Central Europe is a kind of crossroads of language and culture.
Here, you’ll find Slavic-speaking people in the eastern part of the region, and German-speaking people in the western portion. (Slavic and Germanic languages are two branches of Indo-European, a language family that includes most of the languages of Europe and northern India.) Here, you will also find many landlocked countries. Does this feature help explain why even Germany, the largest of these countries, may not have engaged in the same type of exploration of the world as Britain, Italy, Spain, and Portugal? Perhaps.
