engleski

The language of 19th century Croatian court proceedings in the socio-cultural context of the Habsburg Monarchy

The paper will analyse how the changing socio- cultural context was reflected in the language of court proceedings in Croatia between 1830 and 1914 when different macro-level language policies were at work, oscillating between Germanization and Hungarization efforts and the policies of equal linguistic rights granted to all nationalities by the Constitution of 1867. The 1830's were taken as a starting point because socio-economic modernization processes can be traced back to this period. The linguistic results of modernization included the emergence of nationalist language ideologies and language standardization, undergoing the usual stages of corpus planning, status planning, elaboration and implementation. Court records provide an excellent source for the study both of the development of the standard language as reflected in the official court register and the individual language use of lay persons involved in the court proceedings. The paper will also discuss the extent to which multilingual language policies of the Monarchy, including the right to legal interpretation and court interpreting enshrined in the Civil Code of 1852 and Criminal Code of 1853, were actually implemented by courts. Thus, through the analyses of the language of court records, historical language use will be reconstructed and examples from the empirical data will be examined. The research is based on primary archival sources.

Legal language, court proceedings, Habsburg monarchy

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