engleski

Law and Multilingualism in 19th Century Habsburg Monarchy: Voices From the Past, Lessons for the Future?

The nineteenth century is often seen as a period of nation-building, with strong identification between nation and language, and the extensive use of constructive discursive strategies (Wodak et al. 2009: 33) aiming at national homogenization. In multilingual and multicultural communities, however, these homogenizing tendencies were often strongly opposed by a multiplicity of different voices. The multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy is of particular interest due to multiple language contacts which had the potential for a wide range of social conflicts. This situation called for political and linguistic strategies to pacify the escalating inter-ethnic struggles. The implementation of the Nationalitätengesetz (Nationalities law) of 1867 showed that the Habsburg political administration differed from dominant political strategies adopted in other European countries at the time. While the Habsburg administration allowed for the linguistic and cultural development of different ethnic groups within a supranational state, political strategies adopted in other European countries enforced the model of a monolingual nation-state. The struggle for power in the Monarchy in the second half of the 19th century cannot be interpreted in terms of an antagonistic relationship between the central state power and the rising nationalities, but rather as a series of alternative models of power exercised by differing structures, persons and groups who sought to extend their sphere of influence (Rindler-Schjerve 2003). After providing a wider socio-historical and institutional context of the 19th century Monarchy, our analysis will focus on the linguistic situation in Croatia, which was divided between Austria and Hungary at the time. Our corpus consists of historical texts, ranging from normative legal documents, records of court proceedings, school curricula and various demographic, primarily language statistics, to newspaper articles discussing language issues, which were published in the period under consideration (1830-1914). On the one hand, these texts can be used to reconstruct the political- ideological and identity-forming foundations which define language and cultural contact in a given historical context, while on the other, the selection of one language rather than another in a given text indicates the historical preference for certain languages in given public domains. Finally, parallels will be drawn between the language policies, language contacts and conflicts characterising 19th century Habsburg Monarchy and contemporary European multilingualism.

language policy, multilingualism, Habsburg Monarchy

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