This book explores the history of the concepts of state,? tat, valtio and "state," respectively, in English, French, Finnish and Russian. The history of the term helps to understand both the political conditions for the rooting of a certain type of speech acts, and the consequences of this consolidation of the usual ways of doing business with the help of a once rather strange, but now seeming completely unproblematic word. The book opens up interesting opportunities for a comparative cross-cultural analysis of the phenomenon of the state.