Czechoslovak Ruthenia’s 1925 Latinization campaign as the heritage of nineteenth-century Slavism

Abstract

In 1925, two newspapers, both published in Uzhhorod, advocated using the Latin alphabet in the Czechoslovak province of Ruthenia. Efforts by the Czech Agrarian party to consolidate the Republic played some role, but the plans mostly emerged from a longer tradition of Slavic thought which imagined literacy in more than one alphabet, conforming to more than one literary standardization. We trace the nineteenth-century history of Slavic linguistic ideologies from the original Panslavism of Jan Herkel, the “Slavic Reciprocity” of Jan Kollár and his successors, to the Kollárian Czechoslovakism used to legitimate the first Czechoslovak Republic. We survey Ruthenia’s status within Czechoslovakia and then contrast two 1925 Latinization schemes: a proposal from Czech chauvinist František Svojše and a proposal from Rusyn journalist Viktor Barany. While Rusyns mostly remained with the Cyrillic alphabet, arguments made for and against Latinization show that nineteenth century Slavic ideals endured far into the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• Czechoslovakia
• Carpathian Ruthenia
• language codification
• Latin alphabet
• Panslavism

Notes

1. We have transliterated Cyrillic according to Library of Congress conventions for Russian. We cite several texts that do not follow the conventions for Russian, but conform to a Rusyn particularist standardization. Some scholars might prefer to transliterate such texts according to one or another Rusyn transliteration system, but we have opted for consistency and simplicity.