At least 20,000,000 books had already been printed in Europe by 1500, and up to 200,000,000 had been produced by 1600. A consequence of this was that versions written more or less fixed than In this period, French, German and English were eliminated from the vast array of languages ​​spoken in Europe. Profit has been fatal to European linguistic diversity. Publishers would not produce translations of Luther's sermons in every dialect variant of the French countryside; instead they translated them into the printed language “French,” which French literati were supposed to learn. These new print languages ​​created unified fields of exchange and communication in a way that offered an entirely new form of imagined community. Printed language was a necessary but not sufficient condition for nationalism (p.