Dr. Ágoston Berecz (Advanced Academia Fellow, Oct ‘20 – Feb ‘21) will present his research proposal on the topic:

Official Multilingualism in the Eastern Part of Dualist Hungary

on 12 November, 2020 (Thursday) at 16:30 h.

Moderated by Tchavdar Marinov.

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My project aims to provide a comprehensive picture of official linguistic practices in Dualist Transylvania and the Banat. As the linguistically most diverse polity in Europe to have experimented with nation-state building, Dualist Hungary (1867–1918) was arguably an outlier, but certainly not an anomaly in modern Europe, and studying its nationalizing policies can throw into sharper relief dynamics and tensions that were also prevalent in culturally less divided settings. While there is a burgeoning literature on official linguistic practices in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, current notions about how Dualist Hungary handled linguistic diversity in running the business of the state still largely rest on contemporary criticisms, mostly from the later years of the period.

Placing these practices in a ‘from-below’ perspective may afford a view of nationalization in reverse, a phenomenon that challenges state-centred accounts of nationalization. Language loyalty, I argue, existed independent of nationalist persuasions, but explicit and implicit linguistic policies that were intended as Magyarizing could antagonize the non-Magyar masses and render plausible the frames of interpretation that nationalist movements offered. Both Hungarian state elites and non-dominant elites ideologized, played up and silenced conflict and made use of strategies for reproducing, reaffirming and challenging existing compromises over language use. There was also a constant struggle to assert the value of competing cultural skills and knowledge in the symbolic sphere as well as on the occupational market, in particular the mastery of written linguistic standards. The ways political actors harnessed the rhetoric of modernization for competing agendas drew on contemporary European models. Of particular interest is the instrumentalization of European and colonial models in contemporary debates, or better the widespread caricatures thereof. Just as remarkable were the representations of domestic realities in Hungary that politicians and commentators peddled for internal and external consumption. Although they somewhat tailored their arguments to their audiences, in the main both Magyar and foreign authors liked to imagine the nation-building policies of their homelands as successful and they did not mind if they appeared heavy-handed at times. There are also candidates for direct transfer, primarily from Austria and Prussia.
I adopt a broad definition of language policies that embraces both planned and unplanned action and runs from the discourses that justified them through legislation, implementation and the responses they elicited all the way to contemporary reflections. This comprehensive focus makes my project unique in the historiography of Central and Eastern Europe, and it imposes a strategy of alternating the narrative between the micro and macro levels.

The study of the micro level benefits from a sampling of the fonds surviving in eight Romanian county archives, which I have complemented with central government files from the Hungarian National Archives, as well as with the testimony of the local press and ego-documents. The reconstruction of the horizons, ideas and attitudes informing government policies and their implementation, their perceptions and contestation is based on newspapers of wide circulation, the polemical literature and parliamentary minutes. I assess legislative acts in conjunction with their implementation guidelines and the related ministerial decrees. The recent historical literature of nationalism has pointed out how activists had been prone to amplify mundane incidents into apparent all-out national struggles. It is therefore doubly important to read my narrative sources as communicative acts grounded in their contexts and to confront the coverage of the same incident in ideologically opposed papers.

— Ágoston Berecz —