engleski

Multilingualism, Ideology and Identity in 19th century Croatia

The nineteenth century is often seen as a period of nation-building, with strong identification between nation and language, and constructive strategies aiming at national homogenization. Taking a micro-level perspective, we can see that, in multilingual and multicultural communities, these homogenizing tendencies were strongly opposed by a multiplicity of different voices. The paper will discuss the relationship between language, ideology, and identity as discursively constructed in different types of historical texts published in Croatia, which was divided between Austria and Hungary during a period of political and social change when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was transitioning from an authoritarian to a civil- constitutional state. One aspect of this change was the gradual legal recognition of different nationalities and their languages after failed attempts at Germanization during the preceding neo-absolutist period (1849-60). In terms of methodology, my research is based on Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak 2005, 2009) as developed and adapted to the study of the relationship between language and social power in the Habsburg Empire (Rindler Schjerve 2003) . The central observation is that societal multilingualism and language contacts turn into conflicts (Nelde 1990) whenever they are paired with asymmetric status and social hierachisation of the linguistically diverse groups within a state. This will be demonstrated in the analysis of our corpus of historical texts, ranging from normative documents, statistics, school curricula etc, to newspaper articles published in the period under consideration (1867-1914). 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 social domains. Thus, we will be concerned with two main issues. First, we will try to reconstruct the functional distribution of languages to gain information about the domain-specific language use and the social valorisation and status attributed to different languages and their speakers. Secondly, we will try to reconstruct past beliefs and assumptions about languages since they provided the ideological and political bases on which power relations were produced, reinforced and legitimised. The former involves methodological paradigms of sociolinguistic variation and language domain behaviour, while the latter is oriented towards text-analytic procedures which concentrate on the content, argumentation and the linguistic structure. The combination of variationist and contact—linguistic perspectives on the one hand, with discourse analysis on the other, makes it possible to explore the interplay between language use, ideology and societal power. The multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire 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 struggle. 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 Hasburg 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 Austria-Hungary 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). If language was the main factor in power struggles in the multi- ethnic Empire after 1848, then the degree of involvement of a specific ethnic group in power relations depended on how, linguistically, it was granted access to power and decision- making. Did the group have the legitimate right to communicate in its own language within the domains of power, or was it obliged to engage in these domains in another group's language? Not to be able to communicate in one's own language implies exclusion from power and decision making an furthers social subordination. Whenever subordinate groups begin to question their discriminated status and demand autonomy and equal linguistic rights, power domains become a preferred arena of the political struggle which follows. Thus domains such as the judiciary, public administration and education can easily turn into battlegrounds in the inter-ethnic struggle In our study we concentrated on discursive practices in Croatia in the period between 1867 and 1914 when the present-day Croatian territory was divided between two parts of the Monarchy, with Croatia, Slavonia and the town of Rijeka belonging to its Hungarian, and Dalmatia and Istria to its Austrian part. Language conflicts and power struggles differed to some extent in the Hungarian and Austrian parts of Croatia. Although there were still fresh memories of attempts at Germanisation during the neo-absolutist period, the threat in the period following 1867 was posed by other hegemonic groups and their languages, such as Italian in Istria and Dalmatia, and, to a much lesser extent, Hungarian in Croatia and Slavonia. Attitudes to Serbian varied according to political orientation, from views on the need for a South-Slavic alliance against the Empire to a strong opposition to Serbian expansionist policies. Uneasy relations between Croatian and Serbian as reflected in the name of the official language will also be discussed. We will present the results of our studies on domain-specific language use in different Croatian regions focusing on primary legislative sources and other source materials on the one hand, while on the other, we will focus on contents, discursive strategies and linguistic means and forms of realization in a corpus of newspaper articles published in Croatia in the period under consideration, focusing on discursive construction of language, power and identity. Against this background, we will try to explore how the status of languages interacted with different group identities and how these identites were produced by the ideological working of discourse. (Rindler Schjerve 2003)

multilingualism, ideology, identity, Croatia

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