This chapter discusses the problematic but ubiquitous attempts by nineteenth-century linguists to map languages onto language areas and to map states onto those. Languages occupy an uneasy scalar position between dialects and language families: ‘splitters’ will concede an independent status to smaller variants, ‘lumpers’ will group all these variants together into greater wholes. By the same logic, sometimes small language areas are seen as the separate territorial footprints of independent language groups justifying their separate nationhood, while others might claim those areas as part of a larger national whole, as in the case of German expansionism vis-à-vis Schleswig-Holstein and the Low Countries. This chapter discusses the uneasy scalar taxonomy of the Slavic language family as treated by ‘lumping’ pan-Slavic and ‘splitting’ separatist tendencies. The macronationalism of language families constituted a support network for separate national movements in various countries (as in the case of pan-Celticism or pan-Slavism). Macronationalism could also shade into a racial logic for ethnolinguistic macro-groups such as the speakers of Germanic, Indo-European or putative ‘Turanian’ languages.