membership, since they belonged to an ethnic group with an incomplete social structure divided by confessional diversity. During the eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth, allegiance to one of two distinct and previously antagonistic confessions, the Protestant (Lutheran) and the Catholic faiths, was the decisive factor that determined the cultured form of language used, the passing down of traditions and the way in which concepts of cultural orientation were articulated.