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Abstract
Based on statistical sources, this paper examines to what extent citizens of the most advanced provincial cities in fin-de-siècle Hungary were multilingual. I argue that multilingualism was a far less present phenomenon than scholarship suggests. The exact features of multilingualism were closely connected to the local social relations (religion, gender, etc.) and market of languages. The growing nationalism promoted by the Hungarian government and the expansion of Magyar public space had an ambiguous impact on multilingualism, depending on the local society.
Funding
This research was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) [grant K 108670].
Notes
1. I am thankful to Ágoston Berecz for his comments on an earlier version of this text.
2. Defining Croatian and Serbian, Slovak and Ruthenian as separate languages, was of course a deeply politically motivated concept. For the wider context of language engineering in Central Europe, see Kamusella (Citation2008).
3. If not noted otherwise, calculation will be based on 1880 census (OMKSH Citation1882) and on the 1910 calculations of the Hungarian Statistical Office (Hungarian National Archives, XXXII-Citation23-h, box Citation719).
4. Naming locations in Central Europe is always a complicated issue. To avoid anachronism, in the following only the official (Magyar) name of 1910 will be used, while other name variants will be given in parentheses the first time only.
5. Due to the lack of archival sources, I must refrain from the analysis of the regional center with the lowest ranking, Brassó.
6. The sources of all tables are OMKSH (Citation1882, 1:658–715) and Hungarian National Archives, Fond XXXII-23-h, box 719.
In 1880, children aged 0–3 years were not put in the categories of mother tongue but were counted in a different category as “unable to speak.” In 1910, children of the same age were proportionally distributed to the groups of mother tongue. For 1880, I made the same calculations.