The emergence of the nation state as a result of the French Revolution had far-reaching consequences for the concept of state in Western Europe. With the nation came the idea of the nation-state, which in many cases was constituted in the sense of a linguistic nation through the common language. This turned regional language forms in traditionally multilingual areas into a potential ideological threat to the nation, and a period of repression began for the regional languages, which in the Romantic period turned into a period of recuperation for the more successful ones among them. The paper argues that this process led to the emergence of a relatively homogeneous - and specifically Western European - form of societal multilingualism, which we propose to describe as the sociolinguistic type of WERL (Western European Regional Language). It will be argued that these multilingual configurations are to be found within the framework of a "sociolinguistic areal typology" and that the individual cases should be systematically compared within this category. Catalonia is in many aspects a prototypical representative of this type but differs from the other cases primarily by its exponentially greater success in the recuperation phase.