The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe

The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe Tomasz Kamusella

The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe

Also by Tomasz Kamusella THE DYNAMICS OF THE POLICIES OF ETHNIC CLEANSING IN SILESIA DURING THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES THE POLISH-ENGLISH-GERMAN GLOSSARY OF THE REGIONAL TERMINOLOGY OF THE OPOLE VOIVODESHIP THE POLISH-ENGLISH-GERMAN REGIONAL GLOSSARY THE SZLONZOKS AND THEIR LANGUAGE: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian Nationalism SILESIA AND CENTRAL EUROPEAN NATIONALISMS: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918 NATIONALISMS ACROSS THE GLOBE: An Overview of Nationalisms in State-endowed and Stateless Nations (Vol 1: Europe) (edited with W. Burszta and S. Wojciechowski) NATIONALISMS ACROSS THE GLOBE: An Overview of Nationalisms in State-endowed and Stateless Nations (Vol 2: The World) (edited with W. Burszta and S. Wojciechowski)

The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe Tomasz Kamusella Senior Lecturer, University of Opole, Opole, Poland and Thomas Brown Lecturer, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

© Tomasz Kamusella 2009 Foreword © Peter Burke 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–55070–4 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–55070–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kamusella, Tomasz. The politics of language and nationalism in modern Central Europe / Tomasz Kamusella ; foreword by Peter Burke. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–230–55070–3 (alk. paper) 1. Europe, Central—Languages—Political aspects—History. 2. Europe, Central—Politics and government—19th century. 3. Europe, Central— Politics and government—20th century. 4. Nationalism—Europe, Central—History. I. Title. P119.32.E848K36 2008 306.44'943—dc22 2008000162 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book I dedicate to the fond memory of my grandparents, Stefania Borkowska neé Piórkowska (1918– 2005), Franciszek Borkowski (1910–1999), Katharina Kamusella neé Wylezol (1894– 1975), and Paul Kamusella (1898–1964) and to the future of my daughter, Anna Maria

Language. Language is savage flesh, which grows in a wound, in the open wound of the mouth, nurtured on deceptive truth, [ . . . ] language, [ . . . ] is a beast domesticated with human teeth, something inhuman growing in us, and outgrowing us, a red flag, which we spew out with blood [ . . . ]. Translated from the Polish by Kevin Hannan (1954–2008) Suska (2003: 15) ‘Language is Savage Flesh’ Ryszard Krynicki (1943–)

[In Central Europe] [ . . . ] language is a precious commodity, symbol of knowledge and status, root of bloody wars of envy. Nations there destroy nations to possess a quantity of precious linguistic material. ‘Tongues’ Kevin Hannan (2006: 52)

Contents

Foreword

xi

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

xxiv

1

Introduction What is politics of language? Where is Central Europe? The states of Central Europe On the similarity between the concepts of nation and language The normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state Languages and politics in an historical perspective Social scientists, nationalism, and languages From languages to nations From linguistic nations to linguistic nation-states The normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state, today

1 7 11 14 23 29 37 42 44 51 56

2

Language in Central Europe: An Overview Beginnings The German language or languages? The first Central European vernacular made a written language Latin: From lingua franca to ‘dead language’ The Czech language The Polish language The Magyar language The Slovak language Official languages in Central Europe Central European literacies

62 63 73 86 99 108 121 131 136 139

The Broader Linguistic and Cultural Context of Central Europe From Church Slavonic to Ruthenian The Russian language What is in the name of a language? Belarusian and Ukrainian

149 150 158 164 167

3

vii

viii

Contents

Lithuanian Latvian and Estonian Romanian, Moldovan, and other East Romance languages From Slavic to Croatian and Serbian to Serbo-Croatian to Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian Albanian Macedonian Greek Turkish, Gagauz, Tatar, and Karaim Bulgarian Slovenian Sorbian Hebrew and Aramaic Yiddish Ladino Armenian Romani Esperanto Script variants, alphabets, and politics

180 192 201 217 240 246 255 264 276 288 301 307 311 317 320 327 335 341

Part I Central European Politics and Languages in the Long 19th Century

4

5

The advent of nationalism

365

The Polish Case: From Natio to Nation The Polish language and nationalism in partitioned Poland-Lithuania Encyclopedias and politics The rise of the Polish nation-state Polish or Lekhitic? Orthography and politics

367

The Hungarian Case: From Natio to the Ersatz Nation-State Estates politics Language enters politics Magyar: From codification to official language Magyarization and the rise of national minorities The War of Independence Magyar: The state language The mythologization of language in the interest of the nation

431 431 434 439 447 453 456 472

368 406 408 416 418

Contents

6

7

ix

The Czech Case: From the Bohemian Slavophone Populus to Czech Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation Estates politics Language enters politics Landespatriotismus, Czech nationalism, and Pan-Slavism Toward Czechoslovakia Development of nation equates language development Czechoslovakism

481 482 489 495 510 513 518

The Slovak Case: From Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Populus to Slovak Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation Imagining Slovakia and the Slovaks Which Slovak language for which Slovak nation? Slovak nationalism and Magyarization Czechoslovakism The difficult birth of standard Slovak

522 523 531 547 557 562

Part II Nationalisms and Language in the Short 20th Century The triumph of the national 8

9

The Polish Nation: From a Multiethnic to an Ethnically Homogenous Nation-State The emergence of Poland and linguistic nationalism Language politics in interwar Poland Polish: From a minority to hegemonic language World War II: Polish is a minority language once again The unprecedented monopoly of Polish in communist Poland The national communist monolith cracks: From the end of communism to Poland’s accession to the European Union The Hungarian Nation: From Hungary to Magyarország The Magyar and Polish cases compared The shock of Trianon Interwar Hungary Magyar: From the imperial to national language Communist Hungary: Magyar is a small language again The end of communism: Rediscovering the world and Greater Hungary?

569

573 576 587 598 609 620 628 645 648 652 663 667 688 706

x Contents

10

11

12

The Czech Nation: Between Czechoslovak and Czech Nationalism In search of the Czechoslovak nation Again: The twilight of German-Czech bilingualism Czechoslovakia: A home to two nations? No name: The Czech nation-state

714 719 764 771 787

The Slovak Nation: From Czechoslovakia to Slovakia National myths and the Slovak vision of the Slovak past Interwar Czechoslovakia: The Slovak renaissance and Czech domination The first Slovak independence: A brief prelude of Slovak monolingualism The return of Slovak-Czech bilingualism Confusing names: Slovakia independent again

803 805

Conclusion The Central European languages and nationalisms in the long 19th century The languages and nation-states of Central Europe in the short 20th century

905

820 851 861 883

905 919

Notes

956

Bibliography

994

Index

1054

Index of Dictionaries

1129

Foreword

Students of nationalism – whether historians, sociologists, or political scientists – have long been aware of the importance of the politics of language (witness the classic studies by Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Eric Hobsbawm). For their part, linguists have long been aware of the importance of language for the rise of nationalism. All the same, despite their potential importance in both fields, relatively few in-depth studies have been made of the politics of particular languages in particular periods. The problem is that, generally speaking, the linguists do not know enough political history to take on the task, while political historians are ill-at-ease in the field of linguistics. Tomasz Kamusella is an example of that increasingly rare animal, a scholar who feels at home in more than one field. In this book he offers a major – indeed, a monumental – contribution to the scholarly exchange between linguists and historians (not to mention political scientists). Kamusella has produced a magisterial study, ambitious in its aims but supported by original research as well as offering a synthesis of specialized contributions in a number of languages. The book is concerned with what might be called a topical topic – the politics of language. The author’s principal aim is to present historical case-studies, concentrating on the last two centuries, when languages have been particularly entwined with politics, and on four languages (Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak) that were chosen not only because of the author’s linguistic competence but also because, as he says, ‘languages are more politicized in Central and Eastern Europe than anywhere else.’ Kamusella is nothing if not thorough. The core of his book consists of eight chapters, two for each of the key languages. However, a long introduction, virtually a short book in itself, defines key terms and places the case-studies in a wider context. The basic concepts require definition, since as the author observes, neither ‘nation’ nor ‘language’ is as transparent a term as it may seem, and what he describes as ‘ethno-linguistic nationalism’ or more technically as ‘the normative isomorphism of language, nation and state’ is a historical construct that cannot be taken for granted. The distinctions that Kamusella makes between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nations and between linguistic ‘codification’ and ‘standardization’ are particularly useful. xi

xii Foreword

In the second place, writing as he does mainly for Western European and Anglophone readers, Kamusella is careful to place the four languages on which he centers his attention among the many other languages of Central and Eastern Europe. He also places the 19th and 20th centuries in perspective by discussing the earlier history of these languages. Although this is a work of synthesis and comparative analysis, it includes unusual themes, among them the politics of dictionaries and national encyclopedias, as well as fascinating and little-known examples, such as the importance of the German model and even of German-speakers in the codification of Polish and Hungarian; the use of census data on language in the long struggle of the Poles for recognition as a nation; and the regular temporary exchange of children in border areas so that they might grow up fluent in two, three, or four languages. Readers with an interest in cultural hybridity will be delighted to learn about trasianka (literally a mix of hay and grass), applied to the mix of Russian and Belarusian, or surzhyk (wheat with rye or barley), describing the mix of Russian with Ukrainian. It should be emphasized that the central part of the book does not merely offer four case-studies or parallel histories of the relation between language and politics. It analyses as well as describing, making use of both comparisons and contrasts in order to show how languages were affected by political ideas and events, notably by nationalism and by the coming to power of Communist regimes after 1945. Conversely, Kamusella notes how the revival of written vernaculars contributed to the rise of nationalism. The author avoids any monolithic view of his four languages and shows himself to be well aware of the importance of regional variation – noting, for instance, that the situation of Hungarian in Transylvania differed considerably from that in the Great Hungarian Plain. This book should appeal to linguists, historians, and students of politics. Its most obvious attraction is that it fills a major gap in the knowledge of Western European and Anglophone scholars, and that it can be used for reference as well as read from cover to cover. However, Kamusella’s study is more ambitious than that. The concepts it uses and the conclusions it reaches about language and politics are likely to provoke a more general discussion. It is likely to remain the standard work in its field for a generation. Professor Peter Burke University of Cambridge

Preface

This book grew out of a frustration at almost no scholarly exchange between historians and linguists. This realization came to me as a surprise during the 1990s, when the virtues of interdisciplinary research began to be extolled, while language was again employed for making history in Central and Eastern Europe, often with a vengeance. In 1991, the non-national Soviet Union split into the 15 ethnolinguistically defined nation-states and 2 years later, the ethnolinguistic nation-states of the Czechs and the Slovaks emerged. Prior to the fall of communism in 1989, Poland had three neighbors, namely East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, in which language was not the main instrument of statehood legitimization. After 1993, all of them were replaced by seven brand-new straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-states, namely reunited Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. Only the Baltic remained unaltered in this sea of change. Strangely enough, such a dramatic political overhaul did not trigger a single war. Politicians dealt a much worse hand to the Balkans. The 1989 mass expulsion of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey almost ended in a military conflict. In the west of the region, between 1991 and 2006, the breakup of Yugoslavia produced five wars (in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia), six new ethnolinguistic nation-states (Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia), and entailed the splitting of the Serbo-Croatian language into Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and, perhaps soon, into Montenegrin as well.1 Nationally minded linguists table their various ideas about language customized to the needs of politicians and decision-makers, whereas political scientists and historians busy themselves analyzing and recording political changes carried out on the ethnolinguistic basis. In this division of labor, historians and political scientists tend to treat linguists’ proposals on language as a ‘black box,’ believing the latter objectively and faithfully describe the linguistic reality on the ground in a wholly disinterested manner. Thus, when linguists decide that ‘a Bosnian language of centuries-long pedigree undoubtedly exists xiii

xiv Preface

and is inherently different from Serbian,’ or that the ‘evidence clearly indicates that the Slovak dialectal area consists of three distinctive, though kindred dialects,’2 historians and political scientists usually accept such pronouncements as givens, not worth any further analysis. Conversely, linguists treat national master narratives developed by historians as a ‘black box,’ too. They do not question the anachronistic tendency to speak about the Holy Roman Empire as an early ‘German nation-state,’ Greater Moravia as the ‘first Slovak nation-state,’ Poland-Lithuania as the ‘true Polish nation-state,’ the Kingdom of Bohemia as an ‘early Czech nation-state,’ or Rus as the ‘first Russian nation-state.’ As a result, more often than not linguists’ ideas about national languages end up as unquestioned ‘significant arguments’ used for propping historians’ pet national master narratives and vice versa. Artifacts created by both linguists and historians, although often only tentatively or merely nominally connected to linguistic reality and historical events, are of formative influence on the social and political reality in Central and Eastern Europe’s ethnolinguistic nation-states, perhaps to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world. Somehow, these clear instances of politics of language did not register with scholars, who so far have failed to investigate them in a comprehensive manner. One explanation of the fact may be that ‘givens’ are accepted at the face value and one does not spare them a second thought; thus, they become ‘transparent categories,’ which one uses on the everyday basis to function in and to reflect on the social reality, without even realizing the fact. In a similar way, the ubiquitous concept of nation as employed for making and unmaking polities and societies during the last two centuries evaded a comprehensive scrutiny until the late 20th century. Probably, this elusive obviousness of nations and languages was produced by the unquestioned widespread popular use of both concepts and their foundational implication in the national projects, which de facto underlie all the polities extant at the beginning of the 21st century, because each of them is construed as a nation-state, with the rare exception of the Holy See. Most historians and linguists are in the pay of state-owned universities, which does not predispose them well to probing into national master narratives and linguistic arguments that happen to be associated with them. Arguably, more independent private universities nevertheless prefer not to support any research projects which may disenchant (or even nullify) the legitimizing basis of national statehood in a polity where such universities happen to be located. The master narrative nurtures and requires to be nurtured back. The dynamics of this interdependence ostracizes contrarians, and in extreme cases leads to their persecution or even ‘disappearance.’ The danger is less when the scholar is based in a secure and affluent democracy, and directs one’s analytical attention to the regions of the world distant from one’s country of residence. That is why the first famous scholar of nationalism, Hans Kohn (1891–1971), who was of Austro-Bohemian-Jewish

Preface

xv

origin, wrote copiously on European and Soviet nationalisms after 1931, when he had settled safely in the United States, far away from the European scene of both World Wars.3 Thanks to his hands-on experience of ethnolinguistic nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe and in Central Asia, Kohn, as a historian, was also the first one among students of nationalism and ethnicity to reflect on language as an instrument of politics. However, the tradition of national historiography, forged in the 19th century, prevented him from devoting a single chapter of his renowned study, The Idea of Nationalism (1944, New York), to language. Another scholar of the very same origin as Kohn, and also based in the United States, the political scientist, Karl W Deutsch (1912–1993), devoted more attention to language in his influential monograph Nationalism and Social Communication (1953). However, his focus was rather on the role of communication for the processes of nation- and nation-state-building than language itself, which explains why Deutsch unreflectively took data on languages as recorded in official censuses. Similarly, the German historian, Eugen Lemberg (1903–1976), did not transcend this pattern of acknowledging the significance of language for national projects without really analyzing the concept in his two-volume work Nationalismus (Nationalism, 1964, Reinbek near Hamburg). One of the first historians who made language the center of his analysis was the West German student of Central and Eastern European history, Holm Sundhaußen, in his all too little known book, Der Einfluß Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Völkern der Habsburger Monarchie (The Influence of Herderian Thought on the Process of Nation-Building Among the Nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1973, Munich). Likewise, the United States historian, Eugen J Weber (1925–), who stems from Romania, devoted a crucial chapter of his groundbreaking study, Peasants into Frenchmen (1976, Stanford, CA), to an analysis of the importance of language and ethnolinguistic homogenization for the French national project. In the penultimate chapter of his seminal study, Nations Before Nationalism (1982, Chapel Hill, NC), another American historian, John A Armstrong (1922–), probed into the rise of written languages and their influence on group differentiation and political projects in the pre-modern period. In a similar fashion, the French professor of medieval history, Philippe Wolff (1913–2001), made the interactions between the linguistic and political in Western Europe between AD 100 and 1500 into the leading theme of his popular 1971 book, Les origines linguistiques de l’Europe occidentale (Western Languages, AD 100–1500, 1971, London). However, until the late 20th century, not historians but scholars of other disciplines were more interested in researching the mutual influences between language-making and politics. The Catholic priest, Cyril Korolevsky (Cyrille Korolevskij, born: Jean-Baptiste Charon, 1878–1959), presented in his 1955 monograph, Liturgie en langue vivante (Living Languages in Catholic Worship, 1957, London), the tension between the actual use of vernaculars (often politically

xvi

Preface

motivated) and the monopoly of Latin in Catholic liturgy, before the Second Vatican Council changed the situation overnight in favor of vernaculars in the late 1960s. In 1963, the Italian linguist, Tullio de Mauro (1932–), published his so far unequalled monograph, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (A Linguistic History of United Italy, Bari), whose 9th edition remains in print to this day. Three years later, the American linguist, Einar Haugen (1906–1994), contributed an in-depth study, Language Conflict and Language Planning: The case of Modern Norwegian (1966a, Cambridge, MA), on how the interaction between nationally minded linguists, nationalists, and state bureaucracy shaped the Norwegian language and Norwegian nationalism. In 1975, the versatile German linguist and sociolinguist, Harald Haarman (1946–), offered one of the first overviews of history of language politics in Europe in his monograph, Soziologie und Politik der Sprachen Europas (The Sociology and Politics of Europe’s Languages, 1975, Munich). Two years later, the American political scientist, David D Laitin (1945–), who uses the analytical instruments of linguistic anthropology in his research, published Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali experience (Chicago), which was a starting basis for his magisterial Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992, Cambridge). In 1981, later, the Russian linguist based in Estonia, Aleksandr D Dulichenko (1941–), published his groundbreaking study, Slavianske literaturnye mikroiazyki (The Slavic Literary Micro-Languages, Tallinn), devoted to the Slavic micro-languages associated with ethnic or religious groups, which did not manage to overhaul themselves into successful national movements. In 1973, the United States pioneer of sociolinguistics, Joshua Fishman’s (1926–) Language and Nationalism (Rowley, MA) came off the press. It was the first-ever monograph which attempted to look into and generalize about the role of language in nationalism, and the role of nationalism in language-making. In the Germanophone world, Sundhaußen’s colleague, the linguist, Norbert Reiter, replied with an equally interesting and rambling study like that of Fishman’s, namely Gruppe, Sprache, Nation (Group, Language, Nation, 1984, Wiesbaden). La questione della lingua has remained a central subject of research in Italy for the last two centuries, so it comes as no surprise that the seminal collection, The Emergence of National Languages (1984, Ravenna), edited by the Italian classicist, Aldo Scaglione, was published in the country. Significantly, the British linguist, David Crystal (1941–), devoted much place, in his immensely popular Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, Cambridge), to the mutual interferences between the linguistic, the political, and the social. However, the mainstream of linguists faced with the spectrum-like (that is, not easily divided into separate units) multitude of languages persisted in the simplistically positivistic approach to go out into the field in order to count and classify all the languages. In fact, their decisions on which idiom is a dialect and which a language time and again rather created and unmade languages

Preface xvii

than described them in a neutral manner. The same predicament besieged 18thand 19th-century antiquarians and folklorists, whose writings on ‘little known peoples’ frequently engendered new ethnolinguistic national movements. The Czech historian, Miroslav Hroch (1932–), explained in detail the mechanism of this process in both his 1968 and 1970 German-language studies, published jointly in English as Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (1985, Cambridge). In 1951, linguists connected to Christian missionary organizations published the first edition of the famous compendium, Ethnologue: Languages of the world (Dallas, TX), with an eye to providing translations of the Holy Writ to the speakers of all the world’s extant languages. In 2002, the International Organization of Standardization asked the Ethnologue team to draft a common classificatory system for identifying all the world’s languages. Three years later, the latest 15th edition of Ethnologue came off the press, and remains the most renowned compendium on human languages global-wide. (The danger is that when a language is not included in this compendium, it is as good as nonexistent for the international audience, whereas this fact of non-inclusion gives a state where the languages is spoken an ‘argument’ to claim that the language is not a language but a mere dialect or jargon not worthy of any official status.) Although, in agreement with their political tenets, the Soviets created tens of languages per year in the interwar period, the Atlas narodov mira (Atlas of the Peoples of the World, 1964, Moscow) edited by the geographer and ethnologist of Jewish origin, Solomon I Bruk (1921–1994), presented a static (‘given’) picture of the ethnic groups and their languages, similar to that offered by Ethnologue.4 The concepts of language and nation (hardly ever analyzed as salient instruments of classification) were brought together in Heinz Kloss (1904–1987) and Grant D McConnell’s monumental five-volume Composition linguistique des nations du monde (Linguistic Composition of the Nations of the World, 1974– 1984, Quebec). Significantly, Kloss, in his 1967 article ‘Abstand languages and Ausbau languages,’ published in Anthropological Linguistics, introduced a novel distinction useful for conceptualizing about languages. Abstand, or ‘standing apart,’ languages are so different from one another and clearly mutually incomprehensible (for instance, German and Polish) that one is not inclined to treat them as dialects. On the other hand, Ausbau, or ‘built apart from,’ languages are mutually or semi-mutually comprehensible (for example, Czech and Slovak); so in order to become separate languages in their own right, whatever small differences existing between them must be minutely described and deepened in the course of politically (nationally) motivated standardization. The anthology, The Linguistic Turn: Recent essays in philosophical method (Chicago), which the American philosopher, Richard M Rorty (1931–), edited in 1967, popularized among social scientists (including historians) the need to reflect on language not as a seemingly neutral medium of inter-human communication, but as the value-laden and contested instrument of creating and

xviii

Preface

maintaining social reality. The work of structuralists and poststructuralists (for instance, Roland Barthes [1915–1980], Judith Butler [1956–], Jacques Derrida [1930–2004], Michael Foucault [1926–1984], Julia Kristeva [1940–], Thomas Kuhn [1922–1996], Jacques Lacan [1901–1981], or Claude Lévi-Strauss [1908–]) was decisive for the spread of the novel approach in the 1970s and 1980s. This change of approach in research facilitated the writing of the two groundbreaking studies, Imagined Communities (London) and Nations and Nationalism (Oxford), which married insightful analyses of the past and language in an effort to shed new light on the phenomenon of nationalism. Both were published in 1983, and it is notable that the former was authored by the American specialist in Southeast Asia, Benedict Anderson (1936–), and the latter by the British anthropologist of Czech-Jewish origin, Ernest Gellner (1925–1995). The two monographs became the foundations of the present-day interdisciplinary study of nationalism and ethnicity. The thread was picked up by the British theorist of nationalism, Anthony D Smith (1928–), in his seminal The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986, Oxford) and other numerous works, in which he did not shy away from analyzing the political significance of language. Significantly, the British historian, Eric John Hobsbawm (1917–), took up the challenge and employed the novel approaches to nationalism and language in his book Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990, Cambridge). The fall of communism and the breakups of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia spawned a veritable flood of studies (some of doubtful merit and quality), when Sovietologists, who had just lost their subject of scrutiny, reinvented themselves as students of nationalism and ethnicity. When it comes to language as an instrument of politics, many of the new studies explicate phenomena already explained by scholars publishing in less known languages. For instance, the significant book of Miloš Okuka (1944–), a Yugoslav linguist from Bosnia, now based in Germany, Jezik i politika (Language and Politics, 1983, Sarajevo), was not translated into English. Thus, the Western reader with no knowledge of Serbo-Croatian had to wait until the publication of the United States linguist Robert D Greenberg’s Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration (2004, Oxford) to comprehend the connection between the parallel breakups of Yugoslavia and Serbo-Croatian. The 1990s and the turn of the 21st century brought along more studies delving into the interface between the linguistic and the political from a historical perspective. And, once again, it seems that linguists and other social scientists contributed more to this effort than historians. For instance, in 1994, the British sociolinguist, John Edwards, published his popular overview of language and politics, Multilingualism (London). A year later, the English translation (The Search for the Perfect Language, Oxford) of the Italian semiotician, Umberto Eco’s (1932–) La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993, Rome) came

Preface

xix

off the press. It is devoted to the ideologization of language in Europe during the pre-modern period. In 1996, the American ethnolinguist, Kevin Hannan (1954–2008), published his meticulously researched case study of language, history, and ethnicity, Borders of Language and Identity in Teschen Silesia (New York). Two years later, the German linguist, Jürgen Schiewe’s (1955–) insightful Die Macht der Sprache (The Power of Language, Munich) on political and social uses of language from Antiquity to the modern days came off the press. Also in 1998, the French linguist, Louis-Jean Calvet (1942–), analyzed the role of language in social and political conflicts in world history in his popular La guerre des langues: Et les politiques linguistiques (Language Wars and Linguistic Politics, ˙ Oxford). In 2000, the Polish sociologist, Walter Zelazny, published a comprehensive analysis of the French language politics, Mniejszo´sci narodowe we Francji. Etniczno´sc´ , etnopolityka, etnosocjologia (The National Minorities in France: Ethnicity, Ethnopolitics, Ethnosociology, Tyczyn); a similar work is not available in any other language, including French. The following year, the German Turcologists, Jacob M Landau and Barbara Kellner-Henkele’s wide-ranging Politics of Language in the ex-Soviet States (London) came off the press. In their footsteps, the American linguist, Lenore A Grenoble, followed with her in-depth Language Policy in the Soviet Union (2003, Dordrecht). In 2003 and 2004, the UK-based specialist in Islamic Studies, Yasir Suleiman’s two topical studies The Arabic Language and National Identity (Edinburgh) and A War of Words: Language and conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge) were published. Last but not least, in 2005, the Slavist and a colleague of Sundhaußen and Reiter, Siegfried Tornow, published his magisterial compendium of languages and politics in Central and Eastern Europe, from late Antiquity through the 19th century, as presented through the prism of important texts recorded in these languages, Was ist Osteuropa? (What is Eastern Europe?, Wiesbaden). Historians slowly faced up to the challenge. For instance, in 1989, the French archeologist and historian, Maurice Olender (1946–), analyzed the role of linguists and scholars in the rise of racialized categorizations of peoples and their languages in his Les langues du Paradis (The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites. A match made in heaven, 2002, New York). A year later, the United States researcher of French history, R Howard Bloch, analyzed the political uses of linguistics in his article ‘New Philology and Old French,’ published in Speculum. The Hungarian historian István György Tóth’s (1956–2005) enlightening case study Mivelhogy magad írást nem tudsz . . . Az írás térhódítása a m˝ uvel˝ odésben a kora újkori Magyarországon (Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe, 2000, Budapest) came off the press in 1996. In the same year, the German historian Eva Rimmele’s Sprachenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich vor 1914 (Language Politics in the German Empire Before 1914, Frankfurt am Main) was released to the market. Two years later, the American historian, Michael G Smith, published his insightful case study on the ideological preconditions,

xx Preface

interests, and everyday practice of Soviet language politics, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953 (1998, Berlin). Also in 1998, the British historian, Robert J W Evans, strongly emphasized in his inaugural lecture, The Language of History and the History of Language (Oxford), that for an improved understanding of the past historians should research language and the uses to which it was put across ages. In 1999, the United States historian, Stephen G Alter, concentrated on a similar issue like Olender in the monograph Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, race, and natural theology in the nineteenth century (Baltimore, MD). A year later, the revelational collection, The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800 (New York), edited by the American historians, Edward G Gray and Norman Fiering, was offered to readers. Also in 2000, the Polish historian, Jerzy Ogonowski’s much needed monograph Uprawnienia je˛zykowe mniejszo´sci narodowych w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, 1918–1939 (The Language Rights of the National Minorities in the Republic of Poland, 1918–1939, Warsaw) came off the press. In 2001, the United States historian Terry Martin built on Michael G Smith’s study, and showed that language was at the core of the Soviet nationality policy in his The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY). Another United States historian, Patrick J Geary, closely analyzed the concept of language and its political uses in his influential book The Myth of Nations: The medieval origins of Europe (2002, Princeton, NJ). However, the real breakthrough was brought about by the British historian Peter Burke’s (1937–) Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (2004, Cambridge), in which he made Europe’s languages and speech communities the focus of his wide-ranging analysis. Burke’s work shows that there are many discoveries waiting in store for historians who dare follow this novel interdisciplinary path. However, linguists will not give up ground in this contest easily, as evidenced by the British scholar Nicholas Ostler’s comprehensive Empires of the Word: A language history of the world (2005, New York).5 Having said that, I owe the reader an explanation to why I embarked on researching and writing this study. I took the decision after I had realized that language was of crucial importance in the political and social transformation of Central Europe in the 19th century, and that it became the most important instrument of politics in this region after 1918. The situation has hardly changed to this day, which is quite unusual in a global perspective, because although outside Central Europe there are states where language is as intimately intertwined with nation-building and day-to-day politics as in the region (for instance in Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Turkmenistan, or Vietnam), the polities are not clustered in a single region like those in Central Europe. I have analyzed this apparently unique feature of Central Europe in the Introduction, where I also reflect on the historical and ideological malleability of the concepts ‘Central Europe,’ ‘language,’ and ‘nation.’

Preface

xxi

Hoping to shed light on the origin and the everyday practice of this unusual politicization of language in Central Europe, I made up my mind to devote my comparative study to Czech, Magyar (Hungarian), Polish, and Slovak languages and nationalisms. For practical reasons, I assumed that the four nations and their polities constitute the core of Central Europe, otherwise my work would have to cover a much more extensive region from Finland to Greece and Turkey, and from Germany to Belarus and Ukraine, which would require an entire bookshelf of monographs to do justice to such a vast subject matter. Likewise, I limited my research to published books and articles, since appropriate combing through the archives in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia would take a lifetime, on the account of the wide comparative ambition of this work. The main argument of the book is presented in its two parts, each consisting of four chapters on the aforementioned four nations and their languages. In Part I, I have a look at how, during the long 19th century, the Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak national movements utilized language for forwarding and justifying their national projects, and how, in turn, this process shaped the corresponding four national languages. In Part II, I observe the 1918 creation of ethnolinguistic nation-states as postulated by the national movements, and the evolution of the polities through the beginning of the 21st century. Apparently gaining these nation-states was not enough, so their governments put themselves to the task of deepening the ethnolinguistic homogeneity of the states’ populaces. The tendency was slightly reversed after the fall of communism (1989) when Central Europe reopened itself to the world and soon entered the runaway train of globalization upon the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. All the processes have also found their reflection in the four national languages analyzed here, mainly in the form of numerous linguistic borrowings from English. But despite all the changes, Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak politicians have not ceased to employ their national languages for political ends. Although the focus of my monograph is the last two centuries, I found it necessary, for the sake of an uninitiated reader, to devote Chapter 2 to the presentation of the earlier development of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak, as traced since the languages’ inception, and as seen against the context of the rise and uses of Latin and German, which were the first written languages of Central Europe. The analysis is complemented with a glance at the spread of printing, and at the origin and use of different scripts in the region. Furthermore, Chapter 3 offers a wide panorama of all other Central and Eastern European languages from their beginnings to the 21st century. Without at least a cursory knowledge of these languages and political, national, or religious projects connected to them, it is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to understand the course of ethnolinguistic policies pursued by the Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak national movements, and their subsequent nation-states. Obviously, the

xxii Preface

reader may choose to skip Chapters 2 and 3 in order to delve directly into the study’s main subject matter, but I would like to advise her or him to peruse at least Chapter 2 beforehand. On the other hand, the reader can refer to Chapter 3 on a come-and-go basis, when a need arises while she or he is reading the rest of the monograph. I trust that the book does not only fill in a conspicuous gap in research on Central Europe, but that it will also help the interested reader and scholars, especially those engaged in comparative research, understand the region and its peoples, cultures, history, and politics better. Furthermore, it seems that the process of the eastward enlargement of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 was so rapid that many nuances and even quite significant facts about Central Europe did not register with the EU administration or the decision-makers in the Old Fifteen. However, the mutually beneficial functioning of this expanding and deepening Union is pivoted as much on the new members’ good knowledge of and respect for their partners in Western Europe as on the old members’ very same attitude toward the newcomers. If this monograph contributes in whatever little way to the process, I will be glad that I have devoted 8 years of my life and research to compose it. Czissowa 2007

Note on the dedication My grandparents were born to a Europe and the world without policed borders, passports, or visas, when Central European polities were multiethnic and multilingual. They could speak any language of their choice, and moved across the continent and the globe as they pleased. What limited them were financial resources and their imagination. Despite these constraints, before 1918 Stefania Piórkowska’s peasant father went twice, in search of gainful employment, to the United States before the Great War ended. Franciszek Borkowski’s two brothers permanently left their impoverished and backward Mazovia, plagued with poor sand soils, for America in the 1930s. The siblings of Katherina Wylezol and Paul Kamusella roamed the width and breadth of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires as apprentices, workers, and servants. Following the fateful year of 1918, my grandparents saw the end of the old world as they knew it, though it had not been any belle époque to them, because they were simple peasants and workers. Their children were born to the age of ethnic cleansing, homogenizing nation-states, enforced monolingualism, authoritarianism, totalitarianisms, withheld passports, a Europe and the globe cleft with the Iron Curtain, borders closed with barbed wire and enforced with automatic fire response, alongside visas issued at the whim of a bureaucrat. Out of Katherina – Katarzyna was made, and out of Paul – Paweł. The ethnonationally minded authorities also imposed on them the Polonized version of their

Preface xxiii

surname: first, Kamsela, and later, Kamuzela. Our hometown, once known as Kandrzin, became Hydebreck, and now is Ke˛dzierzyn. My wife and I lived half of our lives in this short 20th century (bracketed by the outbreak of the Great War and the fall of communism) that with a hindsight appears to have lasted much too long. Our daughter was born on the threshold of the new in the year that intervened between 1989, which saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the communist system, as well as the disappearance of the Cold War division of the world, and the year of 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up. Luckily, she had no chance to experience ‘how it had been before.’ Being a child she did not share with her parents the trepidations of the systemic change and their longings for the time when Poland would at last become a ‘normal country.’ She is coming of age in a democratic and free state that is part of united Europe. As they used to be for my grandparents, borders once again are just lines on the map to Anna. These lines do not constitute any obstacle to her traveling, and her passport she wears lightly, because her life does not depend on it. This is just another document, rarely embellished by a visa. Neither her name and origin nor a tongue she may speak will cost her dearly, and now no authority will dare to impose them on her. Let it continue to be so.

Acknowledgments

The work was 8 years in gestation and labor, during which time numerous people helped me research and write it. Without their grace and generosity, I would not have been able to complete the book or to weed it of numerous errors and infelicities, which are bound to crop up when one dares to tackle such a broad region as Central Europe in the scope of the politically and socially complicated two last centuries. In the first words, I wish to thank my lecturers at the Central European University in Prague, especially Ernest Gellner, Ferdinand Kinsky, Jiˇrí Musil, and Otto Pick, who all inspired my interest in Central Europe and the study of nationalism. I also extend my thanks to the following persons who encouraged and sustained my academic interests at their most tender: Peter Allen, Mark Behr, Brooke Astor, Fazy Bagherboum, Grazyna ˙ and Wojciech Bartoszek, Diana Bajrami, Jakub Basista, Zbigniew Białas, Walt and Beverly Brown, Asia and Jez˙ Capi, Frank Carter, Richard Chernis, Anette Combrink, Mr Conrad (Chodura), Karl Cordell, Laurian M G Coughlan, Leentie and A M de Lange, Maria and Edward de Virion, Dan (Dragon) Draghici, Leboeuf, Mariaan and Samuel du Plessis, Sheila Fugard, Elmer Kanwisher, Gundolf Keil, Leo Frankowski, Dymytro Gorun, Beata Gren, ´ Valerie Hadley, Rysio Kalamarz, Ewa Klima, Bogusława Kozłowska, Jan-Louis Kruger, Dirk Laermans, Marek Lambert, Jerzy Łukaszewski, the Mataczynskis, ´ Bradius V Maurus III, D-Michael McGreevey, Alister W Macintyre, Donna Marie Mominee, Njabulo S Ndebele, Edward Nycz, Dr Olschowka, Retief Örffer, Asia and Piotrek Pawelec, Nevan Petrovi´c, Emanuel Prower, Robert Pszczel, Iwona Rusek, David L Russell, Jitka and ´ Andrei Savin, John Schoeberlein, Tadeusz Sławek, Stanisław Smigielski, Gosia and Radek Stanek, Neelakshi Suryanarayan, Pascale and Ante Tavernier-Dadi´c, Catalina and Louis Ulrich, Mark Vander Hart, Enik˝ o Veres, Dorothy Voigt, Gunda Wiegmann, Denise Wilton, and Stefan Wolff. At the early stages of the project which resulted in this monograph, advice, encouragement, and letters of reference unstingingly offered by Manfred Alexander, Richard Blanke, Wojciech Burszta, Anna Cienciala, John Kulczycki, Bernard Linek, Janusz Sawczuk, Kai Struve, Philipp Ther, István György Tóth, xxiv

Acknowledgments xxv

and James Turner proved invaluable. The research for this book was generously supported by a Jean Monnet Fellowship, which I spent in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, and by another fellowship granted by the John W Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC. For these two 1-year-long periods the University of Opole, Opole, Poland, kindly gave me a sabbatical, followed by an unpaid leave. Later, during successive summers, I continued the work on an Andrew W Mellon East-Central European Research Visiting Fellowship in the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, and on a research fellowship in the Herder-Institut, Marburg, Germany. Last but not least, thanks to Wojciech Chlebda and Jerzy Lis, who were always on the ready to buttress novel research against all the odds, and the University of Opole for granting me a Habilitationsschrift leave and stipend, which I happily spent in West Ealing, London, writing and cooking dinners for my family. Richard Blanke, Cathie Carmichael, Kevin Hannan, and James Turner read and commented in detail on the first two drafts of my book. Professor Blanke also checked the Polish chapters in the prefinal draft, which was read in whole and usefully commented upon by the anonymous reader, commissioned by Palgrave Macmillan. Other persons who, at different stages and despite lack of time, decided to read through one or a couple of chapters in order to double-check facts and streamline my English prose include Elizabeth Anderson, Jamie Anderson, Ronald Bachman, Kurt Bassuener, Mimi Torchia Boothby, John Cox, Stephen F Cunha, Anthony Dutton, Jenny Fasal, William Harwood, Ramunas Janušauskas, Krzysztof Jaskułowski, Asbed Kotchikian, Svetlana Kujumdzieva, Lori Ann Lahlum, Alex Law, Mark R Lauersdorf, Matthew Lungerhausen, Alexander Markarov, Juraj Marušiak, Carol Matthews, Alexander Maxwell, Olaf Mertelsmann, Robert Nemes, Kenneth Nyirady, Katre Pall, Emilia Palonen, Peter Polak-Springer, Michael Pretes, Joachim von Puttkamer, Jason Strakes, Giedrius Subaˇcius, Claire Sutherland, Matyas Szabo, Ilona Teleki, Mark Vander Hart, Elena Verdolini, James Mace Ward, Eric Weaver, Irén Witte, Resul Yalcin, and Sherifa Zuhur. Furthermore, Abdusabur (Ozod) Abdusamadov, Daniel Abondolo, Ahmet Alibaši´c, Delphine Bechtel, Mark R Beissinger, Kamid Bektaev, Komil Bekzoda, Danuta Berlinska, ´ James Bjork, Hofiz Boboyorov, Marko Boki´c, Glenn Bowman, Anna Chilewska, Gary B Cohen, Artur Czesak, Piotr Długosz, Aleksandr Dulichenko, Karin Friedrich, Krzysztof Frysztacki, Łukasz Grabowski, Miroslav Hroch, Charles Ingrao, Artur Janicki, Franciszek Jonderko, Charles King, Jerzy Kochanowski, George Kolankiewicz, Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, László Kontler, Bogdan Ataullah Kopanski, Elena Korshuk, Dagmar Kusá, Languagehat.com, Sławomir Łodzinski, ´ Kristjan Luts, Piotr Madajczyk, Tatiana Majcherkiewicz, Alexander Markarov, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, Maria Mazzenga, Peter Mentzel, Anton Miklowicz,

xxvi Acknowledgments

Anastasia Mitrofanova, Aleksandr Nadson, Neasa Ní Chinnéide, Jim Niessen, Ewa Nowicka, Cezari Obracht-Prondzynszczi, ´ Nicholas Ostler, Piotr Pałys, Joost Platje, Glanville Price, Martyn Rady, Alfons Rataj, Hans Renner, Andras Riedlmayer, Andrzej Roczniok, Andrzej Sakson, Joanna S´ niezek ˙ (neé Usien), ´ Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, Przemysław Sperling, Grzegorz Strauchold, Krzysztof Stronski, ´ Krzysztof Tarka, Jerzy Tomaszewski, Hunt Tooley, Robert Traba, Jürgen Trabant, Steven Bela Várdy, Tomasz Wielg, Anna Wolff-Powe˛ska, ˙ Walter Zelazny, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm, and Mikael Zolyan provided me with useful information and advice. A special word of thanks goes to Ianitza Ianachkova, my research assistant in the John W Kluge Center, and to Jerzy Tomaszewski, for his sustained encouragement. I am also deeply indebted to the following friends and colleagues who helped me solve a mind-boggling plethora of everyday and professional problems: Sergio Amadei, Bernd Baumgartl, Peter Becker, Paulian Bochenska, ´ Anny Bremner, Tiziano Burani, Enzo Carro, Barbara Ciomei, Maria Luisa Fani, Sèbastien Jahan, Nicky Koniordos, Sabine Mengelkoch, Anthony Molho, Serge Noiret, Irina Ognyanova-Krivoshieva, Trond Nordby, Małgorzata and Olaf Osica, Rita Peero, Arfon Rees, Brian Sandberg, Angela Schenk and Bo Stråth, Irena and Aleksander Surdej, Helen Wallace, and Kataryna Wolczuk in Florence; Mustafa Aksakal, Liz and Robert Albro, Nancy and Alden Almquist, Jamie Anderson, Ronald Bachman, Kurt Bassuener, M Bolek Biskupski, Aleksandra B Borecka, Gregory Borecki, the Bukowskis, Clarissa Burt, Anita Callaway, Peg Christoff, Anna Cienciala, Alfred de Zayas, Margaret Dikovitsky, Regina Fra˛ckowiak, Mary Ann Garth and Mary Lou Andrew, Prosser Gifford, Leor Halevi, Susan Hirsch, Elaine Hubert and William Harwood, Bartosz Jałowiecki, Ablet Kamalov, Ivan Katchanovski, JoAnne Kitching, Svetlana Kujumdzieva, Carol Matthews, Molly Mackinnon, Suzana Milevska, Anna Nadgrodkiewicz, Karen Oslund, Mariusz Pakieser, Katrin and Peter Polak-Springer, Robert Saladini, Regina Thielke, Gregor Thum, Lester Vogel, Jacquia Warren, and Sergei and Irina Zhuk in Washington; Lidia Antonik, Sabine Aßmann, Bernd Baumgartl, Naja Bentzen, Eilin Derakshan, Hanna Fischer, Susanne Fröschl, Petr Glombíˇcek, Ludger Hagedorn, Katherine Jolluck and Norman Naimark, Romek Kalinowski, János Mátyás Kovács, Mikołaj S Kunicki, Susanne Lettow, Krzysztof Michalski, Shai Moses, Klaus Nellen, Maria Nicklas, Emilia Palonen, Ted Paul, Marcie Shore and Timothy Snyder, Hana and David Souˇcek, Michael Staudigl, and Astrid Swenson in Vienna; Julian M Cooper, Wojtek Piotrowicz, and Kataryna and Roman Wolczuk in London; Michael Becker, Sławomir Brzezicki, Heidi Hein-Kircher, Mathias Häberle, Hans Georg Heinkleinz, Johanna Hocke Szparaga, Edeltraut Imhof, Winfried Irgang, Eligiusz Janus, Klaudia Kandzia and Till Scholtz-Knobloch, Danuta Konieczny, Inge Lind, Jaroslav Miller, Eduard Mühle, Wolfgang Schekanski, Ute Schmidt, Matthias Schneider, and Jürgen Warmbrunn in Marburg; and my parents, Anna and Stephan

Acknowledgments xxvii

Kamusella; my parents-in-law, Maria and Andrzej Markowscy; my brother, Mateusz Kamusella; my brother-in-law, Mariusz Markowski; Iwona Charciarek, Elzbieta ˙ and Andrzej Czaplak, Kasia and Grzesiek Dysarz, Mateusz Figiel, Maria Grygierczyk, Stanisław Jałowiecki, Maria Kałamarz, Klaudia Kluczniok, Stanisław Kochman, Jurek Kula, Wanda Laszczak, Gosia (Franciszka) Lewicka, Agnieszka and Bernard Linek, Albert Lipnicki, Teresa Matczynska, ´ Marysia and Herbert Melich, Józef Musielok, Stanisław Nicieja, Joanna Nowak, Sława Pazera, Tomasz Pichór, Basia and Robert Piechoccy, Anka Pietruczuk and Piotr Balcerowicz, Bartosz Poluszynski, ´ Renata and Jarosław Radimˇeˇrský, Violetta and Jacek Ruszczewscy, Jacek Serwanski, ´ Marek Suchecki, Elzbieta ˙ and Ja´sku Szykuła, Joachim Thannhäuser, Arek Tkocz, Teresa Waga, Aleksandra Wieczorek, Sebastian Wojciechowski, Agata Wo´zna, and Ryszard Zembaczynski ´ in Poland. My research on this monograph profited immensely from the open-stacks libraries and excellent interlibrary loan services in the European University Institute, the Institute for Human Sciences, and the Herder-Institut. And it goes without saying that doing research in the Library of Congress was an adventure in itself, especially when I discovered extremely interesting publications of which I had not even been aware that they existed at all. Interestingly, midway through the project such web-based research instruments as the Karlsruher Virtuelle Katalog or Google Book Search proved invaluable, alongside Wikipedias in many neglected Central and Eastern European languages. Peter Burke kindly advised on how to improve the prefinal draft. At Palgrave Macmillan, Michael Strang decided to take the manuscript aboard in spite of its length and complicated subject matter. I am also grateful to him and his assistant, Ruth Ireland, as well as Dhivya Sambath and her colleagues from Integra Software Services for careful editing. For the accuracy of fact and the totality of interpretation of this book I alone take responsibility. At the final stage of the production of the book, my new colleagues in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, were tolerant and supportive, especially Olga Artamonova, Ewelina Debaene, Justin Doherty, Ewa Grzegorczyk, Guido Hausmann, Natalia Kulachkovskaia, John Damian Murray, Conny Opitz, Sarah Smyth, and Dmitri Tsiskarashvili. Colleagues from other departments were also quite helpful, namely, Caitriona Leahy, Moray McGowan, Olek Michalak, and Martine Van Berlo. Significantly, the University of Opole in Poland, represented by Rector Krystyna Czaja, and courtesy of the unwavering support of Irena Jokiel and Wojciech Chlebda, co-financed the compilation of the book’s index, which I greatly appreciate. Kevin Hannan and Ryszard Krynicki (represented by Krystyna Krynicka) graciously agreed to my use of fragments of their poems as epigraphs for the

xxviii Acknowledgments

book. Moreover, Dr Hannan kindly translated the Polish version of Mr Krynicki’s poem into English. The project would have been unthinkable but for the love, patience, and forbearance of my wife, Beata, and my daughter, Anna Maria, who sustained and encouraged me during difficult moments, which I had to overcome while researching and writing this work.

IWM - Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences), Vienna

CAORC - Council of American Overseas Research Centers

University of Opole, Opole, Poland

1

Introduction1

Language has always been a companion of the empire.2 Gramática de la lengua catellana (Grammar of the Castilian [Spanish] Language, 1492, Madrid) (Dedication) Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522)3 [I]t hath ever beene the use of the Conquerour, to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all meanes to learne his (1596). (In Crowley 2005a: 27) Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) It is language, which constitutes the correct border of the nation (1813).4 (In Leuschner 2004: 389) Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. Considerations on Representative Government (1861, Chapter 16) John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) Each healthy nation endowed with its own state, and each healthy nationstate must wish that its national language is also the state language, and its state language the national language.5 (Trampe 1908: 268) A language is a dialect with an army and navy.6 (In Weinreich 1945: 13) ‘Central Europe’ is a vague concept. With the exception of German-language writers, until recently, the region was as alien or exotic to the Western European and Northern American public as the Balkans still are. Prior to World War I, the 1

2

Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

concept of Central Europe was practically unknown in the West unless one associated the region with Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. Germanlanguage authors and politicians from both polities reinforced this association during the Great War, when some proposed creating a Germanic Mitteleuropa (‘Central Europe’ in German) consisting of the Dual Monarchy and the German Empire alongside the eastern territories seized from the Russian Empire. In the period between the two World Wars, the concept of Central Europe was largely ‘de-Germanized’ and its extent limited to the new nation-states between Germany and the Soviet Union, with the Baltic as the region’s limit in the north. The southern reaches of Central Europe, clearly delimited before 1914 as coterminous with Austria-Hungary’s southern border, became fuzzier in the wake of the 1918 territorial changes, when the prewar frontier disappeared within the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) and considerably enlarged Romania. The German–Soviet division of Central Europe between 1939 and 1941 was a prelude to the Third Reich’s eastward expansion, which can be interpreted as an attempt to recreate a Germanic Mitteleuropa. Had the project worked out, such a Central Europe would have become the core of Germany’s PanEuropean empire. The post-1945 division of Europe between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union split the region between the two Cold War camps, the Germanic half (but with the exclusion of East Germany) of Europe allocated to Western Europe, and its non-Germanic half to Eastern Europe. When pro-Central European researchers, usually hailing from the region but active in the West, wished to remark on the cultural or historic distinctiveness of Central Europe, they tended to speak of West and East Central Europe, respectively. But this usage was of no immediate political significance until the fall of communism and collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Central Europe re-emerged therefore as a potent idea and political concept, mostly associated with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Many Austrian and German thinkers stressed that their countries also belong to the region, but in practice Berlin and Vienna chose to emphasize their strong links with Western Europe, as established after World War II. In Austria and Germany, Central Europe is more of a myth of old good times (belle époque) prior to the outbreak of the Great War than any political reality. When I did research in Vienna in 2005, I ran a small experiment. I asked Austrian, German, and other Western colleagues in the Institute of Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) how far Vienna was from Bratislava. The usual guesses were 200 to 500 kilometers. In reality, it is 66 kilometers by car from city center to city center. Until 1945, both cities were connected by a fast tramway line, which, symptomatically, has not been rebuilt to this day.

Introduction

3

This clearly shows how much even an educated Austrian or German sees her or his country as part of the West, even to the defiance of actual geography. The Austrian and German view is shared by numerous Slovenians who prefer to define their state as an undisputed part of Western Europe, while Czechs, Magyars, Poles, and Slovaks do not perceive the post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet states as ‘naturally’ belonging to Central Europe. The political utility of Central Europe waned in the late 1990s, when despite repeated vows of intra-regional cooperation, Bratislava, Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw more frequently disagreed than cooperated, and competed with one another, striving to secure membership in NATO and the European Union for their respective states. Nowadays, when all the four polities are already members of both organizations, the idea of Central European cooperation has been replaced by actual intra-EU and intra-NATO cooperation. Although ‘Central Europe’ is largely an arbitrary geographical-cum-cultural concept, for the analytical and comparative needs of this work, I decided to define it as limited to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. This equally arbitrary decision was dictated by practical reasons of limiting research and the size of the resultant book. Despite that, this work grew quite considerably from what I intended in 2001, when I commenced the research. First of all, I explained the past, and social and cultural realities of the four countries in detail assuming no prior knowledge on the part of the prospective English-speaking or Western reader. Secondly, I added an extensive outline on other Central, South Eastern, and Eastern European languages and their histories, because time and again they have been so intimately connected with historical, political, social, and cultural developments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and earlier polities popularly identified with these four states. With this interdisciplinary exercise in the intellectual history of Central Europe, I aspire to contribute to placing this region within the mental confines of the Western mind. Nowadays, when the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia alongside Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovenia are part of the European Union, social and cultural integration should follow economic integration. At present, the inhabitants of Central Europe know much more about their Western European counterparts than the other way round. Thus, the disappearance of political and economic frontiers is not enough to do away with mental barriers erected by the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the two totalitarianisms of communism and national socialism. But the Western reader may more eagerly undertake the difficulty of getting acquainted with the Union’s eastern flank when she or he realizes that the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia put together are a house to 64.5 million inhabitants, which is a bit more than the populations of France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, oscillating at about 60 million each. Furthermore, as many as 120 million people live in the states that border on this work’s conception of Central Europe

4

Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in the east and south (namely in Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria). ∗

∗

∗

Readers may wonder why I chose to focus on Central Europe’s languages and nationalisms instead of writing a straightforward history of the region. Quite a few such regular histories were already published (as remarked below), but the problem is that they have not become popular textbooks or spawned more accessible brief histories of the region that would be directed at the mass market. What is more, Western readers of the scholarly histories often were left as perplexed by the past and present of Central Europe as they were before perusing these works. A significant quality must have been lost in communication, which prevented better comprehension. I believe that a partial explanation to this paradox is the general underdevelopment of Central European studies in the West. Between 1945 and 1989, Western students and scholars preferred to focus on Eastern Europe, understood as the Soviet Union, to the detriment of research on Central Europe. After the fall of communism, a short-lived wave of books devoted to the political and economic transition in Central Europe burst into Western bookstores. However, the success of this transition made the region of more interest to entrepreneurs than academics; the latter now saw it as ‘so normal’ that it was not worth their time, unlike the horror of the post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet wars or the rise of oppressive dictatorships in numerous post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet states. The decades of Cold War isolation coupled with general avoidance of Central Europe in Western academia made this region into the Other in the eyes of the average Western European or Westerner. At times, Central Europe was perceived as much different from the West as the Soviet Union or communist Yugoslavia, but the latter country was more accessible to Western travelers, while the former more visible because it constituted the main danger to the continued existence of the West. In this configuration, Central Europe became a forgotten nook of the East. The effect was magnified by the stereotype of Kleinstaaterei. This pejorative German term means the occurrence of many petty states, and at the turn of the 19th century it was used as a criticism against the Holy Roman Empire, which, at that time, consisted of about 300 polities. In the mid-19th century, German and Italian nationalists used this concept to justify their drive to build their respective nation-states, which would replace a large number of other polities in the northern half of the German Confederation and in the Apennine Peninsula. After 1918, Berlin leveled a similar criticism of Kleinstaaterei against the numerous nation-states that in Central Europe superseded the three empires of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia.

Introduction

5

The closest counterpart of Kleinstaaterei in English is ‘Balkanization,’ which dates back to 1878, when after the Congress of Berlin the Ottoman Empire’s European possessions in the Balkans were decisively replaced by a plethora of independent and semi-independent nation-states. The usage spread in the wake of the two Balkan Wars (1912–13) and returned with force in the context of the breakups of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. From the Western perspective, the application of the stereotypical concepts of Balkanization and Kleinstaaterei to a region condemns the very existence of small states (as if Belgium, Luxembourg, or Liechtenstein were not smaller) and absolves Western observers from trying to understand the subsequent developments within them and the dynamics of the relations between them. In a self-explanatory manner, the stereotype claims that what follows is ‘unavoidable chaos’ and reliving of ‘ancient hatreds.’ A typical Westerner perceives a multitude of languages, made visible to the international community by their elevation to the position of official and national languages, as mind-boggling and indexical of looming chaos. It is all too easily forgotten that the statedirected liquidation of linguistic, ethnic, and regional differences in France lasted from the French Revolution and was completed in the late 1940s (Weber 1976). After the founding of the Italian nation-state in 1861, such differences persisted well after World War II and began to wane only at the end of the 20th century (Mauro 1963). In the second half of this century, the persistence of these differences in Austria, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom necessitated either federalization or far-reaching decentralization of the polities. Peaceful and prosperous Switzerland with its four official languages appeared as a model to be emulated. On the other hand, the Western (European) myth is that the lack of ethnolinguistic homogeneity is typical of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe, and should be limited in order to ‘enable development and progress’ there. Traditionally, Western (European) political thinkers and statesmen were ready to tolerate cultural and linguistic multiplicity within the borders of a single polity only in post-colonial and Asian states. The same phenomenon earned Central Europe a serious rebuke because the West perceived the region as its faulty and peripheral section in an urgent need of reform. Such a reform tacitly meant doing away with the ‘Babel of linguistic confusion.’ Hence many Western surveys of Central Europe limit themselves to recounting the most known historical events and listings of border changes and national minorities. The dynamics that propelled the changes is spuriously accounted for with a set formulae of ‘ancient hatreds,’ ‘Balkanization,’ or ‘Kleinstaaterei’ that explain nothing. Rather, they perpetuate myths about Otherness of Central Europe vis-à-vis Western Europe. In my study, I attempted to transcend this pitfall by merging historical narrative with an analysis of language politics. Although in Western Europe it

6

Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

is all too easily forgotten, the growing significance of vernacular languages was, in the past, translated into an abolishment of the political unity of the Western Christian world under the guidance of Latin-speaking papacy, a confirmation of separateness of coalescing territorial states vis-à-vis one another and an ideological basis of the religious dissent that spawned the Reformation. Until the Vatican Council II, the use of Latin in Catholic liturgy and vernaculars in Protestant liturgy were the main and immediately perceivable difference between the Catholic and Protestant Churches. The attempted liquidation of languages and dialects other than the standard language anointed as the official and national language of a state was first typical of early modern Western Europe before the practice spread to Central and Eastern Europe. The simultaneous reinforcement of a state’s linguistic differences and the limiting of the latter within its borders – nowadays seen as typical of Central Europe – was the basis of politics of language as it originated and developed in Western Europe. Although the Western European pedigree of politics of language is at present conveniently forgotten, the phenomenon of language politicization is said to be now most visible in Central Europe. It is so because after World War I, the formerly multilingual Western European powers of France and the United Kingdom with the support of the United States chose to delegitimize the existence of Austria-Hungary on the account of its multilingualism and multiethnicity. By the same token, the victorious powers legitimized various ethnonational (formerly, often marginal) movements, which defined their postulated nations in terms of language. The national principle steeped in the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity allowed these movements to carve up Central Europe into a multitude of ethnolinguistic nation-states. What followed with vengeance was forced ethnolinguistic homogenization pursued to assimilate ‘non-national elements’ within a nation-state. The intensity and human costs of this project were much higher than in Western Europe, because there the process of ethnolinguistic homogenization was spread out over two or more centuries, and conducted mostly prior to the rise of the bureaucratic state and industry, which provided the means of making millions conform with the central government’s will. The ethnolinguistic homogenization of Central Europe’s nation-states was carried out and largely completed between 1918 and 1950. In the lifespan of a single generation, compulsory education in the national language, dictatorships, totalitarianisms, imposed border changes, the Holocaust, mass expulsions, dispersal of minority populations, and forced emigration steamrolled the social and cultural reality of the region doing away with multilingualism and multiethnicity which had been the norm there prior to the Great War. In the latter half of the 20th century, the rise of ubiquitous electronic mass media rounded off the process. Thus, it is impossible to speak in a knowledgeable manner

Introduction

7

about Central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries without recounting the politics of language, which legitimized political and social changes proposed by national movements and their nation-states, and also served as an instrument for implementing these changes. To a large extent, the history of politics of language in Central Europe is identical with the political and social history of this region between the mid-19th century and the turn of the 21st century. Philologists, academics-turned-politicians, and politicians-turned-philologists constituted the inner circles of the national movements and were the initial elites of the nation-states created by these movements.

What is politics of language? Syntactical language is a typically human means of oral communication. From the anthropological perspective, different languages of this kind ensured social cohesion within communities (face-to-face human groups) and constituted part of the ethnic boundary, which separated such a group from others. The longlasting separation of one group from another, not mediated by exchange of spouses or economic contacts, contributed to the growing divergence of these groups’ languages, even if these groups had originated from a single one, and thus had shared the same language in the past. Spatial mobility meant that groups of totally or of much different origin came in touch with one another, which ensured the rise of multilingualism when they engaged in lasting contacts or cooperation. Languages of some communities became linguas francas (vehicular languages) of inter-group communication. A qualitative change came with the rise of state. On a given territory, numerous groups were subjected to the rule of a single power center. A narrow elite of warriors and bureaucrats projected the power of this center into each nook of the state, ensuring the compliance of communities (now construed as the polity’s population) with the center’s decisions. In return, the state’s government and elite protected the population, usually against the intrusion of foreign communities or states. The growth of increasingly larger polities limited the degree of face-to-face contacts even among the members of the narrow elite, and thus would necessitate the breakup of such states into more manageable smaller ones. Perhaps, the wish to prevent such an occurrence was behind the rise of writing. Subsequently, written languages enabled the rise and maintenance of continent-wide and maritime empires, like those of Rome, China, the Arabs, the Mongols, Spain, Russia, or England. Usually, the male half of the elite monopolized the ability to write and used one or several languages for administration, governing, and control of a polity. Often numerous vernaculars of the population at large were of no significance beyond face-to-face communication in a village or extended family clan, or a number of closely related villages or clans.

8

Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Written language became an inalienable part of politics, understood as all the activities needed for constructing and maintaining a polity. The technique of writing detached written language from its original and basic function of inter-human communication, and from the speaker and the listener themselves, who had alone produced and shaped language in earlier times when writing did not exist. Records in written language grew into archives and libraries, which became the organizational heart of each extensive and durable polity. Since then a regime change typically required the seizure of such records, and often their destruction and replacement with new ones, when an incoming elite could not effectively appropriate the type of power legitimization employed by its predecessor. The destruction of a polity’s archives also conveniently removed memory of a separate statehood, which allowed a victorious invading power to absorb a defeated state more swiftly. In the case of late medieval and early modern Western and Central Europe, the emergence of separate polities from the increasingly rhetorical supervision of the papacy as the universal political-cum-religious institution of the Western Christian world was reaffirmed by the gradual replacement of Latin with vernaculars as the states’ official written languages. The Reformation, which subjected the religious to state and paved the road to secular statehood, replaced Latin in liturgy with already-established and newly written vernaculars. The use of the newly written vernaculars often did not coincide with established power centers, and thus potentially could be employed to empower regional groups aspiring to join a state’s elite, or to become a separate elite in their own right. Later, similar processes spread to Catholic areas, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, which separated State from Church, and thus excluded Latin from the realm of secular politics (cf. Patten 2006; Tymowski 1999; Urbanczyk ´ 2000). This revolution alongside the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom and enlightened absolutism of Prussia and Austria prepared the ground for another qualitative change in the politics of language. Industrialization and growing state bureaucracies required increasingly more numerous workforce that would be literate in the official language(s) of a state. The increasing economic output generated enough profit to finance free elementary education for a growing number of the inhabitants, until, at the end of the 18th century, the ideal emerged that all children should attend elementary school in order to ensure basic literacy and numeracy for the entire population. The shift from divine legitimization of power to that accorded by a polity’s population allowed for construing the literate inhabitants as ‘nation,’ or the ideological sovereign of the state. To this end, the political rights and duties of the inhabitants were made uniform, making them into equal citizens irrespective of birth or wealth. In this manner, nation-state was born. In most cases, women were partially excluded from the newly found national commonality

Introduction

9

until the first half of the 20th century, when they finally obtained full suffrage. That is why earlier more men were literate than women. In the case of men, their skill of reading and writing in their nation-state’s official/national language(s) was reinforced during their service in national armies of mass conscription. The increasingly centralized model of national statehood aspired to pervade the entire public sphere in a polity. This evoked tacit or explicit policies of ethnolinguistic homogenization. The official/national language of a state replaced other written languages traditionally used within the polity, whereas popular education and mass media contributed to leveling differences in speech, which meant the liquidation of these forms of oral language construed as dialects of the official/national language. In Western Europe, this trend toward the uniformization of written language use unfolded gradually and lasted over several centuries, producing the counterfactual impression that a given state’s population has spoken the official/national language since times immemorial. The multilingual and multiethnic empires of Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans, and Russia did not want, or failed, to transform themselves into centralized nation-states, in which divine-right legitimization of power would be replaced with a nation-based one. Full legal equality of the three empires’ inhabitants and the doing away with divine-right legitimization of power were not effected prior to their disappearance after World War I. This bred social instability because the Western model of national statehood proved increasingly attractive, especially in conjunction with the economic and military successes of Western Europe’s nation-states. Hence, in the eyes of the inhabitants of these nation-states and those of the aforementioned empires, the Western (European) model of national statehood appeared as the norm. In accordance with this line of thinking, the Ottoman Empire was dubbed the ‘sick man of Europe,’ and Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire became known as ‘prisons of nations.’ Because many inhabitants not belonging to the elites of the three empires gradually conceded to these initially Western opinions, the Western powers felt obliged (obviously, when it suited their interests) to intervene in the empires and saw their interventions as fully justified by the ‘non-national, backward, and abnormal’ character of these polities. In the West, at the turn of the 19th century, the belief arose that humanity is ‘naturally’ divided into nations and that this ‘fact’ should be appropriately reflected in the state organization of the (at least non-colonial) world, meaning one state for each nation (or, in reality, one nation for each state in the case of Western Europe and the Americas). In the second half of the 19th century, European scholars and statisticians, confronted with the non-national character of Central and Eastern Europe, believed that the nations, which ‘had to exist there,’ could be brought out from the ‘ambiguity of multiethnic populaces’ using statistics. In the subsequent censuses, one had to declare one’s language, variously interpreted as mother tongue, family language, or language of everyday communication. The declaration of more than one language per person was

10 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

not permitted, which by default excluded the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism from official scrutiny. The logic of this exclusion stemmed from the conviction that a person can belong to one nation only. By the same token, declarations of variously named dialects, already construed as ‘belonging to’ a national language, were noted as declarations of this national language. Census queries on one’s language did not so much measure as create nations in Central and Eastern Europe. Stateless nations, to reaffirm their difference vis-à-vis other stateless groups and the state(s) of their residence, which they do not perceive as theirs, and ensure their own continued existence, have no choice but to ground their specificity in a set of ethnic markers. Language was the main marker of this type in Central Europe. (For instance, religion played a more significant nation-building role than language in the Balkans and the Middle East.) Understandably, having grasped this unusual political significance of language, aspiring leaders of fledgling ethnolinguistic national movements in Central Europe set themselves or their supporters to the task of codifying their respective national languages. This codification entailed making a collection of frequently disparate dialects (that in the past might have been even defined as separate languages) spoken by the tentative members of a postulated nation into a written (standard, national) language. The process often involved absorption of some older written language(s) and writings produced in it (them) as the ‘long-standing’ tradition of literacy in the newly codified national language. In most Central European cases, codification was achieved by the compilation of a standard grammar and dictionary, which were endorsed by the majority of a national movement’s leaders. An increasing number of secular books and periodicals published in a newly written language, alongside the introduction of this language to schools as a medium of education and to state offices as an auxiliary or co-official language, constituted a prelude to the further process of codification, known as ‘standardization.’ In the course of standardization, variety in pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon was eliminated, and a standard of the national language, worked out in such a manner, was recorded in an authoritative multi-volume dictionary and extensive academic grammars. This standardized national language was communicated to the rank and file members of the nation via a school textbook, one-volume dictionary, an officially endorsed book with grammatical and orthographic principles on ‘how to write and speak correctly’ in the language, and a periodical devoted to the ‘cultivation’ of this language.7 A national movement and/or the elite of a nascent ethnolinguistic nation aspired to ‘develop’ their national language, which meant putting it to such uses and describing it in such works as this happened earlier in the case of Western Europe’s main languages. Invariably, an academy of sciences was established to oversee the process of further standardization of a respective national language. Dictionaries of etymology, dialects, neologisms, foreign words, and historical

Introduction

11

dictionaries of the national language followed later. The crowning effort came in the form of multi-volume universal encyclopedia, which encapsulated the most significant information about a given nation and the world as mediated through the lens of the nation’s own national language. The final step on the way to the ethnolinguistically defined independence of a nation and its national language came when the nation obtained its own nation-state, where the national language was declared the sole official language of the polity. In the nation-state, dictionaries, grammars, and textbooks of the national language along with encyclopedias in this language proliferated. They continually reformed and updated the national language in line with the needs of the nation and politics, but also with an eye to novel ways of describing and analyzing language as practiced in the West and neighboring nation-states. Prior to the rise of its ethnolinguistic nation-state, the national movement used the national language as an argument to confirm in the eyes of international public opinion that the postulated nation resided on a given territory, which should be made into the nation’s nation-state. When the goal was achieved, the language served to forward territorial claims against neighboring states on the basis that conspicuous minorities speaking the national language were ‘left outside’ the borders of ‘their’ nation-state. In turn, education and state bureaucracy in the national language ensured assimilation of minorities who resided in the nation-state but spoke other languages than the national one. When a border change was desired, but no significant minority speaking the national language resided in a neighboring state, historical linguists came to the succor of politicians. They ‘proved’ that on the territory in question, the national language was spoken in the Middle Ages until the ‘perfidious’ ancestors of a neighbor nation assimilated the speakers of the national language ‘by oppression and arbitrary use of power.’ And in a case of deadlock, the sides of a conflict succumbed to a ban on the use of languages other than the national one, population exchange, unilateral expulsion, forced emigration, and even genocide in order to make the political borders of the nation-state coincide with the borders of the national language’s speech community (Bluntschli 1870; Böckh 1866; Crowley 2005; Hartweg 1999; Haubrichs 1996; Hroch 1985, 1999; King 2002: 57–58, 164, 225; Leuschner 2004; Trampe 1908).

Where is Central Europe? There is no agreement on what the term ‘Central Europe’ should mean. This concept entered the world of English-language scholarship perhaps due to the impact of Robert William Seton-Watson’s (1879–1951) writings (cf. 1922). He was the first ‘Anglo-American’ researcher to seriously concentrate on this part of Europe for several decades. However, this usage seems to be the reflection of

12 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the seminal work by the German Reichstag deputy, Friedrich Naumann (1860– 1919). In the midst of the Great War his Mitteleuropa8 (1915, Berlin) proposed a vision of a Central European economic-cum-political union under the joint guardianship of Germany and Austria. A year later, the volume was translated into English as Central Europe (London). This coinage became obsolete in the wake of World War II when the Iron Curtain split the continent into the dual structure of Western and Eastern Europe, thus replicating the division of the world into the two Cold War camps (cf. Dvornik 1949). The US-sponsored ‘Area Studies’ programs fortified this bipolar perception of Europe, which continued largely unabated until the breakup of the Soviet bloc in 1989. It is worthwhile remarking though that almost two decades earlier a group of United States scholars of Central European origin had attempted to challenge this dualistic vision by reintroducing the concept of Central Europe into Western discourse and scholarship with the multi-volume A History of East Central Europe (Sugar and Treadgold 1974–). They perceived Central Europe as a region consisting of two halves. The ‘eastern one’ was non-German-speaking and after 1945 found itself in the sphere of Soviet domination. They associated the ‘western half’ with the Germanophone population of divided Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and with the Germanic-speakers of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. In doing so, they emulated the German scholarly distinction between Westmitteleuropa and Ostmitteleuropa (cf. Eberhard et al. 1992). Following the fall of communism, Czech, Hungarian (Magyar), Polish, and Slovak intellectuals as well as the average person in the street often sought to disassociate herself or himself from the half-century-long tradition of imposed Sovietization. And in the latter half of the 1980s, Central Europe appeared the obvious choice, especially so because it was now insulated from implications of German hegemony by the post-1945 division of Germany. Two smaller Germanys better fit Central Europe as partners, not in a position to dominate the region. The discussion about the ‘third path’ of Central Europe between the western and eastern ‘peripheries’ of this continent was usefully recorded in the volume In Search of Central Europe (Schöpflin and Wood 1989). In this work, the clear tendency appeared to narrow the definition of Central Europe just to the erstwhile core lands of the Habsburg patrimony (Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia), while the broader-minded camp preferred to speak of Középeurópa (Magyar for ‘In-Between Europe’) that includes all the states extending from Finland to Greece between Russia in the east and Germany and Italy in the west. The attraction and utility of the concept of Central Europe became apparent when Lithuania and Ukraine (or, at least, its western part) strove to distance themselves from the tarnished legacy of Sovietized Eastern Europe or when Croatia decided to write itself out of the ‘Balkan Cauldron’ and

Introduction

13

disassociate itself from Serbia’s New Yugoslavia (Milardovi´c 1998). In the eyes of the West, Central Europe constitutes the ‘good’ section of ‘New Europe’ as opposed to its ‘bad’ twin of the Balkans ravaged by its ‘ancient hatreds’ (Todorova 1997: 140–160). Neither Latvia nor Estonia shared such preoccupations with Lithuania because they decided to enter Northern Europe, epitomized by Scandinavia’s economic and social success. Slovenia had a complicated love–hate relationship with Central Europe. Slovenian intellectuals readily accepted the multicultural vision of the region, but disliked the possibility of German or Germanic domination, symbolized for them by Austria-Hungary. On the other hand, the submergence of Slovenia in Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1990 made the intellectuals wary of possible dominance of their tiny polity by other middle-sized Central European or Balkan states. Recently, enjoying the richest and best-developed state of all the post-communist ones, the Slovenes have seen their nation rather as unquestionably belonging to Western Europe. From the vantage point of historic cartography, Paul Robert Magocsi’s (1945–) atlases of this part of the continent put the discourse about Central Europe on the map. The first edition of his work published in 1993 was entitled Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. It comprised the lands of the former states of PolandLithuania, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans. A decade later another edition appeared. Its title Historical Atlas of Central Europe (2002) clearly indicates that the classificatory division of the European peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, as extending from the Urals to Iberia, into three equal parts with the middle one named ‘Central Europe,’ has become an accepted usage among Area Studies scholars. With the 2004 enlargement of the European Union (EU) a new problem appeared, namely the division of the Central European states into those that are in and those that are left out. This new border of exclusion and inclusion ran along the eastern borders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania joined the club, and a tentative promise of membership had been given to Croatia and Macedonia. But still Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine as well as Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia remain outside the pale. And however benign it may be, there is no denial that the border of the enlarged European Union is a barrier to free movement of people, ideas (as recorded in books and periodicals), and goods. The ramifications of this phenomenon are already discernible. For instance, as of the beginning of the 21st century, the mass media and the inhabitants of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia have begun to speak of their states as part of ‘Western Europe.’ Soon it may turn out that there is no place for Central Europe once again so that it may re-acquire its former role as the refuge for unwanted peoples and states – this time those stranded between Russia and the European Union.

14 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

As the author of this work, I had to make a decision that would give a more concrete character to this malleable concept. Otherwise it would be impractical to employ it as an organizational framework for this work in the comparative analysis of language policies and nationalisms of the Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak national movements and nation-states. In this respect, I am following Piotr Stefan Wandycz’s (1923–) geographically dynamic vision of East Central Europe (I take the liberty to abbreviate this term as ‘Central Europe’) as the sum of the territories of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, or their predecessors in the past (1992: 12–17). But I cannot stick to the model inflexibly in studying the relationship between language, nation, and nationstates in this region. Thus, the Czechs, Magyars, Poles, and Slovaks, together with their languages and statehoods, constitute the focus of this book. Without referring to their neighbors, however, it would be impossible to comprehend many developments and mutually cross-fertilizing influences. That is why most of the time I take into account the issues of language and nationalism especially those concerning the Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and, less consistently, those pertaining to the Bosnians, Croatians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Slovenes, and Romanians. For the sake of comparison, the Germans and the German-speakers of Austria-Hungary are also singled out, where appropriate; and I try to give due consideration as well to the diasporic ethnic groups or nations of the Jews and Roma, alongside the stateless ethnic groups or nations of the Kashubs, Lemkos, Mazurs, Morawecs, Rusyns, Sorbs, Slunzaks, Szlonzoks, or Poleshuks.

The states of Central Europe9 In Antiquity, no durable state organization was extant in Central Europe. Only the northeastern borders of the 5th-century Roman Empire overlapped with what are western Hungary and the Slovak area south of Bratislava today.10 The short-lived (623–658) Slavic realm of the Frankish merchant Samo extended from Lusatia to southern Slovakia and southeastern Austria. The Avar Khanate established at the beginning of the 7th century lasted until the Franks destroyed it during Charlemagne’s reign (771–814). It comprised contemporary Hungary, southern Slovakia, and western Romania. The Greater Moravian Empire emerged in the 830s. It largely coincided with Samo’s state, with the exception of Carinthia (annexed by the Franks), but with the additions of Pannonia (western Hungary), the territories of modern Slovakia, and southern Poland. In the west, the empire bordered on the Frankish Kingdom and in the southeast, on the Bulgarian Empire. At the end of the 9th century, the Magyars moved westward crossing the Carpathians. They destroyed the Moravian Empire by 906. East of Poland’s current eastern border, during the second half of the 9th century, Kievan11 Rus came into being, established by Varangian (Scandinavian, that is, Germanic) military leaders.

Introduction

15

The political shape of Central Europe that largely remains unchanged to this day started emerging in the 10th century. Following the defeat of the Magyars at the battle of Lechfeld (955), the Holy Roman Empire took over the western lands of the Greater Moravian Empire, that is, of Lusatia (today in eastern Germany), and Bohemia and Moravia (in the Czech Republic). The Piast dynasty organized the state of the Polanians (future Poland) in the second half of the 10th century, while the Magyars established theirs in the 990s. The Polanian state, mostly coinciding with contemporary Poland, disintegrated in 1138 into numerous semi-, and then fully, independent principalities. In the mid-12th century, the Kingdom of Hungary comprised the territories of modern Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, northern Serbia, and northwestern Romania (Transylvania). Because of the special position of Croatia in this structure, this arrangement made the kingdom into a dual Hungarian-Croatian state. In 1226, the duke of Mazovia granted to the crusader Order of the Hospitalers of St Mary of the Teutons a small territory around the town of Chełmza. ˙ They renamed it Kulmsee and in the course of their crusade against the ‘heathen’ Pruthenians (Prussians, related to the Lithuanians), established the ecclesiastical Teutonic State. At the close of the 13th century, this polity comprised of what today is northeastern Poland, Russia’s Kaliningard Oblast, southwestern Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Mongol campaigns (1236–1242) destroyed most of the virtually independent Kievan Rus principalities. The state of the pagan Lithuanians, with its center at Trakai, stepped into the power vacuum and by the 1360s expanded as far as Podolia in the south, Pereieslav in the southeast, Novhorod-Sivers’kyi in the east, and Pskov in the northeast. Kyiv, the capital of the original Rus state, was annexed in 1362. The Kingdom of Poland, reunited in the first half of the 14th century, conquered the Rus Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia in the 1340s and western Podolia in 1366. The Kingdom of Bohemia (alongside the Margravate of Moravia dynastically linked to it) continued its largely independent status in the Holy Roman Empire. Within this empire’s borders, it expanded southward, and by 1269, Lower and Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola belonged to it. The Habsburgs then drove away the Pˇremyslid rulers of Bohemia-Moravia from this Alpine region, so the other dynasty began to expand its realm to the north. By 1373, the new Luxemburg dynasty of Bohemia-Moravia had acquired Lusatia, Silesia, and Brandenburg. The union of the Lands of the Czech Crown, founded in 1346, stabilized with the loss of Brandenburg in 1411. Importantly, in 1344, the ecclesiastical subjection of the crown to the Mainz archbishop was terminated when Rome had elevated Bohemia to the status of archdiocese. Between 1370 and 1382, Poland and Hungary-Croatia were united in the brief personal union under the rule of the Angevin (Anjou) dynasty. This connection gave way to the much more permanent personal union of Poland with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that was promulgated in 1385. The ethnically Lithuanian

16 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

dynasty of the Jagiellonians not only reigned in both these states but also in the Czech Lands (1471–1526) and Hungary (1440–1444, 1490–1526). After 1526, Central Europe was divided between the Jagiellonians ruling Poland-Lithuania and the Habsburgs ruling the Czech Lands and Hungary-Croatia. Following their capture of most of the Balkans in the 14th and the first half of the 15th century and the fall of Constantinople (1453), the Ottoman Turks commenced the conquest of the lands north of the Danube. At the beginning of the 16th century, Bosnia and southern Dalmatia, along with Jedisan (Yedisan) and Budzhak (Budjak) (the southeastern region of modern Ukraine on the shores of the Black Sea), were already part of the Ottoman Empire, while Moldavia and Walachia were vassal states. The battle of Mohács (1526) that marked the expansion of Habsburgs rule in Central Europe also sealed the destruction of medieval Hungary-Croatia. All of modern Hungary up to the Balaton Lake, together with contemporary Bosnia and Croatia (apart from a sliver of land extending from Rijeka to Zagreb), were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Transylvania became an Ottoman vassal state that, with time, gained virtual independence. By 1645, the Ottomans had annexed further Hungarian territories, including eastern Slovakia, western Ukraine, and northeastern Hungary. The narrow crescent of Hungary remaining under Habsburg control with its capital at Preßburg (Bratislava)12 extended from western Croatia via western Hungary to western and central Slovakia. The defeat of the mainly Protestant estates of the lands of the Czech Crown at the battle of White Mountain (Bíla Hora) near Prague in 1620 meant the gradual dissolution of this distinctive structure into the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs. At the Union of Lublin (1569), Poland-Lithuania was made into the dual estates Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. As a result of this event, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ceded to the Kingdom of Poland its western and southern borderlands of Podlachia, Volhynia, Podolia, and Ukraine. In 1454, the westernmost part of the Teutonic state of Prussia was incorporated into Poland and its remaining eastern half became a Polish fief in 1466. The 1525 secularization of the Duchy of Prussia and its homage to Poland commenced the rule of the Hohenzollerns over this Lutheran state. During the 1560s, PolandLithuania seized the other parts (belonging to the Livonian Order, or the Knights of the Sword) of the Teutonic state (Courland and Livonia in modern-day Latvia, and Estonia), but Sweden annexed most of the territory in 1629. In 1660, the Ottomans liquidated the semi-independence of Transylvania, and 12 years later annexed Poland-Lithuania’s Podolia and Ukraine. The lifting of the Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) commenced the Habsburgs’ re-conquest of the lands of the Kingdom of Hungary. By 1718, they had regained all Ottoman Hungary, Transylvania, and Croatia (except Dalmatia seized by Venice), and annexed northern Bosnia, the north of Serbia south of the Sava River, as well as Banat and Oltenia (today in southwestern Romania). During the same

Introduction

17

time, Poland-Lithuania reacquired Podolia (1699). Eastern Ukraine with Kyiv was seized by Muscovy (future Russia) in 1667. During the years 1697–1764, Saxony joined Poland-Lithuania in a personal union. Shortly after its commencement, the Great Northern War (1700–1721) erupted involving the above-mentioned states alongside Muscovy, Sweden, and Denmark. The initial sweeping successes of the Swedes allowed the 1701 proclamation of the Kingdom of Prussia consisting of East Prussia and the Duchies of Pomerania and Brandenburg; the two duchies remained within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. This new Lutheran kingdom of the Hohenzollerns proved an effective player in Central European politics along with the Muscovy, renamed as the Russian Empire in 1721. Both states, with the participation of the Habsburgs of Austria, initiated the three partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) that erased Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe. Russia annexed almost all of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania including the Polish provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, and western Ukraine. Prussia took the western half of the Kingdom of Poland including Mazovia with the Polish capital of Warsaw, while the Habsburgs seized the central and southeastern regions of this kingdom. In the second half of the 18th century, the Habsburg-Ottoman border stabilized along the historical frontiers of Croatia, Hungary, and Transylvania. Prussia won seven-eighths of the rich Duchy of Silesia from Vienna during the years 1740–1742. The remaining part of southern Upper Silesia became unofficially known as Austrian Silesia so as to distinguish it from Prussia’s Province of Silesia. In 1774, Austria annexed northern Bukovina (today in southeastern Ukraine), while in 1792 the Ottomans ceded Jedisan (the strip of the Black Sea littoral in contemporary southern Ukraine bordering on Moldavia). The onslaught of Napoleonic France in 1805–1807 and the Congress of Vienna wrapping up the period of Napoleonic Wars gave a final political shape to Central Europe that remained largely unaltered till the end of the Great War (1918). In 1804, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (reigning 1792–1835) proclaimed the Austrian Empire that comprised the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs and the Kingdom of Hungary and became the Austrian Emperor Francis I. The Frenchimposed dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire followed 2 years later. Thus, the most durable and sizeable political structure of the continent, dating back to the times of Charlemagne, disappeared after one millennium of continued existence. In 1807, Napoleon reestablished a semblance of Poland-Lithuania in the form of the Duchy of Warsaw. It was made up of almost all the territories (except West Prussia) that Prussia had gained during the partitions of Poland-Lithuania as well as of the northern section of the Austrian partition zone. Another Napoleonic addition to the political map of Europe was Illyria (1809– 1813). This province of the French Empire consisted of Dalmatia (formerly divided between Venice and the Republic of Ragusa [Dubrovnik]), southern and western Croatia (without Zagreb), Carniola (future Slovenia), and Carinthia

18 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(today in Austria). In 1812, Russia obtained Bessarabia, or the eastern section of historical Moldavia between the rivers Dniester and Prut (today mostly in Moldova), from the Ottoman Empire. After the defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna (1815) overhauled and legitimized this new political map of Central Europe. The Duchy of Warsaw was made into the Congress Kingdom of Poland and joined in the real union with Russia. Simultaneously, West Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Posen (Poznan) ´ were detached from this kingdom and returned to Prussia, which also gained most of Saxony. In addition, the territory around Cracow was instituted as the Free City of Cracow (also popularly, though incorrectly, known as Republic of Cracow) under the joint protection of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The lands of short-lived Illyria reverted to the Austrian Empire together with Salzburg, Tyrol, and Lombardy-Venetia. In the wake of the 1846 Galician Jacquerie that the Austrians directed against nationally minded Polish noble activists, the Free City of Cracow was incorporated into Austria’s Crownland of Galicia. The January Uprising (1863–1864), mostly of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility against Russia in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, led to the abolition of the distinctive legal and administrative status of this polity. This kingdom, unofficially renamed the Vistula Land, was divided into ten regular gubernias of the Russian Empire. In the Balkans, Great Britain, France, Russia, and Austria exerted increasing pressure on the Ottoman Empire. As a result, after various periods of autonomy granted by the Ottomans, the following new nation-states gained independence: Greece (1832), Romania, Serbia, Montenegro (all three in 1878), Bulgaria (1908), and Albania (1913). Other significant changes during the second half of the 19th century resulted from the development of German nationalism. In lieu of the Holy Roman Empire, the Congress of Vienna established the German Confederation that embraced all the German-speaking provinces of future Germany (except Prussia’s provinces of Posen, and West and East Prussia) as well as the Austrian Empire (except the Hungarian lands). Vienna was the leader of this confederation, though with time the industrialization of Prussia shifted the balance of economic and military power into Berlin’s hands. Prussia utilized its clout by creating the German Customs Union in 1834. The year of 1866, when the Prussian armies defeated the Austrian Empire during the Seven Weeks’ War, was the harbinger of change. By that time, all the Germanic states had joined Prussia’s German Customs Union, except Austria. In 1867, the German Confederation was replaced by the Prussia-led Northern German Confederation, which also superseded the German Customs Union. The way to the eventual proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 was open. Austria lost to Prussia in the standoff for mastery in the Germanophone world. Berlin managed to create a German nation-state, but a ‘faulty one,’ as it did not contain the German-speaking provinces of the Austrian Empire. Thus, its critics dubbed it a ‘Little German nation-state’ (Kleindeutschland ). They disagreed that the new polity was worth the name of Germany. At the same time, the supporters

Introduction

19

of the German Empire tacitly conceded to the view, but opined that this empire was but a significant stepping stone to a future true German nation-state that would include all the German-speaking polities and territories. Faced with the unstoppable ascendance of Prussia, now cloaked as the German Empire, the Austrian Empire had no choice but to reform itself to prevent its disintegration under the growing pressure of various ethnic nationalisms. In 1867, Austria was overhauled as the Dual Monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary. Additionally, in the Austrian Crownland of Galicia, Poles obtained political and cultural autonomy so as to offset the politically obstructive influence of Czech nationalism, painfully felt in Vienna’s richest Crownland of Bohemia. World War I was to utterly destroy the 19th-century political configuration of Central Europe. Austria-Hungary disappeared from the map, while Russia and Germany were pushed away from this area and lost their common border that had existed unchanged since 1815. Their place was taken over by the new nation-states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and the non-national Free City of Danzig (Gdansk). ´ The Russian Empire evolved into the Soviet Union and together with Poland annexed the shortlived nation-states of Belarus and Ukraine.13 The Polish nation-state comprised the territories of St Petersburg’s erstwhile Congress Kingdom of Poland, Vienna’s Crownland of Galicia, most of West Prussia and almost the entire Province of Posen (Poznan), ´ gained from the German Empire, as well as the Gubernia of Grodno (Hrodna) and the western halves of the gubernias of Minsk (Mensk in Belarusian, Minsk ´ in Polish) and Volhynia, gained from the Russian Empire. In 1920, an army of Polish irregulars seized Vilnius (Wilno) with the area around it from Lithuania, and proclaimed the territory as the state of Central Lithuania. In 1922, it was incorporated into Poland, which the international community had no choice but to recognize the following year. Lithuania did not recognize this fact and continued to claim Wilno (Vilnius) as its rightful and historical capital. At the same time, the Prussian region of Upper Silesia with its industrial basin (second largest in continental Europe) was divided between Germany and Poland (1922). Czechoslovakia was founded on the basis of the Austrian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and most of Austrian Silesia (apart from its easternmost sliver granted to Poland), and of Upper Hungary, that is, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. Post-war Hungary lost two-thirds of the historical Kingdom of Hungary to Romania (Transylvania and most of Banat), Czechoslovakia (Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia), the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Croatia, Slavonia, Vojvodina, Syrmia, and eastern Banat), and to Austria (Burgenland). The Austrian section of the Dual Monarchy was limited to a tiny Austria, which also lost southern Tyrol and Istria to Italy, and Carniola to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Other territorial losses of Austria not yet mentioned included Bosnia (annexed in 1908) to the

20 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

above-mentioned kingdom, and Bukovina to Romania. Bucharest also obtained Bessarabia from the defunct Russian Empire. Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) construction of a ‘real,’ Great German nationstate (Großdeutschland) along with the insulating outer shell of its Germanic empire did away with the two decades of uneasy interwar stability. In 1938, Austria (renamed as Ostmark, or Eastern Mark) and the Sudetenland (that is, the southern and northern regions of Czechoslovakia’s Bohemia and Moravia with most of Czech [former Austrian] Silesia) were incorporated into the Third Reich. Hungary seized southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Ruthenia, while Poland took the rest of Czech Silesia and small territories in the north of Slovakia. In the following year, Berlin liquidated the regionalized state renamed CzechoSlovakia. The Czech lands were incorporated into Germany as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia gained sovereignty, but the short-lived and not recognized independence of Subcarpathian Ruthenia finished with Hungary’s annexation of this territory. In September 1939, Berlin and Moscow attacked Poland and partitioned it. The east of the state was incorporated into the Soviet Union, while the west and the center (with the capital Warsaw) went to Germany. As part of the Kremlin’s scheme, Lithuania obtained the coveted region of Vilnius (Wilno). The Free City of Danzig was incorporated into Germany. A year later, the Kremlin annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia alongside Romania’s Bessarabia and northern Bukovina creating the modern border that today separates Romania from Ukraine and Moldova. Bucharest also had to cede north-central Transylvania to Hungary and southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria. In order to round up the description of the changes in the south of Central Europe, it must be added that Yugoslavia (as of 1929 the new name of the former Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) and Greece were partitioned. Germany annexed northern Slovenia and Italy, the southern half of this country. Hungary received Vojvodina and Bulgaria, southern Serbia (today’s Macedonia) and western Thrace centered on the Greek town of Xánthe. Montenegro, the west of contemporary Macedonia, and southern Kosovo went to Italy, which had already annexed Albania and the northern Greek territory around Prága. The truncated Serbian state found itself under German rule. Nominally, the Independent State of Croatia (consisting of Croatia and Bosnia) belonged to the Italian sphere of influence, but Berlin also controlled this polity along with the rest of Greece. As a result of the German attack against the Soviet Union (1941), Berlin took over eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were until then under Soviet rule. Furthermore, the German occupation extended over the whole of Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia. The territories of prewar Poland were directly incorporated into the Third Reich. Central Poland, with the 1941 addition of some parts of the Soviet zone of occupied Poland, was made into the German-controlled Generalgouvernement with its capital at Cracow. The rest of

Introduction

21

the previous Soviet zone of occupation was divided between the Reichskommissariat Ostland and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The former comprised all of ethnically defined Belarus and also Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, whereas the latter overlapped with former Polish and Soviet Ukraine. Romania, as a German ally, reacquired Bessarabia and was granted Transnistria (or Transdniestria in pro-Russian sources), a strip of land east of the Dniester (formerly autonomous Soviet Moldavia included within Soviet Ukraine). After the collapse of fascist Italy in 1943, Berlin handed over Dalmatia to Croatia and separated Montenegro from Albania, making the latter into a puppet state. At the end of World War II, the Allies redrew the political map of Central Europe again. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (with its enlarged borders including Vilnius) were reincorporated into the Soviet Union. The Soviet annexation of the east of prewar Poland, in agreement with the German–Soviet secret pact, was reaffirmed. These lands became parts of the Soviet republics of Belorussia and Ukraine. Moscow also annexed the northern half of East Prussia and incorporated it into the Soviet Republic of Russia. Post-war Poland was ‘indemnified’ with the prewar German territories of southern East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, and Silesia. The interwar Free City of Danzig also became part of Poland. In sum, one-third of interwar Polish territory was lost to the Soviet Union, whereas one-third of post-war Poland was composed of German lands. Czechoslovakia reacquired most of its pre-1938 borders, but lost Subcarpathian Ruthenia (now renamed Transcarpathia) to Soviet Ukraine. Wartime Hungary was reduced to its interwar borders, while Romania, having been a German ally, not only had to return its war gains of Transnistria to Soviet Ukraine, but additionally had no choice but to concede to the permanent loss of Bessarabia to Soviet Moldova, northern Bukovina to Ukraine, and southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria. Yugoslavia was reestablished in its prewar shape, but with the addition of Zara (Zadar), the islands Lagosta (Lastovo) and Chereso (Cres), Istria, the southwestern corner of Carniola, the territory of Gorizia-Gradisca, and two-thirds of the Trieste area, which were ceded by Italy. The territories which Bulgaria and Albania gained from Yugoslavia and Greece during the war were returned to their prewar owners. A territorially diminished Germany and Austria, together with their capitals, were divided between the four victorious powers. In 1949, the western zones of occupation gave rise to West Germany (with its enclave of West Berlin) and the Soviet one to East Germany. At the end of the 1940s, it was obvious that Central Europe had become part of the Soviet sphere of influence. Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania were made into members of the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia and Albania remained communist mavericks largely independent of either West or the Kremlin. In 1955, Austria was reestablished as a neutral state. Despite the communist insurgence, Greece and Turkey remained in the Western sphere of influence.

22 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Iron Curtain apportioned most of Central Europe to the Kremlin’s hegemony and thus made it into a rather undistinguishable part of the Soviet empire. After Josip Broz Tito’s (1892–1980) fallout with Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) in 1947, Yugoslavia followed its own course between the East and the West, which won Belgrade the leadership of the non-aligned states of the world. Autarkic Albania severed its ties with the Soviet bloc in 1961 in its displeasure with the policy of de-Stalinization, which left this state isolated from the rest of the world until the fall of the communist regime in 1990. When NATO admitted West Germany as a member, Moscow reciprocated with the creation of the Warsaw Treaty Organization that united the Soviet satellite states (including Albania that officially left only in 1968) until its dissolution in 1991. The main ‘achievement’ of this organization was the Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia (1968) so as to prevent the state from leaving the Soviet bloc. The following year Moscow overhauled the centralized state of Czechoslovakia into the Federation of the Czech and Slovak Socialist Republics. The 1989 collapse of communism and the break-up of the Soviet bloc that commenced in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia precipitated another overhaul of the political map of Central Europe. In 1990, West Germany absorbed East Germany, and, by default, the new eastern Länder found themselves in the unexpectedly enlarged European Community. In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated into its constituent national republics now elevated to the status of independent nation-states. Two years later, the Czechs and the Slovaks proceeded with their peaceful divorce and created the first ever Czech nation-state (the Czech Republic) and independent Slovakia. The immensity of these changes may be illustrated by the fact that, by 1993, Poland was surrounded by brand-new neighbors. Their three predecessors (Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union) had vanished into thin air, to be replaced by re-united Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia (that is, the Kaliningrad Oblast, or former northern East Prussia). At the same time, like the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia disintegrated into its constituent national republics giving rise to the nation-states of Slovenia (1990), Croatia and Macedonia (1991), and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992). Belgrade’s subsequent wars against Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia (1992–1995), and Kosovo (1999) reduced the Serbia-dominated rump ‘New Yugoslavia’ to a loose coupling of the two sovereign nation-states of Serbia and Montenegro by 2003. The uneasy union was terminated in 2006 when Montenegro announced its independence. The Dayton Agreement (1995) also made war-ravaged Bosnia into a union of the Serbian Republic and the Croat-Bosnian Federation under international control. A similar status of international protectorate excluded Kosovo from Belgrade’s control, though nominally the province

Introduction

23

remained part of Serbia, until the independence of Kosovo was announced in 2008. The collapse of the Cold War order in Europe entailed the eastward enlargement of the Euro-Atlantic structures. First, in 1995, Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the European Union. Four years later, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland became members of NATO. The year 2004 brought about the historic dual enlargement of the European Union and NATO. The Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia acceded the former organization, whereas NATO accepted to its fold, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia alongside Bulgaria and Romania. In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania became new EU members. Brussels also extended tentative invitation to the European Union for Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Turkey. The process of the enlargement of the European Union and NATO seems to have put in place a new line of division between such an enlarged ‘West’ and the diminished ‘East’ that coincides with Russia’s ‘near abroad’ instituted in the form of the Commonwealth of the Independent States (CIS). The CIS groups all the erstwhile Soviet republics except Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Since the mid-1990s, Belarus has hoped to establish an equitable union with Russia. But with this goal seemingly unachievable, both states may remain separate. After gaining independence, the Moldovan elite initially worked toward some form of reunification with Romania. The tactic, however, backfired and led to the civil war (1991), which gave rise to the unrecognized state of Transnistria with its Russian-speaking majority. Chi¸sinˇau recognized its mistake and in the new 1994 Constitution it granted Transnistria a ‘special autonomous status.’ However, this legal change has not yet reversed the division of post-Soviet Moldova. In addition, the Moldovan government created the territorially discontinuous autonomous region of Gagauzia (Gagauz Yeri) for its Gagauz (Christian Turkic) minority.

On the similarity between the concepts of nation and language The two concepts of unusual social and political importance that established themselves into our world today are ‘nation’ and ‘language.’ They form the infrastructural basis of localized and global-wide actions that are described with the adjectives ‘social,’ ‘political,’ and ‘economic.’ These adjectives also circumscribe the main spheres of social science research. Yet, without ‘nation’ and ‘language’ as we understand or misunderstand them, the social, the political, and the economic would be quite different from what they are now. These two basic building blocks of the currently obtaining social reality are obvious to the point of appearing as transparent categories. Because of this social and intellectual transparency of ‘nation’ and ‘language,’ the condition is worth probing

24 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

into. This section analyzes the concepts of nation and language and points out the crucial similarities between them. These similarities illustrate the fact that the two concepts are ascriptive labels, the application of which is arbitrary and mostly depends on the will of the already-recognized nation-states. The last two centuries witnessed the globalization of the model of the nationstate (Kohn 1962). After the wave of decolonization during the 1960s and following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, all the existing states have presented themselves as nation-states (Kedourie 1971; Roy 2000). Nationalism is the only universally accepted ideology of statehood legitimization in such divergent polities as the United States, Poland, and Iran. In this framework, the nation functions as the sole source of sovereignty. All existing states are defined in civic and ethnic terms (Krejˇcí and Velímský 1981). Under the civic rubric, the state is primary in relation to the nation. It was the former that created the latter. Consequently, the citizenry is the nation, and citizenship equals nationality, that is, the state of belonging to a nation. In the ethnic paradigm, the nation coalesces around a specific ethnicity and usually emerges prior to the state. It is the nation that builds its nation-state. Consequently, ethnically defined nationality is the prerequisite, without which an inhabitant cannot be conferred with the citizenship of an ethnic nation-state (Brubaker 1992). The classical examples of civic and ethnic nations are provided by the Americans or the French, on the one hand, and by the Germans or the Italians, on the other. In the former case, ethnicity is usually of little significance. As long as individuals acquire American or French citizenship, they are considered to be members of the American or French nation. On the contrary, when people cannot prove their German or Italian ethnicity, and, by extension, their belonging to these nations, that is, nationality, they are not eligible for citizenship of the German or Italian nation-state. There were in the past and still are numerous ethnic nations or national movements aspiring to statehood, but none of those was or is civic (Minahan 2002). It is so because civic nations cannot exist without the state that defines and creates such nations. Hence, the American, or, more correctly, the United States nation had not existed before the rise of the United States. The French nation came into being as a result of the 1789 French Revolution. This upheaval overhauled the proprietary kingdom into the nation-state, which it vested with the mission of creating the French nation. The story was different in the case of the ethnic nations of Italians and Germans. Initially, it was the narrow, élitist-led national movements that proliferated the national news among the potential members of the two postulated nations. With time, the massification of these movements and the establishment of the Italian and German nation-states stabilized and ensured the continued existence of the previously stateless Italian and German nations (Greenfeld 1992; Hroch 1985; Weber 1976).

Introduction

25

Most of the existing nations are ‘civic.’ The commonality of national experience and the specific geographic relations in the context of the neighboring nation-states imbue such a civic nation with a degree of ethnic character. The same is true of ethnic nations that attained statehood. This introduces a civic element to their predominantly ethnic nationalisms. Ethnic and civic nationalisms are the ideal outcomes of the ethno-civic continuum along which the extant nationalisms can thrive. The German truncation of the French state into the Vichy regime during World War II did not mean ‘halving’ or ending the French nation. By the same token, should the United States statehood ever cease to exist due to some tragic internal disruption or a foreign invasion, the catastrophe would not entail the instantaneous disappearance of the American nation. Analyzing ethnic nations demonstrates that attainment of statehood tends to de-ethnicize their character. For instance, Italy terminated its original national policy of irredentism, and now it no longer claims the Swiss canton of Ticcino and its Italian-speaking population for the Italian nation-state. What is more, naturalization as the way of acquiring Italian citizenship is open to ethnically non-Italian immigrants. At the beginning of the 19th century, the idea of popular literacy as the prerequisite of ‘civilizedness’ appeared in Western Europe (Astle 1784). During the 20th century, this concept extended to all the corners of the globe (Illich and Sanders 1988; McLuhan 1962). From that time on, it was insufficient just to speak and communicate successfully. People had to speak something recognized as ‘a language,’ reified by writing (Anderson 1991; Billig 1995: 31). The illiterate speech of those not conforming to this new communication pattern was dubbed as ‘a dialect’ and became subordinated to ‘a language.’ Dialects created in this manner were made into a language’s oral, that is, ‘uncivilized,’ patrimony or anachronistic offspring14 (cf. Bloomfield 1926: 162). Ideally, the rise and development of the nation-state requires full literacy; otherwise the uniformity of law of much significance for civic nationalism cannot be established (cf. Anderson 1965). Or the commonality of the ethnic national experience cannot be homogenized and related to all of the population that is interpreted as a given nation. The concept of language, as popularly understood, is limited to the written form of language. Writing is a highly specialized technology used for the visualization of language, which is basically an oral phenomenon. On the other hand, this process detaches language from the human agent and allows preserving and transferring messages as objects. In this manner, the previously limited face-toface situation in communication can be broadened to involve larger groups of people, who will never meet most of their fellow-nationals. As a consequence, written language became the principal tool of creating national cohesion. The construction of homogeneous nations would be impossible to achieve without this instrument (Le Page 1964). Uses of a standard language may differ, but civic

26 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

nationalists employ it for largely non-ideologized communication within the nation-state, while their ethnic counterparts tend to ideologize language into part or even the very basis of their nation’s ethnic core (Buck 1916). The United States has no federal legislation on a national or even an official language, or one that plays such a role. The situation is different in the ethnic nation-state of Poland, where Article 27 of the Constitution reserves the official status for the Polish language exclusively. On the other hand, some nation-states, such as France, which pride themselves to be civic, nevertheless prefer to impose a highly ideologized national language on the populace, to the exclusion of other languages (cf. Chlebowczyk 1980; Constitution of the Republic of Poland 1997). Despite its functions, any written language is a complicated sociopolitical phenomenon – a product of history, deliberate choice, and compromise. Quite an extensive economic and political effort must be expended to codify a written language (Cobarrubias and Fishman 1983). First, the codifiers have to agree which piece(s) of dialect/creole continuum(a)15 they will use for the planned written standard. Second, they have to settle on a writing system(s) in which to compile appropriate dictionaries and grammars. This is followed by the translation of the basic world canon of writings into such a standard. Next, the freshly standardized language must be put to use in an increasing number of the formal and informal spheres of social life. And, last but not least, this language should be accepted by the society for which it was designed. In today’s world of nation-states, this target group tends to be a nation (Haugen 1966). The creation of nations and standard languages includes those considered to be members of such a group and using an ‘appropriate’ language, but it excludes the others. Thanks to that, the former are empowered and the latter disempowered. In civic nation-states, persons without citizenship and not knowing the official language of statewide communication are stigmatized as an underclass of immigrants. In ethnic nation-states, besides being described as such, they also can be defined as ethnic or national minorities (cf. Oommen 1997; Tollefson 1991). In a nutshell, the terms ‘nation’ and ‘language’ function similarly. They are purely ascriptive labels, because there is no procedure that prescribes how a group should be elevated to the status of a nation or a segment of dialect/creole continuum to the level of a language. These are arbitrary decisions. And it is the already-recognized nations clad in the mantle of their own nation-states that control these decisions. More or less objective criteria, elaborated by linguists or anthropologists, are of no importance unless their work happens to conform to the needs of a given national/linguistic movement. Surveying the sphere of civic nationalism reveals that a Tanganyika or Zanzibar nation does not exist because these two former colonies merged into Tanzania, resulting in the creation of the Tanzanian nation. Ethnic cases may be even more complex. Northern Poland’s Kashubs are not recognized as a

Introduction

27

nation because no foreign power would benefit, and Warsaw has no wish to diminish the numerical strength of the ethnically defined Polish nation (Synak 1998). Conversely, the much less numerous (Lusatian) Sorbs of Germany are deemed as a nation because, in the interwar period, Czechoslovakia and some other Slavic nation-states wished to weaken Germany by supporting the Sorbian national cause, the issue of which was also officially discussed at the Paris Peace Conference (1919) (Rzetelska-Fleszko 1993; Wyder 2003: 133–139). Despite a century-long history of their own national movement, the Kurds, although usually recognized as a nation, cannot achieve their own nation-state. In the Tajik case, Moscow fashioned the Persian-speaking population of Soviet Central Asia into the Tajik nation in order to separate them from Persia. Unexpectedly, the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled these tentative Tajiks to assume full nationhood, complete with their own nation-state (Roy 2000). In our contemporary world of nation-states similar trajectories of standard languages may be traced. Despite the completed standardization of the Kashubian language, Poland had problems recognizing it until 2005, because in the Central European paradigm, where language equals nation, such an acknowledgment could be tantamount to the recognition of the Kashubian nation (Majewicz 1989: 14). Until 1990, the Moldovan language was written in Cyrillic. After adopting the Latin alphabet, Moldovans have virtually the same language as the Romanians. For political reasons, the Moldovan Constitution recognizes Moldovan as the national language of Moldova. This political act alone makes the Moldovan language separate from the Romanian (King 1999). Low German (Plattdeutsch), spoken in northern Germany, is incomprehensible to the speakers of Allemanian German (Allemanisch), which is used in western Austria and southwestern Bavaria. But both are considered to be dialects of the same German language. Low German is virtually identical with Dutch, but the different national identities of the speakers keep them either from proclaiming Low German a dialect of Dutch, or Dutch a dialect of German, or from creating a common Dutch-Low German language (Szulc 1999). The categories of nation and language, being pervasive and simultaneously transparent in the modern world, require further study and deepened reflection. This may save scholars from the sin of anachronism or from unreflective espousal of the nationalist stance dubbed as ‘primordialism.’ Otherwise, they may fall into the pitfall of unfounded claims that play into the hands of ideologues. Numerous Chinese academics project their nationalism onto the paleontological past and seriously maintain that the Chinese nation has existed at least for several million years. This is much further in the past than Homo sapiens sapiens that originated some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago (Sautman 2001: 103). The same is true of languages. Bulgarian was standardized at the end of the 19th century, Macedonian in the mid-20th century, while Croatian emerged

28 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

from the commonality of the Serbo-Croatian language only a decade ago. Proponents of all these three nationalisms advanced mutually excluding claims to the unbroken continuity of their national languages with Old Church Slavonic. In the 9th century, this written liturgical-cum-administrative language developed on the basis of the Slavic dialect spoken in the Byzantine town of Thessalonicae (Thessaloníki). Slavonic served the Slavic and East Romanesque world of Orthodox Christianity for one millennium. This does not restrain Sofia, Skopje, and Zagreb from labeling Old Church Slavonic as ‘Old Bulgarian,’ ‘Old Macedonian,’ and ‘Old Croatian,’ respectively (Okuka 1998; Schenker and Stankiewicz 1980). Another error against the objectivity of scholarly research consists of succumbing to the urge to view one’s own nation and language as immortal in order to compensate for one’s individual and inescapable mortality. Social reality is like a river. Nothing in its current is present forever. Past experience shows that distinctive human groups and states are created and recreated even during one’s lifetime. For instance, Czechoslovakia existed for 74 years and East Germany for only four decades. The regional-cum-ethnic group of Germany’s Prussians vanished into thin air due to the post-war expulsion of millions of Germans from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, and after the Allies dissolved the Land of Prussia in 1947. The rising sea level of the Pacific Ocean, in a matter of few years, may sink the 29-year-old island nation-state of Tuvalu, as the highest elevation on Tuvalu’s islands measures a mere 5 meters. In 2002, the Tuvaluan government appealed to Wellington for allowing the 11,000-strong Tuvaluan nation to resettle in New Zealand, which, provided the request was granted, would lead to their merger with New Zealanders. Similarly, ideologues and some social scientists persist in the vain hope that the extant written languages will exist interminably. But the fate of a language depends on its speakers and how they fare in the highly malleable world of human groups and states. When a distinctive language community disperses and its members enter new linguistic communities, the old language disappears. After World War II, this happened to Slovincian, a language akin to Kashubian, and to the Prussian variety of Low German. The story may soon repeat itself in the case of Tuvaluan. On the other hand, even written and standardized languages change continuously. That is why it is an ordeal for a modern Anglophone student to read the works of Shakespeare which are purportedly written in something incongruously dubbed as ‘modern English.’ To make head or tail of Old English, the student must learn it as if it were a foreign language. Interactions of English, Spanish, or French with the colonial and post-colonial language environs have resulted in the rise of completely new languages labeled as ‘creoles,’ for instance, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea or Creole in Haïti.

Introduction

29

The future of nations and languages is obscure. For the time being, the place where we live is still the world of nations, nation-states, and national languages. Understandably, then, the creation of nations and standard languages is overwhelmingly a political phenomenon. The members of the earlier created nations and the speakers of the earlier established standard languages have a major role to play on the acceptance or not of new nations and arising languages. Unpredictable exigencies and vagaries of politics and history may bring into being nations and languages about which nobody has dreamed before, including the very members of these nations and the speakers of these languages. On the other hand, circumstances may time and again deny recognition to otherwise well-established nations and standard languages.

The normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state One of the most interesting questions pertaining to Central Europe and its past is how and why the region’s national movements, and later, the nation-states that these movements would construct, adopted the ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism as their ideological basis. This kind of nationalism legitimizes statehood with the notoriously difficult to achieve tight overlapping of language, nation, and state. This normative isomorphism of these three elements assumes that all the members of a nation ought to speak the standardized version of their national language. Preferably, they should be exclusively monolingual (meaning they must not have the command, however scant, of any other languages), and the diversity in the form of dialects construed as belonging to the national language ought to be done away with.16 In turn, the nation-state created for such an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state should be inhabited exclusively by the members of this nation, who speak only the standardized national language. Ideally, no members of the ethnolinguistic nation ought to reside outside ‘their’ nation-state. If they do, such an occurrence obliges the nation-state to expand its territory in order to embrace these stray members of the nation within the state’s frontiers. Alternatively (but not preferably), the nation-state may encourage the nation’s members living ‘abroad’ to ‘re-settle’ (‘repatriate’) in ‘their’ nation-state. On the other hand, the nation-state is to expunge any threat to its ethnolinguistic homogeneity. Dialects of the national language are ridiculed and banned from public life as the sign of backwardness and local particularisms, which hinder the spread of the homogenous national consciousness in the population. And, even more significantly, speakers of languages other than the national one must either acquire the latter and forget the former (thus assimilate) or leave this nation-state, which is ‘not theirs.’17 At the level of international relations, the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state produces the unprecedented phenomenon of a political frontier, which doubles as the ethnic boundary of the nation, and the linguistic

30 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

one of the national language. This leads to another crucial precondition of this model, namely the nation-state cannot share its national language with other nation-states or stateless nations. If it does, this means it is not a nation-state unless it merges with or absorbs such a polity or polities. (Obviously, the notoriously difficult question is which polity should be the ‘absorber’ and which the ‘absorbed.’) In the case of a stateless nation sharing its national language with the nation-state, this polity has the choice of several courses of action. First, it can annex the territory inhabited by this stateless nation. However, this previously stateless nation has to be coaxed to renounce any of its differences that may hinder its ethnolinguistically seamless merger with the polity’s population. Second, the stateless nation may be allowed to follow its own national path if it decides that its language is different from that of the nation-state and the nation-state agrees to such a decision. Third, the nation-state may encourage a third nation-state on whose territory this stateless nation resides to assimilate this ‘troublesome’ population. This model of ethnolinguistic nationalism was never fully expounded in a treatise by some theoretician of this ideology. It emerged by trial and error, though elements of ethnolinguistic nationalism may be traced back to writings by, for instance, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769– 1860), or Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) (Abizadeh 2005; Berlin 2000; Trabant 2006: 195–201, 217–229). Actually, there were never any nationalist thinkers who wrote on the ideology of nationalism in general. This fact distinguishes nationalism from other ideologies, whose supporters explicitly formulated principles of their pet ideologies. For instance, one readily associates liberalism with Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), John Dewey (1859–1952), or Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), socialism with Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Robert Owen (1771–1858), or Karl Marx (1818–1883), fascism with Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), or Francisco Franco (1892–1975), communism with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Iosif Stalin (1878–1953), or Mao Zedong (1893–1976), anarchism with Johann Most (1846–1906), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), or Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), social democracy with Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), or Otto Bauer (1881–1938), conservatism with Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), or Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), Christian democracy with Pope Leo XIII (1878–1913), Pope Pius XI (1922–1939), or John Paul II (1978– 2005), and libertarianism with Adam Smith (1723–1790), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), or Milton Friedman (1912–2006). Today, nation-state and nation are the universally accepted models of territorial division of the habitable landmass and the Humankind (Kohn 1962). No state defining itself in terms other than those of nation-state is considered legitimate, and only these human groups who define themselves as nations

Introduction

31

are eligible for their own statehood. These currently normative concepts unfolded in an unplanned manner in the course of many local developments (such as the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, American Revolution in 1776, French Revolution in 1789, Latin American revolutions of national independence between 1813 and 1825, or Bolshevik Revolution in 1917), which proposed these two concepts as the legitimate alternative to pre-modern (that is, prenational) models of political and social organization. The highly malleable message of nationalism was succinctly summarized in the French Revolution’s slogan ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité,’ which is notoriously ambiguous when it comes to the application of the principles. Whatever nation and nation-state meant had to be time and again invented and re-invented by states that transformed their populations into nations and by national movements that created their nations and strove to provide them with appropriate nation-states. Hence, the meaning and actual application of both concepts changed each time when it came to their application in a specific moment, in a specific place, and in relation to a specific group of people. Despite this inherent localism and particularism of nationalism, nowadays, this is the sole global ideology of statehood legitimization. A legitimate polity must be a nation-state. Non-national polities must either transform themselves into nation-states or perish. Not surprisingly then, in the absence of any nationalist thinkers on nationalism in general, one can enumerate an endless procession of ‘fathers of nation’ (hardly any mothers of nation are mentioned, which is the reflection of the overwhelming paternalization of politics, which continues to this day18 ), who led specific national movements and wrote copiously on corresponding national projects. It suffices to mention Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) of Turkey, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) and Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) of Germany, Simon Bolivar (1783–1830) associated with numerous Spanish-speaking nationstates of Latin America, Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) of Poland, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) of the United States, Jomo Kenyatta (1893–1978) of Kenya, Giuseppe Mazzini of Italy, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970) of Egypt, Reza Pahlavi (1877–1944) and Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–1989) of Iran, František Palacký (1798–1876) of the Czech Republic, Jan Smuts (1870–1950) and Nelson Mandela (1918–) of South Africa, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) of Ukraine, or Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) and Mao Zedong of China. The only time when nationalists came to creating a movement that would transcend state borders and local ethnicities, was in 1834, when Mazzini founded the international organization of nationalists, Giovine Europa (Young Europe). This feat was not repeated later, unless one takes into consideration the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization.19 However, membership in both organizations has been limited to internationally recognized nation-states, while Mazzini’s Giovine Europa grouped representatives of stateless nation-states in search of their own nation-states. Although there has been no place in the League of

32 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Nations and United Nations for stateless nations, the global character of both organizations strongly contributed to the world-wide spread of nation-state as the sole model of legitimate statehood. If a nation-state is a state for one nation only, the question arises what a nation is. There is no single definition of nation, to which all parties concerned would subscribe. But looking beyond the essentialism of the ‘what-question,’ it may be more worthwhile to inquire what political function the concept of nation fulfills. It confers any human group that chooses to describe itself as a nation (provided the group’s claim is accepted by recognized nation-states) with the right to seek its own statehood, enshrined in international law as the principle of ‘national self-determination.’ Borrowing biological nomenclature, one could say that nation is the highest taxon (classificatory unit) of human groups. In today’s politics and political vocabulary, there is no concept that would grant a human group a more privileged status than that of nation. Beyond that extant nations seem to have nothing else in common. For instance, the demographic size of state-endowed nations may vary from well over 1 billion members (China, India) to 11,000 (Nauru, Tuvalu), and that of stateless nations from 15 million (the Kurds), and 6 million (the Catalonians) to several tens (Native American nations in Northern America and Russia’s native Siberian nations). On the other hand, in the case of staggeringly multicultural, multilingual, or multireligious nations (the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Papua New Guinea, or the United States) hardly anything else but common citizenship of their nation-state unites populations concerned. In other cases, sharing the same religion, language, customs, or the myth of common origin is the prerequisite to membership in a nation.20 In a nutshell, ‘nation’ is an ascriptive label arbitrarily applied to selected human groups. This selection is conducted by fully recognized actors of international relations (that is, nation-states), and proceeds in line with these actors’ interests. Hence I call this process arbitrary, because it is entirely dependent on the discretion of the decision-makers and not connected to some objective, earlier agreed upon criteria. From the point of view of the human groups wishing to ‘apply’ for the status of nation, the process is an unpredictable lottery. Interestingly, the character of the concept of ‘a language’ is very similar to that of ‘nation.’ There is no linguistic definition of ‘a language’ that could be satisfactorily applied to all the entities recognized as languages. In 1926, the United States linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) proposed that mutually intelligible forms of language should be defined as dialects and those mutually unintelligible as languages. But the concept of intelligibility is extremely subjective. For instance, Portuguese usually have no problems understanding Spanish, but Spaniards do not understand Portuguese unless they acquire it as a second language. Moreover, where to put the border between intelligibility and unintelligibility? If one understands 60 percent of what an interlocutor says, is that

Introduction

33

an indicator of intelligibility or unintelligibility? And what if one understands 40 percent of what is said?21 Furthermore, social and political reality has falsified Bloomfield’s definition time and again. For all practical reasons, Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, Bulgarian and Macedonian extremely close, and Romanian and Moldovan identical, but politics (that is, the dynamics of nation- and nation-state-building) made them into separate languages. On the other hand, the dialects of Chinese are as diverse and mutually unintelligible in speech as French and Italian. Hong Kong’s Chinese students speak the Yue (Cantonese) dialect, but have to learn the Mandarin (Beijing) dialect as a foreign language if they wish to pursue their studies or career elsewhere in China. What unites the Chinese dialects is the writing system. Because all the dialects share the same grammatical structure and system of word formation, usually a typical text noted in the Chinese script can be read and understood by the speakers of each dialect. Obviously, dialectal oral realizations of the same text remain mutually unintelligible. Similarly, some dialects of German are mutually unintelligible as well. For example, the speakers of the Low German dialect (Plattdeutsch) do not understand those speaking in the Alemannic dialect (Alemännisch). On the other hand, Low German-speakers have no problems communicating with Dutch-speakers, but this fact does not make Low German into a Dutch dialect or Dutch into a dialect of the German language. There are no attempts to forge some separate Dutch-Low German either. What separates Low German from Dutch is the political border that keeps the German and Dutch nation-states separate. Because the Latin script is shared by the written languages employed in Western and Central Europe, it could not be used for unifying the German dialects, as the Chinese script does in the case of the Chinese dialects. The German dialects are construed as belonging to the German language on the ground that most of the territories inhabited by the German-speakers used to be contained within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire until its dissolution in 1806. Furthermore, unlike in China, practically all German-speakers acquire standard German at school for the purpose of official and interdialectal communication. Prior to the rise of written vernaculars, Europeans wrote and read in Latin, Byzantine Greek, Slavonic, Hebrew, and Arabic, but more often than not spoke in local dialects much removed from these languages. Standard languages as employed in today’s Europe usually stem from the dialect(s) connected to a power center(s) (capital, royal court). Obviously, from the temporal perspective, these languages are secondary to dialects (as any written language to its oral realization, which initially constituted the basis for the rise of the former, made independent from its speakers, and reified as an entity by the technology of writing), but it is popularly, though entirely anachronistically, believed that dialects are ‘children’ of a ‘mother’ language. From the viewpoint of areal linguistics, dialects form dialect continua within which dialects change gradually from village to village,

34 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

from town to town, from region to region.22 Dialects in the neighboring parishes are mutually intelligible, but the farther one ventures from one’s village the more difficult it becomes to understand speakers of dialects used in faraway localities. Zones of sharp linguistic discontinuity exist only between such dialect continua, for instance, in Central Europe between the North Slavic, West Germanic, and Magyar dialect continua; in Western Europe between the West Germanic and Romance continua; and in the Balkans between the Romance, South Slavic, Greek, and Turkic continua. Hence the question arises, for instance, how it was decided where Polish dialects stop and Czech ones begin, and where Czech dialects terminate and Slovak ones commence, if all of them are part of the seamless North Slavic dialect continuum? Obviously, it was a political decision usually imposed by the process of state formation. The North Slavic dialects contained within the boundaries of Poland were construed as ‘Polish,’ and by default as ‘belonging’ to the standard Polish language. The same process unfolded in what today is the Czech Republic and Slovakia. If Polish linguists claimed that the area of the Polish dialects dipped into the Czech lands or Slovakia, and if their Czech and Slovak counterparts claimed the same for their languages in regard of the Polish territory, the usual reason of these claims were political aspirations, not the linguistic reality, characterized by the gradual change within the North Slavic dialect continuum.23 Because languages are much more politicized in Central and Eastern Europe than anywhere else, this possessive political thinking about standard languages, construed as national, and ‘their’ dialectal areas is of profound influence on historical linguistics too. The 19th- and 20th-century political decisions on which dialects belong to which national languages is anachronistically projected into the distant past when even no states and nations, as we know them, existed. For instance, the concept of the Slovak language as distinct from Czech emerged between the end of the 18th century and the mid-19th century, when standard Slovak was indeed codified. But modern Slovak historians of their national language claim all the manuscripts and publications produced in any Slavic dialect on what today is the territory of Slovakia, as ‘written in Slovak,’ though authors of the documents called the language(s) in which they were writing as ‘Slavic,’ ‘Bohemian,’ ‘Bohemian-Slavic,’ ‘our language,’ or ‘simple language,’ but not ‘Slovak’ (cf. Preston 1993; Rizner 1929–1934). In Central and Eastern Europe, this anachronistic and nationally motivated approach to historical linguistics led to contentious clashes among scholars in the region. The most telling instance is the struggle over the ‘correct national ownership’ of Old Church Slavonic. Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Serbian historical linguists claim it for their own national languages naming it ‘Old Bulgarian,’ ‘Old Croatian,’ ‘Old Macedonian,’ and ‘Old Serbian.’ From time to time Slovak and Slovenian linguists also joined the fray, identifying Old

Introduction

35

Church Slavonic as ‘Old Slovak’ and ‘Old Slovenian.’ The political significance of language for Central and Eastern European nationalisms did not allow these linguists to agree that Old Church Slavonic, originally codified on the basis of the Slavic dialect of Thessalonicae (today, Thessaloníki in Greece), with time, spawned and/or influenced the rise of Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovak, and Slovenian, as separate languages (Stankiewicz and Worth 1966: 117–144). The situation is much different in Western Europe, where linguists from Catalonia, France, Galicia, Italy, Portugal, or Spain never claimed that Latin, from which their national languages originated, was ‘really’ ‘Old Catalonian,’ ‘Old French,’ ‘Old Galician,’ ‘Old Italian,’ ‘Old Portuguese,’ or ‘Old Spanish.’ They even allowed from the transitory period of ‘vulgar Latin’ between the gradual disappearance of standard Latin as a written and spoken language in the last centuries of the First Millennium CE, and the emergence of Catalonian, French, Galician, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish as new written languages at the beginning of the Second Millennium. Romanian linguists also followed this Western tradition of historical linguistics because their Romance vernacular is inherently unintelligible to the vernaculars of the neighboring nations (that is, Magyar, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Serbian). Hence, there was no need to emphasize the separateness and antiquity of Romanian by claiming Latin as ‘Old Romanian.’ The prestige derived from the fact of having originated from Latin was enough to secure high international status for the Romanian language (Schlösser 2005: 38–44). Like ‘nation,’ the concept of ‘a language’ is an ascriptive label arbitrarily designated by political forces to this or that dialect (vernacular) endowed, or to be endowed, with its specific written form. As such, ‘a language’ properly belongs to the set of issues researched by political scientists. Linguistics is the study of language (in general) and dialects. Due to their intimate link, the linguistic and the political mutually influence each other. It is sociolinguists who probe into the under-researched interface between those two24 (Bloomfield 1926: 162; Crystal 1987: 25; Kamusella 2004). Having presented the meaning and mechanics of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state in its role of the organizational and ideological basis of Central and Eastern European nationalisms, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical ramifications of the actual implementation of this principle. From everyday practice, we know that without succumbing to totalitarian methods, it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to make people monolingual and sift away those speaking different languages into separate homogenous entities imagined as nations. An even greater degree of difficulty is posed by the second step required to be taken after this initial ‘unmixing of nations.’ A new ethnolinguistic nation must be fitted into its own nation-state. But the nation-state to be true to its name, it has to be ‘cleansed’ of ‘foreigners,’ that is, inhabitants

36 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

who lived on the territory for generations, but happened to speak a language different than that of the nation in possession of the polity. Nowadays, in comparison to the majority of extant polities worldwide, most of the nation-states of Central Europe are unnaturally homogenous in their ethnolinguistic composition. Non-Polish-speakers constitute less than 1 percent Poland’s population, non-Magyar-speakers amount to 2 percent of Hungary’s inhabitants, non-Czech-speakers are less than 3 percent in the Czech Republic’s populace, non-Romanian-speakers constitute less than 11 percent of Romania’s inhabitants, and non-Slovak-speakers amount to less than 15 percent of Slovakia’s populace. But the vast majority of the minority non-national language-speakers could not help acquiring this language at school within the nation-state of their residence. In most cases, it will ensure their assimilation in the near future (Eberhardt 1996: 128, 135, 138, 244, 250). This unusual homogeneity was achieved at a stupendous human cost. The borders of new nation-states founded on the rubble of the destroyed multiethnic polities after 1918 were drawn and re-drawn after both World Wars. These ethnonationally motivated and legitimized changes made tens of millions into foreigners without their need of moving to a different country and tossed tens of millions across the changing borders in forced population exchanges, internationally agreed expulsions, unilateral schemes of forced emigration, deportations, internal dispersals, and due to the denial of citizenship, among others. The interwar descent of the region from democracy into authoritarianism, the wartime Holocaust of Jews and Roma perpetrated by the Third Reich, and the post-war imposition of Soviet totalitarianism facilitated this process of ethnolinguistic homogenization by loosening and nullifying established social bonds and absolving national leaderships from observing the conventional moral norms. Finally and ominously, one could be true to one’s nationalism, which made one’s own nation into the highest good to be fortified and cherished at whatever cost and suffering it could mean to other nations and national minorities (Magocsi 2002: 191; Ther and Siljak 2001). The thrust of the aforementioned factors was less felt in the Eastern European territories contained within the borders of the enlarged, post-1945 Soviet Union. The policy of enforcing spatial and social mobility within this state, and the policy of Russification (disguised as ‘Sovietization’), intended to transform the polity’s population into a classless communist nation/people (narod), mitigated the drive to pursue ethnolinguistic homogenization of the national republics. In comparison with the interwar period, the degree of homogeneity increased only in Soviet Ukraine (17 percent of non-Ukrainians) and Soviet Moldova (onethird of non-Moldovan-speakers). In Soviet Byelorussia (Belarus), the share of non-Belarusians in the population slightly increased to 22 percent.25 On the other hand, the rise in ethnolinguistic heterogeneity was dramatic in the Baltic republics annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940–1945. Non-Latvian-speakers

Introduction

37

amounted to 48 percent of the population in Soviet Latvia, non-Estonianspeakers almost to 40 percent in Soviet Estonia, and non-Lithuanian-speakers to 20 percent in Soviet Lithuania (Eberhardt 1996: 54, 56–57; Magocsi 2002: 136, 139, 152). In the Balkans, the situation in Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece recalled that of Central Europe, while federated communist Yugoslavia, like the Soviet Union, preserved more of a traditional ethnolinguistic heterogeneity in its national republics. In Greece, 7 percent of inhabitants were non-Greek-speakers in the interwar period and this low percentage was maintained after 1945. In post-war Albania, the share of non-Albanian-speakers sank to 3 percent, and in Bulgaria of non-Bulgarian-speakers to 12 percent. In post-war Yugoslavia, the interwar statistical category of Serbocroats was shelved, and as a result no national group formed an ethnolinguistic majority any more. But the Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs speaking their common Serbo-Croatian language made up 72.6 percent of the population. A bout of ethnic cleansing similar in its intensity to that suffered in Central Europe between 1939 and 1950, occurred in the course of post-Yugoslav wars (1991–1999), which, so far, produced five nation-states (Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) and trinational Bosnia. Another casualty of these wars was Serbo-Croatian split into three new languages, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.26 Non-Slovenian-speakers amount to 12 percent of Slovenia’s population, non-Croatian-speakers to 22 (or even 10) percent of Croatia’s inhabitants, and non-Macedonian-speakers to one-third of Macedonia’s populace. In Serbia-Montenegro, prior to the 2006 dissolution of this confederation, Serbian-speaking Serbs and Montenegrins constituted 67.6 percent of the population. In Serbia proper this percentage was 89.2, and in Montenegro 71.1. In autonomous Vojvodina, Serbian-speakers amount to 59 percent of the inhabitants, while almost exclusively Albanianspeakers reside in the UN protectorate of Kosovo (independent since 2008). In Bosnia, Bosnian-speakers (43.6 percent), Serbian-speakers (31.3 percent), and Croatian-speakers (17.3 percent) account for the majority of the population27 (Eberhardt 1996: 313; Magocsi 2002: 156, 158, 160, 162, 165–166, 169, 173).

Languages and politics in an historical perspective In the pre-modern world, languages tended to function as ‘ethnolects,’ that is, distinctive badges of human groups. The effect of group forming is isolation, meaning that members of a given group interact more intensively and for longer periods of time with one another than with members of other groups. In turn, this isolation and in-group interaction produce language difference. In mutual feedback, this isolation and language difference reinforce each other and contribute to the rise and maintenance of the ethnic boundary, which, despite existing entirely in the heads of the group’s members, effectively encloses their

38 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

group and separates it from the outside world, that is, other human groups. Looking at a human group from this perspective makes it into an ethnic group (Barth 1969). Should we translate this anthropological reflection into sociological terms, the concept of basic-level ethnic group is replaced with that of community (Gemeinschaft), whose most pervasive trait is face-to-face communication, conducted via direct verbal exchange in the community’s dialect or language. The usual low spatial and social mobility of the members of a community, in their eyes, confers their community with a quality of timelessness. The growing number of links established among similar communities was mediated by specialists, that is, merchants, warriors (nobility), and men of religion (clergy), who together constituted a demographically narrow elite. This elite endowed with higher spatial and social mobility amounted to the organizational framework of a polity. The elite created and maintained the polity by controlling and ‘gluing’ together a plethora of largely isolated communities contained within the polity’s political borders (Gellner 1983: 5). What decisively distinguished the elite (that is, natio of medieval and early modern Western and Central Europe) from the immobile members of communities (populus, that is, non-estates population composed of peasantry and commoners) was literacy, which allowed for the rise and spread of non-face-toface communication. Literacy spawned bookkeeping, archives, and diplomatic correspondence. This unique technology permitted the rise of potentially worldwide polities and development of formalized communication among these polities, communication construed as ‘international relations,’ a subject studied by political scientists. Before the rise of writing people talked to communicate, but literacy required writing and speaking something construed as ‘a language’ to ensure effective communication. Face-to-face communication is crucially facilitated by the shared immediacy of familiar social context and body language, always available within the bounds of a community. Since this prop is not accessible in non-faceto-face communication, the novel situation necessitates standardization of the vocabulary, usages, and grammar of a language employed for communication mediated by writing. However diverse ethnic origins of a given elite may be, it typically settles for the official use of one to three written languages within its polity.28 Obviously, this language (or languages) evolved from the vernacular (oral language) of some community, or a group of closely related communities. This community or communities may but do not have to constitute part of the elite, which employs an official written language that began as a vernacular of the community(ies). Latin is an obvious example of such an official language, which did not emerge in Central Europe (Armstrong 1982: 282; Billig 1995: 31). In the pre-modern world, borders and territories of polities frequently intersected as exemplified in Europe by various groupings and different kinds of

Introduction

39

territorially disparate (even discontinuous) states and statelets enclosed inside the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, Habsburg and Prussian monarchs had equally extensive possessions within as outside the empire. The divine legitimization of rule endowed religions with special political significance, and by extension, also the written languages connected with them, namely, Latin in Western Christianity (Byzantine, archaizing Attic), Greek and (Old Church) Slavonic29 in Eastern Christianity, and (Classic) Arabic in Islam.30 The written form being of more importance than the oral, with all the four languages, specific writing systems got indissolubly attached, namely the Latin alphabet, the Greek script, Cyrillic, and the Arabic alphabet, respectively. The rise of the modern state in Europe was steeped in the 16th-century theory of sovereignty, developed in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), Martin Luther (1483–1546), and Jean Bodin (1529–1596). After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), this theory was put into widespread practice across Europe, in line with the principle, cuius regio, eius religio31 (coined in 1555 for the needs of the Peace of Augsburg). The theory of sovereignty maligned the phenomenon of overlapping state borders and jurisdictions and recommended centralization and homogenization of jurisdiction in a polity. Economic development encouraged urbanization and intensification of economic contacts at all societal levels and spurred population growth as well. This translated into the growth of the elite, which increasingly doubled as the state’s budding bureaucracy. Literacy began to spread beyond the elite’s confines among non-noble and non-estate traders, artisans, moneylenders, landowners, intelligentsia (civil servants, teachers, and journalists), and impoverished nobility, who eventually constituted the middle class (bourgeoisie) in the modern states of Western Europe. This change took longer in Central and Eastern Europe, where serfdom and the largely non-monetary and agricultural mode of economy hindered modernization until the late 19th century and even the first half of the 20th century. Instead of a full-fledged middle class, only an intelligentsia32 came there into being as a mediator between the populus and the estates (natio). Later, this intelligentsia began to propagate the national message. It was difficult (though not impossible33 ) to achieve this wide spread of literacy in languages removed from the everyday vernacular(s) spoken by population at large; languages, which were not transmitted from generation to generation in a ‘natural’ manner, that is, within families and (speech) communities. Latin and Slavonic were exactly this type of languages, acquired in classroom usually by the male members of the elite. Hussitism and the Reformation challenged the established religious-cum-political order along with the elevated status of Latin. Jan Hus (1370–1415) and Luther encouraged the use of vernaculars for improved comprehension of the Holy Scripture among the faithful. This entailed the rise of vernaculars as new written and official languages, usually stemming from the dialects of power centers (royal courts and capitals). The technology of printing

40 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

sealed this change though the bulk of book production in Western and especially Central Europe remained in Latin until the turn of the 18th century. The connection of Latin with modernization and progress was so strong that in the very century, the Russian Academy of Sciences (founded in 1724) published its proceedings in this language. Paradoxically, when Latin was replaced by vernaculars in Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, its use spread to Eastern Europe at the expense of the official status of (Church) Slavonic, increasingly perceived as eponymous with backwardness. At the turn of the 18th century, the use of Slavonic was limited to the ecclesiastical sphere in Poland-Lithuania and the same occurred in the Russian Empire during that century (Burke 2004: 52–60; Schiewe 1998: 62). English replaced Latin and Norman French as the official language in England between 1420 and 1460. (In 1532, the official use of Welsh was proscribed in this kingdom. But French was not banned from British law courts until 1788.) After 1492, Spanish (Castilian) predominated in Spain’s administrative use, which was also true of Portuguese in Portugal. (Between 1555 and 1713, Spanish was the official language in the Low Countries, then followed by French and Dutch.) In 1539, French supplanted Latin as the official language in France. In the same year, the gradual replacement of Latin by Polish commenced in the Polish half of Poland-Lithuania. In the polity’s Lithuanian section, Ruthenian (predecessor of modern Belarusian and Ukrainian) was employed until 1696, when Polish replaced it. Danish supplanted Latin after 1536, but the use of French and German in their official capacity continued in Denmark (and Norway, which was included in this kingdom) until the turn of the 18th century. Latin was also revived in Denmark as an instrument of curbing the Germanophone influence radiating across the border from the Holy Roman Empire. The rise of official Swedish followed a course similar to that of Danish, with the difference that Latin remained in official use, especially in Sweden’s Finland. German tended to replace Latin in the northern half of the Holy Roman Empire where Protestantism supplanted Catholicism. German was the sole official language of the Kingdom of Prussia, founded in 1701. In 1784, German replaced Latin as the official language in the Habsburg lands; but 6 years later, this measure was revoked in the Kingdom of Hungary, where Magyar replaced Latin gradually between the 1820s and 1844.34 (Obviously, since 1784, German had remained the official language of the southern [Catholic] section of the Holy Roman Empire.) Italian (Tuscanian, Florentine), though of high prestige since the 14th century, became an established official language when modern Italy was founded in 1861. Contrary to the drive for establishing a single official language in a polity, in 1798, the official status of Italian, German, and French was instituted in Switzerland and reconfirmed in 1848. In 1938, Romansch was added as Switzerland’s fourth official language.

Introduction

41

The monolingualism of state administration was exported by European colonial powers overseas. In 1757, Portuguese replaced all other administrative languages in Brazil. (This decision was reinforced by the moving of the Portuguese capital from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, where it remained until 1821.) In 1770, Spanish was decreed the sole official language in Spain’s seaborne empire. Exclusively, English and French were used for administrative purposes in French and English colonies, when they were founded beginning in the 17th century.35 The continental character of the Russian Empire (established in 1721) distinguished it from the seaborne empires built by the colonial powers of Western Europe. The transition from Old Church Slavonic to Russian commenced in the early 18th century, when modernized Cyrillic (as we know it today) was developed for printing non-religious books in the empire. Russian written in this new Cyrillic emerged as a compromise hybrid of Slavonic and Moscow’s vernacular between the mid-18th century and the beginning of the following one. The liquidation of the multiplicity of administrative languages in the Russian Empire lasted between the 1860s and the beginning of the 20th century. Although the process was never completed (Swedish and Finnish remained in official use in Russia’s Finland despite the imposition of official Russian in 1900, which proved ineffective), for all practical reasons, Russian was the sole administrative language of the Russian Empire in the 1910s. In the Ottoman Empire, the need for linguistic unification was not felt until the demise of the Caliphate in 1923. The non-territorial autonomy given to accepted religious communities (millets) preserved the official use of Byzantine Greek and Slavonic in the Orthodox millet. Turkey, as the empire’s successor, had no choice but to adopt Turkish as the sole official language in order to be accepted as a ‘modern and legitimate nation-state’ by the West. This also entailed the radical supplanting of the ‘backward’ Arabic script with the ‘progressive’ Latin alphabet for writing Turkish (1928) in the emulation of the Soviet example. In the Soviet Union, Cyrillic was not entirely dropped in favor of the Latin script, but this step was seriously considered in the 1920s, construed as ‘necessary’ for spurring up modernization. It was maintained that modernization equates Latinization, that is, the introduction of the Latin alphabet.36 Hence, the traditional scripts of almost all the languages used for writing in the Soviet Union were ‘Latinized’ between 1923 and the late 1930s, except those of Armenian, Belarusian, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. Beginning in the late 1930s, Cyrillic replaced the diverse versions of the Latin alphabet employed by the Soviet Union’s numerous languages37 (Altermatt 2002: 339; Burke 2004: x–xiv; Markowski and Puzynina 1994: 56; Martin 2001: 182–207; Ostler 2005: 332–333, 374, 394, 468; Price 1998: 125– 126, 175, 257, 368, 457, 463–464; Russification 2006; Scaglione 1984: 81; Schlösser 2005: 101).

42 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Social scientists, nationalism, and languages Conventionally, the history of modern Europe is associated with the French Revolution (1789) and this caesura is often employed in the periodization of world history with the parallel addition of the American Revolution (1776). In light of this article’s focus, the main difference between these two revolutions is that, in 1794, in France the use of languages and dialects other than standard French was proscribed in administration, education, and other public contexts. The ‘founding fathers’ of the United States saw no need for such a law, and to this day, there is no single piece of federal legislation that would make English the official language in the United States.38 Hence either in New York City or in Wyoming, one does not have to apply for a permit to publish election ballots or erect public signs in Spanish, Chinese, Polish, or Somali, or any other language for that matter. Although France and the United States are posed as the par excellence examples of civic nation-states, French nationalism includes a strong ethnic strain, expressed by the extreme politicization of the French language. (The first, very limited, provision for the public use of minority and regional languages in France was legislated only in 1951.) This proves that each nationalism is an ideological mixture of the civic and the ethnic. The conventional distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism is drawn for analytical reasons. One sees the basis of civic nationalism in citizenship (jus soli) and that of ethnic nationalism in ethnically construed nationality39 (jus sanguini), which one has to clearly express in order to qualify for citizenship of such a nation-state as Germany or Poland. In a civic nation, citizenship equates nationality. Another difference between these two kinds of nationalism is that in the civic model it was the state that transformed its population into a nation, and by default, itself into a nation-state. Conversely, in the ethnic model, it is the nation (created by a national movement), which has to secure a nation-state for itself (Brubaker 1992; Edwards 1994: 154). Between the French Revolution and the main wave of decolonization in the 1960s, nationalism became the sole ideology of statehood legitimization. Nation (also known as ‘people’s will’) replaced God as the fountain of temporal power. Soviet-style communism also aspired to this role. But following the breakup of the Soviet Union (1991), all the successor states reinvented themselves as nationstates with the tentative exception of Belarus, in which case Minsk/Mensk prefers to use Sovietism (that is, Soviet communism, less communism) to legitimize its power. Nowadays, the vast majority of the world’s nation-states are civic in their ideological creed. The ethnic ones concentrate in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Asia, where mainly the Soviet ideologues were responsible for spreading the ethnic version of nationalism. They drew from the Soviet Union’s

Introduction

43

administrative division, which was based on the framework of ethnolinguistic national republics. In textbooks of modern history, the gradual globalization of the model of nation-state encapsulates the process of modernization in the eyes of a political scientist. Sociologists describe the same development as the process of ‘gluing’ face-to-face and relatively isolated communities into non-face-to-face societies (Gesellschaften) usually coterminous with polities. The lack of face-to-face communication, which previously ensured internal cohesion of communities, was replaced by the mediated communication conducted via writing and printing in the nation-state’s official (or most widely employed) language(s). Cohesion in millions-strong societies was achieved by the spread of full literacy and granting all the members with the same kind of citizenship and full suffrage. In Central Europe, the latter goal was achieved after World War I, and the former in the wake of another World War.40 These changes boosted spatial and social mobility of the former members of communities to the limits of the state frontiers and across all the social strata. The usual instruments for increasing this mobility and ensuring the polity’s internal cohesion were popular elementary education, military conscription, the press, and popularly espoused political mythologies, which produced the feeling of national commonality, popularly interpreted as patriotism. In this manner, citizens of the newly founded nation-states transposed their loyalty from their Gemeinschaften to the nation and its nation-state (Anderson 1991). In turn, the same process introduced a clamp on the elite’s mobility, who, prior to the rise of nation-states, had roamed the breadth and width of Europe and the colonial world. At first, the privilege was available to those of noble birth or ecclesiastical position with the knowledge of Latin, Greek, or Slavonic. Later, no specific citizenship was required for entering the service of the colonial empires, but some sought for expertise and the knowledge of a language necessary for a given venture. In the pre-national age, the command of French or German enabled secondary school-leavers and university graduates (that is, members of the intelligentsia) to seek career in many polities of continental Europe. All these aforementioned developments are conventionally referred to as ‘modernization.’ This is a versatile, though a little solipsistic, catch-all term. We simply assume that the world we live in is ‘modern’ and radically different from those times we bracket away as ‘pre-modern.’ One can conveniently point to the differences between the modern and pre-modern times, but the term modernization obfuscates variegated ways that led to such a defined ‘modernity,’ and also the various outcomes of these disparate processes, which we unreflectively lump together as ‘modernity.’ It seems that the lowest common denominator of modernity is the fact that nowadays the world’s entire population is neatly divided into nations and all the habitable landmasses among nation-states. We live in the age of nationalism.

44 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Because social sciences arose during the 19th century in the West, where the construction of nations and nation-states commenced, by default, their subject of research is the national. When a sociologist says ‘society,’ she usually means ‘nation,’ and by uttering the term ‘state,’ a political scientist actually refers to ‘nation-state.’ Likewise, sociolinguists research ‘language communities’ (Sprachgemeinschaften) implicitly construed as ‘ethnolinguistically homogenous nations.’ Anthropologists were partly immune to this tendency because they maintained a clear conceptual distinction between community and society and alternated between researching modern and pre-modern human groups. The rest of social scientists predominantly focused on the so-called modern world, which deprived them of this useful comparative perspective. Perhaps this explains why such groundbreaking theoretical analyses of nationalism as Nations and Nationalism (1983) and Imagined Communities (1983) were authored by anthropologists Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) and Benedict Anderson (1936–), respectively.41 Sociolinguistics developed during the 1960s and 1970s in North America and the United Kingdom as a reflection on the linguistic dimensions of ethnic and racial difference. Soon, however, important contributions to this discipline were added in West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Significantly, the most comprehensive reference on sociolinguistics available is the bilingual EnglishGerman two-volume publication, Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society/Soziolinguistik. Ein Handbuch zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Soziolinguistik (Ammon 1987–1988, 2nd edn 2004– 2005). This development seems to be the function of the unusual politicization of language in Central and Eastern Europe. Scholars from this area of the continent tend to speak of ‘ethnolinguistic nations and nation-states.’ This collocation is largely unknown among Western European and Northern American political and social scientists.

From languages to nations John Locke (1632–1704) claimed that the function of language was to communicate ideas that existed independently of it and lamented that language was a ‘mist before our eyes,’ which separated humans from knowing the ‘real world.’ Commenting on Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690, London), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780), in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Understanding, 1746, Amsterdam), maintained, unlike Locke, that the function of language was constitutive in the formation of ideas. In his work, Condillac also presented his vision of the origin of language with which Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) disagreed in his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (The

Introduction

45

Treatise on the Origin of Language, 1772, Berlin). This discussion redirected scholars’ attention from the process of conveying messages via language to language as a phenomenon in itself. A development parallel to that in everyday life when people thrown out from their cozy Gemeinschaften into non-face-toface Gesellschaften could not just speak to communicate but, while speaking, had to conform to the principles of formalized systems construed as languages. Thus, at the levels of everyday experience and scholarly research, language ceased to be a transparent category, which Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) still failed to include in his vast philosophical system of the categories of human understanding (Trabant 2006: 165, 177). Herder’s thinking on language was not only informed by the changing social role of written language, and this new quality in scholarly research on language, but also by the widespread feeling that the written use of his own vernacular, German, still needed to be justified in the face of the continued domination of prestigious French and Latin in scholarship and politics (that is, among aristocracy and in royal courts). To this end, the genre of ‘defences’ of a vernacular-turned-written language emerged. Perhaps the initial model for all such defences was La Défense et Illustration de la langue francoyse (The Defence and Description of the French Language, 1549, Paris) written by the poet Joachim du Bellay (1522–1560). Obviously, the theoretical basis for such defences stemmed from Dante Alghieri’s (1265–1321) Latin essay, De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of Vernacular), which encouraged the rise of literature in Italian. In his Prose della volgar lingua (Vernacular Prose, 1525, Venice), Pietro Bembo (1479– 1547) proposed the puristic and archaizing model for shaping ‘proper Italian’ as steeped in the Florentine language of Dante, Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), and Giovani Boccaccio (1313–1375). Bembo also introduced to the discourse the concept of l’amore della lingua (‘love of one’s language’) in emulation of that of l’amore della patria (‘love of one’s fatherland’) (Trabant 2006: 87–88). This tradition influenced the poet Martin Opitz (1597–1639), who in his Latin publication, Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae (Aristarchus, or on the Contempt for the German Language, 1617, Beuthen and der Oder [Bytom Odrzanski]) ´ defended the German language and presented an inspiring vision how it should be shaped to become an equal of French and Latin. That such defences of German, like that of Opitz, were needed was clear because even the Prussian monarch Friedrich the Great (ruled 1740–1786) preferred to use French and spoke about German with disdain. French was also the language of science, and in 1784, the Berlin Academy of Sciences rewarded the French writer, Antoine de Rivarol (1753–1801), for his Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (A Treatise on the Universality of the French Language, Berlin). The elite of the German-speaking polities began to favor the German language over French only in the course of the Napoleonic Wars in the 1810s (Schlösser 2005: 78–79).

46 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Herder presented his views on language, history, and human groups in his massive and all-embracing Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791, Riga and Leipzig, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1800, London). Significantly, he identified languages as markers of ethnic groups and ethnically defined nations (Völker), which contributed to the emergence of the notoriously vague term Volksgeist (spirit, genius, soul, or character of the nation, people, or ethnic group). Herder actually never used this word and, in his works, spoke of Geist des Volkes, Geist der Nation, Nationalgeist, Genius des Volkes, and Nationalcharakter, which means the same. In his terminological choices, he fell back on older similar coinages: Locke’s ‘national character,’ Montesquieu’s (1689–1755) l’esprit général d’une nation (general spirit of nation), Voltaire’s (1694–1778) esprit des hommes (spirit of people), Friedrich Carl von Moser’s (1723–1798) national-Geist (national genius, 1765), or Jakob Wegelin’s (1721–1791) esprit des nations (spirit of the nation, 1772) and esprit de la sociéte (spirit of the society, 1772). This line of discourse spawned the terms ‘national character’ and ‘national consciousness,’ widely used to this day, and that of ruskaia dusha (Russian soul or spirit), frequently used to ‘explain’ the Russian exceptionalism. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who coined the term Volksgeist in 1801 for referring to customs, laws, and traditions as forming the inner life or spirit of a nation, people, or ethnic group. On this basis, Fichte spoke of Geist der Zeiten und der Welten (spirit of the times and the world) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892) claimed that different nations possess ‘different spirits.’ This conviction in the existence of an entity named ‘spirit of nation’ moved Heyman Steinthal (1823–1899) and Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) to establish a separate science devoted to the study of this entity, namely, ‘psychology of nation’ (Völkerpsychologie). To this end, they founded their influential periodical, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Psychology of Nation and Linguistics, 1860–1928) (Eisler 1904; Leuschner 2004: 396–397; Rotenstreich 1974). Herder’s equation of language with nation (ethnic group) went back to Bembo and Vico, and also stemmed from the Bible-inspired search for the pre-Babel lingua adamica, or the original language given by God to the Humankind. This impulse led to the compilation of extensive dictionaries of purportedly ‘all human languages,’ for instance, Peter Simon Pallas’s (1741–1811) two-volume Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa (The Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of the World, 1786–1789, St Petersburg). In such dictionaries, languages were implicitly or explicitly defined as idioms of different peoples. In the 19th century, this approach spawned historical linguistics, which searched for parallel genealogies of languages and peoples. The greatest achievement of this movement was the thesis and proof of the common origin of the IndoEuropean42 languages and peoples. These developments alongside Herderian thought shaped the Prussian scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1767–1853)

Introduction

47

belief that ‘die wahre Heimat ist eigentlich die Sprache’ (Actually, one’s real fatherland is one’s language) (quoted in Bobrownicka 2003: 126). This tradition of thinking on language resulted in the hypothesis that language determines thought.43 From this complex of ideas in 1812 (that is, at the height of anti-Napoleonic struggle remembered in German historiography as the Befreiungskriege, or the War of Independence), the Prussian poet and German nationalist, Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), coined the popular slogan that Germany is there where the German language sounds in his famous poem ‘Was ist das deutsche Vaterland?’ (What is the German Fatherland?). Perhaps Arndt drew from Fichte’s 1808 Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin, Addresses to the German Nation, 1922, Chicago and London), where the latter identified the ‘true frontiers’ of a nation-state with the territory inhabited by the speakers of the national language (Abizadeh 2005: 340; Trabant 2006: 210–239). In the absence of any polity identifiable as ‘Germany,’ this association of the postulated German nation with the German language became a widespread ideological basis for German nationalism at the beginning of the 19th century. In the first half of the century, this ethnolinguistic strain of nationalism became popular in Central Europe and the Apennine Peninsula, where, unlike in Western Europe or the Americas, the extant polities failed to transform their respective populations into nations and themselves into nation-states. In emulation of the German example and following the Herderian reflection on language, various incipient national movements in this region began to collect folk songs and codify respective vernaculars as ‘national languages.’ In their own eyes and in the eyes of other national movements, these activities lent legitimacy to their national projects. What is more, Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit is a bag full of anecdotes and prophecies, which came handy when his equation of nation and language became popularly accepted in the mid-19th century. For example, he claimed a brilliant future for the ‘downtrodden Slavic peoples,’ thought that Magyar was bound to disappear under the pressure of German and the Slavic languages, and characterized the Germanic peoples as ‘bellicose’ and their Slavic counterparts as ‘peace-loving.’ This effectively spawned various national myths, upon which various national movements acted well into the interwar period (Sundhaußen 1973). The road of ethnolinguistic nationalism to political reality took over half a century. This ideology emerged in the 1810s, mainly in Prussia in the course of the Napoleonic Wars. The political influence of this kind of nationalism became apparent when in 1848–1849 various ethnolinguistic national movements fought or appealed for autonomy or independence in the Austrian Empire. In 1848, the first All-Slavic Congress convened in Prague. It paved the way for Slavic national movements and the growing Pan-Slav and Russian influence among many of them. (Ironically, delegates participating in the Congress communicated in German, the usual lingua franca of Slavic intellectuals and

48 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

politicians before it was partially replaced by Russian at the turn of the 20th century.) The first widely accepted fruition of ethnolinguistic nationalism came with the founding of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and the German Empire (1871) as Italian and German nation-states, respectively. Understandably, linguistic homogenization became a priority. In the 1870s minority languages and German dialects were banned from education and official use in the German Empire. Similarly, in the 1860s Tuscanian cast in the capital of Rome as ‘Italian’ became the national language in the Kingdom of Italy. The knowledge of standard German became widespread in the German Empire by the end of the 19th century, when illiteracy disappeared and each child attended elementary school. On the other hand, the economic backwardness of Italy delayed the liquidation of illiteracy and the acquisition of standard Italian by all the population until the mid-1970s. To this day, many an Italian says that the inhabitants of Naples or Sicily do not speak dialects of Italian but separate languages (Markowski and Puzynina 1994: 45–46, 53, 63–65). In the Balkans, nation-states began to be carved out from the Ottoman Empire’s periphery with the aid of the Western European powers. In 1832, Greece gained independence, while Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia in 1878, Bulgaria in 1908, and Albania did so in 1913. The linguistic element was present in the Balkan nationalisms but it was not predominant at that time. What mattered was religion. For instance, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) provided for exchange of population between Greece and Turkey. The criterion for this exchange was religion, not language. Orthodox Christians (many speaking exclusively in Turkish but writing it down in Greek characters) were expelled from Turkey to Greece, and Muslims (many speaking only Greek but writing it down in Arabic characters) from Greece to Turkey. In autonomous Montenegro and Serbia, autonomous Bosnia administered by Austria-Hungary, and on the territory of future Bulgaria, Russified Slavonic persisted as the local (millet) official language until the 1860s and 1870s, and Byzantine Greek (Katharevousa, literally ‘purifying language’) in Greece until 1976. The language element was more clearly visible in Romanian nationalism. In 1821, Romanian replaced Byzantine Greek as the official language in Walachia and Moldavia, which unified in 1859 forming Romania. Drawing from the belief that Romanians were descendants of ancient Roman settlers and in search of progress, between 1860 and 1863 the Latin alphabet replaced Cyrillic for writing Romanian. The Albanians were religiously disunited. Half of them professed Islam, one-third Orthodox Christianity, and the rest Catholicism. What set them apart from other Balkan nations was their specific language, which they decided to write in Latin characters in 1908 (previously, Albanian had also been noted down in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Greek letters) (Crampton 1997: 62; Price 1998: 6, 221, 386; Schenker 1980: 80). In Central Europe, the model and ardent promoter of linguistic homogenization was Prussia/the German Empire. Because Berlin adopted nationalism as the

Introduction

49

legitimizing ideology of its state-building aspirations, the German language, as the basis of German nationalism, became a significant instrument of politics. In the 1861 statewide census, the question about one’s language was included for the first time. In 1866, the Prussian statistician Richard Böckh (1824–1927) published his influential treatise, Die statistische Bedeutung der Volksprache als Kennzeichen der Nationalität (The Statistical Significance of the People’s Speech as the Indicator of Their Nationality), in Steinthal and Lazarus’s equally influential journal, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. In his contribution, Böckh proposed that one’s nationality is apparent in one’s language. This thesis, which he had propagated since the First International Congress of Statistics in Brussels (1853), ‘scientifically proved’ that censuses could measure the demographic size of nations by asking the question about one’s language. Under this influence (significantly, Böckh was one of the organizers of the Fifth International Congress of Statistics in Berlin in 1863), the Sixth International Congress of Statistics convened at St Petersburg in 1872, accepted language as the ‘objective’ indicator of nationality. By the turn of the 20th century, this equation of language with nation became so widely accepted in Central Europe that Ludwig Trampe pompously stated in his 1908 book that ‘[e]ach healthy nation endowed with its own state, and each healthy nation-state must wish that its national language is also the state language, and its state language the national language’44 (Trampe 1908: 268). In Austria-Hungary, the first census with the ‘language question’ included was conducted in 1880, and only 17 years later in the Russian Empire. It was a political hot potato. Soon it turned out that the question did not merely ‘measure’ nations, but rather created them. Census results provided aspiring national movements with arguments to demand autonomy and independence of specific territories where the majority of the inhabitants belonged to this or that nation. Not surprisingly, manipulation and falsification of census data by governments and these movements became rife. Censuses also facilitated the task of the national movements striving to create ethnolinguistic nations. Census takers were instructed to disregard dialects and the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism. A person had to pick one of the recognized standard written languages. On the other hand, Jews disappeared from statistic, because they did not speak a single language, and Yiddish, disparaged as ‘jargon’, was classified as German. But anti-Semitism persisted, which provoked the rise of Zionism (Jewish nationalism). After much controversy in the first half of the 20th century, revitalized Hebrew was made into the national language of the Jewish nation in Israel, in line with the ethnolinguistic paradigm of nationalism (Hobsbawm 1990: 97, 100; Jezernik 2004: 174; Leuschner 2004: 393). The pressure of ethnolinguistic nationalisms was most keenly felt in the Austrian Empire. The 1867 reform, which transformed it into Austria-Hungary, lessened the pressure for a while by replacing German with Magyar as the

50 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

official language in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. In its section of the monarchy, Vienna had also to agree to the supplanting of German with Polish in Galicia, and Budapest to the elevating of (Serbo-)Croatian to a co-official language alongside Magyar in Croatia-Slavonia. Beginning in the 1870s, Budapest set on the course of transforming the Hungarian half of the empire into an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state. Magyarization became the order of the day. Vienna pursued a more liberal course of espousing multilingualism. In 1880, Czech became a co-official language (alongside German) in Bohemia and Moravia. Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian) was allowed into education in Galicia, and Slovenian in Carniola. In the monarchy’s Hungarian half, Budapest purged languages other than Magyar from public life and education, with the tentative exception of Croatia-Slavonia. They persisted though in churches, private schools, and publications. These languages included German, Romanian, Ruthenian (that is, Rusyn), Serbian (Serbo-Croatian), and Slovak. The Serbo-Croatian language was a compromise standard based on a shared (Štokavian) dialect and accepted by a handful of Croatian and Serbian intellectuals in 1850 at a meeting held in Vienna. They hoped for the creation of a common South Slavic nation-state (that is, Yugoslavia). The difference between the two national variants of Serbo-Croatian was maintained with the instrument of script, Croatians retained the Latin alphabet for writing, and Serbs Cyrillic. Other differences separating these variants were negligible, when one chose not to emphasize or politicize them. In 1868, Serbia and Montenegro resigned from Slavonic in favor of Serbo-Croatian, but it went under the name of Serbian in the latter state until 1923. In 1877, the name of this language was changed from Croatian to Serbo-Croatian in Croatia-Slavonia, and in 1907, from Bosnian to Serbo-Croatian in Austria-Hungary’s Bosnia. In Russia after the 1905 Revolution, the use of minority languages was allowed in publications and sometimes in education. Among others, they included Estonian, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Little Russian (Ukrainian), Polish, and White Russian (Belarusian). St Petersburg also reconfirmed Finnish and Swedish as the official languages of the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Great War electrified national movements across Central and Eastern Europe, because it opened the window of opportunity for replacing multilingual empires with ethnolinguistic nation-states. Interestingly, the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation administrations replaced Russian in its capacity of the official language with German and Polish in Russia’s Vistula Land (formerly, Kingdom of Poland), and with German and Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Ruthenian (Ukrainian), White Ruthenian (Belarusian), and Yiddish in other occupied western Russian territories. All these languages, except German and Polish, were employed in this role for the first time in history – this constituted a precedence, which the national movements wanted to use in order to develop their own separate ethnolinguistic nation-states, whenever possible. (Liulevicius 2000).

Introduction

51

From linguistic nations to linguistic nation-states The eventual rubberstamping of the ethnolinguistically defined national principle into the basis of the political order in post-World War I Central and Eastern Europe came with the Allies’ espousal of the United States President Woodrow Wilson’s (1856–1924) concept of ‘national self-determination.’ Austria-Hungary was slated for splitting along ethnolinguistic lines into nationstates. Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (after 1929, Yugoslavia), Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were founded as ethnolinguistic nation-states. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire spawned the Turkish nation-state, but the rhetorical acceptance of the principle of selfdetermination by the Bolsheviks actually stalled the creation of nation-states on the territory of the former Russian Empire. Briefly independent Belarus and Ukraine were suppressed. However, shortly afterward, the revolutionary authorities bowed to the force of ethnolinguistic nationalism and based the administrative division of the Soviet Union on ethnolinguistic national republics, including Ukrainian and White Russian (Belarusian) republics, and the autonomous Moldavian (Moldovan) republic as part of Soviet Ukraine. Self-determination was denied to rump ‘German Austria,’ which together with the Germanophone areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia (later known as the Sudetenland) aspired to be united with Germany. The state was also forced to rename itself as ‘Austria.’ Otherwise, in all the aforementioned new nationstates and the Soviet Union’s republics, respective national languages were employed as official languages.45 One language per nation-state or Soviet republic. (The tactical use of nationalism in the Soviet Union meant that in the latter case the paradigm was not always observed as in the case of Belarussia, where also Russian, and between 1920 and 1938, Polish, and Yiddish functioned as co-offical languages.) Not to fall foul of the internationally accepted and encouraged normative isomorphism (overlapping) of language, nation, and nationstate, the 1920 Czechoslovak constitutional law on state language declared Czechoslovak as the official and national language of the Czechoslovak nation and its nation-state. Similarly, the 1921 Constitution declared Serbocroatoslovenian as the official and national language of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. But the kingdom’s name still enumerated three different nations. In statistics, Serbs and Croats were rolled into Serbocroats, but Slovenians featured separately. After the 1929 coup, the discrepancy disappeared. The state was renamed Yugoslavia (literally, ‘South Slavia,’ meaning the South Slavic nationstate), while its inhabitants were usually referred to as the ‘Yugoslavs,’ and Serbocroatoslovenian as the ‘Yugoslav language.’ The problem was that in reality Serbo-Croatian was not unified with Slovenian and the Serbocroatoslovenian dialect of southern Serbia (that is, Macedonian) was more similar to Bulgarian than Serbo-Croatian. The amalgamation of the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenians

52 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

into a single Yugoslav nation also failed to materialize. A similar predicament was suffered in Czechoslovakia. Czech and Slovak remained separate languages, like the respective nations of Czechs and Slovaks speaking these languages. In addition, all the new nation-states and republics were far from homogenous from the ethnolinguistic viewpoint. For instance, Moldavian-speakers constituted a mere one-third of Soviet Moldavia’s populace, Czechoslovakspeakers two-thirds of Czechoslovakia’s inhabitants, Polish-speakers two-thirds of Poland’s population, Latvian-speakers 73 percent of Latvia’s populace, Ukrainian-speakers 80 percent of Soviet Ukraine’s inhabitants, Belarusianspeakers 81 percent of Soviet Byelorussia’s population, Serbocroatoslovenianspeakers 83 percent of Yugoslavia’s populace, Lithuanian-speakers 84 percent of Lithuania’s inhabitants, Estonian-speakers 88 percent of Estonia’s population, Magyar-speakers 90 percent of rump Hungary’s populace. In the post-1918 hugely enlarged Romania, the share of Romanian-speakers in the population sank from 92 to 72 percent. In Bulgaria, Bulgarian-speakers amounted to 83 percent, Albanian-speakers to 92 percent of Albania’s inhabitants, and Greekspeakers to 93 percent of Greece’s populace (after the population exchange with Turkey) (Eberhardt 1996: 40–42, 161, 168, 215, 237, 283–284; Magocsi 2002: 173; Rothschild 1977: 36, 89, 192, 203, 284). The lack of ideologically required ethnolinguistic homogeneity in the newly founded nation-states necessitated regulation of the resultant precarious status of the non-speakers of the national language, which made them into foreigners in these new nation-states, even though they remained in villages and towns where their families had lived for centuries. Hence, the Allies imposed an intricate lattice of bilateral and multilateral minority rights protection treaties on the new nation-states.46 This new order did not extend to the Soviet Union. But the Kremlin recognized that ethnolinguistic nationalism could not be disregarded en route to communism. During the 1920s and 1930s, national minorities in the national republics obtained autonomy at the level of regions, communes, towns, and kolkhozes (villages turned into collective farms). Beginning in the late 1930s, this intricate system of minority rights protection was limited to regions within the national republics (Martin 2001). The Holocaust, population movements and exchanges caused by World War II and its aftermath, reaffirmed the application of the principle of the isomorphism of language, nation, and state in Soviet-held Central Europe at the cost of minorities and their rights. The degree of ethnolinguistic homogeneity achieved was unprecedented. But the short-lived existence of the Slovak nation-state during the war terminated not only the linguistic but also the political fiction of the Czechoslovak language, making post-war Czechoslovakia a bi-national state. Between 1940 and 1945, the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania alongside vast tracts of territory severed from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, which were incorporated into Soviet Byelorussia,

Introduction

53

Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Moldavia. After limiting the scope of ethnolinguistic and national autonomies in the late 1930s, following World War II, the Kremlin set out on the course of combating the ‘bourgeois-national deviation’ in order to make the population into a communist Russian-speaking and classless Soviet nation (people). Official encouragement for speaking the ‘communist language’ of Russian usually decreased ethnolinguistic homogeneity within the national republic, but boosted the percentage of Russian-speakers in the entire Soviet population. During World War II, Germany and Italy partitioned Slovenia, Serbia proper (less Vojvodina annexed by Hungary) was made into a German protectorate, and Montenegro into an Italian one, Bulgaria seized southern Serbia (post-war Macedonia), while Croatia proper and Bosnia were made into the Independent State of Croatia. These wartime divisions mostly followed ethnolinguistic lines and thus unraveled the post-1929 drive to produce a homogenous Yugoslav-speaking nation out of all the South Slavic inhabitants. Communist Yugoslavia was re-established as a federation. The political and linguistic fiction of the Yugoslav (Serbocroatoslovenian) language was replaced with Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, and the political fiction of the Serbocroatian (Yugoslav) nation with the separate nations of Croats and Serbs complete with their own national republics. In order to unmake wartime Bulgarianization of southern Serbia, Belgrade made it into the republic of Macedonia and supported the rise of the Macedonian nation complete with its own Macedonian language. The Montenegrins also received their own national republic and a similar republic of Bosnia was unexpectedly granted to the newly declared ‘Muslim’ nation, soon renamed as ‘Bosnian.’47 As a result, the common Serbo-Croatian language came to be shared by the four separate nations of Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs. This development went against the logic of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state. When independent India was founded in 1947, the leadership of this new civic nation-state wished to emulate the Soviet model of ethnolinguistic union republics in basing post-colonial India’s administrative division on ethnolinguistically homogenous states. In 1956, when the new administrative division was due to be implemented, Delhi partly backed off from this position. Indian politicians rightly noticed that proposed overlapping of administrative borders with linguistic (and thus, sometimes with religious ones) would encourage the rise of ethnolinguistic (and sometimes also additionally religionbased) nationalisms, which could eventually destroy this state. Undoubtedly, they were right in taking into consideration the religious-cum-national (‘communal’) violence, which has sporadically threatened the unity of India to this day (Ambedkar 1955). But Yugoslavia located in this part of Europe where statehood legitimacy is derived exclusively from the normative isomorphism of language, nation,

54 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and state, the stratagem of the common Serbo-Croatian language for most of the nations residing in Yugoslavia did not last. In 1991, the Soviet Union broke up into ethnolinguistic nation-states (including Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine, among others). Apparently, in the postcommunist world, there was no place for multinational polities in Central and Eastern Europe. Similarly, beginning in 1991, Yugoslavia split into three ethnolinguistic nation-states (Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia), bi-national SerbiaMontenegro, tri-national (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian) Bosnia, and the overwhelmingly (Gheg) Albanian-speaking UN protectorate of Kosovo (Kosova, gained independence in 2008). At the same time, the linguistic reality of SerboCroatian became a political liability, which entailed the division of this previously common language into Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. The separation of Serbian and Croatian was easily achieved as the former is written in Cyrillic characters and the latter in Latin ones. But this leaves practically no graphic difference between Bosnian and Croatian, which share the same version of the Latin alphabet. The Montenegrins mark their linguistic difference by employing two Cyrillic letters not used by the Serbs and claiming to have two national alphabets of equal significance, that is, Cyrillic and Latin. In 2006, Belgrade and Podgorica did not renew their confederal agreement, and Serbia and Montenegro parted their ways after the Montenegrin declaration of independence. Both polities became straightforward ethnic nation-states, but the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state may entail separation of the Montenegrin language from Serbian, which, if effected, would transform Montenegro and Serbia into full-fledged ethnolinguistic nation-states. Kosova may follow the same path if allowed independence, provided it would not join Albania. Should then Tirana and Podgorica not agree on a new compromise Gheg-Tosk standard of Albanian, the Kosovans might decide to codify their own Gheg language in opposition to Albania’s Tosk-based language. In such a case, Kosova would emerge as another (seventh) post-Yugoslav ethnolinguistic nation-state. In Central Europe, the force of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state required the federalization of Czechoslovakia in 1968–1969, which produced the Czech and Slovak socialist republics. In 1993, bi-national federal Czechoslovakia broke up and was replaced by two straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The force of this normative isomorphism was distinctly felt in Estonia and Latvia, both of which were seriously Russified by the influx of Russian-speaking Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians during the post-war period. After regaining independence, both nation-states withheld citizenship from these Russian-speakers unless they mastered conversational Estonian and Latvian, respectively. Russification was much more limited in Lithuania and was thus even welcomed by Lithuanians because it countered the traditional Polish influence in this country.

Introduction

55

In Soviet Byelorussia and Soviet Ukraine, Russification entailed the disparaging of Belarusian and Ukrainian as ‘backward peasant talk’ not better for anything else but folklore songs and tales. In practice, this attitude allowed to make the de jure recognized languages of Belarusian and Ukrainian into ‘dialects’ of Russian, a status that had been officially imposed on both languages in tsarist Russia. As a result of this policy, not only do all Belarusians and Ukrainians speak Russian, but also many of them have no command of their national languages. The ideological status of Ukrainian as the sole national language of Ukraine was reaffirmed in the 1996 Constitution. Accordingly, Ukrainian politicians and administrators made conscious effort to learn Ukrainian if they had not spoken it before. In post-Soviet Belarus, Belarusian remained the nation-state’s undisputed official and national language until 1995, when Russian was made a co-official language. But in reality, Russian is now the sole official language of this polity. Between 2000 and 2005, all universities and secondary schools with the national language of Belarusian as the medium of instruction were either closed or Russian supplanted Belarusian as the language of instruction. Studiously drawing legitimacy from the Soviet symbols and history, Minsk/Mensk succeeded in the transformation of Belarus into a non-ethnolinguistic, Soviet-style, civic nation-state. Post-Soviet Moldova (Moldavia) reaffirmed its status as an independent nation-state by emphasizing the national and official status of the Moldovan language over Russian, much to the dislike of the Russian-speaking minority concentrated in the easternmost sliver across the Dniester River. The replacement of Cyrillic with the Latin script for writing Moldovan made this language look the same on the printed page as Romanian. This change was part and parcel of the initially enthusiastically embraced project of union with Romania, which, however, alienated Moldova’s Russian-speakers and led to a civil war in 1991. The overwhelmingly Russian-speaking east was made into the unrecognized polity of Transnistria (Transdniestria) with Russian as the official language and a provision for Moldovan that it can be employed in minority education as long as it is written in Cyrillic characters. In order to address the fears of the Russian-speakers, now Chi¸sin˘ au emphasizes the politically construed separateness of Moldovan vis-à-vis Romanian; the Moldovan government also dropped the project of a union with Romania and granted wide-ranging autonomy to Transdniestria to entice it back into Moldova’s fold, but so far to no avail. Officially, post-Soviet Russia remains a multinational and multilingual federation, but in reality Russians make up almost 80 percent of its population, while (native and second-language) Russian-speakers 99 percent. Russian functions as the sole official language of the entire federation and it makes serious inroads into the administration and education, which should be conducted in the national languages of the autonomous republics. The most independentminded of all the republics is Tatarstan. The Tatarstan parliament decided that

56 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the script of the Tatar language would be changed from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. This change would follow the early Soviet tradition of Latinization and the example of the Turkish language. Earlier, in the post-Soviet Turkic nation-states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, appropriate versions of the Latin script replaced Cyrillic for writing the respective national languages. But in 2003, the Russian Duma overruled the decision of the Tatarstan Parliament by decreeing that only Cyrillic can be employed for writing the national languages of the federation’s autonomous republics. This decision may be interpreted as the Kremlin’s effort to prevent Pan-Turkic influences from penetrating into the Russian Federation given that in the 1990s, Turkey propagated the idea of developing a single version of the Latin alphabet for all Turkic languages. On the other hand, the Duma’s act can be a reflection of the Chinese model of ensuring cultural unity for the multinational and multilingual state by the means of a single writing system.

The normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state, today The intellectual roots of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state can be traced back to Herderian thought on language, early 19th-century German nationalism (that, among others, drew on his ideas), Prussia’s political use of this nationalism beginning in the mid-19th century, and to the founding of the German Empire as a German nation-state on the basis of this nationalism. The founding of Italy as an ethnolinguistic nation-state also reinforced this trend though the German example was of more significance due to the unprecedented economic, military, and economic success enjoyed by the German Empire. Mainly from this polity, the idea that a legitimate nation-state must be created from the tight overlapping of language, nation, and state spread across Central and Eastern Europe. However, German nationalists have not achieved this ideal to this day. During World War II, Hitler aspired to ‘gather’ all the German-speakers within a ‘truly’ German nation-state of the Third Reich, but did not manage to incorporate the German-speaking Swiss into this polity. After 1945, the idea of this normative isomorphism as a national project definitively lost luster in divided Germany. Today, German is a national or official language shared by six nation-states, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.48 Although language was a significant element of Italian nationalism, Italian nationalists had to be pragmatic because their country was economically and socially quite backward in comparison to Prussia and the German Empire. Hence they did not emphasize the importance of Italian as much as their German counterparts did in the case of the German language. On the other hand, after the Great War, with the exception of Switzerland, there were few Italian-speaking communities remaining outside the Italian borders, unlike in the case of interwar Germany, whose international politics was closely related

Introduction

57

to the millions-strong German-speaking minorities spread across Central and Eastern Europe. Nowadays, Italy shares its national language with San Marino, Switzerland, and the Vatican; and in Italy’s autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige (South Tyrol), German is a co-official language. The nation-states fully conforming to the ideal of the normative isomorphism extend east of the German and Italian frontiers. In Central Europe, the majority of polities neither share their unique national languages with other states nor allow additional official or national languages, nor permit the founding of some autonomous regions or republics on their territories, in which such additional languages would be employed. Today (that is, in late 2006), the post-communist nation-states of this kind include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.49 The post-Soviet ones include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the post-Yugoslav ones, Macedonia and Slovenia. Actualizations of a weaker version of this normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state exist north, east, and south of Central Europe. Sweden is a splendid example of an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state, but it shares its national language of Swedish with Finland, where it functions as a co-official language along with the national language of Finnish. This disqualifies Finland from the exclusive club of ‘true’ ethnolinguistic nation-states. Denmark practically fulfills all the requirements to qualify, but autonomous Greenland and the Faroe Islands are included in the Danish state along with their specific national languages of Inuit and Faroese. None of these predicaments is suffered by Norway, but its national language comes in two not fully intelligible varieties, which are as much different from one another as Danish from Icelandic.50 Bokmål (literally, ‘book language’) is a slightly Norwegianized version of Danish, and Nynorsk (literally, ‘New Norse’), a standard developed in the late 19th century from local Norwegian dialects, deemed to be closest to medieval Norse, the ‘language of Vikings.’51 But with this reservation, Norway belongs to the club, as Iceland does. The Icelanders do not share their Icelandic language with any other state or an autonomous region located outside Iceland, too. South of Central Europe, Turkey qualifies to be a member of the club of the ethnolinguistic nation-states, but not Greece, since the latter polity shares its national language with Cyprus. The 1974 division of Cyprus is not recognized and neither is the independence of North Cyprus with Turkish as its official language. But any future reunification of this island state will perhaps require making Turkish a co-official language along with Greek, which, by default, will exclude Turkey from the club. Albania almost attained the ideal of becoming a straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-state, but for Kosovo with Albanian as its co-official language. In communist Yugoslavia, Kosovo was an autonomous republic included in the Socialist Republic of Serbia. Even before the post-Yugoslav wars broke out,

58 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Kosovo had been stripped of its autonomous status in 1989, and Albanian was banned from official use. In 1999, the region was made into an international protectorate with Albanian, English, and Serbian as its official languages, but the Serbian presence is minuscule in comparison to the Albanian population. In reality, Albania and Kosova (as Albanians prefer to write the name) are two Albanian-speaking polities. In 2006, Montenegro and Serbia chose not to renew their confederal agreement, which in the wake of the Montenegrin declaration of independence, meant the rise of Montenegro and Serbia as two new nation-states. Due to the autonomous status of Vojvodina located in Serbia, and the official use of Serbian in Bosnia, Kosova, and Montenegro, Serbia still does not qualify as a member of the club of the polities, which fulfill all the requirements of the isomorphism of language, state, and nation. But should Montenegro declare Montenegrin, construed as separate from Serbian, as its national language, this polity could join the club. Croatia does not fulfill the isomorphism’s all preconditions, because Croatian, like Serbian, is a co-official language in Bosnia. East of Central Europe, Ukraine is the closest to attaining the status of a true ethnolinguistic nation-state. In 1996, Kyiv enshrined the status of Ukrainian as the sole national and official language in the Constitution and did not give in to Moscow’s pressure into making Russian a co-official language as numerous postSoviet states had done (with the exception of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). But in 1991, the Crimea was made Ukraine’s only autonomous region with Russian and Tatar as co-official languages. Belarus’s exceptionalism stems from the fact that it is the sole Central or Eastern European nation-state, which, beginning in 1995, completely resigned from seeking its legitimacy in ethnolinguistic nationalism. Minsk/Mensk chose the civic model (which also meant the replacement of fledgling democracy with Soviet-style authoritarianism). All other post-Soviet states still aspire to the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, including the Russian Federation, where Russians make up more than fourfifths of the population, and practically all non-Russians speak Russian and are not allowed to use any other script but Cyrillic for writing their national languages as long as they enjoy their own autonomous republics. (The Jewish Autonomous Region Birobidzhan is the sole exception, as Yiddish written in the Hebrew script is employed there in official capacity.) With the exception of Turkmen-speaking Turkmenistan, all other post-Soviet nation-states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan) do not fully fulfill the isomorphism’s requirements, because either they allow the co-official use of Russian along the national language, or house autonomous republics or regions with co-official languages other than the national one, or enjoy autonomous republics or regions with the national language but located on the territory of the neighboring states.

Introduction

59

Although on the plane of rhetoric, in Western Europe, the civic kind of nationalism has traditionally played a more significant role than its ethnic counterpart, the ideological significance of language was not overlooked. Hence, it is almost a contradiction in terms to be a Frenchman or French woman and not to speak the French language. Neither does Paris allow any autonomous regions on the territory of France. But, on the other hand, French functions as an official and national language in numerous other nation-states that used to be French colonies. The same phenomenon is experienced by monolingual Portugal, and by the Netherlands,52 the United Kingdom, and Spain, where languages other than Dutch, English, and Spanish, respectively, are allowed in autonomous regions. In Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, two or more official languages are in use. In Western Europe, only one small polity qualifies as a straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-state – the aforementioned Iceland. Malta with its national language of Maltese would have qualified, too, except that English is a co-official language there.53 South of Europe, the Islamic nation-states from Morocco to Iraq share Arabic as their national/official language. In sub-Saharan Africa, several national/ official languages are used in a single polity or a singular national/official language is shared with an erstwhile colonial power. The situation is similar in the Americas. The exceptions include Ethiopia and Somalia. In the former nationstate, Amharic is the sole national and official language and Somali in the latter. However, Somalia as a polity disappeared in the early 1990s, while colonial English and Italian, alongside Arabic, remain in widespread use. The ideological importance of the isomorphism of language, nation, and state is much more discernible in Asia. Iran with its national language of Persian (Farsi) was a straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-state until the Islamic Revolution (1979), which endowed Arabic there with a semi-official, political-cum-religious status. One encounters the same situation in Pakistan with its national language of Urdu and in Bangladesh with Bengali. Arabic brushes shoulders with them in religious and traditional education, and in politics. On the other hand, Urdu and Bengali are co-official languages in India’s various states. Furthermore, in both Pakistan and Bangladesh, alongside India, Myanmar (Burma), Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Singapore, English functions as a de jure or de facto co-official language. China is divided into two separate polities (communist China and Taiwan) and Korea as well (North and South Korea). They may evolve into separate nation-states. In addition, in communist China’s autonomous regions Mongol, Tibetan, and Uyghur function as co-official languages. But Bhutan with its sole national and official language of Dzongkha,54 Cambodia with Khmer, Israel with Hebrew, Japan with Japanese, Laos with Lao, Indonesia with Indonesian, Thailand with Thai, and Vietnam with Vietnamese appear to be straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-states with no co-official languages or autonomous regions embedded in their territories. In Oceania, the same could

60 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

be said of Papua New Guinea with Tok Pisin, Nauru with Nauruan, Samoa with Samoan, Tonga with Tongan, and Tuvalu with Tuvaluan, if English did not function there as a de facto co-official language. In addition, the Samoan nation is split between independent Samoa and the United States’ territory of American Samoa. Central and Eastern Europe houses 11 ethnolinguistic nation-states, which fully comply with the restrictions of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state. In Western Europe, there is one state of this kind, two in Africa, and nine in Asia, so altogether twelve outside Central and Eastern Europe. Although it would require another paper to answer fully this question, nevertheless it is interesting to ask what the causes of the rise of ethnolinguistic nation-states outside Central and Eastern Europe were. It seems that ideologized monolingualism in Bhutan, Iceland, and Japan is the function of the long-lasting isolation of the polities until the 20th century. Japan and Thailand successfully and Ethiopia almost successfully withstood attacks of the colonial powers. Central and Eastern European Jews brought the ideal of the normative isomorphism to Israel, and Soviet functionaries to Turkmenistan. In Asia, four genuinely ethnolinguistic nation-states (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam) are clustered together in Indochina. Except Thailand, all of them used to be French colonies. Perhaps their espousal of ideologized monolingualism in local languages was a reaction to the excesses of French colonial rule, which had imposed on the local elites the ideologized French monolingualism. Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese nationalists who fought against French colonialists could not help but construct the legitimization of their nation-states by emulating the French example of not allowing any other languages, but the national one, the exclusive official status in the nation-state. This also influenced Thailand’s modernizing efforts. A similar mechanism of reaction to and emulation of Italian colonial rule could be discerned in the case of Somalia. Regarding the most populous ethnolinguistic nation-state, Indonesia (with 242 million inhabitants), it seems that the Indonesian national movement drew from the example of Japanese ideologized nationalism. During World War II, Japan occupied the Dutch East Indies, which became independent as Indonesia. Some Indonesian nationalists also experienced ideologized monolingualism in the Netherlands and nearby France and Germany when they pursued their university education in Europe. The most ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-states (that is, almost without native speakers of other languages than the national) are Iceland, Japan, and Poland.55 In the cases of Iceland and Japan, this unusual homogeneity was achieved by the long-lasting maritime isolation of both polities. On the contrary, large-scale ethnic cleansing, expulsion, population exchanges, and sweeping border changes were employed to arrive at this result in the Polish case. In Africa, none of the two ethnolinguistic nation-states is homogenous, though

Introduction

61

in Somalia, Somali-speakers make up 85 percent of the population. From the viewpoints of territory and population, in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland (38 million inhabitants) is the largest ethnolinguistic nation-state. In the perspective of the entire world, this distinction goes to Indonesia56 or to Japan (120 million inhabitants), if one takes into consideration the high degree of ethnolinguistic homogeneity in the latter polity. On the other end of the continuum, in Central and Eastern Europe, one finds Macedonia and Slovenia, each with 2 million inhabitants.57 From the global perspective, the smallest ethnolinguistic nation-states are Bhutan58 and Iceland, with populations of 2.23 million and 0.3 million, respectively (World Factbook 2005). In 9 out of 11 Central and Eastern Europe’s ethnolinguistic nation-states, the Latin script is employed for writing their national languages. Cyrillic is used to write the national languages in Bulgaria and Macedonia. Outside the region, in the world’s 12 remaining ethnolinguistic nation-states, five national languages are written in Latin characters (Icelandic, Indonesian, Somali, Turkmen, and Vietnamese). All other seven national languages employ their own unique scripts, Japanese uses a writing system derived from the Chinese script, the national languages of Ethiopia and Israel alphabets derived from the Semitic (Canaanite) script, and those of Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand scripts derived from the classical Brahmini syllabary of Sanskrit (Rogers 2005: 120, 205, 221–222). Worldwide, the Latin alphabet is employed for writing national languages in 14 out of the globe’s 23 ethnolinguistic nation-states. In Central and Eastern Europe, 6 national languages spoken in the 11 ethnolinguistic nationstates are Slavic (Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Slovak, and Slovenian), 2 Finno-Ugric (Estonian and Magyar), 2 Baltic (Latvian and Lithuanian), and 1 Romance (Romanian).59 Clearly, so far Slavic national movements have been most persistent and successful at achieving in their nation-states the ideal of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state.

2 Language in Central Europe: An Overview

Difference of Language being generally a Sign of Difference of Nation, [an] Attempt against a Language, will look like a Design against the Nation that speaks it (1711). (Richardson in Crowley 2005a: 94) Human language consists of words, which were fashioned by peoples, who are absolute lords of language.1 (Vico 1990) Princìpi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (1744, Section 32). Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) The fact of living together and continually communicating in a distinctive language makes a human group into a nation. [. . .] The natural boundaries of states are [. . .] their internal boundaries corresponding to the fact of speaking the same language [. . .].2 (Fichte 1845: 315, 346) Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation, 1808). Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) Dialect words – those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1868, chapter 20) Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) [T]he medieval peasant spoke, but the modern person cannot merely speak; we have to speak something – a language. (Billig 1995: 31) 62

Language in Central Europe

63

A ‘language’ is the interplay and struggle of regional dialects, professional jargons, generic commonplaces, the speech of different age groups, individuals and so forth. (Clifford 1988: 46) [National languages] are all huge systems of vested interests, which sullenly resist critical enquiry. (Sapir 1963: 118) [Language] uses us as much as we use language. (Lakoff 1975: 3)

Beginnings The linguistic picture of Central Europe, as we know it, started forming in the 6th to 9th centuries. The coming of the Slavs (or rather the spread of their language and way of life to unrelated various ethnic groups) marks the beginning of this caesura that largely closed in 896 AD when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians into Pannonia. This event gradually divided the hypothetically continuous area of Slavic settlement into a southern section, extending from contemporary Slovenia to Bulgaria, and into a northern section, which coincided with the areas from the Elbe in today’s eastern Germany to the upper Volga in northeastern Russia. In the west, the Magyar-speakers skirted the East and Carinthian Marks (future eastern Austria) of the Holy Roman Empire. This region, previously the meeting point of Slavic- and West Germanic-speakers, changed into the linguistic borderland between the latter and the Magyars. In the eastern corner of the arch of the Carpathians (future Transylvania), perhaps, the transition region of East Romance- and Magyar-speakers developed. East of the mountains, the open steppe, extending to Central Asia and Siberia, attracted various groups, mainly Turkic-speaking groups of pastoralists from the east, as it had the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars before. Pechengs, Cumans, and, between the 1230s and 1380s, Tatars of the Golden Horde dominated this area. During the time, Romance-speakers from Transylvania and the eastern Carpathians migrated to the steppe south and east of the Carpathians, which created a more homogenous East Romancephone area extending to the Danube delta and the Dniester. This process culminated in the emergence of Moldavia and Walachia in the second half of the 14th century. As a result, the territory, populated by Magyars and East Romance-speakers, separated the Northern and Southern Slavs (Magocsi 2002: 6–15; Sedlar 1994: 3–13; Urbanczyk ´ 2000: 136–138). Official Romanian historiography proposes that these East Romance-speakers were the remnants of the Latin-speaking settlers who had peopled Dacia when it had been a Roman province in the years 106–271. In this view, these settlers had

64 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

mingled with the local population of Illyrians and Thracians, who had become increasingly Romanized. This hypothesis of ethnolinguistic continuity between the Roman settlers and present-day Romanians has not been sufficiently substantiated yet. It seems more likely that the retreat of the Roman Empire entailed a gradual disappearance of the Romancephone influence, as it happened in Britain after the Roman legions left the island in 410, though the Roman rule (established in 43) had lasted there twice as long as in Dacia. Most probably, the Romance-speakers survived south of the Danube in Pannonia and Dalmatia. The Byzantine Empire3 partly shielded them from the upheavals between the 5th and 10th centuries, but seeking security they abandoned agriculture and the sedentary way of life, because they stood no chance of successfully defending themselves against steppe nomads in open plains or valleys. These Romance-speakers sought security in the Dinaric, Balkan, and Rhodope Mountains, where they became transhumant pastoralists. Searching for newer pastures, they migrated northward along the arch of the Carpathians and perhaps lost the skill of writing, for they did not leave any documents. Slavophone Christianity, complete with the Cyrillic alphabet, probably came to them from Bulgaria. Between the 13th and 18th centuries, they settled along the middle and northern Carpathians up to eastern Moravia. Mostly, they preserved their Orthodox Christianity, but became Slavicized (Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 220; Sedlar 1994: 146). The language of the Romancephone population living between the Carpathians and the Danube is nowadays classified as ‘East Romance’ because, with the coming of Magyars and the southward expansion of Slavs in the Balkans, Romance-speaking pastoralists, who were spread northeastward along the mountain ranges, lost direct contact with other Romance-speakers in northern Italy and Dalmatia, where Latin literacy survived. The boundary between Slavic- and Romance-speakers in this region gradually moved southward and to the west. Until the 16th century, a Romancephone population lived in the east of historical Croatia between the towns of Karlstadt (Karlovac) and Knin. This severing of the Romance dialect area led to the evolution of the West Romance-speakers, identified today as the Catalans, Corsicans, Galicians, Italians, Francoprovençal-speakers, French, Occitans, Rhaeto-Romance-speakers, Sardinians, Spaniards, and Portuguese (I have enumerated only the most significant groups). Specialists often add Dalmatian to the group of the West Romance languages. It was a language spoken from Istria to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) that died out in the 17th century, though pockets of its speakers held out for two centuries longer. But this classification tends to be contentious. Vlachs, Kutzo-Vlachs, Vlahs, or Tsintsari are remnants of the Balkan Romancespeaking transhumant pastoralists, whose groups occur in the mountainous areas of northern and central Greece, southeastern Albania, southern Macedonia, Dobruja, and Istria. Although the pockets of the Romancephone population seem, to a certain degree, to be the remnants of the Romance dialect continuum

Language in Central Europe

65

in the Balkans, since the end of the 19th century, Bucharest has claimed their languages as ‘sub-Danubian dialects of Common Romanian’ most fully represented by ‘Daco-Romanian,’ or the Romanian language (Carmichael 2005; Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 25; Price 1998: 121–122, 382–383). The philological division between West and East Romance languages gained currency in the middle of the 19th century. At that time, the political significance of language was on the rise, as manifested in the successful nationalisms of the Italian and German nation-states (founded in 1861 and 1871, respectively), which were linguistic in character. In addition, the example of these two nationalisms inspired a plethora of ethnolinguistic national movements in Central Europe. In line with the West’s self-professed ‘scientific progress,’ which produced the industrial revolution, philologists aspired to transform their eclectic field of antiquarian and folkloristic pursuits into a rigorous ‘science of language.’ Drawn to the midst of public interest by Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory of evolution as per analogy in biology, philologists-turned-linguists trusted most the method of classifying the similar as related in single ‘families’ and the dissimilar in separate ones. Soon, this classificatory approach was translated into the practice of putting together cognate ethnolinguistic groups into larger clusters as long as they were territorially contiguous. Such divisions initially were applied on the synchronic plane. But Darwin’s concept of the diachronic (genealogical) ‘tree of life,’ illustrating the divergence of species from one another through time, proved an attractive model for linguists as well. Following the tenets of diachronic classification, the Germanic-speaking inhabitants from the territory of the former Holy Roman Empire were described as ‘Western.’ In this classificatory scheme, the eastern branch comprised the Germanic languages of the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, and Crimean Goths, dead for a long time since the existence of Gothic-speakers was attested for the last time in the Crimea in the 16th century (Majewicz 1989: 35). Thanks to the classificatory efforts of linguists, we know that Magyar is the only non-Indo-European language extant in Central Europe. It belongs to the Uralic family, which is divided into the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic subfamilies. The Samoyedic languages, namely Enets, Nenets (Yurak), Nganasan (Tavgi), and Selkup (Ostyak Samoyed) survive in northern Siberia but are bound to disappear, for only 33,000 people spoke them in 2002. The Finno-Ugric subfamily is usually divided into the Fennic (Finno-Permian or Finnic-Volgaic-LappPermian) and Ugric branches. The former is comprised of four subdivisions. The Baltic (Finnic) embraces Estonian, Finnish, Ingrian, Karelian, Livonian, Lude, Livvi, Vepsian, and Votian. The Sami (Lapp) consists of six Sami (Lapp) languages or dialects. Mordvin (Erzya, Moksha) and Mari (Chermiss) constitute the Volga (Volgaic) subdivision, while Komi (Zyryan, Zuryen), Komi-Permiak (Permian Komi),4 and Udmurt (Votyak) the Permian subdivision. The speakers of these languages live in the region that extends from northern Scandinavia,

66 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Finland, and Estonia to northwestern Russia over to the Urals. Only Finnish and Estonian can claim more than one million speakers. Other Baltic-Finnic languages were spoken by 59,000 people in 2002. At the same time, the speakers of Sami (Lapp) languages numbered 34,000, of the Permian-Finnic languages 0.78 million, and of the Volga-Finnic languages 1.1 million. The Ugric branch comprises Magyar along with Mansi (Vogul) and Khanty (Khanti, that is Ostyak proper). There is no territorial continuity between the areas where the Ugric languages are spoken. Magyar-speakers live in Hungary as well as in its neighbor countries, namely in southern Slovakia, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, along the border with Romania and in the center of that country (eastern Transylvania), and in Serbia’s autonomous region of Vojvodina. The Mansi- and Khanty-speakers numbered 16,000 in 2002. They reside in the Ob River basin located in northwestern Siberia. Some scholars believe that the common Finno-Ugric-speaking area extended from the Ob River and the Urals to the Baltic but that was at least 4000 years ago. Hence, the Finno-Ugric languages, unlike the Slavic languages, are not mutually comprehensible. Apart from Estonian, Finnish, Magyar, and Sami, the vast majority of the speakers of other Uralic languages live in the Russian Federation. In 1917–1918, together with Turkic peoples, who reside side by side, they established the short-lived Muslim state of Idel-Ural (Idel is Tatar for the Volga River), which extended on the western side of the Urals from the Arctic to future Kazakhstan. Today, Russia’s Finno-Ugric-speakers inhabit four autonomous republics, Karelia, Komi, Mari El, and Udmurt, along with the Komi-Permiak Autonomous Region (Komi-Perm). However, their minority and linguistic rights are usually observed in the breach, which means rapid Russification (Abondolo 1998; Dying Fish Swims in Water 2005; Kiss and Nagy 1999: 35–36, 40; Uralic Languages 2006). Writing radiated into Central Europe from the Roman Empire in the two script forms derived from the Roman and Greek alphabets. The two scripts were correlated with the respective literacies in the Latin and Greek languages. The border zone between these two different writing traditions largely coincided with the line that divided the empire into western and eastern halves. Latin prevailed in western Dalmatia and Pannonia, while Greek was adopted east of this area and also in the south of the Apennine Peninsula. In emulation of the Avar Khaganate (founded in the late 560s) in Central Europe, where the polity’s (Turkic or Caucasian-speaking) elite ruled the Slavic-speaking population, the Turkic Bulgars (known as ‘Protobulgarians’ in Bulgarian national historiography) established their predominantly Slavophone khanate along the lower Danube at the close of the 7th century, having wrested these lands from the Eastern Roman Empire. They had earlier come in touch with Greek literacy while residing on the northern shores of the Black Sea. Not surprisingly, they employed Greek letters to carve short stone inscriptions either in Slavic or Turkic Bulgarian (sometimes confusingly called ‘Proto-Bulgarian’). The

Language in Central Europe

67

presumably illiterate Avars isolated the Bulgars from the Western European tradition of Latin-script-based literacy until the 810s, when the Bulgars alongside the Frankish Empire destroyed the Avar Khaganate. Significantly, it seems that the Avar elite adopted Slavic as the lingua franca of their multilingual and multiethnic khaganate. Thus they were responsible for spreading the use of this language in the vast territory from the northern Carpathians to the Danube and the Drava, and from Carinthia to Transylvania. The Magyar scribes also learned the skill of writing in what today is southern Ukraine. They adapted the so-called ‘Runes’ (perhaps, from their Turkic neighbors5 ) to their specific phonological needs and developed their own Magyar alphabet. They carved short inscriptions and numbers with knives onto wooden sticks. This tradition of Magyar writing prevailed until the 17th century among the Magyar-speaking Szeklers (Székely in Magyar) of Transylvania, who, in the past, had defended the eastern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary. (Similarly, up to the same century, the Runic script survived in Sweden.) Very few Magyar ‘Runic’ inscriptions survive to this day but, interestingly, the historian István Szamosközi (1565–1612) used these ‘Runes’ in writing as a code. At the end of the 20th century, a limited use of the Magyar ‘Runes’ was revived in Budapest among Magyar nationalist circles for symbolic rather than any practical ends. However, some nationalist scholars, on the basis of the accidental similarity between a few Magyar ‘Runes’ and Sumerian characters, spuriously claim that the Magyars are descendants of Sumerian settlers, who arrived in Pannonia 6500 years ago. This continued symbolic and politicized use of the Magyar ‘Runes’ evokes time and again the persisting legend that at the end of the 16th century, an attempt was made in Trentschin (Trenˇcín) to make the ‘Runes’ the official script in the Kingdom of Hungary (Balázs 2000: 107; Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 344; Curta 2004: 146–148; Magyar 1996; Mojdl 2005: 137; Sedlar 1994: 425–426; Urbanczyk ´ 2000: 131). As a rule, however, in the early Central European polities, writing was an unknown technology. Writing arrived in this area with the advance of Christianity. The new religion was introduced in the region either from the Holy Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire. In the wake of the missionary endeavors, the two different literacies, Latin and Greek, respectively, penetrated Central Europe. The tradition of eastern Christianity allowed the translation of the Holy Scripture into languages other than official Greek or Latin as well as the use of these languages in writing where practical. In this manner, during the 3rd to 5th centuries, the mainly Greek-based alphabets were developed for the Semitic languages of Coptic and Syriac employed for official purposes and liturgy in Egypt and Asia Minor, and also for the Indo-European language of Armenian and the Caucasian languages of Georgian and Albanian6 in the Caucasus. An exception was the Gothic language with its script based on the Roman alphabet, but the Goths operated north of the Danube where the influences of the Latin and Greek literacies converged.

68 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Another liturgical and administrative language of this type entered history in the mid-9th century. At that time, the Frankish Kingdom and Bulgaria opposed further expansion of Greater Moravia,7 a Slavophone polity that had arisen in Central Europe two centuries after the destruction of the Avar Khaganate.8 Moravian leaders sought an alliance with Byzantium, which resulted in the Christianizing mission (863–867) and the conversion of this realm to the new faith. The two leading missionaries, brothers Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, who came from Thessalonica (Salonika), put into writing the local Slavic dialect of their hometown using a new script, Glagolitic. Later, the brothers and their disciples translated the Bible9 and other Christian writings into this Slavic language. Constantine and Methodius sought formal recognition from the Holy See because Greater Moravia was in the Frankish Kingdom’s sphere of influence. Rome consented, but after Methodius’s death (885), his followers were expelled from the country, the Byzantine rite was replaced with the Latin one and the Latin language replaced Slavic. The change was sealed with the destruction of Greater Moravia at the hands of the Magyars (Picchio 1980: 5–6). It is assumed that the Glagolitic alphabet stemmed from the fusion of the Carolingian minuscule and the Greek cursive. It also included one letter derived from a Hebrew character. The script was known as ‘Cyrillic’ after its presumed inventor, Saint Cyril (Constantine). The term ‘Glagolitic,’ derived from the Slavonic term for ‘word’ (glagol), became current only in the 16th century (scriptura glagolitica) (Franoli´c 1994: 12; Sedlar 1994: 426). At the same time, philologists named the language written in Glagolitic ‘Old Slavic,’ or ‘Old Bulgarian.’ Nowadays, it is more common to refer to this language with the terms ‘Church Slavonic,’ or ‘Old Church Slavonic,’ which were coined at the beginning of the 19th century.10 Previously, the language of Slavophone liturgy and Slavic translations of the Bible was known as ‘Slavic’ or, simply, as ‘our language.’ These designations of the liturgical language remained widespread among the Orthodox Slavs until the end of the 19th century (Picchio 1980: 1–5). Following the demise of Greater Moravia in the first decade of the 10th century, Bohemia and Moravia found themselves within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire (950) and the tradition of Western Christianity, steeped in the Latin language. In 966, the Polanian state (future Poland) accepted Christianity from Bohemia. Hungary followed suit in 1000 or 1001 when the pope recognized the pagan Vajk as King Stephen (reigned 997–1038). Stephen suppressed the last vestiges of liturgy in Slavic in the territory of his kingdom. However, it survived until the 1030s in the Polanian state, and until the 1090s in Bohemia. By that time, Latin had become the language of liturgy and written communication in Central Europe. Within the limits of Western Christianity, Slavonic liturgy in the Glagolitic script was tolerated in Croatia, where it persisted until the beginning of the 20th century in the island of Veglae (Krk). In the Kingdom of Bohemia Croatian monks were allowed to settle in the Emmaus monastery

Language in Central Europe

69

(Emauzy, or Na Slovanech) in Prague during the 14th century. They celebrated mass in Slavic and wrote in Glagolitic until the 17th century. In 1390, some Emmaus monks moved to a cloister near Cracow and introduced the Slavic rite to the Holy Cross church in the capital of the Kingdom of Poland. This tradition lasted there until the 15th century. But these pockets of Slavonic liturgy, surviving in the sphere of western Christianity, were of no political or cultural significance apart from maintaining the channel of communication through which the Czech-language homilies of the Bohemian religious reformer Jan (John) Hus, transcribed into Glagolitic, entered 15th-century Croatia. Only the Reformation gave Slavonic liturgy a new lease of life when the Protestant printing press was established in Urach near Tübingen to publish Slavic texts in Glagolitic characters. In the course of the Thirty Years’ War, Emperor Ferdinand II (reigned 1619–1637) seized this press in 1626 and in the following year, passed it on to Rome, where it was used to publish Catholic Slavophone texts in Glagolitic until 1905 (Franoli´c 1994: 18–20; Sedlar 1994: 148–149, 427). Pope Innocent XI (1676–1689), in his preface to the Roman-Illyrian Breviary published in 1688, attributed the invention of the Glagolitic script to St Jerome (340–420), who had completed his official Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, in 405. This saint had come from the Roman province of Dalmatia that serendipitously happened to coincide with Croatia. The link made in this anachronistic manner allowed claiming the alphabet for the Roman-Catholic tradition and resulted in the new name for it, the ‘Hieronymian script,’ derived from St Jerome’s name. At the same time, some called Glagolitic the ‘Illyrian alphabet,’ relating it to the Roman prefecture of Illyria that had contained the Balkan Peninsula (but not Dalmatia). In the Slavic Orthodox tradition, the Glagolitic script and early books preserved in it were perceived as an inalienable part of Orthodox Christianity. Hence, Orthodox churchmen called it ‘Bukvitsa,’ a name derived from the East Slavic word for ‘letter’ (bukva).11 And, in Croatia, those who wished to emphasize the Slavic connection chose to dub this script as ‘Slovenish’ (that is, Slavic) (Glagolitic 2003). Cyrillic resembles the Greek alphabet more closely than Glagolitic. The Cyrillic script probably developed in the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018), where the disciples of Cyril and Methodius settled after 885, following their expulsion from Greater Moravia. The idea of writing had been known to the Turkic Bulgars since the moment they had emerged as an ethnic group at the mouth of the Don River at the beginning of the 6th century. On the northern shores of the Black Sea, the Greek script had been known since antiquity, while the Goths introduced the Runic alphabet in the 3rd century. This was followed by the Gothic script in the 4th century, and the Armenian, Georgian and Aghvanian alphabets in the 5th century. Some undeciphered Runic inscriptions left by the Bulgars include characters similar to some Cyrillic letters.

70 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Khan Boris I (reigned 852–889) adopted Christianity in 864 and the Bulgarian Sabor (Diet) of 893 proclaimed Church Slavonic as the official language of the Bulgarian Empire for both religious and secular purposes. And to emphasize the independence of Bulgaria from Byzantium, Boris founded the Bulgarian Patriarchate at Ohrid. The monks expelled from Greater Moravia established the centers of Church Slavonic scholarship and education in Ohrid and the Bulgarian capital of Preslav. At the end of the 9th century, or at the turn of the following century, they codified Cyrillic. This new script gradually replaced Glagolitic among all Slavic peoples who accepted Christianity from Byzantium. Glagolitic manuscripts ceased to be produced in Bulgaria at the turn of the 11th century. Croats stuck to Glagolitic and the Latin alphabet replaced it in Bohemia and Moravia. Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic literacy reached Kievan Rus with the official Christianization of this realm in 988. But it is known that between 907 and 972, Kievan and Byzantine rulers contracted agreements, written in Greek and Slavic. Glagolitic might be used for the Slavic texts, but the earliest Kievan Rus inscription in Slavic (found near Smolensk) was done in Cyrillic and dates back to the first quarter of the 10th century (Crampton 1997: 13–16; Fojtíková et al. 1989: 463–464; Mojdl 2005: 157–158; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 464). Serbs arrived in the area they now occupy in the 7th century. Their leaders accepted the authority of the Byzantine Empire two centuries later, which also meant their gradual Christianization. The first Serbian state had a checkered history in the 10th and 11th centuries before it was established as a stable and Orthodox Christian polity in the mid-12th century. During the 12th century, the Serbs adopted the Slavic language written in Cyrillic so as to mark their separateness vis-à-vis the Greek language of the Byzantine Empire. With the enormous territorial expansion of tiny pagan Lithuania at the beginning of the 14th century, its rulers acquired northern and northwestern Rus with its Orthodox Christian population. They also accepted their Slavic chancery language written in Cyrillic as the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The officially pagan character of the polity continued until the Lithuanian Duke Jagiełło ( Jogaila) adopted the Roman Catholic faith and became the King of Poland in 1386 (Sedlar 1994: 426). The Rus recension (variant) of Slavonic continued to be employed in Orthodox churches located in the Rus lands annexed to Poland and Lithuania. In secular use, this language acquired numerous characteristics of the contemporary speech of the Orthodox Slavic inhabitants of Poland-Lithuania. As such, it became known as ruski (Ruthenian) and functioned alongside Latin, German (in cities), and Polish, as an official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until 1697. The Baltic language of Lithuanian remained an unwritten idiom used as a family, and sometimes, secret language among the members of the Jagiellonian Dynasty until the late 15th century. Jagiełło’s son, Kazimierz IV (reigned 1446–1492) was

Language in Central Europe

71

the last Polish-Lithuanian monarch to speak this language (Ostrówka 2005: 104; Snyder 2003: 19; Topolska 2002: 79, 336). Hebrew exerted an important, though not prevailing or lasting, influence on early Central European literacies. The most accepted view is that Jews arrived in Central Europe from the Frankish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire as traders beginning the 12th and, especially, 13th centuries. At that time, crusaders crossing Europe on their way to the Holy Land incited much anti-Semitic fervor in the empire, which convinced numerous Jews to leave for Bohemia, Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Hungary, where they were welcome and their skills valued. The occurrence of the Black Death (1347–1354) brought about another wave of persecutions and sent most of Western European Jews to Poland-Lithuania. In the second half of the 14th century, numerous expulsion edicts issued against Jews in Western Europe hastened this process. Some scholars claim that Khazaria, neglected by researchers, also contributed to the rise of the Central and Eastern European Jewry, especially at its earliest stage in the 9th and 10th centuries. Jewish refugees from Western Europe were surprised to find in Central Europe Jewish communities, which had already been several centuries old. Jewish settlers from Khazaria offered a credible solution to this mystery. At the beginning of the 7th century, the Khazars, the Turkic people, established their empire between the Sea of Azov and the northern Caspian Sea. In 740, the ruling clans of the Khazars converted to Judaism. The Khazar realm, attacked from the south by Arabs, eventually collapsed in 965 under the onslaught of Kievan Rus. This event dispersed the Judaized Khazar elites to Byzantium and the Balkans. Some enterprising Jews were valued in early Central European states for their rare skills. Subsequently, between the early 11th and the late 12th centuries, some of them minted coins for the Polanian rulers and even put inscriptions in Hebrew characters on them. These inscriptions and interlinear translations of biblical and talmudic passages into Slavic (but always written in Hebrew characters) are a proof of a Judeo-Slavic language, which flourished between the 10th and 13th centuries in the Czech lands, Poland-Lithuania, and the Rus lands. Jewish authors traditionally referred to the Slavic lands of Central Europe as ‘Canaan,’ because of their belief that the ancestors of the Slavs came from Palestine (known as Canaan before Jews conquered this land). Accordingly, they named the Slavic language of the aforementioned glosses and inscriptions in Hebrew characters, as Canaanic. In order to distinguish between the Semitic vernacular of the ancient Canaanites and Judeo-Slavic, the latter is known under the name of ‘Knaanic,’ a Romanized transliteration of the Hebrew term leshon knaan (Davies 1982: I 79; Geller 1994: 24–28; Gumowski 1975; Kinder and Hilgemann 1978: 154–155; Stankiewicz 1984: xiii; Wexler 1993: 28–55). The Carolingian Empire, renewed as the Holy Roman Empire in 962, became the model of development for these Central European polities that had no direct contact with Byzantium. As early as the 11th and 12th centuries, rulers of the

72 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Polish princes, began to invite monastic orders, craftsmen, and settlers from the overpopulated areas in the Holy Roman Empire. They brought along the new form of selfgovernment for towns and villages, which assured swifter economic growth than the direct rule of a lord. Towns and villages were founded and refounded on the basis of this Teutonic law (ius teutonicum). First, they were founded in the western part of Central Europe, for instance, Vienna, Marburg (Maribor) and Esztergom prior to 1200, and Agram (Zagreb), Linz, Buda, Hermannstadt (Sibiu), Kaschau (Kassa, Košice), Prague, Płock, and Danzig (Gdansk) ´ before 1250. By the end of the 14th century, this phenomenon spread to the easternmost nooks of the kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, as well as to the main towns in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the mid16th century, the very last towns in Poland-Lithuania’s easternmost reaches, among others, Połock (Polatsk/Polotsk), Witebsk (Vitebsk/Vitsebsk), Smolensk ´ (Smolensk), Minsk/Mensk (Minsk ´ in Polish), Kyiv, Perejesław (Pereieslav), ˙ Zytomierz (Zhytomyr), and Kołomyja (Kolomyia) were granted Teutonic law self-governments (Magocsi 2002: 40–41). The overwhelming majority of the settlers spoke a great variety of West Germanic dialects. Because their groups usually were recruited from specific regions, they tended to preserve their dialects and specific local cultures in the new environs. That is why until today, the groups of Saxons12 have survived in central Romania, and pockets of Swabians in the area where the borders of Hungary, Romania, and Serbia meet. These settlers stopped coming to Central Europe in the 15th century and, by that time, the compact area inhabited by Germanic-speakers extended to western Pomerania, Lower Silesia, the northern, western and southern mountainous edges of the Czech lands as well as to the westernmost strip of Hungary (today Austria’s Burgenland and the region around the Slovak capital). A significant number of Germanic-speaking islands were located in East Prussia and in the south and west of the Kingdom of Hungary. This spotty transitory borderland marked the meeting point of the West Germanic dialect continuum with the North and South Slavic, as well as Magyar dialect, continua. During the 16th to 19th centuries, more Germanicphone settlers were invited to settle in Hungary and the Russian Empire. But the general ethnolinguistic shape of Central Europe survived, largely unchanged until the flight and expulsion of Germans and German-speakers in 1944–1950 (Magocsi 2002: 104–105; Ther and Siljak 2001; Várdy and Tooley 2003). The Teutonic law towns and villages used chancery German as the language of administration; for instance, until the 14th century in Cracow, the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, still longer, that is, the next century in Lwów (Lviv), and even longer in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Davies 1982: I 94). When Polish became the language of politics and culture across Poland-Lithuania, the influence, however, was so strong that Polish and Latin replaced German at the

Language in Central Europe

73

end of the 16th century, as the language of the Landtag (regional diet) in Royal Prussia, the western part of Prussia incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland in 1466 (Friedrich 2000: 38).

The German language or languages? The first Central European vernacular made a written language German13 was the first vernacular in Central Europe that challenged the monopoly of Latin as the dominant written language of Western Christianity. It became a leading language of administration in the Holy Roman Empire during the 13th and 14th centuries, though it was used alongside Latin. By the time of Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian (reigned 1314–1347), most imperial documents were issued in chancery German, especially those pertaining to matters in the south German-speaking areas. His successor, Charles IV (reigned 1347–1378), who was also the King of Bohemia, instituted the lands of the Czech Crown as a separate entity centered on Bohemia and guaranteed this entity administrative distinctiveness within the empire. Charles moved the imperial capital to Prague, which brought the center of chancery German within Central Europe. At that time, chancery German developed as a specialized jargon for imperial administrators and lawyers, guided by the Latinate usage, employed at the imperial chancery. The decentralized nature of the Holy Roman Empire, combined with the frequent changes in the location of the imperial capital, caused the emergence of several varieties of chancery German, though their users strove to keep them mutually intelligible for the sake of efficient exchange of documents within the empire. Had this polity not survived until 1806, political fragmentation could have been paralleled by the rise of separate languages from these varieties of chancery German, as happened in the case of the Slavic languages. Church Slavonic had the potential of becoming the source of a most important Slavic language, if it had been accepted as the official one in a polity embracing most of the Slavic-speakers. But due to its association with the Orthodox Church, Church Slavonic did not become the sole official language in Poland-Lithuania. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth declined in the late 17th century and no Slavophone polity, comparable to the Holy Roman Empire, that would have embraced most of the North Slavic-speakers, arose. The Russian Empire, founded in 1721, spurred the rise of its own Russian language and limited the use of Church Slavonic to matters ecclesiastical in the course of the 18th century. The aforementioned perceived separateness of the varieties of chancery German is clearly visible in German terminology that refers to them as ‘chancery languages’ (Kanzleisprachen). Between the 14th and 16th centuries, there were five main varieties, which differed in grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, variants of the Gothic script, and, above all, prestige. Lower Saxonian

74 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(Niedersächsisch) was the chancery language of the Hanseatic League (founded in the mid-12th century with its center in Lübeck) employed in the north of the Holy Roman Empire and in the northern half of the Teutonic Order state (Livonia), that is, from the Low Countries to present-day Latvia and Estonia. Lower Saxonian chanceries occurred as far north as Bergen (southern Norway) and the Baltic island of Gotland (today, belonging to Sweden), and as far south as Dortmund, Magdeburg, and Berlin. Lower Saxonian was fairly close to Dutch, but the 843 partition of the Carolingian empire had allocated western Flanders to the West Frankish Kingdom, which subsequently evolved into France. In 1581, the Protestant United Provinces (today, the Netherlands) announced their independence and left the empire. The Habsburgs, in possession of the Catholic Spanish Netherlands (today’s Belgium), contested the independence of the United Provinces until it was finally reaffirmed in 1648 in the Peace of Westphalia. The political separation of the United Provinces facilitated the rise of Dutch as a separate language based on the dialect of Amsterdam in the 17th century. The process was completed with the publication of the officially commissioned and endorsed Dutch translation of the Bible (1626–1637). In addition, Calvinism separated the Dutch from the overwhelmingly Lutheran Low Germanicspeakers. In the Spanish Netherlands, which became Belgium in 1830, French dominated, thus preventing the spread of Dutch or standardization of the local Germanic dialects until 1898, when Flemish was recognized as a co-official language alongside French. Although almost identical with Dutch, the political and religious border shaped Flemish into a separate language. The language union of 1982, signed by Belgium and the Netherlands, made Dutch and Flemish two equal varieties of the Netherlandish language. Linguists tend to project the present-day difference between Dutch and German into the past by dividing the Low Germanic linguistic commonality between Low Franconian and Low German/Lower Saxonian. The former, construed as the source of Dutch, denotes the western section of the original Low Germanic dialectal area, and the latter, construed as belonging to the history of the German language, the eastern half of this dialect area. Ironically, the successful competition posed by the towns of the Low Countries, hastened the decline of the Hanseatic League in the 15th and 16th centuries, before, for all practical reasons, it disappeared in the 17th century. Had the league won the competition, a Lower Saxonian German might have become an official language of northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium’s Flanders. The book production in Low German peaked in the mid-16th century at 800 titles per annum, but rapidly declined to 100 in 1700. The last Lower Saxonian Bible was published in 1622. The last chanceries stopped using Lower Saxonian and switched to West or Middle West German chancery languages by the 1660s.

Language in Central Europe

75

Another interesting phenomenon in the northern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire was the Frisian language, a cognate of Dutch and Lower Saxonian. The Frisians, seafaring fishermen and merchants who lived on the Frisian Islands and the facing coastland extending from the present-day western Netherlands to southern Denmark, operated between the Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia, and England. In 802, Charlemagne recognized the Frisians as a separate people, but under the pressure of Dutch and German, the Frisian language ceased to be employed for official purposes after 1573. Frisia, split between the empire and the Netherlands, preserved its autonomy until 1744 in the former polity, and until 1795 in the latter. The revival of the Frisian language commenced in the 19th century. In the Netherlands, the Frisian Academy was founded in 1938, and in West Germany, the North Frisian Institute followed in 1964. In 1970, Frisian became a co-official language alongside Dutch in the Netherlands and has been used in the polity’s administration since 1986. Apart from Lower Saxonian, the other four chancery Germans were Upper German (Oberdeutsch), Swiss German (Schweizerdeutsch), East Middle German (Ostmitteldeutsch), and West Middle German (Westmitteldeutsch). All the four belong to the High German (Hochdeutsch) branch of Germanic dialects as opposed to the Low German (Niederdeutsch, Plattdeutsch)14 branch represented by Lower Saxonian. Hence, Lower Saxonian was more distinctive vis-à-vis the other four chancery Germans than the four vis-à-vis one another. The East Middle German and West Middle German chancery languages represented the Middle German sub-branch of the High German dialects, while Upper German and Swiss German the Upper German sub-branch. The terminological employment of the term ‘High German’ is further complicated by its use as a synonym for standard German and for the most prestigious variants of chancery Germans (except Lower Saxonian) in the past. Hence, ‘Old High German’ (Althochdeutsch) of the 9th century is none other than West Middle German, ‘Middle High German’ (Mittelhochdeutsch) of the 13th century – Swiss German, and ‘New High German’ of the 17th and 18th centuries – East Middle German. Erratically, the label of ‘High German’ is denied to the High German dialect, which, between the 14th and 16th centuries, formed the basis for the most significant German chancery language employed in the imperial chancery. This variety is known as ‘Common German.’ The Middle German dialects were spoken south of Aachen, Magdeburg, and Thorn (Torun), ´ whereas the Upper German, south of Karlsruhe and Nuremberg. The imperial chancery of the Habsburgs, usually located in Vienna, employed Upper German, which endowed it with so much prestige that its usual designation was Common German (Gemeines Deutsch, also known as Bavarian). Due to its prestige, this chancery German was employed by Low Germanspeakers in the southern half of the Teutonic Order state, that is, from Danzig (Gdansk) ´ to Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Courland (present-day Latvia). But

76 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Habsburg emperors, busy controlling vast territories from Spain to Transylvania, did not pay any special attention to their chancery’s variant of German, because, apart from this language, they employed chancery Bohemian, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish in administration. This allowed for the emergence of West Middle German and East Middle German as separate chancery Germans. The former (also known as Franconian) was employed in the Rhineland, especially in Cologne, the latter in Thuringia and Saxony, or the region between Erfurt and Dresden. In the 16th century, Saxony was the most developed region in the empire, and the elector of Saxony was often entrusted with imperial administration when the emperor was away from Vienna. This made East Middle German the second most significant chancery German immediately after imperial Common German. East Middle German was popularly referred to as the Meissen language (Meißnisch), derived from the 10th-century Meissen Mark. Another designation for this language was Upper Saxonian (Obersächsisch) as contrasted with Lower Saxonian. The northwestern corner of present-day Germany, extending from the Danish border to Essen and Merseburg, was the homeland of the Saxons,15 for the first time mentioned in the 2nd century. It was this ethnic group, who, together with the Angles and Jutes, invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. In 1180, their extensive Duchy of Saxony was dissolved, but its memory survived in the Estonian and Finnish names for Germany, namely, Saksamaa and Saksa. The part, later known as Saxe-Wittenberg, became the Electoral Duchy of Saxony in 1356. In 1423, it passed into the hands of the margrave of Meissen. The margravate and duchy became the core of new Saxony with its capital in Dresden, which extended from Brandenburg to Bavaria and from Gotha to Görlitz (Görlitz/Zgorzelec). The memory of the original Saxony is preserved in modern Geremany’s Land of Lower Saxony and of the later Saxony in the Länder of Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony. The chancery language of Swiss German (Alemannian) developed when the core cantons of future Switzerland commenced their successful struggle against Habsburg control in 1291. In 1499, the emperor confirmed the autonomous status of Switzerland before it gained full independence in 1648 and left the Holy Roman Empire. Unlike in the Netherlands, the chancery variety of German did not develop into a separate language due to the multi-lingual and multi-confessional character of the polity. But in Switzerland’s Germanophone section, local dialects of different cantons (for instance, Züritüütsch in Zurich, or Bärndütsch in Berne) tend to be employed in speech (even in official situations) and the use of standard German is limited to writing. However, since the 1970s, it has been opined that Swiss German (officially referred in this language as Schwyzertüütsch) should be recognized as a separate fifth official language of Switzerland. The situation is similar in Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. The former gained independence in 1866 and the latter a year later. The inhabitants of both polities speak local Upper and Middle

Language in Central Europe

77

German dialects, respectively, but write in official German, and also French in the case of Luxembourg. Luxembourg strode the middle ground between Switzerland and the Netherlands. The local dialect, Luxemburgish (Luxembourgian, Lëtzebuergesch), was introduced to schools in 1912, has been used in the parliament since 1945, and was elevated to the status of the national language of Luxembourg in 1984. Between the 17th century and 1945, Alsace (Elsaß) and Lorraine (Lothringen), changed hands between the empire/Germany and France. In Alsace the population spoke an Upper German dialect and a Middle German in Lorraine. In 1466, the first German translation of the Bible was published in the Alsatian capital of Strassburg (Strasbourg). The use of both dialects was discouraged in France through administrative methods. However, despite Paris’s displeasure at the fact, the Strasbourg educational administration introduced in 1982 obligatory lessons of standard German in all Alsatian elementary schools and of the Alsatian dialect in all secondary schools. In Lorraine, the local dialect was traditionally known as ‘Francique’ or ‘Platt.’ The latter term is confusing, as the dialect belongs to the West Middle German dialectal area. Perhaps this usage is a reflection of the general incomprehensibility of the Low German Flemish speech, which Frenchspeakers encountered to the north in the borderland between Wallonia and Flanders. On the other hand, Platt is also the colloquial German term for any German dialect. Francique refers to the Duchy of Franconia (Herzogtum Franken), which extended from east of Metz to Bamberg. In the 5th century, from their homeland on the lower and middle Rhine, the Germanic Franks16 conquered the land, which became known after them as ‘Franconia.’ From this base, they set out to build their Kingdom of the Franks, which spawned the Carolingian Empire, and later, France and the Holy Roman Empire. Drawing on this illustrious past, the Germanic-speakers in Lorraine appealed for the recognition of their Franconian dialect as the original national language of France, equal to the French language. The Nancy-Metz educational authority proposed to introduce German, instead of Franconian, to Lorraine schools, because the latter seemed too close to Luxembourg’s Luxemburgish language, which Paris declined to recognize. Finally, in 1991, the French Ministry of National Education allowed for the selection of matriculation examination in Lorraine’s local dialects or the ‘Franconian language of Luxembourgish.’ In Alsace, Germanicspeakers, satisfied with the German diglossia model of speaking the dialect at home and standard German in official situations, did not appeal for elevation of their Alsatian dialect to the status of a separate language. In addition to the aforementioned distinctive dialects, near-languages, and languages from the West Middle German dialect area, the Jewish language of Yiddish emerged. Jews first arrived on the territory of the future Holy Roman Empire as Roman settlers in the 4th century. They concentrated in the region of Cologne. Another wave of Jews again reached the Rhineland in the 9th century.

78 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

They probably came from Romancephone Lorraine. For several generations, their community was bilingual, Romance- and Germanic-speaking. Soon, for the purposes of everyday communication, they adopted the Germanic speech of their Christian neighbors. Jewish merchants contributed to the spread of Jewish communities across the empire. Although Hebrew was even then considered to be loshn koydesh (‘the language of holiness’), these merchants, meeting their coreligionists from variegated language communities, for the sake of mutual comprehensibility, used Hebrew as a limited language of commerce and bookkeeping, which, in turn, influenced the Germanic speech of the empire’s Jewish communities. The fourth Lateran Council (1215) imposed various restrictions on Jews across Western Europe, among other things, forcing them to live in ghettoes. This social isolation spawned Juden-Teutsch (‘Jewish German’), or Yiddish, which emerged from this Hebrew-Germanic amalgam. Jewish refugees took this language to non-Germanicphone areas in Central Europe. They did not swap it for the Slavic, Magyar, or Baltic idiom of their neighbors because Jews mainly settled in towns and cities, frequently populated by Germanic-speaking settlers from the empire and their descendants. Alongside Latin, chancery German remained there an official language until the 16th century. The high status of this language prevented Jews from acquiring the languages of the nobility and the peasantry living in the countryside. However, with time, numerous Slavic influences entered Yiddish. Unlike other Germanic languages, Yiddish was written and printed in Hebrew characters, which graphically made it into a Jewish idiom. From the Germanic term Teutsch (nowadays rendered Deutsch in standard German) for ‘German,’ not only the name of Yiddish emerged (as explained above), but also that of ‘Dutch,’ which is Duits in Dutch, though it is Niederländisch or Holländisch in German. In the 16th century, Dutch Dietsch, Duitsch, Duytsch, or Nederduitsch for the Dutch language, was even closer to German Deutsch. Similarly, Teutsch/ Deutsch sounded to the uneducated Englishspeaker more like ‘Dutch’ than ‘German.’ Hence, the dialectal speech of the ethnoreligious groups of Amish and Mennonites residing in eastern Pennsylvania is referred to as ‘Pennsylvania Dutch,’ though their idiom is derived from the Upper German dialectal area. In addition, Teutsch became Tüütsch in the Swiss German name for itself, Schwyzertüütsch. When German was codified in the 17th and 18th centuries, its newly elevated status meant condemnation of dialects disparaged as ‘kitchen or rotten German.’ The same treatment was meted out to Yiddish. In the 18th century, Jews, who remained in the empire, aspired to leave ghettoes and merge with the mainstream of Germanophone society. They achieved this aim in the 19th century, which entailed giving up their low-status language for prestigious German. At that time, Yiddish was dubbed ‘jargon,’ and the Yiddish-speaking Jewry of Central and Eastern Europe accepted this view as their own, though

Language in Central Europe

79

they accessed their Hebrew-based Jewish culture through translations into this language. Hence, from Yiddish’s original name, Teutsch, the Yiddish verb – ‘to explain’ (taytsh) – emerged, and the Yiddish explanatory translation of the Pentateuch was known as taytsh-khumesh. Before World War II, three-quarters of all the Jews spoke Yiddish. Along with Belarusian, Polish and Russian, it was a co-official language in Soviet Belarus (1920–1938). But the ideological decision to ally Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, with renewed Hebrew, coupled with the Holocaust, made Yiddish a marginal language (Geller 1994: 26; Sherman 2006; Sitarz 1992: 17–24). The monopoly of chanceries declined in the 16th century with the spread of printing and the rise of religious discord. The developments pitted imperial Common German and the Meissen language, associated with the Catholic and Protestant camp, respectively, against each other. The Protestant translation of the Bible was published in the Meissen language, and the Catholic in the imperial Common German. The technology of printing in the hands of the intellectual movement of religious reform could fulfill the Protestant promise of the Holy Scripture and liturgy in people’s speech. A complete German translation of the Bible by Martin Luther (1483–1546), the Thuringian, was published in 1534. Its phenomenal success was thanks to his conscious attempt to make this translation comprehensible to the largest possible number of Germanic-speakers, whatever dialectal and regional differences may have split them. Luther employed his native Upper Saxonian (Meissen) language, which he purged of localisms not occurring in other chancery Germans. Simultaneously, he borrowed from these chancery varieties the words and grammatical constructions that were most widespread. The merger resulted in Luther’s own variety of written German. This was acknowledged in Johannes Clajus’s (1535–1592) Grammatica Germanicae linguae [. . .] ex bibliis Lutheri Germanicis et aliis eius libris collecta (A Grammar of the German Language [. . .] Based on Luther’s Bible and His Other Writings, 1578, Leipzig), which was published until 1720. In the latter half of the 16th century, Druckersprachen (printers’ languages), or varieties used by publishing companies, replaced chancery languages, though the latter’s tradition continued in handwritten manuscripts and documents. For instance, Lower Saxonian survived in Lübeck’s city registers until 1809. Luther’s variety of German, bolstered by the incessant production of his German Bible (200,000 copies by 1626) was identified with the Upper Saxonian Druckersprache employed in the printing centers of Leipzig and Wittenberg. Other Druckersprachen included Bavarian-Austrian (derived from imperial Common German and employed in Vienna and Prague), Swabian-Bavarian (Augsburg), Nurembergian (Nuremberg), Upper Rhenish (Basel, Switzerland and Strassburg), Middle Rhenish (Frankfurt, Mainz, Worms, and Cologne), and Swiss (Zurich and Bern). Upper Saxonian and Middle Rhenish stemmed from the

80 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Middle German dialectal area and all the other Druckersprachen from the Upper German dialectal area. Symptomatically, after the decline of the Hanseatic League, there developed no Druckersprache identified with the Lower Saxonian chancery language or the Low German dialectal area, though some books were printed in chancery Lower Saxonian in Lübeck and Hamburg until the last decades of the 17th century. In addition, Swabian-Bavarian was fairly close to Bavarian-Austrian. In the 18th century, linguists began to use the term ‘High German’ (Hochdeutsch) as a synonym for ‘standard German,’ because all the Druckersprachen drew on the High German dialectal area. This usage relegated the Low German (Niederdeutsch) to a low status of ‘peasant talk,’ popularly designated as Plattdeutsch. Although the German scholarly term for ‘dialect’ is Dialekt or Mundart (literally ‘by the way of mouth’), in colloquial speech it is referred to as Platt (an abbreviation of Plattdeutsch). The European invention of the movable type for printing is associated with Johann Gutenberg (1399–1468), who perfected this technology in the late 1440s when active in Strassburg and, then, in Mainz.17 Initially, printshops were established in Mainz (c. 1450) and Strassburg (1458), followed by Bamberg (before 1462), Subiaco near Rome (1464), Cologne (1465), Rome (1467), Basle (Switzerland, 1468), Plzen ˇ (Bohemia, 1468), Augsburg (1468), Lübeck (1468), Venice (1469), Milan (1469), Paris (1470), Aargau (Switzerland, 1470), Regensburg (1471), Verona (1471), Treviso (1471), Bologna (1471), Ferrara (1471), Naples (1471), Florence (1471), Cremona (1471), Messina (1471), Speyer (1471), Buda (Hungary, 1472), Esslingen (1473), Merseburg (1473), Ulm (1473), Lyon (1473), Alst (Flanders, 1473), Louvain (Flanders, 1474), Valencia (Spain, 1474), Cracow (Poland-Lithuania, 1474), Blaubeuren (1475), Breslau (Wrocław, 1475), Burgdorf (1475), Trent (1475), Saragossa (Spain, 1475), Rostock (1476), London (1476), Seville (Spain, 1477), Angers (France, 1477), Eichstätt (1478), Prague (Bohemia, 1478), Oxford (1478), Chablis (France, 1478), Barcelona (Spain, 1478), Würzburg (1479), Toulouse (France, 1479), Poitiers (France, 1479), and St Albans (1480). Between the mid-13th century and the 1470s, the new technology became firmly established in the Holy Roman Empire (including the Low Countries, Switzerland, Bohemia, and Moravia) and the Apennine Peninsula, whence it spread to France, England, Spain, Hungary, and Poland-Lithuania. Leaving aside this core area, I note the significant directions along which printing spread at a later date. Printshops were founded in Vienna (1482), Erfurt (1482), Passau (1482), Odense (Denmark, 1482), Stockholm (1483), Kosinj (Croatia, Hungary, 1483), Granada (Muslim Andalusia, early 1480s, for producing Hebrew texts), Magdeburg (1485), Heidelberg (1485), Brünn (Brno, Moravia, 1486), Schleswig (1486), Copenhagen (1490), Hamburg (1491), Czernichów (Chernihiv, Poland-Lithuania, 1493), Cetinje (Zeta, 1493), Senj (Croatia, Hungary, 1494), Constantinople (Istanbul, a Hebrew press, moved there from Muslim Granada, conquered by Christian forces in 1492), Danzig

Language in Central Europe

81

(Gdansk, ´ Royal Prussia, Poland-Lithuania, 1498), Constantinople (Istanbul, 1506 and 1727), Edinburgh (Scotland, 1507), Tîrgovi¸ste (Walachia, Ottoman Empire, 1508), Uppsala (Sweden, 1510), Sel¯anik (Thessaloníki, Ottoman Empire, 1510), Wilno (Vilnius, Poland-Lithuania, 1520), Iceland (1531), Kronstadt (Bra¸sov, Hungary, 1534), Lwów (Lviv, 1539), Ireland (1551), Belgrade (Ottoman Empire, 1552), Adrianople (Edirne, Ottoman Empire, 1554), Moscow (1565), Warsaw (1580), Ostróg (Ostrih, Poland-Lithuania, 1581), Smyrna (I˙ zmir, Ottoman Empire, 1628 and 1646), Damascus (Ottoman Empire, 1605), Moschopolis (Ottoman Empire, 1731 [today, Voskopojë in Albania]), Corfu (Ottoman Empire, 1817), Greenland (1830). The use of printing technology was largely limited to Catholic and Protestant Europe. The Orthodox Church favored handwritten books until the 18th century in Russia and until the 19th century in the Balkans. Only at the beginning of the 20th century, did printing become widespread in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, despite ulema’s (learned men of Islam) opposition. Hence, the northward spread of this empire across the Balkans to southern Central Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries hindered the rise of printing in this region. The vast majority of the printshops produced books in Latin characters (that is, either Gothic or Antiqua18 ). The first publications in Church Slavonic rendered in the Glagolitic script came off the press in Kosinj (1483), Venice (1483, 1493), and Senj (1494). The earliest Cyrillic book in Church Slavonic was published in Cracow (1491), followed closely by ones produced in Cetinje (1493), Tîrgovi¸ste (1508), Prague (1517), Venice (1519), Wilno (1522), and Hermannstadt (Sibiu, 1546). The vast majority of Cyrillic books were produced in Poland-Lithuania and Hungary/the Habsburg lands until the mid-18th century, when Russia took over the leading role in this field. Since the 1460s, prints in Hebrew (in Hebrew characters) were published for biblical scholars and Jewish communities. The few printshops which were active in the Ottoman Empire prior to 1727 usually catered to the Sephardic Jewish reader, producing books in Hebrew and Ladino (all printed in Hebrew characters). The very first books printed were invariably in Latin and most of the book production remained in this language until the 18th century. But the first books in Central Europe’s vernaculars were printed quite early: in German (1461, Bamberg?), Czech (1468, Plzen), ˇ Classical Greek (1476, Milan), Polish (1513, Cracow), Latvian (1522), Byzantine Greek (1526), Magyar (1533, Cracow), Yiddish (1534, Cracow), Estonian (1535), Lithuanian (1547, Königsberg [Kaliningrad]), in Ladino (1547, Constantinople), Slovenian (1550, Tübingen), Albanian (1555), Walachian (Cyrillic-based Romanian, 1559, Kronstadt), Cyrillic-based Ruthenian (1562, Nie´swiez˙ [Niasvish]), Lower Sorbian (1574), Bibliˇctina (Slovakized chancery Czech, 1581, Bartfeld [Bardejov]), and Upper Sorbian (1597). Later, they were followed by the first books in Finnish (1642), Grazhdanka-based vernacularized Church Slavonic (1708), Ottoman

82 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(Old Turkish, 1729), Gagauz (1810, Vienna), modern Slovak (1846, Preßburg [Bratislava]), and Esperanto (1887, Warsaw), among others. Today, scholars from Croatia and the Orthodox Slavic states tend to identify early publications in the local recensions (versions) of Old Church Slavonic as books published in their national languages, standardized in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bearing in mind this qualification, they claim that the first book in Glagolitic-based Croatian came off the press in 1483 (Kosinj), in Serbian (or Montenegrin) in 1493 (Cetinje), in Belarusian in 1517–1519 (Prague), in Ukrainian in 1581 (Ostróg), in Russian in 1564 (Moscow), or in Bulgarian in 1683 (Rome). Some Russian scholars recognize this problem and agree that the first book in Russian or in the vernacular of Muscovy came off the press in 1625. Similarly, according to some, the printing of the first Serbian book occurred in 1761. By comparison with Western Europe, the first book in Italian was printed in 1471, followed by English (1474), Catalan (1474), French (1476), Flemish (1477), Spanish (1483), Portuguese (1489), Danish (1495), Swedish (1495), Breton (1499), Provençal (1501), Icelandic (1540), Basque (1545), Welsh (1546), Romansh (1557), Gascon (1565), Scottish Gaelic (1567), Irish (1567), Finnish (1642), Sami (1649), Cornish (1700), and Manx (1707).19 ∗

∗

∗

The sway of Luther’s German was such that even Catholic translations of the Bible followed his variety of German. One of the few exceptions was John Eck’s (1486–1543) translation, which stuck to the Bavarian usage of Upper German. When a publisher of a German-language Bible realized that some words employed by Luther may have been incomprehensible for the readers in a given region at which the translation was targeted, a glossary of Lutheran terms explained in a local dialect was appended. Common German remained the language of imperial administration, but in the 17th century, the Meissen language as redefined by Luther was increasingly accepted as the German language of literature and scholarship. The Silesian poet Martin Opitz (1597–1639), who also served as a secretary to the Polish-Lithuanian King, Władysław IV (reigned 1632–1648), promoted the use of this variety for writing poetry in German in his Von der teutschen Poeterei (On German Poetry, 1624, Brieg [Brzeg]). His appeal was espoused and implemented by the Silesian-Saxonian school of Baroque poets active in the 17th century. Following the example of Florence’s Accademia della Crusca (1582), which promoted the Tuscanian dialect as the Italian language, the Fruchtbringende Gessellschaft (Fruition Society) was established in Weimar in 1617, 5 years after the first edition of Accademia’s Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (The Dictionary of the Accademia della Crusca, Venice). Additional German Sprachgesselschaften, or language societies, sprang up in 1633, 1642, and 1644. The Académie française (French Academy) was founded in Paris in 1635. It followed the puristic model of the Accademia della

Language in Central Europe

83

Crusca in its aim ‘to clean the tongue from dirt’ (Burke 2004: 146). Crusca means ‘chaff,’ which is shorthand for ‘separating wheat from chaff.’ The Preface to the Académie’s Dictionniare de l’Académie française (The Dictionary of the French Academy, 1694, Paris) emphasized that this work was to maintain the French language’s purity. Similarly, in 1697, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) proposed that a language academy should be established to promote and safeguard the purity of English. Not surprisingly, the program of the Fruchtbringende Gessellschaft adopted in 1644 obliged the society to maintain the purity of German through the purging of foreign words (mainly French and Latin) and to compile a dictionary of this language. Luther’s variety of Upper Saxonian was popularly deemed to be the model of purity and excellence. Naturally, in his Der Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum, oder Teutscher Sprachsatz (The Genealogical Tree of the German Language, or the German Vocabulary, 1691, Nuremberg), which was the first normative dictionary of German, Kaspar (Caspar) Stieler (1632–1707) drew on this variety. But, the opposition to Upper Saxonian continued in the Habsburg lands, where imperial Common German remained in popular use until the end of the 18th century. The domination of Upper Saxonian in the role of standard German was ensured by Johann Christoph Gottsched’s (1700–1766) Grundlegung einer deutschen Sprachkunst (The Foundations of German Grammar, 1748, Leipzig) and Johann Christoph Adelung’s (1732–1806) monumental, five-volume Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuchs der Hochdeutschen Mundart (An Attempt at the Full Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of the High German Dialect, 1774–1786, Leipzig). No comparable movement for the standardization and elaboration of imperial Common German developed. What is more, in addition to the flowering of German linguistics in Saxony, the University of Halle, also located in the same kingdom, was the first one to replace Latin with German as the medium of education. As a result, not only theologians, writers, and poets, but also scholars employed Upper Saxonian as their preferred variety of German. Linguists frequently refer to it as ‘Middle German literary language’ (ostmitteldeutsche Schreibsprache). Its prestige was so conspicuous that at the turn of the 19th century, when German nationalism arose in reply to Napoleon’s destruction and occupation of the Holy Roman Empire, the variety replaced Swiss German as an official language in Switzerland. Saxony, popularly referred to as ‘German Attica and Tuscany,’ truly became the cradle of standard German. The kingdom’s special role for German language and culture continued after 1815, when it lost half of its territory to Prussia as a reprisal for Saxony’s support for Napoleon. Between this date and 1871, when Prussia founded the German Empire, the German political, economic and cultural center shifted from the southern and central Germanophone polities to Prussia. Most Prussians, as well as the inhabitants of the north Germanophone polities, spoke local Low German dialects. The three-century-long tradition

84 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of German literacy in Upper Saxonian was established well enough that the political changes did not bring about the slightest attempt to resurrect the Low German chancery language of Low Saxonian as a standard German. Hence, Low German-speaking population used their local dialects at home and with friends, but they employed standard German in church and office. The Low German dialects being practically mutually unintelligible with standard German, Low German-speakers acquired standard German at school as if it were a foreign language. The resultant diglossia continues to this day in northern Germany. Unlike in the other areas of Central Europe, nowadays largely ‘cleansed’ of dialectal variance, local dialects remain in popular use along the standard language in the Germanophone polities. Prussia’s unreserved embrace of the fledgling Upper Saxonian standard of German, combined with the polity’s increasing political and economic might, and also the desire to harness this language in the service of German nationalism, made this state home to philological endeavor equal to that which continued in truncated Saxony. Other than Adelung’s, significant early multivolume dictionaries of German were published in Prussia or Prussia’s close allies, namely in Berlin (1793–1800), Braunschweig (1807–1811), Hannover (1818–1820), Magdeburg (1833–1849), Darmstadt (1834), and Frankfurt am Main (1834). But Saxony continued to lead the way with the second edition of Adelung’s dictionary (1793–1802) and further extensive lexicographic works printed in Halle (1793–1795) and Leipzig (1834, 1852–1861, 1860–1865). In addition, the publication of the definitive 33-volume Deutsches Wörterbuch, commenced by Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and his brother, Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), in Leipzig in 1854, was completed in 1971 in the very same city, then in communist East Germany. Having conceived this dictionary in 1838, they aspired to collect all words perceived as ‘German,’ from Luther to Goethe, as attested in extant publications and manuscripts. In the late 1850s, this inspired the compilation and publication of The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1884–1928, which the Oxford University Press later renamed as The Oxford English Dictionary), which pledged to gather all ‘English’ words from 1000 onward. But the employing of German, more attuned to the Upper German dialects and graphically differentiated from the Upper Saxonian standard by the use of a different version of the Gothic script, continued especially in Bavaria and Switzerland, though also in Austria-Hungary. In 1830, a significant two-volume dictionary of this Upper German variety was published in Munich. This divergence was limited with the political and economic ascendancy of Prussia, which defeated the Austrian Empire in 1866 and forged the German Empire in 1871. The actual standard of the German language was agreed upon only after the creation of this new empire. In 1879, Bavaria (a constituent of this empire) adopted a generally binding orthography and a year later Prussia officially espoused

Language in Central Europe

85

it too when Konrad Duden (1829–1911) enshrined this spelling system in his dictionary compiled ‘in accordance with the new Prussian and Bavarian rules.’ This event officially marked the rise of Binnendeutsch, or Common Standard German, and not surprisingly, Duden’s orthography became the spelling norm in force all over the empire. Since that time German orthography has undergone two major reforms, agreed upon by the representatives of the Germanophone states – in 1901 and the 1990s. The Duden Wörterbuch, whose new editions duly reflected these changes, however, still remains the guideline for all writing in German.20 In 1898, Theodor Siebs (1862–1941) worked out the pronunciation norm of the German language in his Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (German Stage Pronunciation, Berlin). As a convinced Prussian (though born in Bremen), he declared the Middle German pronunciation as the standard of German pronunciation. German linguists consider Siebs’s codification as a ‘North German’ (Norddeutsch) contribution to the standardization of German in order to include, though in an indirect manner, the suppressed tradition of Lower Saxonian. Lower Saxonian, though spoken by the majority of Prussia’s population, was so much disparaged that many more people spoke there in standard German than elsewhere in the German-speaking areas, where the retaining of local dialects for everyday communication was much higher. But Siebs’s ‘translation’ of the officially agreed upon standard of written German into the sphere of pronunciation did not hold much outside Prussia. To this day, pronunciation of standard German varies considerably in various regions of the Germanophone polities, strongly influenced by local dialects, which are usually used in colloquial speech (Umgangsprache). The cultural and social significance of some of these dialects is such that they serve as Kultursprachen, or ‘written culture languages’ that do not usually alter the user’s national identification bond with standard German and his or her nation-state. These varieties express the regional difference centered on a distinctive dialect of high local prestige. The most significant of the Kultursprachen include Swiss German, Bavarian (akin to the preceding), Alsatian (Elsässisch), and, less so, Low German (Plattdeutsch) in northern Germany. Fledgling Kultursprachen were also in use in East Prussia, Silesia, and the Sudetenland, but their development was cut short after the post-1945 expulsion of Germans from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (incorporated into Poland and the Soviet Union) and from Czechoslovakia. The diglossic presence of dialects alongside standard German maintained difference in the use of the written standard in Germanophone states. The resultant varieties (Varietäten, Varianten) employed in Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Namibia, and Switzerland, German scholars refer to as Außendeutsch, or ‘outside (foreign) German.’ However, authoritative dictionaries were published only in Austria and Switzerland with the goal of codifying the two states’ written varieties of German as slightly different from the Binnendeutsch employed in Germany. Traditionally, such

86 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

dictionaries have had some influence on the use of German in Bavaria. In addition, the political, ideological, and economic division of postwar Germany into West Germany and East Germany (1949–1990) produced many lexical differences, giving rise to the concepts of ‘West German’ and ‘East German.’ The latter variety, duly recorded in specialist dictionaries, disappeared following the collapse of communism and West Germany’s wholesale absorption of East Germany. Last but not least, it is interesting to note how politics and history influenced the stance of German as a lingua franca in Central Europe and in the world. The economic, scientific, and cultural success, and the soaring international prestige of the German Empire was such that in the 1900s German surpassed French as an international language of scholarly periodicals. In addition, between 1909 and 1925, more monographs in the field of natural sciences were published in German than in any other language, including English. The dismantling of the German colonial empire after the Great War entailed that the use of German as an official language was once again limited to Europe, with a partial exception of South West Africa (Namibia). World War II demoted German and French as international languages of scientific communication to the second league. English won this competition hands down, because the English-speaking states of the United States and the United Kingdom, alongside the Soviet Union, contributed most strongly to the victory of the Allies in this war. The Kremlin’s participation in the success translated into the growing significance of Russian as an international language of science. This language’s ascendancy was over after the fall of the Soviet bloc (1989) and the breakup of the Soviet Union (1991). In the 1990s, more than 90 percent of natural sciences monographs were published in English, and 75 percent of all scientific periodicals employed this language (Buchdruckerkunst 1888: 550, 556–557; Burke 2004: x–xiii, 146; Deutsche Sprache 1889: 788–789; Drukarstwo 1983; Fac 1994: 45; Gil 2005: 78, 264; Hoˇrec 2003: 32–33; Janich and Greule 2002: 37–38; Kloss 1978: 90–145; König 2005: 92–93, 102–103, 132; Langevelde 1999; List 1993; Magocsi 2002: 54–56; McArthur 1992: 438, 736, 757; Moszynski ´ 2006: 51, 124–126; Nabert 1994: map; Price 1998: 130–134, 179–182, 199–200, 203, 257, 312–313; Richter 2003; Schiewe 1998: 66–149; Shmeruk 1992: 18; Stevenson 1997: 66; Szulc 1999: 63–74, 81–84, 89, 94–95, 202–203, 229; Tornow 2005: 294–295; Viereck et al. ˙ 2002: 244; Zelazny 2000: 247, 262–263, 266–267).

Latin: From lingua franca to ‘dead language’ After sketching the rise and codification of German as the first written vernacular to arise in Central Europe, it is necessary to have a look at the first ever widespread and long-lasting written language of this region, Latin. It was in administrative and official use from the time when the first Central European

Language in Central Europe

87

polities adopted Christianity from Rome (880s–1000s) to the eventual replacement of Latin with local written vernaculars (1780s–1840s). Obviously, some vestiges of Christianity as established in antiquity on the Roman territories south of the Danube (present-day Austria and western Hungary) survived into the early Middle Ages. However, in the 560s, Slavs and Turkic Avars seized control of the region, which effectively demoted Christianity from the position of state religion. Until Central Europe found itself firmly placed under the control of or in the sphere of influence of the Frankish Empire, it had been a transitory region between this polity and the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, who Christianized Greater Moravia beginning in the 860s, also sought Rome’s approval for their activities. This allowed for lessening the linguistic-cum-political tension, which had unfolded between the Church of Rome and Byzantium since the 7th and 8th centuries. The two missionaries walked the middle path of compromise and, instead of choosing either Greek or Latin, so strongly politicized, they settled for elevating the Slavic vernacular into a written language endowed with a brand new script, Glagolitic. This compromise was over upon the death of Methodius in 885, when his and Cyril’s disciples were expelled from Greater Moravia and fled for safety to Bulgaria. In this manner, Church Slavonic literacy became established in the Slavophone areas of the Balkans. Shortly afterward, Glagolitic was replaced with Cyrillic, which was more similar to the Greek alphabet. Most of the Balkans was in Byzantium’s sphere of influence; hence, Church Slavonic Christianity and Cyrillic-based literacy became unambiguously part of Byzantine Christianity, conceptualized as ‘Orthodoxy’ after the Great Schism of 1054, and ideologically opposed to Latin-based ‘Catholicism’ in Western and Central Europe. The influence of Byzantine Christianity in Kievan Rus dated back to the 860s, but only in the 950s, it became socially and politically influential, clothed in the garb of Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic before it became the state religion in 988. The victory of Rome’s Latin Christianity in Greater Moravia was short-lived, since Magyar invaders destroyed this polity between the mid-890s and 906. Meanwhile, the northwestern reaches of former Greater Moravia, that is, later Bohemia and Moravia, found themselves under the influence of the East Frankish Kingdom. As a result, the continuity of Christianity as the state religion was preserved in this region. The mostly non-Christian Slavic territories and polities between the Oder (Odra in Czech and Polish) and the Elbe, and in today’s Austria, were incorporated into this Kingdom (and, later its successor, the Holy Roman Empire) between the 920s and 1010s, which entailed the imposition of Latin Christianity as well. The Magyars’ westward expansion was checked at the battle of Lechfeld (near Augsburg, 955), when the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I the Great (reigned 936–973), defeated them. From that time onward, Hungary found itself under the influence of the Holy Roman Empire and strove to expand at the cost of Byzantium in the Balkans. Although Hungarian rulers initially

88 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

issued a handful of documents in Greek, Latin Christianity had gained much social and political significance since the 970s and became the state religion in 1000 or 1001. Latin won again. In the Polanian state (future Poland), Latin Christianity was adopted as the state religion in 966 from Bohemia in order to emphasize the former polity’s desire to maintain its independence from the Holy Roman Empire. Since the early 10th century, Bohemian rulers had managed, time and again, to win a modicum of independence from East Frankish kings before they settled for the autonomous status of their state within the Holy Roman Empire. It was the Teutonic Order, which between 1226 and 1400, in the course of an ongoing crusade, introduced Latin Christianity along the southeastern Baltic littoral from Danzig (Gdansk) ´ to present-day Estonia. Meanwhile, in 1385, Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania formed a union, which meant the adoption of Latin Christianity by non-Christian Lithuanian-speakers in the north of this Duchy and making it the state religion of Poland-Lithuania. In the rest of the extensive Grand Duchy of Lithuania, mostly composed from erstwhile Kievan Rus territories, Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic Orthodoxy continued to predominate. It was also true of Kievan Rus areas seized by Poland in the mid-14th century. Orthodox Christianity, complete with Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic literacy, also dominated in the northeasternmost corner of Hungary (today, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia), where the cultural and political influence of Kievan Rus preserved the tradition of Greater Moravia’s Slavonic Christianity. In Walachia and Moldavia, which emerged as separate polities at the turn of the 15th century, Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic Orthodoxy was adopted to emphasize their political and cultural independence or separateness vis-à-vis Catholic Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. This example was emulated by Walachian-speakers in Hungary’s Transylvania. Following the defeat of the Hungarian forces at the battle of Mohács (1526), the Ottomans seized most of Hungary. Ottoman (Old Turkish) replaced Latin as the official language of the state administration in central Hungary, though Latin continued to be used for administrative purposes in the Ottomans’ autonomous Transylvania, though Magyar replaced it gradually in this role. At the same time, the Reformation, instigated in Wittenberg by Martin Luther’s 95 theses in 1517, spread in the center and east of the Holy Roman Empire, in Scandinavia, the former Teutonic Order’s land, incorporated into Poland-Lithuania (partly as a fief) and into Sweden, and in Transylvania. Strong Protestant influences also permeated the rest of partitioned Hungary, and Poland-Lithuania. Following the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, the extent of homogenously Protestant territories in Central Europe was limited to the northern half of the empire and the Baltic littoral. Lutheranism and Calvinism survived alongside Catholicism and Orthodoxy in Transylvania, Catholicism and Islam in Ottoman Hungary, and Catholicism in Royal Hungary. In the

Language in Central Europe

89

homogenously Protestant areas, local written vernaculars supplanted Latin in secular and ecclesiastical administration, and liturgy, though it remained there a significant language of scholarship and education until the mid-19th century. In Poland-Lithuania and Hungary, the thrust of the Counter-Reformation was not aimed against Protestants alone. The desire was to make the polities homogenously Catholic. In 1596, the Uniate Church was established for Poland-Lithuania’s Orthodox population, which entailed the temporary suppression of these hierarchs and the faithful, who chose to remain Orthodox. The Habsburgs followed this example in the wake of their successful reconquest of most of Hungary from the Ottoman hands, which was completed by the turn of the 18th century. New Uniate Churches were established in northeastern Hungary (1646) and Transylvania (1700). In this manner, Latin (and sometimes Greek) replaced Church Slavonic as the language of ecclesiastical administration in the eastern half of Poland-Lithuania and in northeastern Hungary; and Church Slavonic and Cyrillic-based Walachian in Transylvania. This cultural and ecclesiastical eastward spread of Latin allowed for abolishing Cyrillic-based Ruthenian as an official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1697. In the course of the Counter-Reformation, the Society of Jesus (founded in 1540) created a dense network of elementary and secondary schools complete with university-level colleges. They catered to noble and burgher sons in Central Europe, which fortified the everyday use of Latin as the elite language of written and oral communication, because this language was the medium of education in this Jesuit educational system. The success of this system was such that Orthodox hierarchs had to acquire Latin despite seeing it and its alphabet as a ‘language of the devil.’ Three years after the proclamation of the Russian Empire, when the Russian Academy of Sciences was founded in St Petersburg in 1724, the dispute broke out as to whether its proceedings should be published in not yet standardized Russian (that is, Grazhdanka-based Muscovian Church Slavonic vernacularized by the strong influence of Ruthenian and the Moscow vernacular) or German. Latin turned out to be the only possible compromise solution. Although the Jesuit educational system combined with various political measures contained the spread of Protestantism, it could not revert the steady increase in the use of vernacular languages at the expense of Latin. Luther still wrote as many as 60 percent of his letters in Latin, not German. (Incidentally, he inspired and encouraged the Latin translation of the Koran, which was published in Basle in 1543.) In the 1520s, 90 percent of all printed book titles were in Latin. This percentage sank to 70 percent half a century later, but it took much longer before half the book titles were published in Latin and half in German in the Holy Roman Empire beginning in the 1680s. (The switch from Latin to vernacular was quicker in France, where in 1501, 10 percent of book titles produced in this kingdom were in French, 20 percent in 1549, and already 55 percent in

90 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

1575.) This process of transition to vernaculars in book production was slow in Poland-Lithuania and even slower in Hungary. The 1773 dissolution of the Order of Jesus marked the beginning of the end of the dominance of Latin in Central Europe as the language of politics, administration, education, and scholarship. In that year, Polish was made into the sole language of the educational system in Poland-Lithuania and the last vestiges of Latin were removed from official use in this polity by the early 1790s. In 1784, German replaced Latin as the official language of the Habsburg lands, but beginning in the early 1790s, this reform was limited to the Holy Roman Empire. In Hungary, Latin remained the main official language alongside Magyar and German, which first reasserted their significance in towns and komitats.21 Finally, Magyar replaced Latin as Hungary’s official language in 1844. However, soon the Magyar War of Independence (1848–1849) nullified this achievement, meaning the replacement of Magyar with German and Latin. This situation remained largely unchanged until the founding of Austria-Hungary with Magyar in 1867 as the sole official language in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. During World War II, the Independent State of Croatia used Latin as a symbol of its fundamental difference vis-à-vis the Cyrillic-based literacy of the Serbs, who had dominated interwar Yugoslavia. For instance, the title of a monumental (though never completed) Hrvatska enciklopedija/Encyclopaedia Croatica (Croatian Encyclopedia, 1941–1945, Zagreb) was given in Croatian and Latin. Obviously, in Central Europe, as elsewhere in the world, Latin remained the language of Catholic liturgy until the turn of the 1970s. The replacement of Latin as an, or even the, official language in Central Europe’s polities between the mid-18th century and the 1860s by local written vernaculars was accompanied by the ascendancy of French as the language of international communication, polite discourse, and increasingly of scholarship and science. French superseded Latin as the sole official language of France between 1490 and 1539. Following the Norman conquest in 1066, Norman French supplanted Latin as the official language in England during the 13th century. After England lost most of its territorial possessions in France in the 15th century, the turn of the following century was marked by the supplanting of both French and Latin, with English. However, French remained the language of law courts in England as late as 1733. The territorial shrinking of the increasingly impotent Holy Roman Empire, especially visible after the treaty of Westphalia (1648); the continued political fragmentation of the Apennine Peninsula; and the waning of the Spanish Empire (rounded up with the loss of most of its American colonies in the 1810s and 1820s) translated into the political and cultural dominance of France in Western and Central Europe. In the first era of globalization during the 19th century, the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815 did not hinder the transformation of French into the worldwide language of diplomacy, scholarship and science. This shift from

Language in Central Europe

91

Latin to French among Central Europe’s elites was facilitated by the Romance commonality of both languages. In the second half of the 19th century, German successfully rivaled French in its role of the language of international and scientific communication in Central Europe. This elevated status of French and German was over after World War II. Russian was imposed on the unwilling population in East Central Europe (the Soviet bloc), while English gained a similar position in the western half of the region, like elsewhere in Western Europe. The Iron Curtain separated the Cold War spheres of political, military and economic influence of the Soviet Union and the United States, complete with Russian and English, respectively, as the preferred media of international communication. Following the fall of communism (1989), the breakup of the Soviet Union (1991) and the acceptance of eight postcommunist states into the European Union (2004) effectively broadened the sphere of the use of English in its function of international language to the western borders of Russia and Belarus. In Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the post-Soviet Caucasus, and much of post-Soviet Central Asia, both English and Russian function as languages of international communication. ∗

∗

∗

The name of Latin stems from Latium (literally, the ‘land of the Latini,’ an Italic ethnic group), or the region, which in antiquity extended around Rome, and today, constitutes the southern half of the Italian region of Lazio. In turn, ‘Lazio’ is the contemporary Italian rendering of ‘Latium.’ Initially, Latin was the vernacular of Rome and its vicinity. It was closely related to other Italic languages (dialects), Aequian, Faliscan, Marrucinian, Marsian, Oscan, Paelignian, Picenian, Sabine, Samnitic, Umbrian, Vestinian, and Volscian. None of them is known from more than a handful of inscriptions. Rome dominated the central section of the Apennine Peninsula before established traditions of literacy in these languages could have developed and spread. In the 7th century BCE, the alphabet was brought to Sicily and the south of the Apennine Peninsula by Greek colonists. The non-Indo-European Etruscans adopted this so-called ‘Western Greek script’ for writing in their own language, and, in turn, Italic peoples emulated this example. The Latin form of this alphabet is attested from the 5th century BCE onward. It is difficult to clearly distinguish earlier forms of the Latin script from similar alphabets employed for writing in other Italic languages. All of them were rather alike. As in other Italic languages, Latin was initially written from left to right or in the boustrophedon (literally, ‘as an ox ploughs’) fashion, that is, lines were written alternatingly left to right and right to left. But by the 5th century, the left-to-right norm had been established and is followed in all languages, which employ the Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts for writing. The other, right-to-left direction is employed, for instance, by languages written in the Arabic and Hebrew scripts.

92 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Latin script’s capitals, used for an increasing number of epigraphic inscriptions on monuments and stone plaques, reached their present form by the 1st century BCE. Cursive forms of this alphabet developed for everyday and literary use. By the 5th century BCE, a new kind of cursive, known as ‘uncial,’ had emerged as a formal book-hand. It spawned various local scripts employed in Western Europe after the disappearance of the Roman Empire; one of them, the specific Irish alphabet survived until 1965. Carolingian minuscule, derived from this late Roman uncial, became the basis of modern lower-case letters, but also influenced the rise of the Gothic script (which was used for writing numerous languages in Central Europe and German for the longest time, until 1941) and also the Irish (Gaelic, Celtic) alphabet. Records of Latin were very sparse before the end of the 3rd century BCE. Beginning in this century, the tradition of Latin literature commenced with translations and emulations of Greek literary works. By 200 BCE, the Roman Republic had conquered almost the entire Apennine Peninsula, the eastern and southern coast of Iberia, and the southeastern coast of the Adriatic (modern Albania). Seventy years later, Roman rule extended over nearly the whole of Iberia, parts of southern Gaul, Dalmatia, the south of the Balkans (presentday Greece), western Asia Minor, and the Province of Africa (today, Tunisia). When the republic was transformed into the Roman Empire in 27 BCE, the polity had already absorbed entire Gaul, most of the northern Balkans, central Asia Minor, and most of the Asian and African littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, from Syria to present-day Algeria. The rapid territorial expansion of Rome required efficient administration. This practical requirement contributed to the progressive standardization of Latin as the main medium of this administration in the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE. Latin orthography was standardized rather late, around 20 BCE. Archaisms were preserved or even revived in legal and religious texts, while the bilingualism of the Roman elite in Greek and Latin translated into the adoption of numerous Greek linguistic loans. The historic writings of Sallust (86–35 BCE) and Livy (59 BCE–17 CE) along with the poetry of Virgil (70 BCE–19 CE) and Horace (65–8 BCE) constituted the corpus of the ‘classics’ or the norm of correctness to which the later generations of Latin writers aspired. This norm enforced by the educational system, administration, military, and merchants preserved unity of standard Latin as long as the Roman Empire remained a coherent political unit. The attraction of the empire was such that the inhabitants of its western half acquired Latin as a lingua franca and soon it became their first language. In its eastern section, the empire ensured a parallel ascendancy of Greek. The political disorder of the 3rd century caused a temporary decline in Roman education and literary output. The gap between the classical norm of standard Latin, already 300 years old, and the spoken

Language in Central Europe

93

language deepened. Regional differences in the vernacular developed too. Thereafter, Christian and non-Christian authors sought to reassert classical Latin as the written standard, though the former preferred to make it a bit closer to spoken usage in the interest of more efficient evangelization. Despite the cultural significance of Greek, Latin remained an official language of Byzantium until the 6th century. After the termination of the Western Roman Empire (476), written Latin was best preserved in the most thoroughly Latinized areas of Italia, Iberia, Gaul, and Dalmatia. Pope St Damasus (366–384) probably commissioned St Jerome (342–420) to check and edit existing Latin translations of the Bible into Latin. In the process, the latter produced the Vulgate, which became the standard translation of the Bible employed in the Western Christian Church. With no political organization effectively uniting Western Europe, this Church ensured the linguistic and cultural unity of the region. The correctness of Latin as the written language of Western Christianity was increasingly checked against the Vulgate (from Latin editio vulgata, or ‘popular, approved, widely accepted edition [of the Latin Bible]’) and not the ‘pagan’ classics. The last renowned Latin-language writer to compose works in Vulgate Latin was Gregory of Tours (538–594). He criticized the King of the Franks, Chilperic I (reigned 561–584), for introducing four new letters to ‘our [Latin] alphabet,’ intended to represent Germanic sounds better, and for ordering existing manuscripts to be corrected with the use of these novel characters. [æ] and [w] survive to this day, and graphically mark the transition from classical to medieval Latin. The 5th- and 6th-century fragmentation of the patrimony of the Western Roman Empire was followed in the 7th century by the rapid expansion of Islam in the Middle East and Northern Africa, which limited Byzantium to the Balkans and Asia Minor. This entailed the replacement of Greek and Latin with Arabic as the official language in these regions. During the second and third decades of the 8th century, almost entire Iberia and the southwestern corner of Gaul were incorporated into the Caliphate. This separated one-third of the Latin-speaking areas from the world of Western Christianity and demoted Latin in the region to a language of a non-dominant religion. As a result of these events, the cultivation of Latin learning and scholarship was limited to a handful of monasteries, while, on the other hand, regional differences between Latin-speaking regions widened. In turn, these increasingly distinctive Latin dialects tended to influence the use of standard Latin, producing ‘vulgar Latin,’ that is, heavily vernacularized written Latin. This dialectal interference was avoided in Ireland whose Celtic vernacular was so much distant from Latin that Irish priests and monks had to learn Latin by the book. In this manner, standard Latin was best preserved in Ireland, which was Christianized between the mid-5th and mid-6th centuries. Meanwhile, non-Christian Germanic ethnic groups of Angles, Jutes, and Saxons invaded

94 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

England and largely terminated there the post-Roman tradition of Latin learning and speaking in this language. Irish monks alongside missionaries from the Apennine Peninsula re-Christianized England at the turn of the 7th century. Likewise, in the 8th century, the re-Christianization was furthered in the Germanic-speaking territories, which would later coincide with the Holy Roman Empire. Learned non-Romance-speaking Irish, English, and Germanic (Teutonic) monks spearheaded the revival of Vulgate-based standard Latin (lingua latina) vis-à-vis vernacular (vulgar) Latin, which came to be known as lingua romana (‘Roman language’), rustica romana lingua (‘rural Roman language’), or romancium circa latinum (‘Roman close to Latin’) beginning in the 8th century. Only non-Romance-speakers were not influenced by these non-standard Romance (Latin) dialects, which made it easier for them to use standard Latin as a second language, unlike in the case of Romance-speakers who could not prevent their everyday speech from coloring their use of Latin. The founding of Charlemagne’s (reigned 768–814) Frankish Empire (800), which was comprised of the majority of the Romance- (vulgar Latin-) speaking territories under control of Christian suzerains, accelerated the revival of standard Latin. This empire’s elite saw this polity as the direct continuation of the Western Roman Empire. This claim could not be successfully substantiated without the tradition of Latin literacy and the ongoing use of standard Latin vis-à-vis Greek-speaking Byzantium or the Eastern Roman Empire. Hoping for the re-establishment of Latin as the universal language of Western Christianity, Charlemagne employed the English monk, Alcuin (Ealhwine, Albinus) of York (735–804) in 781, to educate the royal family and the court. In 796, he settled at Tours as abbot, and the school there became one of the most important centers of learning in the empire. Beginning in 789, Alcuin effectively standardized Latin anew with his works on grammar and his copious writings in Latin. Thanks to Charlemagne’s unwavering support, this new standard, popularly known as ‘Medieval (Carolingian) Latin,’ became the universal written language of Western Christianity, and was also employed for oral communication by nobles and clergy. The success was so resounding that already in the 820s, the belief emerged that Latin was the ultimate sacred language. It was claimed that the Latin text of the Bible had been written under the inspiration and dictation of the Holy Ghost, who accorded it supreme authority even as to matters of grammar. On the other hand, this new standardization deepened the gulf of difference between the Romance vernaculars and Latin, making the latter into a language with no native-speakers, let alone for a handful of rulers and scholars raised by their parents to speak Latin since their early childhood. During the Renaissance, the humanists saw many elements of Alcuin’s codification as ‘corruption,’ and sought to reassert the classical form of Latin as established at the turn of the 1st century CE. Dante Alghieri (1265–1320),

Language in Central Europe

95

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374), and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), popularly seen as the ‘fathers of the Italian language,’ themselves valued their Latin writings more than rerum vulgarium fragmenta (bits of stuff in the vulgar tongue). Their popularity as writers, combined with their opinion that eternal fame could come only from works composed in the ‘eternal language of the Romans,’ led much authority to the humanist project of renewing Latin. This movement, intellectually led by the examples of the non-Romance-speakers, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) and Thomas More (1478–1538), produced the new standard of humanist Latin, often termed ‘Neo-Latin.’ The first project of the Neo-Latinists, to translate the surviving Greek texts into Latin was completed between the 14th and 16th centuries. The most accomplished poet, writing in the new standard, was a Polish-speaking Polish-Lithuanian noble clergyman, Sarbievus (Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, 1595–1640), whose poetry earned him the sobriquet of ‘Christian Horace.’ Even when increasingly more books were written and published in vernaculars, most scientific, philosophical, and theological literature (along with popular belles-lettres and works dealing with political science, economics, history, biography, or memoirs) were swiftly translated into Latin, especially from English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish, between 1370 and 1830. Beginning in the 16th century, the hub of this lively and profitable publishing and translation industry was located in the Low Countries. While Neo-Latin won the hearts of secular users in the 15th century, the Catholic Church stuck to Medieval Latin, before Neo-Latin entered ecclesiastical use as an element of the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century. The clear sign of which Latin a writer preferred was script. The first printed Western book was Gutenberg’s Latin Bible (1455) produced in Gothic letters, which evolved from the Carolingian minuscule. Ten years later, in the Apennine Peninsula, Latin publications were composed with the use of Antiqua, modeled on the Latin alphabet as written in classical Rome. Although books in most vernaculars continued to be printed in the Gothic script, Antiqua has already become the standard script for Latin-language publications in the mid-16th century. In education, the shift from Medieval Latin to Neo-Latin was visible in the use of textbooks. Students perused Donatus’s (flourished in the 4th century) Latin grammar, popularly dubbed ‘Donat’ until the 16th century. In their schools, Jesuits replaced it with Emmanuel Alvarez’s classicizing Latin grammar for the first time published in Lisbon in 1572. Like ‘Donat’ earlier, this grammar became known as ‘Alvar.’ Neo-Latin won in writing, but Medieval Latin, which allowed for various linguistic loans from vernaculars, mostly remained a popular language of oral communication across Western and Central Europe. Beginning in the 16th century, along their Donats or Alvars, students used Ambrogio Calepino’s (1440–1510) monolingual dictionary of Latin, Cornucopiæ, published in 1502 in Reggio. This work codified the lexicon of Medieval Latin

96 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and Neo-Latin and became a household name as ‘Calepinus.’ In subsequent editions, this dictionary was paired with numerous vernacular languages and the lexical standards of Neo-Latin gradually replaced those of Medieval Latin in this dictionary. Jacopo Facciolati (1682–1769) and his student, Egidio Forcellini (1688–1768), produced the most famous seven-language version of Calepinus (Pavia, 1718), which was frequently reprinted. Charles Dufresne Du Cange (1610–1688) compiled the authoritative monolingual dictionary of Medieval and Neo-Latin, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, which was published in three volumes in Paris (1678). Further editions followed, the fourth was broadened to eight volumes (Paris, 1840–1850), and the definitive fifth one to ten volumes (Niort, 1883–1887). Du Cange still treated Latin as a means of everyday communication among the educated and elites, unlike Facciolati and Forcellini. They saw Latin to be a closed chapter and conceived of collecting all Latin words as attested in extant books and inscriptions. In the four volumes of Totius Latinitatis Lexicon (The Entire Lexicon of Latin, 1771, Padua), the fruit of their labor, they provided copious citations illustrating different meanings along with Italian and Greek equivalents. This scholarly dictionary, not that of Du Cange, provided the basis for all modern bilingual dictionaries of Latin. Following the division of the Carolingian Empire in 843, there was no single polity that could enforce the use of a single medieval standard of Latin throughout most of the Western Christian world. Byzantium fulfilled such a role for Greek until 1543, and later, the Orthodox millet within the Ottoman Empire. Hence, even though modern Greek is as different from Byzantine Greek as the Romance languages from Latin, the singularity of the Greek language was preserved through political means. Classical Greek, as codified in Athens in the 5th century BCE, Byzantine Greek of the Eastern Roman Empire, classicizing Katharévousa (‘purifying language’) Greek of the 19th century and the present-day vernacular Greek (Demotic, Dhimotiki, literally, ‘language of the common people’) differ widely from one another, but they have been invariably conceptualized as a single language. The splitting of the Romance- (vernacular Latin-)speaking area into France, a plethora of Italian statelets, Spain, and Portugal produced the stimulus for elevating local vernaculars to the status of written languages alongside prestigious Latin, which was increasingly less intelligible to Romance-speakers. The awareness of the difference between standard Latin and Romance vernaculars (vulgar Latin) grew during the 8th to 10th centuries and gave way to writing in French, Italian (Tuscanian), Spanish (Castilian), and Portuguese in the 11th and 12th centuries. The early flourishing of literature in these languages occurred during the 13th century. Between the 14th and 15th centuries, they were widely used in administration and largely replaced Latin as the official language in the 16th century. The first printed book in Italian came off the press in 1471, in French in 1476, in Spanish in 1483 and in Portuguese in 148922 . The Romance language of Romanian is the product of an

Language in Central Europe

97

interaction between Romance-speakers from Byzantium’s northern periphery, Byzantine Greek, Church Slavonic Orthodoxy, and corresponding literacies, which makes this language very different from other Romance languages. In spite of that, Cyrillic-based Walachian (Romanian) became an official language of Walachia and Moldavia at the end of the 16th century (the first printed book in Romanian was published in 1544), though Church Slavonic (and beginning in the early 18th century, also Greek) dominated in liturgy and ecclesiastical administration until the 1820s. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Latin was pushed away from official use by ascending vernaculars (Romance and other) in Western Europe. A similar, though belated, phenomenon unfolded in the Holy Roman Empire and PolandLithuania in the 18th century. Still more books in Latin were published in this region by the mid-18th century than in local written languages. And Latin continued to dominate in the politics and administration of the Kingdom of Hungary until the mid-19th century. All these aforementioned vernaculars later made into standard languages in Western and Central Europe began as local color verbatim quotations in Latin texts and textbook-like props and glossaries to make acquisition of Latin in schools easier. The first vernacular texts were usually translations from Latin, the first grammars of the vernaculars were written in Latin, and in the first dictionaries of these vernaculars were invariably paired with Latin. In 1809–1810, a reform of the educational system in Prussia came complete with the classical secondary school. Students were taught ten hours of Latin and six hours of classical Greek a week. As in the case of the Jesuit educational system, such secondary schools produced graduates able to freely converse in Latin. This model of ‘classical gymnasium’ spread to western German-speaking states, the Austrian Empire, and Russia. But in the second half of the 19th century, Central European universities ceased to insist that students submit their theses in Latin. Those times when René Descartes (1596–1650) or Isaac Newton (1642–1727), for the sake of precision and Europe-wide communication, felt compelled to write their scholarly treatises in Latin were definitively over. In the interwar period, Latin and Greek were demoted in schools to the status of subjects with the goal of providing one with a mere passive knowledge of both. After World War II, Greek was altogether dropped from the general curriculum, while the teaching of Latin was limited to legal practitioners, medical doctors, and biologists who employ elements of this language for their specialized needs. Until the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Latin had remained the language of Catholic liturgy and, to a significant degree, the language of the higher echelons of the administration in the Catholic Church. At the turn of the 1970s, local vernaculars replaced Latin in both functions. Latin is still the official language of the Vatican and the Church’s most important documents and texts (including papal encyclicals) are published in this language. However, Italian

98 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

nowadays fulfills the role of the actual vernacular of the Vatican’s administration and inhabitants. (The pope’s Swiss Guards actually communicate in German.) Enthusiasts of Latin can enjoy weekly five-minute Latin-language radio news broadcast from Finland since 1989 and Latin translations of the famous French comic book series, Asterix. In order to avert the decline of Latin as a language of administration and everyday education, Pope Paul VI (1963–1978) established the Latinitas Foundation in 1976. Its mission is to promote the study of classical and medieval Latin and, significantly, to promote the increased use of the Latin language by publishing texts in Latin and other suitable means (usually, radio broadcasts). In 1992 and 1997, this foundation published the two volumes of Lexicon recentis Latinitatis (Dictionary of Recent Latin, Vatican), which records new Latin words as mainly coined by the members of this foundation for describing the realities of the modern world. They meet each week to deliberate on new Latin words. Within this limited scope, Latin continues as a ‘semi-living language’ in the Vatican, meaning its predominantly male speech community whose members usually acquire this language in adulthood. Since the times of Alcuin’s codification of Latin that definitively dissociated this language from any language community, which could be defined as Latin’s native speakers, there was no way to know how exactly Latin words were pronounced, let alone in classical Rome. Users of Latin usually reconstructed this pronunciation on the basis of their native vernaculars. Today, the most popular reconstruction is that based on Italian, which in pronunciation seems to be closest to Latin. In the past, Central European students usually deepened their command of Latin at universities in the Apennine Peninsula, which added to the current popularity of this pronunciation. The most curious version of Latin pronunciation emerged in England in the wake of the so-called ‘great vowel shift’ in English, which almost completely detached English spelling from pronunciation between the 15th and 17th centuries. Unreflectively, this change was transposed on how English-speakers pronounced Latin, making them virtually unintelligible to Latin-language interlocutors from elsewhere in Europe. For instance, Caesar’s (100–44 BCE) Veni, vidi, vici sounds /veni, vidi, vichi/ in the Italianate pronunciation became /vee-neigh, vie-die, vie-sigh/ in a less radical Anglicized pronunciation and /way-knee, we-dee, we-key/ in a more radical one (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 770; Banniard 1995: 111–117; Burke 2004: x–xi; Egger 1992–1997; Grafton 2006; Grant 1954; Hankins 2001; Hrvatska Enciklopedija 1941; Jähnig and Biewer 1991: 22–23; König 2005: 99–100; Kontler 1999: 50–54; Kósa 1999: 50; Latin Today 2003; Leisering 2004: 57; Magocsi 1996: 71–72; 2002: 8, 12–13, 18–19, 21, 47, 53, 63, 65; Mikołajczak 1998: 153, 190, 254–255, 263; Mojdl 2005: 109–110; Poccetti et al. 2005: 9–242; Pop 2005b: 36–38; Price 1998: 175, 251, 256–257, 286–293; Rada et al. 1995: 31–39; Richter 1982: 436; Rogers

Language in Central Europe

99

2005: 172–176; Schlösser 2005: 43; Schneider 1998: 9–10; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 2253; Staunton 2005: 94; Wolff 2003: 68, 92, 112, 131, 133, 140). ∗

∗

∗

The rise of chancery German(s) (in emulation of Latin) as the first written vernacular in Central Europe furnished a model that, along with those of French and Italian from Western Europe, was quickly emulated. Czech and Polish became full-fledged chancery languages of politics and administration in the 14th and 16th centuries, respectively. The continuous tradition of writing in the Czech language commenced at the beginning of the 14th century. During the reign of Charles I (that is, Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV), texts, not only religious and didactic but also scholarly, were written in this language. And beginning in the last quarter of the 14th century, legal and administrative documents were issued in Czech. Not surprisingly, written Czech, being so closely connected to the royal and imperial court, grew from the central Bohemian dialect of Prague.

The Czech language The earliest texts with strong Czech influences were committed to paper in Glagolitic letters during the 9th century. Glagolitic literacy soon was limited to Croatia, but its elements survived in Bulgaria through the 12th century, and from the mid-14th-century Croatian monks revived this tradition at the Emmaus monastery near Prague. Initially, they wrote in Old Church Slavonic but soon switched to vernacular Czech. By 1416, the monks had even completed a full translation of the Bible into Czech, written in Glagolitic letters. However, the prevailing standard was to write in the Latin script. The problem was how to reflect Czech sounds with Roman letters that had been originally devised for the Latin language so different from Slavic. Chancery German, which had battled with this problem in the 12th and 13th centuries, provided Czechlanguage writers with a method of dealing with this predicament. Groups of two to four letters (digraphs, trigraphs, or multigraphs) were employed to represent sounds, which did not occur in Latin. For instance, German [sch] and [tsch] correspond to the sounds (phonemes) /sh/ and /ch/. Similarly, Czech phonemes written today as [ˇc], [š], and [ˇr] were originally represented with [cz], [ss], and [rz]. Usually no trigraphs or multigraphs were used to represent Czech sounds. During the Hussite Wars, this kind of writing with the use of digraphs became associated with Catholicism. The Catholic establishment of the Holy Roman Empire attacked the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus (1370–1415) on many counts, including his support for singing hymns and conducting some elements of liturgy in vernacular Czech rather than in Latin, which he did in the Bethlehem

100 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Chapel (Betlémská kaple), Prague. To this day, this chapel is associated with the beginnings of Hussitism. Hus translated numerous hymns taken from the Vulgate, official Latin translation of the Bible, into the Czech vernacular spoken at that time in Prague. After he was burned at the stake as a heretic, his supporters, Hussites, espoused not only written Czech as the language of their liturgy and administration, but also Hus’s vision of new Czech orthography in a symbolic opposition to unreformed Catholicism. In his De orthographia bohemica (On the Czech Orthography, 1406), Hus opposed digraphs and argued that single letters should represent different sounds. He proposed to modify Latin characters with diacritics. So [ˇc], [š], and [ˇr] replaced [cz], [ss], and [rz], respectively, and the distinctive diacritical characters [á], [é], [í], [ó], and [ú] were introduced for representing long vowels. (Originally, Hus wrote them with the use of a dot above the letter, for example [e], ˙ a method borrowed from the Jewish practice of rendering the Slavic palatal consonants with Hebrew letters modified by diacritical dots.) At the end of the Hussite Wars in the 1430s, this system became the spelling norm, especially in the Hussite stronghold of Bohemia. In Moravia, which remained largely Catholic and free of Hussite influence after 1469, the use of digraphs continued, which erected the graphic boundary between the chancery varieties employed in Bohemia and Moravia. This gave rise to separate chancery Bohemian and Moravian, which persisted as separate languages until 1918, due to the growing administrative and political separation of Bohemia and Moravia. Apart from that, some digraphic exceptions remained in Hus’s usage. Notably to this day, German, Czech, Polish and Slovak share the digraph [ch] for denoting /palatal h/. In addition, in Czech and Slovak, this digraph follows letter [h] in the alphabetic order of dictionaries and encyclopedias (Auty 1980: 163–170; Moszynski ´ 2006: 31; Panzer 1999: 98; Porák 1979: 9–17; Siatkowska 1992: 87; Stankiewicz 1984: xiii). The first printshop in the Czech lands opened in Plzen, ˇ Bohemia (1468). Hus’s Czech translations of the New Testament appeared in 1475 and 13 years later, his full translation of the Bible. The first grammar of Czech (that is, chancery Bohemian), Gr¯amatyka Cžeská (Czech Grammar, 1533, Námˇešt’) by Beneš Optát (died in 1559), was based on the usual model of Latin grammar, but it was written in Czech, which emphasized the high status of this language vis-à-vis German and Latin. (This grammar even came off the press a year earlier than the first grammar of German written in German, Teütsche Grammatica [Augsburg] by Valentin Ickelsamer [1500–1537].) On the other hand, the first grammar of Czech written in Latin, Vavˇrinec Benedikti’s (Laurentius Benedicti, 1555– 1615) Grammaticae Bohemicae (Czech Grammar, Prague), was published only in 1603. The first printed dictionary of chancery Bohemian (in which it was paired with Latin) was published in 1511 in Plzen. ˇ Two years later, a Latin-GermanBohemian dictionary (Vienna) followed, and in 1531, a Latin-Italian-FrenchBohemian-German one (Nuremberg) was released. Further, Zikmund Hrubý

Language in Central Europe

101

(Sigmund Gelenius, 1495–1554) commenced Czech lexicography with his Greek-Latin-German-Bohemian Lexicon symphonum (The Symphonia of Words, 1537 and 1544, Basle). Interestingly, he still spoke of the ‘Slavic language’ (lingua sclavinica), not Czech or Bohemian. Matouš Benešovský (1550–1595) authored the first monolingual dictionary of Bohemian, Knjžka slow cžeských (The Book of the Czech Words, 1587, Prague). In 1598, in Prague, two extensive dictionaries, Nomenclator quadrilinguis (The Four-Language [Czech-Latin-Greek-German] Dictionary) and alphabetical Silva quadrilinguis [The Forest of Four Languages] were published, both authored by Danˇel (Daniel) Adam z Veleslavína (1546–1599). In his 1571 grammar of Czech (published in 1857 in Vienna), the Hussite Bishop Jan Blahoslav (Blažek) (1523–1571) reflected on the Slavic languages. He opined that there existed three Slavic dialects, Church Slavonic, Czech (Bohemian), and Polish. Blahoslav also remarked on the transitional dialect area between Czech (Bohemian) and Polish. He stated that in Moravia the language was closer to Czech and in Silesia to Polish. Between 1579 and 1594, the publication of the full Czech translation of the Bible from the original languages completed the codification of chancery Bohemian. The Unitas fratrum, or Jednota bratrská (Czech Brethren, stemming from the Hussites), printed this translation in Kralice in western Moravia. Hence, it is widely known as the ‘Kralice Bible.’ It was a late flowering of chancery Bohemian, which had been a truly international language in the 15th century. The spread of the use of chancery Czech in diplomatic correspondence was spurred by the monarchs from the PolishLithuanian dynasty of Jagiellonians. Between 1471 and 1526, they reigned in the lands of the Czech Crown and between 1490 and 1526, in the Kingdom of Hungary, which created a personal union between both polities. At that time, Polish was not yet widely employed for writing purposes, while Cyrillicbased Ruthenian (unambiguously associated with Orthodox Christianity) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not deemed appropriate for the administration of the Catholic Czech and Hungarian Crowns. Apart from Latin, the obvious choice was chancery Bohemian, whose prestige was such that many PolishLithuanian nobles preferred it to Polish until the mid-16th century. German had been a significant chancery language in the Holy Roman Empire since the 13th century, but in Hungary and Poland-Lithuania its use was limited to the self-governments of towns and cities populated by Germanic-speaking settlers from the empire. In addition, the Germanophone Habsburgs competed with the Jagiellonians for dynastic domination in the lands of the Czech Crown and Hungary. The initial victory of the Jagiellonians strengthened the position of chancery Bohemian as a language of diplomatic correspondence between the Czech Crown, Poland-Lithuania, and Hungary. Between 1346 and 1411, Czech kings also reigned as the Holy Roman Emperor, which added to the prestige of chancery Bohemian in the empire’s German-speaking areas. In the second half of the 14th century, Brandenburg and Bavaria’s Upper Palatinate were briefly

102 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

incorporated in the lands of the Czech Crown. Hence, Czech was employed in correspondence with Bavaria, Brandenburg, and Saxony. In the Battle of Mohács (1526), which opened Central Europe to Ottoman23 penetration, the last Jagiellonian King of the Czech Crown and Hungary, Louis, died. The Habsburgs, who had ruled as Emperors since 1438, gained the Czech and Hungarian thrones, too. This translated into the ascendancy of chancery German in diplomatic correspondence all over Central Europe. In 1527, the language was introduced into the administration of Bohemia. The resultant bilingual Bohemian-German administration of the lands of the Czech Crown became more German than Bohemian after the mid-16th century. The 1607 decision of the Moravian Snˇem (Diet) that children of domiciled (usually German-speaking) foreigners could inherit real estate only if they knew Bohemian was not observed. The growing tension between the emperor and the Protestant estates of the lands of the Czech Crown culminated in the Bohemian Snˇem (Diet) of 1615. Among other things, it was decided that Czech (Bohemian) should be the exclusive language of the body, with the exception of delegates from Silesia and Lusatia, who would be allowed to speak in German. The decision never took effect but, nevertheless, contributed to the growing politicization of language by associating Czech with Protestant nobility and burghers, and German with their Catholic counterparts. The violent standoff between the emperor and the Protestant estates of Bohemia and Moravia, which commenced in 1618, ended in the triumph of the imperial forces at the battle of White Mountain (1620, Bílá hora, today in Prague). The Catholic emperor’s victory entailed massive expulsions of Protestant Czech-speaking nobility, who were the main users and protectors of chancery Czech. This language reached the highest point of its development in the numerous polemical, theological, educational, and scholarly writings of the renowned Czech Protestant Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský, 1592–1670). In 1628, he, along with a group of Czech Brethren, escaped to Leszno in the Kingdom of Poland. He never returned to Bohemia and died in the Netherlands. For some time, he also resided in Upper Hungary (future Slovakia), where numerous Czech Protestant expellees settled down. They brought to this land chancery Czech whose correctness was checked against the usages employed in the Kralice Bible. This gave rise to the ‘Bible language,’ Bibliˇctina, which was preferred by Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Protestants (mainly Lutherans) to ‘Catholic’ Latin. (In the 19th century, the Protestant group also referred to this language as ‘Old Czech’ and ‘Old Slovak.’) On the other hand, in the first half of the 19th century, codifiers and promoters of modern Czech pictured Komenský as the ‘Czech Luther,’ whose writings made Czech into a full-fledged language equal to German and Latin. Obviously, this propagandistic sobriquet was a liability in Catholic Moravia and delayed the acceptance of standard Czech in this region. The Czech language did not immediately disappear from administrative and literary use after 1620, as popularly believed. The process of replacing it in the

Language in Central Europe

103

Slavophone lands of the Czech Crown (that is, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia) with Latin and German was gradual and never complete. The renewed organization (Verneuerte Landesverfassung) of Bohemia (1627) and Moravia (1628) put chancery German on equal footing with Czech as the official languages of both these lands. After this, German gradually replaced Czech in most important administrative functions. Written Czech (referred to as Bohemian and Moravian) survived in court minutes, guilds and local self-governments. The fusion of official German and vernacularized Czech resulted in the Slavic idiom heavily interlaced with Germanic lexical and syntactic loans. The Germanophone elites referred to it contemptuously as Küchelböhmisch (‘kitchen Czech’). However, in the mid-18th century, a few book titles were published in this kind of Czech, along with reprints of some religious publications written in 16th-century Czech, idealized as the language of the Kralice Bible. Nowadays, scholars tend to refer to the post-1620 Czech, employed in Counter-Reformation publications printed in Bohemia and Moravia, as ‘Jesuit Czech,’ because leaders and educators of the Society of Jesus spearheaded the re-Catholicization of Central Europe. After the abolishment of the Bohemian Chancellery in 1749, Czech disappeared from the central government institutions in Vienna (Auty 1980: 172; Heck and Orzechowski 1969: 132; Hoˇrec 2003: 54–56; Janich and Greule 2002: 303; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 30, 189; Kováˇc 1998: 67; Magocsi 2002: 54; Price 1998: 116; Rada et al. 1995: 229; Siatkowska 1992: 121; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 208). Some authors continued to write scholarly texts in Czech, and grammars for use in schools kept appearing. There were even opinions that the Czech language should be purified from foreign words and phrases, most strongly voiced by Václav Jan Rosa (1625–1675) in his Latin-language work, Cžechoˇreˇcnost, seu Grammatica linguae Bohemicae (The Grammar of the Bohemian Language, 1672, Prague) (Auty 1980: 172–173; Stankiwicz 1984: 5–6). This puristic streak in linguistic thinking appeared more strongly in Bohemia in the context of the attempts undertaken to cleanse the German language of Latin and French loanwords (Neustupný 1989). In the Holy Roman Empire, still one-third of all the book production was in Latin during the 1740s. In Vienna, Emperor Joseph I (reigned 1705–1711) and his court used Italian, emperors Charles VI (reigned 1711–1740) and Francis I (reigned 1745–1765) used Spanish, while French was commonly spoken when other emperors ruled. Friedrich the Great of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786) also talked in this language and openly despised German. This disparaging attitude to vernaculars was popular among the nobility in all of Central Europe. They favored Latin and, beginning in the 18th century, French (Basaj 1999: 163; Waterman 1966: 137). Latin united the Central European world of literacy until the sweeping social reforms of the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Maria Theresa (reigned 1740– 1780), and of her son, Emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765–1790). They centralized the administration of the Habsburg hereditary lands, created a civil service and

104 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

military based on merit not birthright, established popular elementary education, and commenced dismantling of the serf system. Their modernizing efforts took France as a model. They noted that the written vernaculars had already replaced Latin (and also French in the latter polity) in France and the United Kingdom, in the 16th century. Written French and English, much closer to the speech of the subjects, proved a better instrument of unification and modernization than Latin. Obviously, imposition of such a written vernacular put at disadvantage those groups of subjects who spoke starkly different idioms, for instance, Celtic languages or Basque. However, Latin was available only to the narrow estate stratum that accounted for not more than 5 percent of the population. Potentially, literacy in a vernacular was accessible to the majority of the population. The situation was different in the Habsburg lands where Latin was supplanted by German. Most of the subjects spoke Slavic or Magyar, not German. The replacement of Czech with German as the medium of education in Bohemian schools had been completed by 1775. To this end, a year earlier, Maria Theresa’s decree had replaced most Czech-language schools in villages either with Germanophone or bilingual ones. At that time, teaching in all the town elementary and secondary schools was already being conducted in German. In 1784, German replaced Latin as the language of instruction at the University of Prague. Since Czech was useful for German-speaking administrators in the Slavic-speaking areas, it survived until 1806 in the Military Academy at Vienna. (Interestingly, Czech was then supplanted by Polish, but reinstated in 1824.) The dissolution of the Society of Jesus (1773) made the exclusion of Latin from non-ecclesiastical contexts easier. From the mid-16th to the mid18th century, the Jesuits had united Catholic Europe through the introduction of Latin as the medium of modern education for the members of the estates. It was especially true of the Catholic lands in the Holy Roman Empire as well as Poland-Lithuania and the Kingdom of Hungary (Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 196; Píšová 1997). The originally Western European inclination toward vernacular literacy became quite visible in Central Europe at the end of the 18th century. In 1784, Francis II issued an imperial decree that replaced Latin with German as the language of state administration and higher education (Johnson 2002: 139). The socio-cultural unity of early modern Central Europe, steeped in Latin and more tentatively in Catholicism, started unraveling under the influence of revolutionary France. The idea that the population of a realm, construed as a ‘nation,’ not God, is the source of legitimacy, decisively overhauled European politics. The bayonets of the French imperial army spread the message of nationalism all over Central Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. The intellectual currents that emphasized the importance of the ‘language of the people’ surfaced throughout the 18th century before Johannes Gottfried

Language in Central Europe

105

Herder (1744–1803) enshrined it in his writings. For instance, as early as 1746, in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, Amsterdam), the French philosopher Étienne de Condillac (1715–1780) argued that ‘each language expresses the character of the people who speak it’ (Geary 2002: 25). And Herder famously proposed that language most fully expresses the invisible genius (spirit) of a people. In the 19th century, his view became one of the more important philosophical underpinnings of the specifically Central European linguistic variety of ethnic nationalism. This kind of nationalism, seen as the font of statehood legitimization, completely overhauled the political map of Europe between 1871 and 1945/1989. Initially, the estates expressed strong opposition to Vienna’s modernizing reforms, which they perceived as an onslaught against their ancient privileges. The members of the estates still did not use ethnic nationalism to legitimize their defence of the administrative and cultural distinctiveness of their traditional homelands. Nobility, propertied burghers, and clergymen saw no contradiction in remaining loyal subjects of the monarch while preserving simultaneously their specific political rights in Bohemia or Moravia even at the cost of stalling the modernization that Vienna imposed from above. Changes were destroying the established order that, in the eyes of the estates, had served them and their ancestors well for centuries. It was anathema to them that Joseph II refused to be crowned as King of the Czech lands. This move weakened the already tentative ties between Bohemia and Moravia. His brother and successor, Leopold II (reigned 1790–1792), had to reverse some reforms of his mother and Joseph II so as to stabilize the situation in his lands. In 1791, he symbolically reaffirmed the unity of the Czech lands through his coronation at Prague. Ironically, the Moravian estates opposed this act that could lead to the renewed subjection of Moravia to the political supervision of Prague and the Bohemian estates, as had been the rule in the previous centuries (Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 191–194). While the Bohemian estates used the Czech language to emphasize their separateness, their Moravian counterparts could not, as it would amount to accepting political and cultural subjugation of Moravia to Bohemia. So, while Bohemian students usually chose to pursue their further education at the University of Prague, the majority of their Moravian colleagues chose the University of Vienna. Similarly, when Bohemians continued to call their Slavic language ‘Bohemian’ in Latin and German, and ‘Czech’ in Czech, Slavo-, and Germanophone Moravians talked about theirs as ‘Moravian,’ ‘Slavic’ or ‘Moravian Slavic.’ In teaching history, they did not follow the Bohemian tendency of subsuming the past of Moravia under Bohemian history and published their own locally produced textbooks of Moravian history. In the eyes of both the Bohemian and Moravian estates, the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margravate of Moravia appeared to be separate polities. But Bohemian leaders, drawing on the largely

106 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

discontinued tradition of the lands of the Czech Crown, desired to extend the concept of their kingdom so that it would become coterminous with the territorial extent of this erstwhile Crown. Obviously, the Moravian estates were appalled (Hroch 1999: 78–79). The regional patriotism (Landespatriotismus, zemské vlastenectví) of the Bohemian estates is often, though incorrectly, associated with the beginnings of Czech ethnic nationalism. Regional patriots of the bilingual German-Czech Bohemian natio (which excluded the peasantry, that is, the majority of the population) did not want to create some ethnolinguistically homogenous Czech-speaking nation. Primarily, they aspired to preserve their homeland as a distinctive political and administrative unit, then endangered by the centralizing and modernizing reforms of the Theresian and Josephine eras. Secondarily, they hoped that one day it might be possible to recreate the union of the lands of the Czech Crown. A revived chancery Czech (Bohemian) would be useful to this end, because, on a linguistic and literacy basis, it would allow for marking the difference of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, construed as the Crown’s territorial core, vis-à-vis the Habsburgs’ other hereditary lands (lying within the perimeter of the Holy Roman Empire), which were overwhelmingly German-speaking. Such an illustrious Bohemian noble as Franz Josef Kinsky (1739–1805), who served as field marshal of the Austrian army, defended the rights of the Czech language. He was a son to Philipp Joseph Kinsky (1700–1749), Maria Theresa’s loyal High Chancellor of Bohemia, but a staunch Bohemian autonomist. Franz Josef Kinsky wrote his famous defence of Czech in German. German dominated in this genre of defences of the Czech language that came off the press during the last three decades of the 18th century, because Czech was yet to be revived and developed, while German was a prestigious and widely used language, which allowed for making the defence of Czech heard across the Holy Roman Empire (Kinsky 1888: 744). Similarly, Dante’s defence and praise of Italian, De vulgari eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence, 1303–1305, first published not in the original but in the Italian translation, as De La Volgare Eloquenzia in 1529 in Vicenza), which started and legitimized the movement for the official use of vernaculars in Western Europe, was written in Latin. Before Dante himself codified and dignified Italian (or rather Tuscanian) in La Divina Commedia (1309–1321), Latin was the sole prestigious and widespread written language of scholarship, and temporal and ecclesiastical administration. The road to the codification and official recognition of new Czech commenced at the turn of the 1790s. Initially, it drew from Jan Karel Rohn’s (Johann Karl, 1711–1779) four-volume Czech-Latin-German Nomenclator (‘Dictionary,’ 1746–1768, Prague) and Karel Ignác Thám’s (Carl Ignaz Tham, 1763–1816) twovolume German-Czech Nationallexicon (‘National Dictionary,’ 1788, Prague and Vienna). In 1789, Václav Matˇej Kramerius (Wáclaw Matˇej Krameryus, 1759– 1808) founded one of the earliest Czech-language newspapers, in which he

Language in Central Europe

107

propagated the use of the Czech language. Two years later, the Chair of Czech Language was established at the University of Prague (Heck and Orzechowski 1969: 196). However, the Catholic priest and prodigious scholar, Joseph Dobrowsky (or, in standard Czech, Josef Dobrovský, 1753–1829), whose groundbreaking study on the history of the Czech language and literature (Geschichte der B¨ohmischen Sprache und Litteratur, Prague) was published in 1792, wrote exclusively in German and Latin. In 1802 and 1821, his equally groundbreaking ¨ and comprehensive two-volume German-Czech dictionary (Ausfuhrliches und vollst¨andiges deutsch-b¨ohmisches synonymisch-phrasologisches W¨orterbuch, Prague) came off the press. Dobrovský’s scholarly activities were the direct result of the dissolution of the Jesuit order. However, subsequently, the ecclesiastical structures could not provide a demanding and rewarding career for such ambitious individuals as Dobrovský. Dobrovský, a student of Johann Christoph Adelung, applied the methods and theories, his teacher had developed while codifying the German language, to the standardization of Czech. Drawing support from Franz Josef Kinsky and other Bohemian aristocrats, Dobrovský worked as a Bohemian patriot (Landespatriot, zemskí vlastenec) and not a Czech ethnonationalist. He subscribed to the traditional estates program of maintaining the separateness of Bohemia and recreating the union of the lands of the Czech Crown within the framework of the Habsburg lands. The idea of establishing a monolingual and ethnolinguistically homogenous Czech nation-state did not occur to Dobrovský, though nowadays Czech school textbooks usually describe him as an early Czech national activist. However, Dobrovský’s choices presented in his scholarly works laid the foundation for the codification of contemporary Czech as a national language, which, in the 20th century, was employed for the task of creating a homogenously monolingual Czech nation-state. He grounded his codification in the archaic grammatical structures of chancery Czech as used in the Kralice Bible, the dictionaries and historical works of Danˇel Adam z Veleslavína, and in the writings of Komenský (Auty 1980: 176; Basaj 1999: 164–165). At the turn of the 19th century, gradually fewer Czech-language publications were printed in the Gothic lettering so strongly associated with the German language. The switch from the Gothic script to Antiqua for writing and publishing in Czech was largely complete by the 1830s. A sudden surge in the publication of grammars (28), dictionaries (14), and theses (20) between 1775 and 1825 reflects the broad range of the discussion about how to standardize the Czech language. It also helped the acceptance of Dobrovský’s model on the part of Czech national activists in the first half of the 19th century. The early fruition of this process came with the publication of the five volumes of the first authoritative dictionary of the Czech language, Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), compiled by Josef Jungmann (1773–1843) (Hroch 1999: 66).

108 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Between Dobrovský and ethnolinguistic Czech nationalism stands the towering figure of Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848). He was a famous Bohemian student of religion, and a philosopher and mathematician, who regarded the limitation of the concept of nation merely to Bohemia’s Czech-speakers as an anathema to the social and historical reality of this crownland. In his 1810 and 1816 lectures, he proposed that Czech- and German-speakers of Bohemia should create their own bilingual nation of the Bohemians, instead of trying to split the land along the linguistic cleavage. His approach to the national question combined regional patriotism of the estates with the Western European concept of the political nation. The whole population of the province was to be made into a nation irrespective of ethnic and confessional differences. Thus the established and administrative structure would not have to be overhauled. This stability would allow the swift modernization of the proposed Bohemian nation, as happened in the case of France or the United Kingdom. Bolzano’s ideas lost in the confrontation with the Central European model of the ethnolinguistically defined nation, which, incited by the Napoleonic onslaught, entered the region in the form of German ethnolinguistic nationalism. When a modicum of status quo ante was reintroduced at the Congress of Vienna (1815), this nationalism was suppressed. But in the latter half of the 1840s, an officially espoused revival of German nationalism was encouraged. In 1848, this process culminated in the endeavor to build a German nation-state that would encompass almost all German-speakers, less those of Switzerland. Vienna opposed it because such a national polity would have necessitated the destruction of the multilingual and multiethnic Austrian Empire. In addition, German nationalists did not take into account interests and political ambitions of the non-German-speakers who lived on the territory of the German Confederation (largely coterminous with the former Holy Roman Empire) and Prussia. As a result, German nationalism incited numerous Central European ethnolinguistic nationalisms in the second half of the 19th century. In 1871 and after 1918, these nationalisms along with their German counterpart would destroy the existing traditional societies and polities to replace them with ethnically homogenous nations housed exclusively in their own nation-states. Despite the havoc of forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing that this process entailed, the rise of nation-states is equated with ‘modernization,’ as if modernization had been inherently impossible in multiethnic and multilingual polities (Hroch 1999: 197–205). The discussion of this issue continues in further chapters.

The Polish language After German and Czech, Polish was the third written vernacular language to develop in Central Europe. There are no early Old Church Slavonic manuscripts as in the case of Czech that could be associated with the Polish language.

Language in Central Europe

109

However, Slavophone Christianity and Church Slavonic literacy reached Silesia and Małopolska when these future Polish regions were part of Greater Moravia. In ‘Bogurodzica’ (The Mother of God), the oldest preserved Polish song from the 13th or 14th century, which served as the military anthem of the Polish army in the 15th century, clear Church Slavonic elements were preserved. The first extant texts recorded in Polish date back to the 14th century but a tradition of continuous literacy in this language developed only at the beginning of the 16th century. Christianity came to Poland from Bohemia. This involved the influx of Czech-speaking churchmen, officials, and scribes to the fledgling polity of the Polanians, or the ethnic group that built this state and gave the name to Poland, as attested in the records from the 12th century (Bem-Wi´sniewska 1998: 69). Obviously, as in Bohemia, the Czechophone specialists wrote in Latin but communicated with the locals in their own Slavic idiom, which meant the transfer of Western Christian church terminology into Polish via the Czech language. When Czech became a chancery language already in the 14th century, its influence on spoken Polish increased. Chancery Czech became an international language for use in the Slavic-speaking areas of Central Europe if one did not know Latin, or if his interlocutor might not grasp a message spoken in this classical tongue of ancient Rome. Alongside towering Latin, Czech developed into a language of diplomacy and culture on a par with German. Czech mostly played the role of an auxiliary official koine in the Slavophone areas of Central Europe, like German in the Germanicphone areas of Central Europe and the Holy Roman Empire. In the 15th century, Polish developed thanks to numerous texts that were either emulations or translations of Czech originals. It was the usual way for a new written vernacular to be codified. For instance, the first texts written in Czech were translations from Latin originals. Translating Latin prayers and hagiographies also facilitated the emergence of Polish as a written language. The Frenchman, Piotr Stojenski ´ (Statorius Petrus, Gallus, or T[h]onuillanus, died in 1591) authored the first grammar of Polish, Polonicae Grammatices Institutio (The Foundations of Polish Grammar, 1568, Cracow). The first grammar of Polish written by a Pole was Compendiosa Linguae Polonicae Institutio (The Brief Grammar of the Polish Language, 1690, Gdansk) ´ by Jan Karol Woyna (Jan Karol Wojna, Carolus de Jasienica) (1605–1693). Despite numerous grammars of Polish written in Latin and German (the latter for the benefit of German-speaking merchants from the Holy Roman Empire and for burghers and nobility in Poland-Lithuania’s Germanophone provinces of Prussia and Courland) during the 17th and 18th centuries, the first Polish-language grammar of this language, Walenty Szylarski’s (1730–1770) Gramatyka powszechna wszystkim je˛zykom i własne polskiemu prawidła w sobie zamykaja˛ca (Universal Grammar of All Languages, with the Principles of Polish Duly Presented), was published in 1767.

110 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the 16th century, when Polish became a fully developed chancery language, it was still fashionable to speak in Czech or at least to include Czech words and phrases in one’s speech. This phenomenon spread among aspiring nobility and burghers, who were not rich enough to master Latin at one of the universities in the distant Apennine Peninsula. Instead of speaking in rudimentary and incorrect Latin, which could make one into a butt of ridicule, the obvious choice was to make oneself popular through using Czech. The famous Czechophile and influential Cracow printer, Jan SandeckiMalecki (1490–1567), even opined that Polish was a dialect of the Czech language. This Czech influence in Polish weakened at the end of the 16th century. However, Grzegorz Knapski (Knapiusz, Cnapius, 1564–1639), who authored the extensive three-volume Polish-Latin-Greek dictionary, Thesaurus Polonolatinograecus (1621–1632, Cracow) used Czech entries from the dictionaries of Danˇel Adam z Veleslavína as the model for the Polish translations of Latin and Greek terms. (But it was Robert Estienne’s [1503–1559] Dictionnaire français-latin [French-Latin Dictionary, 1541, Paris] that served as a general model for Knapski’s dictionary.) After the 1526 union of the lands of the Czech Crown with the Habsburg lands, the importance of chancery German increased in the Czech lands. At the same time, the political importance of the Czech Crown declined, especially due to continued confessional discord sealed by the massive expulsions of Protestant nobility after 1620 (Orło´s 1993: 16–20, 24–29; Siatkowska 1992: 98–101, 194; Stankiewicz 1984: 38–39, 48). The 16th century was the ‘golden age’ for the Kingdom of Poland as was the 14th century for the Czech Crown. The Polish economy, based on the extensive grain-producing latifundia, grew rapidly. A unique kind of noble democracy (also obtaining in Hungary and Bohemia) developed, and after the extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty (1572), produced an institution of the monarch elected by all the nobility. In 1569, prior to the death of the last Jagiellonian King Zygmunt August (reigned 1548–1572), the 1385/1386 personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was transformed into a union between these states. The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania emerged as one of the largest and most powerful European states of that time. Although the first publications in Poland-Lithuania were produced in Cracow in 1473, the first extant Polish-language printed book came off the press only in 1513. This was followed four decades later by the first printed Bible in Polish, published in 1553 in Brze´sc´ (Brest, today in Belarus) thanks to the effort of Polish Protestants (Calvinists). Subsequently, Catholics responded with their own translation of the Holy Writ (1561). However, only Jakub Wujek’s (1541–1597) Catholic translation of the Bible (1599) gained significance equal to that of the Protestant Brze´sc´ Bible when it came to setting standards for written Polish (Bienkowska ´ and Chamerska 1990: 7–9; Klemensiewicz 1974: 255). The noble writers, Protestant Mikołaj Rej (1505–1569) and Catholic Jan

Language in Central Europe

111

Kochanowski (1530–1584), forsook Latin in favor of Polish, and codified the Polish language with their numerous poetic and prose writings. Although the first Polish-Latin glossaries began to appear in the first half of the 16th century, the first extensive Polish dictionary, Jan Ma˛czynski’s ´ (1520–1584) two-volume Lexicon Latinopolonicum (The Latin-Polish Dictionary), was printed in 1564 at Königsberg in Ducal Prussia. Like Jan Blahoslav, he maintained that Polish is a dialect of the larger Slavic language, and that all Slavic-speakers use various dialects of the same language. Stojenski’s ´ first grammar of Polish was in Latin, unlike Optát’s Grammatyka ˇceská written in Czech. In 1589, Jan Rybinski ´ (1560– 1621), who stemmed from a Polonized Czech family, published his praise of the Polish language, De linguarum in genere, tum Polonicae seorsim praestantia et utilitate oratio (On Language in General, Including the Defence of the Polish Language and a Speech on Its Usefulness, Gdansk). ´ He wrote it in Latin, though, as had Dante his De vulgari eloquentia. In 1670, the Jesuit priest, Bohuslav Balbín (Bohuslaus-Aloysius Balbih, 1621–1688), wrote a similar defence of Bohemian (Czech), Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua Slavonica, praecipue Bohemica (A Dissertation in Defence of the Slavic Language, Especially Bohemian), published in 1775 in Prague. Prior to the 1620s, the prestige and official status of chancery Bohemian was so strong that there was no need to ‘defend’ this language (Klemensiewicz 1974: 353–354, 412; Rada et al. 1995: 295; Siatkowska 1992: 137; Stankiewicz 1984: 46–47; Ziomek 1980: 363). Although Latin had been the sole official language of Poland-Lithuania, the scales began to tip in favor of the vernacular, Polish, due to the extensive use of this language as a propaganda tool of the Reformation in the 15th century. At that time, Polish also became the main sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. In 1505, this nobility gained upper hand over the monarch and effectively transformed itself into a Poland-Lithuania natio, which from that moment effectively controlled the state. The first significant official change in favor of forming chancery language of Polish happened in 1536. Polish replaced German in sermons delivered at the Marian church, the most important Catholic church in the Polish capital of Cracow. The default use of German in Teutonic law towns rapidly declined. In 1539, the Seym (noble parliament) decided that all laws and edicts would be published in Polish with a summary in Latin. The first use of Polish in this capacity by the Seym eventually occurred in 1543. All these developments guaranteed chancery Polish a more elevated political status than even Latin enjoyed. When a (semi-) real union replaced the personal one between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569, Polish became an official language in the grand Duchy alongside Latin and Ruthenian (Klemensiewicz 1974: 234; Schenker 1980: 200; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 193–194; Wydra and Rzepka 2004: 180). In the 16th century, Polish orthography achieved its general shape. Initially, publishers and writers emulated the German and Czech models of digraphs

112 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

for representing specific Polish sounds. Later Hus’s idea of using single letters modified with a diacritic became popular. But as Hus and his writings were associated with Protestantism, Polish-language Catholic writers were reluctant to espouse the Czech innovation wholeheartedly. Hence, the Polish spelling system is a mixture of specific diacritic letters [a˛], [e˛], [´c], [ł], [n], ´ [ó], [´s], [´z], [z], ˙ and digraphs [ch], [ci], [cz], [dz], [dz], ˙ [d´z], [ja], [je], [ju], [rz], [si], [sz], [zi]. Interestingly, Polish is the only standard Slavic language that preserved the nasal vowels of Common Slavic (as reflected in Old Church Slavonic writings), namely [a˛] for /nasal o/, and [e˛] for /nasal e/. (Obviously the Polish nasal vowels are not exactly the same as in Church Slavonic.) In addition, some relics of nasal vowels are found in some South Slavic dialects. The only other European languages to use nasal vowels are French and Portuguese (Panzer 1999: 62; Urbanczyk ´ 1983). In late medieval and early modern Central Europe, the ethnic background of the monarch and his court tended to diverge from that of the population over which he ruled. The Lithuanian dynasty of the Jagiellonian rulers of PolandLithuania (1386–1572) used the Baltic language of Lithuanian in their family and household at least until 1492 (Snyder 2003: 19). Ruthenian written in the Cyrillic letters of Orthodox Christianity functioned as the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania before its personal union (1385/1386) with the Kingdom of Poland and the official Christianization of this duchy. The Jagiellonian rulers of Poland-Lithuania did not find it difficult to acquire Polish, as it was rather close to Ruthenian. On the other hand, actual Christianization applied only to the northernmost, Lithuanian-speaking nook of the Grand Duchy, as the rest of its extensive territory had been Christian since the times of Kievan Rus. Christianity arrived in Lithuania from Poland in the form of Catholicism and Polish, written in the Latin alphabet, was the language of politics and power. The 1569 union with the Kingdom of Poland fortified the position of Polish in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and marginalized the Ruthenian language and the Cyrillic alphabet. The Counter-Reformation gradually limited the extent and popularity of Protestantism in the late 16th century. For historical and political reasons, the Catholic nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the local noble converts from Protestantism to Catholicism preferred Latin to Polish, since the latter was perceived as symbolic of the Reformation. Beginning the mid-17th century, more publications in Latin than in Polish were published in the Grand Duchy, which was preferred over Polish in administration also. In 1697, Ruthenian was abolished as an official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which led to the gradual emergence of Polish as the de facto sole official language in the Grand Duchy. This created a paradoxical situation wherein Latin, alongside Polish, continued to be the official medium of politics and bureaucracy in the Kingdom of Poland, but predominantly Polish was used in this capacity in the Grand Duchy. Obviously, Latin was also present in the political life of Lithuania, as the Polish nobility and the Lithuanian boyars24 gradually

Language in Central Europe

113

merged (after 1413) into the largely homogenous noble estate (natio) of PolandLithuania. Their languages of choice were Polish and Latin (Topolska 2002). Although burghers continued to use German for official business in Cracow until the end of the 16th century, as elsewhere in the towns of western Poland, its use waned (sometimes officially discouraged) with the rise of Poland-Lithuania as the regional power of Central Europe. In the late 16th century, Latin and Polish replaced German in Poland’s Royal Prussia and both languages made considerable inroads in the Polish fief of Ducal Prussia after its 1525 homage to the Polish king. In 1561, Poland-Lithuania gained Courland and Livonia, but Polish did not replace German as the official language in this territory until 1677. The position of Polish became fortified across Poland-Lithuania, while chancery Czech remained the official language in the commonwealth’s two tiny duchies of O´swie˛cim and Zator (near Cracow), gained from the Czech Crown in the latter half of the 15th century, until the 17th century. Armenians, who settled in Poland-Lithuania as merchants, and Tatars, who joined the polity’s army and were ennobled, wrote in Polish and Ruthenian (or local Slavic dialects) employing Armenian and Arabic letters, respectively. The former switched to the Latin alphabet in the 17th century, but the latter kept their specific script until the 20th century. Interestingly, both groups divided by religion and history, originally shared the same vernacular, Kipchak Turkic (Cook 2000: 93; Friedrich 2000: 38; Tazbir 2001: 281, 296–298; Usien ´ 2001). In the second half of the 16th century and especially in the 17th century, Polish attained the rank of a Central European koine earlier enjoyed by Czech, because at that time Poland-Lithuania became the center of Central European politics, economy, and culture. Outside this polity, Polish was employed as the language of official, scholarly, and diplomatic discourse in Muscovy, Moldavia,25 and Walachia. Peter I the Great (reigned 1682–1725), who modernized and transformed Muscovy into the Russian Empire, spoke Polish and admired the language, despite his military conflicts with Poland-Lithuania and his support for the official use of ‘simple language’ (future Russian). Polish along with Latin, Dutch, German, and French seemed to him media better suited for channeling modernization into his realm than official Church Slavonic, inextricably bound with the Orthodox Church. Peter decisively limited the Church’s political hold on the state to allow for Westernization, which entailed the gradual reducing of the use of Church Slavonic to matters ecclesiastical. In the 17th century, Latin and Italian (Tuscanian) gradually lost their role of international languages in Western Europe to French. During this transitional century, Spanish became an aspiring regional language in southern and Mediterranean Europe, and German in the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia. By the same token, Polish was the language of choice in Slavophone areas from Lusatia to Muscovy and in the Balkans. In the empire, Germanic-speaking merchants learned Polish when they planned to pursue business ventures in the Slavic-speaking regions. The status of

114 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the language did not change much after the territorial and institutional decline of Poland-Lithuania commenced in the mid-17th century with the Cossack Wars and protracted warfare against Muscovy and Sweden. The Cossack leader Bohdan Chmielnicki (Khmel’nyts’ki) (1595–1657) was a petty Polish-Lithuanian noble educated by Jesuits. As such, while governing and administering his Cossack state, he employed Polish alongside Church Slavonic. He also maintained correspondence in Latin and spoke Ottoman Turkish. In Smolensk ´ (Smolensk), Czernichów (Chernihiv), Kijów (Kyiv), and other Polish-Lithuanian territories incorporated into Muscovy in 1667 and 1686, the tradition of using Polish for social, cultural, educational, and administrative ends continued until the 1830s, and among Polish noble gentry there until the end of the Great War (Beauvois 2005: 475–723; Janowicz 2006: 17; Magocsi 1996: 196, 256; Tazbir 2001: 275, 281, 286–287, 301–318). The renewed influence of Latin in Central Europe commenced with the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits were the main carriers of this trend in culture and education. They believed that if Catholic reforms were to be truly universal, they had to be transmitted through the sacred medium of Western Christianity, the Latin language. Their thinking in this regard clashed strongly with the Protestant propagation of local vernaculars in liturgy and public life. (In southeastern Poland-Lithuania, these two contradictory trends met and caused Orthodox leaders to establish schools with Greek and Church Slavonic as the media of instruction. The latter language was close to the local idiom, while the former as distanced from it as Latin from Central Europe’s vernaculars.) During the 1550s and 1560s, Jesuits opened numerous colleges in the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), Hungary ruled by the Habsburgs, as well as in Poland-Lithuania. When the order was dissolved in 1773, 200,000 students were learning at Jesuit colleges in Poland-Lithuania alone. By that time, virtually every Central European nobleman had received his education in a Jesuit school and could communicate in Latin in speech and writing. This emphasized the difference between the nobility and the peasantry, even if both spoke the same or similar idioms. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this contributed to the rise of the influential ideology that maintained that the Polish-Lithuanian nobility descended from the Iranian Sarmatians and the peasants from Slavs. Hence, the nobles sometimes referred to Polish, as the ‘Sarmatian language,’ completely forgetful of its Slavic character (Magocsi 1996: 157–159, 2002: 51; Mikołajczak 1998: 186–187; Tazbir 2001: 284). In the 16th and 17th centuries, Holy Roman emperors, with their realms and interests extending from the Adriatic to the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, frequently spoke languages different from the Germanic or Slavic idioms of their subjects. Similarly, many elective kings of Poland-Lithuania did not have a command of Polish or Ruthenian, as they usually came from abroad. As a result, they had to resort to Latin in order to govern and administer their new

Language in Central Europe

115

realm. In the 18th century, French gradually replaced Latin at the royal court in Warsaw (the Polish capital since 1611) as elsewhere in Europe. But the personal union with Saxony (1697–1763) led to the renewed influence of the German language. (Until the mid-17th century, the Polish-Lithuanian monarchs of the originally Swedish Vasa dynasty had tended to address Royal Prussia’s Germanophone nobles and burghers in German.) It was also the first language of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–1796). Her St Petersburg court employed it on par with French. Administrators also used German in Muscovy’s Livonia (today’s southern Estonia and northern Latvia), where cities were uniformly German-speaking. After Russia annexed half of the territory of Poland-Lithuania (partitioned in 1772, 1793, and 1795), it turned out that the majority of the empire’s literate subjects spoke and wrote in Polish. For all practical purposes, the ruling elite became trilingual, that is, Russian-, Polish-, and German-speaking. Hence, Russian tsars, until Alexander II (reigned 1855– 1881), tended to address and reply to the representatives of the Polonophone and Germanophone nobility and burghers in French, Polish, and German. With his cultural policies, the ethnically Polish King Stanisław August Poniatowski (reigned 1764–1795) contributed to the diminishing role of Latin in Poland-Lithuania. He could not be active in international politics, since at that time Russia closely controlled the commonwealth’s domestic matters and foreign relations. After Pope Clement XIV (1769–1774) dissolved the Society of Jesus (1773), the Commission of National Education (KEN, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej) took over the Jesuit educational system. It was the first ministry of national education in Europe. This commission replaced Latin with Polish as the medium of education and subsidized the writing of appropriate textbooks. The Piarist priest Onufry Kopczynski ´ (1735–1817) wrote the first school grammar of the Polish language; it remained in popular use well into the mid-19th century (Johnson 1950: 76, 287; Klemensiewicz 1974: 496–506, 652–653; Rodkiewicz 1998: 160; Schenker 1980: 206; Tazbir 2001: 296, 300). The first partition of Poland-Lithuania (1772) constituted a shock that convinced the Polish-Lithuanian ruling stratum centered around the monarch to reform the state. They wished to centralize Poland-Lithuania and endow it with a hereditary monarchy in order to transform the commonwealth into an absolutist polity modeled on those of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The introduction of Polish as the language of education was the first step in this direction. During the 1770s and 1780s, Polish also became the dominant language of politics. Reformists opined that Polish should become the sole official language of Poland-Lithuania. This view gained much credence after German was imposed as the sole official language in the Habsburg lands (1784). (Similarly, German had been almost exclusively employed in this function in Ducal Prussia since 1660, when it had gained independence from Poland-Lithuania, and especially after the 1701 transformation of the duchy into a kingdom.) When in 1791

116 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Seym enacted the first ever Constitution in Europe, which encapsulated the reform program, its text was published in Polish only. In the following year, Polish supplanted Latin in all courts, elevating, for all practical purposes, the former to the status of the commonwealth’s sole official language. The leaders of the reform postulated Polonization of the population, especially Ruthenianspeakers and Jews. To this end, the production and import of Cyrillic and Hebrew-script books were to be prohibited, except for religious needs. In these Polonization plans, Lithuanian-speaking peasants were not mentioned; they were commonly overlooked since they constituted a tiny minority of no political influence. On the other hand, the position of German in Central Europe was so well established that no one considered the extension of similar Polonization measures to German-speakers. Father Franciszek Salezy Jezierski (1740–1791), a high official in KEN, defined nation as an assembly of people sharing the same language and customs. Jacobins in revolutionary France, who prohibited the use of languages and dialects other than Parisian French in 1794, soon espoused the same view. The 1791 Constitution unsuccessfully attempted to transform PolandLithuania into a unitary and centralized monarchy. But the promulgation of this document sped up the two further partitions (1793 and 1795) that removed Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe. German replaced Polish as the official language in those Polish-Lithuanian lands that were granted to Berlin and Vienna, though the majority of the population there could be defined as Polish-speakers. With Vienna annexing Galicia in 1772, prior to the introduction of German as the official language in the Habsburg lands and before Polish gained the same status in Poland-Lithuania, Latin continued to play a significant role there until the beginning of the 19th century. On the other hand, Polish remained the language of administration and education in the Russian partition, though the majority of the inhabitants were Ruthenian-, Lithuanian-, German-, or Yiddish-speaking. The 1797 decision to replace Polish with Russian was not heeded. In Napoleon’s Duchy of Warsaw, a French protectorate consisting largely of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania’s bare Polish-speaking core (taken back from Austria and Prussia), Polish regained its official role alongside French, so frequently heard then in government offices (Beauvois 2005: 212; Klemensiewicz 1974: 507–513; Tazbir 2001: 301, 304–311). In this rump Polish-Lithuanian state, carved out by Napoleon’s decision, Samuel Bogumił Linde (1771–1847) secured for himself the position of principal of the bilingual Polish-German secondary school in Warsaw. Linde came from a German-speaking Protestant family in Torun. ´ With the support of Prince Adam Czartoryski, Linde compiled and published his six-volume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1807–1814) in Warsaw. In this work, he supplied comparative translations of significant Polish terms into German (in the Gothic type) and Russian (in Cyrillic) and compared many

Language in Central Europe

117

of them with similar words in other European and Slavic languages. Linde’s dictionary not only standardized the Polish language but also provided the model for the standardization of other Slavic languages. Josef Jungmann’s five-volume Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague) closely emulated that of Linde (Klemensiewicz 1974: 653–656; Orło´s 1993: 42–45). Linde’s work remained the first and sole authoritative dictionary of Polish until the beginning of the 20th century, when a similar six-volume work appeared. In 1815, when France’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw was partitioned, its western half was re-incorporated into Prussia, while the rest, organized as an autonomous Kingdom of Poland, was passed on to Russia. In the absence of a state, which the Polish-Lithuanian nobility would choose to call ‘Poland’ and to identify with, the Polish language, as codified by Linde’s dictionary, became a symbolic state for this stateless noble natio. Self-nourished on Polish culture and past glory, the nobility hoped to recreate Poland-Lithuania. In the second half of the 19th century, Polish language and literature incited for the national cause the growing group of Polish-speaking intelligentsia of variegated social background. At the turn of the 20th century, Polish ethnic nationalists emerged from this intelligentsia. They envisioned an ethnolinguistically homogenous Polish nation-state. After 1918, and especially in the wake of World War II, the Polish language was to become the instrument for creating national homogeneity (Tazbir 2001: 319). Interestingly, to this day, Polish scholars have not managed to agree on the dialectal base from which the Polish language sprang. Claims and counterclaims for the distinction were usually traded by historians and linguists from Wielkopolska and Małopolska with their centers in Poznan ´ and Cracow, respectively. Tellingly, the Polish names of the two regions include the word ‘Poland’ in their names, viz. ‘Great Poland’ and ‘Little Poland.’ Prior to the partitions, nobles from both regions had engaged in a similar competition claiming the historical distinction of ‘original Poland’ either for Wielkopolska or Małopolska. There is no such difficulty in the case of the Czech language, whose development was closely connected with Prague as the capital of Bohemia and the lands of the Czech Crown. Moravia, with its separate tradition of literacy that persisted from the 17th century until 1918, never became the center of all-Czech policy-making or nation-building efforts. The fledgling Moravian regionalism-cum-nationalism, especially strong after 1905, did not supplant Czech nationalism, either. Thus, no Czech region or city has ever (or successfully) aspired to replace Prague as the center of Czech political and cultural life. The situation was quite different in the Polish case. The Polanian state originated during the 10th century in Wielkopolska with its capitals in Gniezno, and later in nearby Poznan. ´ But this polity’s capital moved to Cracow in Małopolska in 1038, where it remained until 1611. Then

118 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the capital moved again, this time to Warsaw in Mazovia. (Between the late 12th century and the mid-16th century, the region was largely independent and did not become fully integrated with the Kingdom of Poland until 1577. The moving of the capital to Warsaw secured the re-incorporation of the Mazovia to Poland and brought the power center closer to the geographical center of Poland-Lithuania.) In 1138, the Polanian state splintered into an ever-growing number of semi- and fully independent principalities that were not re-united until 1320, with the significant exceptions of Mazovia and Silesia. The latter became a part of the lands of the Czech Crown. The first extant texts recorded in Polish date back to the 14th century, which mostly links them to the new post-1320 Polish state with its capital in Cracow, that is, in Małopolska. Nevertheless, some scholars agree that the dialect from Wielkopolska formed the basis of chancery Polish because the ruling Piast dynasty came from this region. this region. The other camp opts for Cracow’s Małopolska dialect, as the power center of the Kingdom of Poland was located there for almost half a millennium, during which period written Polish came into being and developed into a full-fledged language. The Wielkopolska opponents criticize this thesis and duly note that some particularities of the Małopolska dialect are not reflected in standard Polish (cf. Budzyk 1956; Klemensiewicz 1974: 35–76). Both camps underestimate the influence of power decentralization on the coalescing Polish culture and language prior to the 14th century. In addition to Cracow, semi- and fully independent centers of princely power arose in Gdansk, ´ ˙ Poznan, ´ Sieradz, Płock, Dobrzyn, ´ Inowrocław, Krosno Odrzanskie, ´ Zaga n, ´ Głogów, Jawor, Wrocław, Opole, Bytom, Racibórz, and Cieszyn, among other places. All the rulers stemmed from the Piast Dynasty, which guaranteed a modicum of political unity and fortified the position of the Polish vernacular as the oral language of inter-dynastical and political communication. German and Czech, however, made inroads as languages of written and oral communication in Silesia and Małopolska and German gained prominence in Pomerania and northern Mazovia. The inter-regional political use of the Polish vernacular shielded it from local dialectal influences and gradually made it into a supradialectal vernacular of power. Individuals who spoke local dialects but aspired to a career at the princely or ecclesiastical court readily acquired this dialect as a badge of distinction and sophistication. The tentatively established use of the Polish vernacular was significantly modified by the incorporation of the vast Ruthenian-speaking areas after the conquest of the Halich Rus (1340) and the personal union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1385/1386). Simultaneously, the direct male line of the Piast Dynasty died out and power shifted into the hands of the Lithuanianand Ruthenian-speaking Dynasty of the Jagiellons. Polish was a third language, which they acquired along with Latin. The point of political and economic gravity of the state moved eastward from the Polish-speaking area to the borderland,

Language in Central Europe

119

where Polish and Ruthenian were spoken side by side. At that time, the latter vernacular enjoyed greater prestige because Ruthenized Church Slavonic was the written language of administration in the Grand Duchy and due to its closeness to their speech, Ruthenian-speakers identified it as their Ruthenian language. Polish-speakers were disadvantaged in this respect, since their vernacular was too much distanced from Latin or German, the languages of writing. Hence Polish emerged as a chancery language in the 16th century as a result of the fusion of the Polish supradialectal vernacular with strong Ruthenian influences. These influences weakened during the 16th and 17th centuries because the Cyrillic script and, increasingly, the Ruthenian language were identified with the marginalized Orthodox population. The Grand Duchy’s boyars became Polonized and after 1596, a significant section of the Orthodox population joined the Uniate Church, which entailed gradual resignation from temporal Ruthenian and ecclesiastical Church Slavonic for Polish and Latin, and also from Cyrillic for the Latin script. After the 1697 abolishment of Ruthenian as an official language in the Grand Duchy, in the 18th century, manuscripts in Ruthenian, which were few and far between, were largely done in Latin letters. To the untrained eye of a native Polish-speaker from the Ruthenian-speaking areas, these manuscripts appeared to be written in ‘local Polish.’ Similarly, local Tatars also wrote Ruthenian but in the Arabic script. Today’s transliterations of their books into the Latin alphabet are frequently identified as ‘Polish,’ and those into Cyrillic as ‘Belarusian.’ The Ruthenian culture and idiom, redefined at the turn of the 20th century as Belarusian and Ukrainian, remained a significant factor in the development of Polish language and literature at least until 1945. In the wake of World War II, ethnic Poles living between Wilno and Lwów were expelled west of postwar Poland’s new eastern border, while the same harsh treatment was extended to Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Lithuanians, who were expelled to the east of this border. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, supradialectal Polish infused with Ruthenian influences became the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, whatever their ethnolinguistic background might be. Because the nobility constituted the privileged ruling stratum, they roamed freely across the commonwealth unlike the rest of the population (except traders and itinerant artisans). This spread linguistic innovations among the nobles and leveled dialectal differences, which they acquired during childhood. Their Polish they recorded in numerous books and manuscripts, which they invariably wrote for the noble reader. Poland-Lithuania was an overwhelmingly rural country, so burghers were few and many spoke German or Yiddish, not Polish. The peasantry, who spoke many languages (Polish, Ruthenian, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian), was reduced to slave-like serfdom. By law and tradition, both peasants and burghers were excluded from Polish-Lithuanian politics. As a

120 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

result, they usually did not write or read books published in Polish. Hence, until the 19th century, the Polish language remained a noble affair, je˛zyk panów, or ‘the language of the lords’ (Martel 1938; Ostrówka 2005: 104; Stang 1932). Today, pan is the Polish form of formal address (‘Mr’ in English), as opposed to the familiar ty (‘thou’). Prior to the rise of Polish ethnic nationalism in the late 19th century, the term pan was reserved for addressing nobles. In the Belarusianand Ukrainian-speaking areas in the east of interwar Poland, this form of address served as the ethnic boundary between the local Poles, who did not perceive their non-Polish-speaking neighbors as equals and so they chose not to address them as panowie (pl of pan). Poles living in this region maintained that they were nobles or of noble origin, unlike Belarusians and Ukrainians to whom they accorded the perennial role of peasants and social inferiors. Not surprisingly, the authorities in Soviet Byelorussia and Ukraine successfully employed this ethno-social cleavage in anti-Polish propaganda. In Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian, informality and formality in speech is rendered by the distinction in ‘thou vs you’ (cf. tu vs vous in French, or du vs Sie in German), that is, ty vs vy. Hence panove became a pejorative term intended to designate ‘Polish noble lords, oppressors of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.’ When the Soviet Union annexed the eastern half of interwar Poland, pan as the form of address was strictly prohibited even in the case of Polish-speakers. It was replaced with the terms obywatel (citizen) and towarzysz (comrade). Interestingly, in reaction to imposed Russification, Ukrainian-speakers retained pan as the form of formal address, often combined with vy and the plural form of the verb. The Lithuanianlanguage form ponas functions as pan in Poland, and Soviet propaganda did not manage to eradicate this usage or mark it as negative. In Czech, as in Ukrainian, the same combination of pan and vy is employed in formal contexts, unlike in Slovak, which follows the Polish usage of pan with the singular form of the verb. This is one of the few differences between the extremely close languages of Czech and Slovak. Pan probably entered Polish by way of Czech in the 10th century. Prior to the arrival of Magyars in Central Europe, Croatian and Pannonian Slavic župan meant ‘governor of a region (župa).’ In this meaning, župan, rendered as ispan, entered the Magyar language and as Gespan in the German language. In the latter case, today, Gespan is also a rare term for ‘collaborator.’ Probably, the conflation of pan and Slavic hospod (gospodarz in Polish) for ‘lord, or master of the household’ spawned Bohemian (Old Czech) Hospodin for ‘Lord, God.’ This term gave rise to Ruthenian Hospodar, which, in the 14th century, became the official term of address for the rulers of Moldavia and Walachia. The etymology of pan is unclear. It is variously claimed to stem from unattested Old Slavic *panъ, Avar zoapan of unknown meaning, Old Turkic chupan for ‘helper of a regional governor,’ or Old Iranian gopan for ‘shepherd of cows, guard of the herd’ (Bankowski ´ 2000 vol. 2: 491; Bednarczuk 2005; Brückner 1927: 173, 393; Martynau 1993: 147; Melnychuk et al. 2003: 273; Rejzek 2001: 210, 444, 752).

Language in Central Europe

121

The Magyar language Upon Christianization (1000/1001), Latin became the official language of the straggling Kingdom of Hungary. Apart from the Magyarophone core, the realm’s inhabitants included Slavic-speakers in Upper Hungary (modern-day Slovakia) and Romance-speakers in Transylvania. Even more Slavophone population entered the kingdom’s borders after the incorporation of Slavonia (today, western Croatia and northern Bosnia) in 1089 and the Kingdom of Croatia (northern Dalmatia) in 1091. The first texts recorded in the Magyar language appeared as early as the end of the 12th century. In the following century, Hungarian rulers started accepting the usually Germanicphone hospites (settlers) from the Holy Roman Empire called ‘Saxons’, as well as the Turkic-speaking Cumans (Kun in Magyar) who fled from the east in the wake of the Mongol onslaught. (Before this event, Cumans and Pechengs had been established in the area that would be organized as Walachia and Moldavia in the mid-14th century.) Saxons, Cumans, and the Magyar-speaking Szeklers (Székelys) secured the Transylvanian border against the steppe nomads, while Saxons also guarded the frontier with the Polanian state. King Louis (Lajos) I (reigned 1342–1382) not only ruled over Poland (as of 1370) but also dominated the Romance-speaking Walachians (future Romanians) in Walachia and Moldavia, founded when the control of the Golden Horde had receded from this area. Louis I’s power extended over Slavophone Bosnia too (Hungary 2003; King 1999: 13–15; Molnár 2001: 52). Although the Magyars constituted 70 percent of the population (Hungary 2003: 20) in Hungary proper (without Croatia and these dependencies), the kingdom’s sphere of influence and its intensive political and economic contacts with the Apennine Peninsula and the Holy Roman Empire made Latin the obvious choice for the kingdom’s official language. The extinction of the original Magyarophone Árpád Dynasty in 1301 fortified the status of Latin. Charles Robert (Károly Róbert) of the Angevin Dynasty (reigned 1307–1342) came from Naples. In order to isolate himself from the old centers of power that could endanger his rule, the king established his court in Visegrád (1323) on the Danube Bend (Kósa 1999: 126). Unlike the Bohemian and Polanian (Polish) dukes who had to accept the dominant position of the Holy Roman Empire vis-à-vis their realms, King István (Stephen) I (reigned 997–1038), with undisputed control over his state, did not have to recognize the emperor’s political suzerainty. Upon Christianization, István received the insignia of royalty from the papacy, an achievement that the Bohemian rulers did not secure in a permanent manner until 1198 and the Polanian ones until 1320. During István’s rule, the royal capital Székesfehérvar (Stuhlweißenburg in German) and the primate’s seat in Esztergom (Gran in German) emerged as the centers of power and Latinate culture (Kósa 1999: 117).

122 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Although, as in the case of Czech and Polish, some Magyar translations of Latin texts appeared in the 14th and 15th centuries, the chancery Magyar language emerged only in the 16th century, especially in autonomous Transylvania. (In Royal Hungary Latin persisted in the function of an administrative language, while Ottoman [Old Turkish] in this section of Hungary directly incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.) The two Magyar priests who received education at the University of Prague (that is, in Bohemia, then the foremost center of Hussitism), Tamás Pécsi and Bálint Ujlaki, translated the Bible into Magyar between the 1410s and the 1430s, under the influence of Hussitism, which propagated the use of vernaculars in liturgy. First, they worked in Syrmia (today, southern Vojvodina in Serbia), which was Hungary’s Magyarophone center of Hussitism, Waldensianism, and Bogomilism. Accused of heresy, both were banished from Syrmia and completed their translation in Hungary’s vassal land of Moldavia. Their translation survives in fragments, but, significantly, introduced to Magyar orthography Jan Hus’s diacritical device for marking long vowels. First it spread among Calvinist Magyar-speakers, but soon their Catholic counterparts accepted this standard as well. This diacritical modification of letters survives in standard Magyar, like in standard Czech and Slovak, in the form of acute accent. These diacritic Magyar letters include [á], [é], [í], [ó], [˝ o], [ú], and [˝ u]. The first Hungarian printshop opened in Buda in 1472 and produced its first book a year later. It was a Latin-language chronicle. The first Magyar-language book was published only in 1533 at Cracow in Poland. The first translation of the Gospels into Magyar appeared 3 years later in Vienna. The first Magyar-language book that was brought out in Hungary came off the press in 1536 at Újsziget. Five years later, János Sylvester’s (Ioannes Sylvester, 1504–1572) translation of the New Testament was published in Sárvár (Kotenburg in German). A pupil of Erasmus (1466–1536), Sylvester, authored the second grammar of Magyar, Grammatica Hungarolatina (The Grammar of Magyar [Written] in Latin, 1539, Sárvár). Mátyás Dévai Bíró (1500–1545), known as the ‘Hungarian Luther,’ authored the very first grammar of this language, published in 1538 in Cracow. Other early grammars, invariably written in Latin, followed in 1606, 1645, 1655, 1682, and 1686. The first extensive Latin-Magyar dictionaries appeared in 1590 in Debrecen. The Calvinist scholar, Albert Szenci Molnár (1574–1634), who authored the 1600 grammar, also compiled the most significant dictionary, Dictionarium Latinohungaricum (The Latin-Magyar Dictionary, 1604, Nuremberg). In 1708, another Calvinist, Ferenc Pápai Páriz (1649–1716), updated and modernized Molnár’s dictionary, which remained the standard reference for users of Magyar and Latin in the Kingdom of Hungary until the mid-19th century. The Protestant emphasis on the need to make the Holy Writ available in vernaculars encouraged the Vizsoly Calvinist minister Gáspár Károli (Gaspar Caroli, 1529–1592) to translate the Bible into Magyar. The translation from the original languages was published in 1590 in Vizsoly. Transylvania’s Lutherans also

Language in Central Europe

123

attempted their own translation of the Holy Script, but Gáspár Heltai (died in 1574) managed to complete only the New Testament (1562, Koloszvár [Cluj]). Hungary’s Magyarophone Catholics had to wait for their version of the Bible until 1626, when the Jesuit György Káldi’s (1570–1634) translation from the Vulgate came off the press in Vienna. However, it was the Calvinist Bible of Vizsoly that has influenced Magyar language and literature more than any other book. Some 300 editions of this translation were recorded up to 1940. It was used among Hungary’s Protestants until 1975 and was preferred by Catholics despite the revised edition of Káldi’s Bible, which appeared in 1865, and was not superseded by a new Catholic translation of the Holy Writ until 1973, this time from the original languages. In the Czech Crown, it was the Kralice Bible, translated by the Czech Brethren, which became the basis for the further development of chancery Czech in the 17th century, and the model closely emulated in the standardization of modern Czech at the beginning of the 19th century. In Poland-Lithuania, the Counter-Reformation gradually overcame the significance of Protestantism, and Wujek’s Catholic translation of the Bible constituted the model for those who wrote in Polish during the 17th and 18th centuries. The situation in the Kingdom of Hungary, partitioned between Catholic Austria, the Islamic Ottoman Empire, and multiconfessional (though predominantly Protestant, if one takes into account the nobility and burghers) Transylvania, was still different. The Hungarian Primate and Archbishop of Esztergom, Péter Pázmány (1570– 1637), was born a Calvinist, and converted to Catholicism as a teenage student. Recognizing the fact that mainly Protestants contributed to the development of chancery Magyar in the 16th century, Pázmány adopted this ‘Protestant Magyar’ for the written and propaganda needs of the Counter-Reformation. Thus, in the 17th century, he shaped this language as a common, supra-confessional medium of literate Magyar-speakers, to which Protestants and Catholics contributed equally. His contribution to the partial re-Catholicization of Hungary earned him the sobriquet ‘Second Apostle of Hungary’ (the first one was St Stephen). Importantly, Pázmány’s ideological adversary, the Calvinist Bishop of Transylvania, István Geleji Katona (1589–1645), authored the first ever grammar of Magyar actually written in this language, Magyar Grammatikátska (The Small Grammar of Magyar, 1645, Karlsburg [Alba Iulia]). This grammar unified the principles of Magyar orthography and syntax. The continued importance of the Calvinist Bible of Vizsoly as the model of Magyar usage emphasized this Catholic–Protestant linguistic symbiosis. In a similar fashion, the Holy Roman Empire’s German-speaking Catholics adopted Luther’s version of Meissen German as standard German, in spite of the fact that it differed from the Common German of the imperial chancery and administration. Furthermore, any acute politicization of German in the empire and of Magyar in Hungary was prevented by the continued use of Latin as the official language,

124 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

prevalent especially among Catholics. Even Matthias I Corvinus (reigned 1458– 1490), who stemmed from the Hungarian Magyar-speaking nobility, preferred to employ Latin, which, previously, had been the natural choice for the ‘French’ House of Anjou or the Germanic-speaking Bavarian, Luxembourg, Habsburg, and Slavophone Jagiellonian monarchs, who had ruled the kingdom between 1301 and 1457, and had had no, or limited, knowledge of Magyar. By the same token, the Prince of Transylvania, István Báthori, elected the King of PolandLithuania and known in this position as Stefan Batory (reigned 1576–1586), communicated with the court in Latin. By law, this Lingua Patriae (‘language of the Fatherland’) remained the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary till 1844, though numerous politicians, nobles, scholars, and members of the intelligentsia of various ethnolinguistic backgrounds and origins wrote and spoke Latin until 1867 (Balázs 2000: 113, 133, 139; Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 345–347; Drsatova 2005; Janich and Greule 2002: 324; Kontler 1999: 154, 157, 208; Kósa 1999: 62; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 469; Tornow 2005: 182, 224–226). Thus, the term ‘chancery Magyar,’ used for comparison with chancery Czech and Polish, is a misnomer. The royal chancery hardly ever used Magyar to administer the kingdom. However, this language was employed for low-level ecclesiastical administration in the Protestant Churches, which, to a certain degree, justifies the use of this concept, before Magyar became an accepted language of administration, alongside Latin, in autonomous Transylvania. Mátyás Dévai Bíró’s Orthographia Vngarica (Magyar Orthography) published in 1538 and 1549 in Cracow contributed to the initial systematization of Magyar spelling, before the task was largely completed by Katona’s Magyar Grammatikátska. Bíró drew on the example of one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence as envisioned by Jan Hus. But the chancery and Catholic tradition of digraphs, stemming from German and early Czech usage, also persisted. The amalgamation of both these systems progressed slowly, as it had to overcome the Protestant–Catholic antagonism. This process continued until the beginning of the 19th century. In a nutshell, to this day, Magyar orthography, same as the Polish spelling system, includes letters modified with diacritics and digraphs for denoting phonemes. For instance, the diacritic characters, [á], [é], [ó], [ö], [˝ o], [ü], [˝ u], and the digraphs, [cs] for /ch/, [gy] pronounced as in British ‘during,’ [ly] for /soft l/, [ny] pronounced as in British ‘new,’ [zs] for /zh/, [sz] for /s/, or [ty] pronounced as in British ‘tune.’ This connection between Protestantism and the rise of chancery Magyar also contributed to the linking of the language with these Magyar dialect areas where Protestants constituted the majority of the population or a leading political force. In geographical terms, it was the eastern reaches of Royal Hungary (modern-day eastern Slovakia and eastern Hungary) and Transylvania (today in Romania) (Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 275; Janich and Greule 2002: 324; Középiskolai történelmi atlasz 1996: 41; Tornow 2005: 226).

Language in Central Europe

125

The Battle of Mohács (1526) holds a similar symbolic value for Magyar nationalism as the Battle of White Mountain does for its Czech counterpart and had even more traumatic consequences. At Mohács, the Hungarian king died, which precipitated the dynastic change, and the defeat laid Hungary and much of the Habsburg lands open to Ottoman attack. The defeat was a watershed event that, on one hand, allowed the Ottoman Empire to complete its incorporation of the Balkans, while on the other, it constituted a stepping-stone to further expansion in Central Europe and around the northern shores of the Black Sea. In the 1530s, the Ottoman armies campaigned as far west as Vienna and Graz. The situation improved in 1541. Sultan Süleyman I the Magnificent (reigned 1520–1566) seized Buda, the Hungarian capital since the early 15th century. The so-called period of ‘trisection’ of Hungary commenced. The Ottomans directly administered central Hungary with Budin (Buda) as their administrative center. The Habsburgs, as the legitimate rulers of the Kingdom of Hungary, retained control over rump ‘Royal Hungary,’ the narrow arch of land that extended from northern Croatia via western Hungary (north of the Balaton Lake) to Upper Hungary (Slovakia). The Hungarian nobility established their new capital at Pozsony or Preßburg in German and Prešporo(e)k or Prešpurk in Slavic (today Bratislava). Transylvania with the easternmost slice of modern-day Hungary was established as a vassal principality of the Ottoman Empire.26 The Magyarophone Báthory dynasty ruled Transylvania from their capital located at Gyulaféhervár (Karlsburg in German, today Alba Iulia, also the seat of the Catholic bishop of Transylvania), but the region’s main center of learning and culture was Kolozsvár (Klausenburg in German, today Cluj) (Kontler 1999: 140–143). This situation lasted largely unchanged until the end of the 17th century. Three years after the unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683), the Habsburg armies recaptured Buda and Transylvania. In 1690, the Transylvanian capital was moved to Klausenburg (Kolozsvár) and the region was incorporated into the Habsburg lands. The sultan relinquished almost all of Hungary in the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz (Karlóca in Magyar, Karlofça in Ottoman, today Sremski Karlovci in Serbia). The Kingdom of Hungary was re-established, but with Croatia and Transylvania administered separately by Vienna-nominated governors. In 1765, Transylvania was made into a Grand Duchy with its capital in Klausenburg. What held together the concept of united Hungary during the two and a half centuries of the partition was the notion of the Hungarian natio. It was overtly formulated by the Diet of 1498. Like in Poland-Lithuania, all the noblemen, irrespective of the size of their property, enjoyed identical liberties, and together constituted the ‘Crown of Hungary.’ The jurist, István Werb˝ oczy (Stephanus de Werbewcz, Werbeiots, 1485–1541), collected all the customary laws regulating the privileges and duties of the Hungarian nobility in the famous Tripartitum (Three Parts). It was presented to the Diet of 1514. Although the deputies did

126 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

not ratify the collection, nevertheless it became the basis of Hungarian law until 1848. The Tripartitum was published in Vienna in 1517 and translated into Magyar in 1577. This law code was similar to the Ruthenian-language Lithuanian Statute (Litovskii Statut), compiled between 1522 and 1529, and revised in 1566 and 1588. (It was translated into Polish as late as 1614.) Like the Tripartitum, the Statute construed the noblemen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a natio, and remained the basis of law on the territory of the former Grand Duchy until 1840. Furthermore, the Hungarian Diet of 1514 passed a legislation that subjected the peasantry to ‘eternal servitude’ (perpetua rusticitas), which fortified the difference in the social and political status between the peasants and the nobility. In Poland-Lithuania, the gulf of difference between these two social groups was justified by the 16th-century theory of their separate ethnic origin; the peasants from the Slavs and biblical Ham, and the nobles from the Sarmatians and biblical Japheth. Ottoman expansion brought to the Balkans and Central Europe a new kind of literacy tightly connected to the religion of Islam. The most visible sign of its difference was the Arabic alphabet. However, in this script, scribes noted texts in three languages, which were used in separate spheres of social life. Arabic, the language of the Koran,27 remained the sacred language of the religion. In Persian, the Ottoman elites read and wrote literature, while Ottoman (Old Turkish with significant linguistic loans from Arabic and Persian) served the needs of imperial administration. But this mattered to the new ruling elites only. The Christian ‘infidels’ were allowed to keep their languages as well as their faith as long as they paid taxes and did not rebel. Areas of compact Turkish-speaking settlement extended only to Thrace, Dobruja and Macedonia. Obviously, the political identity of this empire was steeped in religion, not in language or ethnicity. Numerous Ottoman administrators and clerks who resided in Ottoman Hungary were either of Slavophone Bosnian stock or Albanian-speaking. Sometimes, they also wrote in their own vernaculars with the use of Arabic characters. In addition, the Budin pasha corresponded with his Magyar raya (non-Muslim subjects) in the southern variant of the Magyar language. For the sake of everyday communication between the new masters and the population at large, the Magyar-Turkic pidgin language developed (Balázs 2000: 134; Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 271; Borowski 2001: 70–71; Kontler 1999: 134; Németh 1970: 7–10; Sužied˙elis 1997: 182–183; Tornow 2005: 222, 225). In Royal Hungary, where the Counter-Reformation made significant inroads, the Jesuits spread the knowledge of Latin among the nobility. In the proximity of the Holy Roman Empire and the imperial court in Vienna, and the absence of an equally attractive center of Magyarophone culture, German became the language of social advancement. But this development endangered the old privileges of natio Hungarica (Hungarian natio), so the lesser nobles with no access to German-language education stuck fast to Latin as the ‘age-old language’ of

Language in Central Europe

127

the Kingdom of Hungary. This was made easy by the geographical nearness of Royal Hungary to the Apennine Peninsula. Obviously, the Hungarian nobles’ command of this ancient tongue, as in the case of Czech and Polish-Lithuanian nobility, more often than not was limited to several phrases used in speech and writing (Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 271; Tóth 2000: 133–135). The tradition of Magyar-language literacy, always marginal to its official counterpart in Latin, the Magyar language developed most strongly in semiindependent Transylvania. A 1572 princely decree made Unitarianism, Lutheranism, Reformed Calvinism, and Catholicism, the principality’s four ‘accepted religions.’ This privilege was extended to Transylvania’s three nationes of the Hungarians (Magyars), the Magyarophone Szeklers, and the German-speaking Saxons. This arrangement excluded the Romance-speaking Vlachs/Walachians (future Romanians) and their Orthodox religion, thus preparing the ground for the ethnonational Magyar–Romanian conflict, which would flare up in the second half of the 19th century. The Reformation tradition of using the vernacular in church and the aforementioned social divisions encouraged the development of Magyar and German literacies alongside the traditional use of Latin. The Walachians’ ecclesiastical Old Church Slavonic literacy, as well as their secular one in East Romance dialects written in Cyrillic characters, was barely tolerated. Hence, many Orthodox priests were hardly literate, which was unheard of among Transylvania’s Protestant and Catholic clergy. In emulation of the 1596 Brze´sc´ (Brest) Union that made a sizeable part of Poland-Lithuania’s Orthodox faithful into the Uniates with their own Slavonic liturgy but under the pope’s jurisdiction, Vienna pressed for a similar solution in Royal Hungary. The Ungvár (Uzhhorod) union was concluded in 1646 for the Slavophone (Ruthenian) Orthodox population in eastern Upper Hungary (today, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia). Emperor Leopold I (reigned 1658–1705) encouraged the replacement of Orthodox Christianity with the Uniate faith among Transylvania’s Orthodox Walachians as well. The process commenced in 1699. A year later, the emperor confirmed the union in a detailed diploma. Hence, at least by the letter of law, the Romancephone Walachians, who joined the Uniate Church, attained the status of another Transylvanian natio equal to the Magyars, the Szeklers, and the Saxons (Hitchins 1986: 543; Hungary 2003: 15; Magocsi 1978: 23). From the 1530s to the end of the 17th century, dramatic political changes disrupted the tradition of Magyar literacy. However, a few outstanding individuals managed to write significant works, which created a modicum of continuity for this literacy. First among them was the poet Bálint Balassi (Balassa, 1554–1594). He attained such significance for Magyar literature as Kochanowski for Poles or Komenský for Czechs. Born to an influential Protestant family, Balassi converted later in his life to Catholicism. He died of wounds received during the Ottoman siege of Esztergom. In the same town, then under the Porte’s control,

128 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Primate Péter Pázmány resided. Not unlike Balassi, he converted to Catholicism and developed the Hungarian variant of Counter-Reformation sermonizing that won back numerous Hungarian Protestants for the Catholic faith. In his writings, the prolific and versatile scholar Albert Szenci Molnár opposed Pázmány’s Catholicism, besides publishing his groundbreaking Latin-Magyar Dictionary, which served many generations of Hungarian nobles striving to express themselves in Latin. Another significant Protestant scholar, János Apáczai Csere (1625–1659), published his Magyarophone encyclopedia, Magyar encyclopaedia (Hungarian Encyclopedia), at Utrecht in 1653. These developments decided that the northeastern dialect spoken in Debrecen, Kaschau (Kassa in Magyar, today Košice) and western Transylvania would become the dialectal basis for standard Magyar (Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 273, 324; Janich and Greule 2002: 324; Kontler 1999: 157). It seems that Magyar dialects spoken in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary remained more mutually comprehensible than the Slavic ones classified as Czech and Polish, and spoken in the lands of the Czech Crown or in Poland. Two factors account for this phenomenon. First, the Magyar language spread from the Pannonian core territory, where the first Magyar-speakers settled in the beginning of the 10th century. The Slavic-speaking population that spawned later the Polish and Czech groups had already been settled in the region in the 6th century. So the history of the divergence of the Slavic idioms is at least four centuries older. Second, Slavs were engaged in agriculture, which encouraged a sedentary way of life with a very low level of spatial mobility. The Magyars were the steppe pastoralists, who established themselves in the puszta (from Slavic pusty meaning ‘empty land’), or the Pannonian steppe. They retained their pastoral economy that required wandering with herds of cattle for hundreds of kilometers. This high spatial mobility let the Magyars maintain the relative uniformity of their speech (Kósa 1999: 60). Due to the exigencies of Hungarian history, the following languages have exerted the most profound influence on Magyar: Latin, Slavic (including Church Slavonic and the vernaculars of the Bosnians, Croats, Ruthenians, Serbs, Slovenes, and Slovaks), German, East Romance Walachian, Ottoman, and French mediated via the German of Vienna. But in the wake of the wars with the Ottoman Empire, the main winner in the field of literacy was Latin. In the 1730s, prints in Latin peaked at 69 percent of all the publications produced in Hungary. Meanwhile, the average annual book production in Magyar amounted to 38 titles between 1697 and 1706, but rapidly sank to between two and five book titles per year between 1711 and 1728. The drop was caused by the Habsburgs’ seizure of Transylvania from Ottoman control, which entailed the superseding of Magyar with Latin and German as official languages. Later, the centralizing and modernizing reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II tipped this ratio of languages in administration and book production in favor of Magyar and German.

Language in Central Europe

129

In 1766, 25 Magyar-language publications came off the press. Between 1765 and 1790, the number of Latin publications decreased from 50 percent to 39 percent of the total book production in Hungary, while those in Magyar rose from 27 percent to 34 percent, and in German from 16 percent to 23 percent28 (Kont 1909: 50; Kosáry 1987: 135). The importance and influence of Latin in the cultural and political life of the kingdom was so great that the Hungarian nobility gave it the nickname of ‘father tongue,’ as opposed to the ‘mother tongue’ of Magyar. These sobriquets deftly reflected the gender gap in the nobility; usually boys received formal education, and thus they only had the chance to acquire Latin. Women, noble or not (with the notable exception of aristocracy), tended to speak local vernaculars employed in their families. In the period of modernization that commenced in the mid-18th century, Latin, however, was too weak an instrument to oppose the influence of imperial German. György Bessenyei (1747–1811), an early Hungarian intellectual and writer, who championed the use of Magyar, published his Ágis tragédiája (The Tragedy of Agis, Vienna) in 1772, which Hungarian linguists and literature specialists consider the beginning of the Hungarian Enlightenment. Today this year is also employed to mark the beginning of the ‘new Hungarian period’ in a typical classification of the history of the Magyar language, as well as the ‘birth’ of modern Magyar-language literature (Kósa 1999: 67). Bessenyei and his colleagues made quite an effort to change the linguistic situation. For instance, though the Hungarian press commenced in 1705, the first periodicals were published exclusively in Latin. The first German-language newspaper came off the press in 1764, and the first Magyar-language newspaper, Magyar Hírmandó (Hungarian Messenger), was published in Preßburg in 1780. The number of Magyar newspapers grew to 15 in 1792. But the spread of the ideas encouraged by the French Revolution caused the Habsburg court and the Hungarian nobility to tighten censorship. Only four Magyar-language newspapers survived in 1805 (Kosáry 1987: 137–139). The absolutist reaction was also connected to the Martinovics conspiracy of 1794–1795. Father Ignatius Martinovics (1755–1795), an ex-Franciscan of Serbian descent, proposed to replace the monarchy with a democratic republic in emulation of the French model. The Hungarian republic of his vision would have included the three autonomous regions inhabited by non-Magyarspeakers, Slavonica containing most of Upper Hungary, Illyrica coinciding with southern Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia, and Valachica composed of a part of Transylvania and Banat. Martinovics and his five closest associates were duly executed after the discovery of this plot. Although this event was not of real significance, the political repercussions were enormous. The Hungarian nobility fully agreed with Vienna’s suppression of this republican tendency that, however tentatively, could endanger the elevated status of the former and the legitimacy of the emperor’s absolutist rule. This also meant the reversal in

130 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

language policy from the use of particularistic Magyar and German in favor of universalistic Latin (Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 229). The Martinovics conspiracy also indicated the beginning of ethnic Magyar nationalism steeped in language and aspiring to transform the population of Hungary into a monolingual Magyar nation. The Hungarian nobility gradually espoused this ideology during the first half of the 19th century, eventually discarding the possibility of building a multiethnic Hungarian nation united by common statehood. The way to ethnic Magyar nationalism led through language policy. After 1784, German gradually replaced Latin in the administration of the Kingdom of Hungary, as well as in secondary schools and tertiary educational institutions. All these changes, like most other modernizing reforms in the Habsburg lands, were revoked at the end of Joseph II’s reign and immediately after his death in 1790. In the face of the French danger, Vienna gave concessions to the Hungarian nobility in the forms of piecemeal language rights. In 1805, Hungarian government agencies were allowed to correspond in Magyar with the Lieutenancy Council, the institution through which Vienna controlled the kingdom. In 1830, it was agreed that this council, alongside higher courts of law, was to process Magyar petitions in Magyar. The meetings of the Hungarian diet were held exclusively in Latin until 1840 and this language remained the medium of instruction at the University of Budapest for 4 years longer. Eventually, in 1844, Magyar replaced Latin as the official language of the kingdom (Johnson 2002: 139; Kann and Zdenˇek1984: 224–225, 230–234; Kósa 1999: 68). The turn of the 19th century was the period of ‘language renewal’ (a nyelvújítás kora). Numerous Magyar writers, scholars, and intellectuals set themselves the task of ‘language reform.’ They aimed at codifying the Magyar language so that it could serve the needs of modern society as English, French, or German did. The two main camps that conducted this process were the orthologists (Orthologus) and the neologists (Neologus). The former wished to correct the usual usage mistakes and leave Magyar largely as it was already. Their opponents hoped to purify the language from ‘foreign influences’ by the extensive use of made-up words and neologisms, which would replace numerous loans from Slavic, Turkic, German, and Romance. By the 1820s, the neologists’ vision of language reform had won the day. Between 1772 and 1849, around 100 various dictionaries of the Magyar language were published and hence Magyar had been successfully standardized by the mid-19th century. However, the Magyar-speakers had to wait for two decades for the first multivolume authoritative dictionary of their language, comparable to Linde’s Polish and Jungmann’s Czech dictionaries. Gergely István Czuczor (1800–1866) and János Fogarasi’s (1801–1878) six-volume A magyar nyelv szótára (The Dictionary of the Magyar Language) came off the press between 1862 and 1874 in Budapest (Forgács 1998: 104–105; Janich and Greule 2002: 323; Kósa 1999: 68–70).

Language in Central Europe

131

The Slovak language The Slavic population of Upper Hungary included peasants, burghers and nobility, though practically all nobles, even if of Slavic origin, spoke Magyar and Latin, and as such considered themselves to be the members of the Hungarian natio. The city-dwellers usually spoke German as elsewhere in the Kingdom of Hungary (and Central Europe for that matter). Peasants talked in a plethora of local dialects that were mutually intelligible and extended from Bohemia to Hungary’s Subcarpathia and across the state border into Poland-Lithuania. Literacy was mainly limited to the nobility and clergy, who wrote in Latin, and to burghers, who preferred to write in German. Obviously, Jews cultivated their religious literacy in Hebrew and Aramaic, and secular writing in Yiddish, but invariably with the use of Hebrew characters. Upper Hungary’s noble families of Slavophone provenance, by virtue of being part of the larger Hungarian natio dominated by Magyar-speakers, gradually acquired Magyar as their second or, later, even first language. By the same token, Slavic-speakers, who managed to establish themselves as burghers in cities, had to acquire German. In both cases, the bilingualism soon turned into monolingualism after one to three generations. During the trisection of Hungary, Upper Hungary, centered in the new Hungarian capital of Preßburg, emerged as the political and cultural center of Royal Hungary. With the domination of the Habsburg monarchs in this rump Hungary, coupled with the growing significance of cities, German gained the status of an unannounced co-official language, used alongside Latin for administration, education, and scholarship. Probably, the first books printed in Upper Hungary were the religious hymnals in Magyar that appeared during the early 1570s in Komjáti (Komjatice) near Nyitra (Nitra) (Slovak Collections 2003: 1; Soltész 1973: ill 27). Current ethnolinguistic Slovak nationalism traces the roots of the Slovak language and nation to the times of Greater Moravia, claiming the polity to have been the ‘first Slovak state,’ and Old Church Slavonic, none other than the ‘Old Slovak language’ or the ‘vernacular of the Slovaks,’ which was adopted ˇ for written purposes by Cyril and Methodius (Bagin 1993; Durica 1996: 8, 10). However, there is no continuity in politics, culture, or written language between this early Slavic polity and the modern Slovak nation. Although it seems reasonable to propose that, from the biological point of view, the modern Slovaks may be descendants of the Greater Moravian population, this proposition is also true in the case of the Czechs, the Rusyns, the Poles in Małopolska, as well as of a significant section of the population in modern-day Hungary. On the other hand, the Slavic vernacular of Greater Moravia’s Slavophone population did not disappear after the incorporation of this area into Hungary. Thus, the continuity of the use of this vernacular was maintained, though it was not the basis for the emergence of standard Slovak only. The vernacular speech

132 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Greater Moravia’s Slavophone population equally contributed to the emergence of the chancery languages of Bohemian, Moravian, and Polish, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the rise of Rusyn. Obviously, the vernacular significantly changed and diverged between the collapse of Greater Moravia in the late 9th century and the emergence of the aforementioned languages. Interestingly, in the school year 1996/1997, the cherished national myths, linking Slovakia to Greater Moravia and Slovak to Old Church Slavonic, were officially taught as facts from the officially approved textbook Dejiny Slovenska a Slovákov (History of Slovakia and the Slovaks) by the controversial Slovak émigré ˇ historian, Milan S Durica. It took the principled stance of the Slovak leading historians to remove this textbook from schools (Kritika & Kontext 1997: 4–65). The very ethnonym Slovák appeared for the first time only in 1485, and until the 19th century it either meant Slavs in general or the Slavic population of Upper Hungary. For most of the time, religion not language was employed for dividing the local population as elsewhere in Central Europe. During that period, most Latin authors simply called the population, who in the 19th century would become known as Slovaks, Slavi (Slavs). When a need arose to contrast them with the Slavs of the Czech Crown, the Slovaks were dubbed as Slavi Pannonii (Pannonian Slavs) as opposed to Bohemii (Czechs). In the second half of the 18th century, Russian scholars denoted the idiom of the Slovaks as slaviano-vengerskii or ‘Slavic-Hungarian’ as opposed to slavianskii, that is, Church Slavonic. This semantic closeness of the ethnonym ‘Slovak’ to that of ‘Slav’ endowed the Slovak national movement with the myth that of all the Slavic nations the Slovaks are the most direct descendants of the original Slavs, and the Slovak language the most direct continuation of Old Slavic. If it was necessary to issue a document in an idiom comprehensible to the Slavophone Upper Hungarians, chancery Bohemian (Czech) was the obvious choice. The oldest document from this region issued in this language dates back to 1422. Bohemian emerged as another chancery language of Upper Hungary alongside German and Magyar. But Latin dominated there until the mid-19th century. This Bohemian language infused with a degree of Slovak dialectal influences developed into two regional varieties. They were employed in city administration, private correspondence, occasional poetry, and church sermons. Because of the geographical centers of these two varieties, the modern Slovak linguists term them as ‘cultural Western Slovak’ (kultúrna západnoslovenˇcina) or ‘cultural Central Slovak’ (kultúrna stredoslovenˇcina). During the 1980s, ‘cultural Eastern Slovak’ (kultúrna východoslovenˇcina) made a decisive appearance as an analytical category, but from the ethnonational vantage, it was the written language of the population, who today identify themselves as Slovaks, Slovjaks, and Rusyns. Thus, claiming this written language exclusively for the Slovaks is an act of ethnonational appropriation.

Language in Central Europe

133

Soon religious strife decisively imposed itself onto this secular tradition of low-key secular literacy. After the battle of White Mountain (1620), numerous Czech Protestants fled to Upper Hungary, where the privileges of religious toleration granted to the Hungarian natio shielded them from Catholic persecution. With time, Protestants accounted for one-seventh of the Upper Hungarian Slavophone population. They wrote in the Czech (Bohemian) language as codified in the Kralice Bible. It became slightly Slovakized and was dubbed Bibliˇctina (or the Bible language). In the framework of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits decided to use the vernacular as proposed by Protestants. In Upper Hungary, their answer to Bibliˇctina, distanced from the local Slavic vernacular, was cultural Western Slovak. In a largely unchanged shape, it was used in religious publications. During the second half of the 19th century, Czech and Slovak philologists imposed the nationally-colored designation of ‘Jesuit Slovak’ (jezuítska slovenˇcina) on this de facto Upper Hungarian Slavic written religious language. The relative Slovakization of the written language as employed by Catholics caused Upper Hungary’s Protestants to de-Slovakize their variant, in order to make it closer to Bohemian Czech. To this end, Pavel Doležal (1700–1778) published his Grammatica Slavico-Bohemica in Preßburg in 1746. This work emulated Václav Jan Rosa’s Cžechoˇreˇcnost, seu Grammatica linguae Bohemicae (1672, Prague), who identified the idiom of Upper Hungary’s Slavophones as Bohemian (Czech). The title of Doležal’s work can be literally translated as The Grammar of the Slavo-Bohemian Language, but Slovak and Czech philologists usually settle for the more interpretative translation, referring to the language as ‘SlovakCzech.’ Although this is an anachronism, they may not be far off the mark, because Doležal and other Slavophone Upper Hungarian Protestants imagined their idiom as common with that of Bohemia’s Czech-speakers. Later, this gave rise to the concept of the Czechoslovak language, which hindered the final ˇ codification of the Slovak language until the mid-20th century (Duroviˇ c 1980: 211–213; Krajˇcoviˇc 1988; Pallas 1786; Stankiewicz 1984: 5–6; Törnquist-Plewa 2000: 200–201). The Catholic–Protestant split translated itself onto Slavophone literacy in Upper Hungary through religious publications. In 1636, an influential Protestant hymnal, Cithra sanctorum neb žalmy a pisné duchovní staré i nové (The Holy Sitar or Psalms and Old and New Religious Songs) was published in Bibliˇctina. Nineteen years later, the Catholics replied with their own hymnal, Cantus catholici (The Catholic Hymnal), printed in Jesuit Slovak. The Protestant camp gained the upper hand in this ideological race when Daniel Krman’s (Krmann, 1663– 1740) Bibliˇctina translation of the Bible came off the press in 1722 in Halle. In the mid-18th century, there was an attempt at a Catholic translation of the Holy Scripture into Jesuit Slovak but it remained in manuscript. Interestingly, Calvinists, who did not wish to cooperate either with Catholics, who wrote in Jesuit

134 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Slovak (Western Slovak), or with Lutherans, who employed Bibliˇctina (close to Czech and Central Slovak), employed the local vernacular of the Komitat of Sáros (Šariš), today identified as the eastern Slovak dialect. The Slavophone Calvinists published their translation of the Psalter into their specific written vernacular in 1752 in Debrecen. Calvinist translators used the Magyar system of spelling to make their language decisively different from Bibliˇctina so much influenced by written Czech. But the innovation of ‘Calvinist Eastern Slovak’ largely petered out by the turn of the 20th century. This language lasted longest among the Sáros Calvinist Slavic-speaking emigrants in the United States (Dulichenko 2004: 196–226; Siatkowska 1992: 232–237). In 1783–1785, Jozef Ignác Bajza (1755–1836) published two volumes of his René mládenca príhodi a skusenosti (René or Adventures and Experiences of a Young Man, Preßburg), hailed as the first novel in the modified vernacular of western Upper Hungary (Slovakia). This feat earned him the title of the ‘father’ of this language, though Bajza’s written vernacular did not form the basis for the codification of present-day standard Slovak. At the same time, in 1783, the ‘first newspaper in Slovak’ (that is, in ‘Jesuit Slovak’) started publishing at Preßburg (Bratislava). Three years earlier, Juraj (Georgius) Papánek’s (1738– 1802) Historia gentis Slavae. De regno regibusque Slavorum (History of the Slavic People: On the kingdom and kings of the Slavs, Fünfkirchen [Pécs]) came off the press. Papánek traced the history of the Slavs to Greater Moravia. In agreement with Herderian thought, subsequent readers, intent on endowing Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speaking population with its own particular identity, interpreted Papánek’s history as that of the Slovak nation. In this interpretation, the Slovaks are posited as a nation with the oldest tradition of statehood in Central Europe. Unfortunately, ‘a millennium of Hungarian occupation’ caused them to ‘forget’ this proud tradition (Bagin 1993: 15; Kosáry 1987: 137; Siatkowska 1992: 287). This early coalescing of the Slavic-Slovak national idea found its not fully conscious expression in the grammatical and lexicographic work of the Catholic priest Anton (Antonio) Bernolák (1762–1813). Like Josef Dobrovský, after the suppression of the Society of Jesus and gradual secularization of life, Bernolák had little possibility of a brilliant intellectual career in the ecclesiastical structures. He chose the profession of a linguist of the local Slavic idiom. While Dobrovský wrote on the Czech language in German, Bernolák used Latin for the study of Slovak. In 1790, his Grammatica slavica (The Slavic [nowadays, anachronistically translated as ‘Slovak’] Grammar, Preßburg) came off the press and was followed by the posthumous edition of his six-volume Slowá´r ˇ ˇ Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoNemecko-Uherskí seu Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-LatinoGermanico-Ungaricum (The Slovak Dictionary: Czech-Latin-German-Magyar, Buda), published in 1825–1827. Bernolák’s writings and dictionary codified the variously named ‘Slovak’ or ‘Slavic’ language on the basis of western Upper

Language in Central Europe

135

Hungary’s Slavic vernacular, or ‘Jesuit Slovak.’ The written language was similar to ‘Jesuit Czech,’ that is, chancery Czech, which did not follow (or did not fully follow) Hus’s orthographic reform and was employed in Counter-Reformation religious literature. Chancery Moravian, especially in the form current in Brünn (Brno), was quite similar to this Jesuit Slovak. Linguists tend to call Bernolák’s early codification of Slovak Bernolaˇctina (Bernolák’s Slovak) (Siatkowska 1992: 288–289; Stankiewicz 1984: 25–26, 30). The crowning of Bernolaˇctina’s success came with the Catholic translation of the Bible into this Slovak, which came off the press between 1829 and 1832 in Esztergom. Over 300 religious books and school textbooks for Slovak Catholics were published in Bernolaˇctina before the 1860s. But to future activists of the Slovak national movement, Bernolaˇctina seemed too close to Czech, as the West Slovak and Moravian dialects do not differ much. They perceived Moravia and its speech as ‘belonging to’ the Czech language. Due to this fact, Bernolák’s codification could be used as an argument for subsuming Slovak as a dialect of Czech or for making it into a variant of some common Czechoslovak language. What is more, the parallel persistence of Bibliˇctina among Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Lutherans could have reinforced the religious cleavage with a linguistic one. In light of that, the next codification of Slovak, conducted in the 1840s, shunned both Bibliˇctina and Bernolactina. Standard Slovak was based on the Central Slovak dialect and drew on the written tradition of ‘cultural Central ˇ Slovak’ (Bagin 1993: 17; Duroviˇ c 1980: 216). Slovak proponents of Czech, the most vocal among Upper Hungary’s Slavicspeaking Lutherans writing in Bibliˇctina, fought against this new standard, whereas Magyar and German alongside traditional Latin dominated in the public life of Upper Hungary until 1918. Unlike Bernolaˇctina, the use of Bibliˇctina continued until the Great War. Slovak became an official language of Slovakia within the borders of Czechoslovakia, but only as the Slovak variant of the common Czechoslovak language. In practice, Czech dominated in all the spheres of life in Czechoslovakia. In the short-lived independent Slovakia (1939–1945), there was no time to complete the codification of Slovak, but at least it was made into the sole official language of this state. This achievement could not be easily overlooked in postwar Czechoslovakia so Prague grudgingly accepted standard Slovak as a co-official language. The transition period lasted until 1968, when Czechoslovakia was federalized. The Slovak language received its long overdue six-volume Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1959–1968, Bratislava) edited by Stefan Peciar and others. Similar extensive dictionaries of Polish and Czech were published in the first half of the 19th century, and of Magyar in the other half of this century. But Slovak became (perhaps) permanently the sole official language of a state only in 1993, when independent Slovakia emerged following the break-up of Czechoslovakia (Janich and Greule 2002: 275).

136 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The history of the standardization of Slovak as conducted in the 19th and 20th centuries does not belong to this section’s focus, but the need to contextualize its development with that of Czech, Magyar, and Polish necessitated this brief sketch of future events. By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that Roman lettering (Antiqua) started prevailing in Polish- and Magyar-language publications already in the second half of the 16th century, whereas Czech prints continued to be published in Gothic letters until the 1820s, and Slovak ones even a decade or two longer. Apparently, Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Calvinists followed the Magyar tradition of using Antiqua even in the 18th century, while some stalwart Lutheran Slovaks not only stuck to Bibli´ctina but also to the Gothic lettering until the turn of the 20th century. These typographic choices made Polish and Magyar books graphically different from German publications, which utilized the Gothic lettering well into the mid-20th century (but increasingly fewer German-language prints in Gothic fonts were published after the mid-19th century). The prevalence of Gothic (Black) letters in Czech and Slovak books indicated the strong influence of German-language culture in Bohemia, Moravia and Upper Hungary that continued unabated until the second half of the 19th century. However, in the Gothic script used for printing in Czech and Slovak, diacritic letters devised by Hus replaced German multigraphs (Auty 1980: 178; Bagin 1993: 20; Soltész 1973). Due to Slovak’s proximity to Czech in the field of culture and politics, Slovak spelling closely follows the example of Czech orthography in the framework of which single letters (monographs) correspond to phonemes. Slovak also shares Czech’s only digraph [ch] for denoting palatal /h/ in addition to a few more digraphs such as [ia], [ie], [iu], [dz], and [dž] that correspond to the Polish usage with [ja], [je], [ju], [dz], and [dz]. ˙ Other differences include Slovak’s [ä], [ô], [l’], [´l], and [´r] that do not exist in Czech, and Czech’s [ˇe], [ˇr], and [u˚] that do not occur in the Slovak language (Gašparíková and Kamiš 1983: XVII).

Official languages in Central Europe The further development of Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak is analyzed in the next chapters as well as the use of these languages for political purposes. But this section deserves a word of summary to put the linguistic situation into a broader Central European perspective. In the late 14th century, following chancery German, chancery Czech (Bohemian) was the second vernacular to arrive in Central Europe. Soon, along with Latin and German, it became the language of literature and scholarly discourse, and of administration and ecclesiastical life. In the last field, Czech was largely limited to church liturgy and administration in the communities of Hussites and other groups of Slavophone Protestants living in the Czech lands and Upper Hungary.

Language in Central Europe

137

Polish and Magyar closely followed the Czech model of language codification in the 16th century. The trisection of the Kingdom of Hungary that took place at the very same time, however, stalled the further development of Magyar, which remained secondary to Latin, German, and Ottoman Turkish (Osmanlıca, Old Turkish). The use of Czech declined in the mid-17th century following Vienna’s suppression of the Slavophone Protestant nobility in Bohemia and Moravia, who used this language in writing. What is more, the union of the lands of the Czech Crown gradually unraveled. There was no more political center mutually intertwined with Czech literacy (not unlike in Hungary). With time, this contributed to the emergence of Bohemian and Moravian, as close, but different written languages. The situation was the opposite in Poland-Lithuania, which attained the status of the regional power in Central and Eastern Europe. During the late 16th century and the 17th century, Polish replaced Czech in its function as the intellectual and diplomatic lingua franca in East Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Slavophone areas of the Balkans, but also in Moldavia and Walachia. The period of Polish-Lithuanian economic and political buoyancy stopped during the 18th century, but the commonwealth survived until its final partition in 1795. Beside the official Latin, Polish became the de facto official language of administration and political life in the Kingdom of Poland already in the first half of the 16th century. At the close of the 17th century, it even rose to the status of the sole official language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Polish was elevated to this status in the Kingdom of Poland and became the only medium of education in all Poland-Lithuania during the last three decades of the 18th century. The international role of Polish also continued, though increasingly curbed by the use of French throughout Central and Eastern Europe. German suffered a similar fate, when even rulers of German-speaking polities talked in French and declined to speak German, this ‘unrefined language of peasants.’ Polish as an official language had a checkered history during the 19th century. Until the early 1830s, it had survived as the language of administration in the Polish-Lithuanian territories incorporated into Russia. In the Congress Kingdom of Poland under Russian control, it retained a more elevated status as an official language until the mid-1860s. Then Russian replaced it. In the Austrian and Prussian partitions of Poland-Lithuania, German was introduced into administration and public life already at the turn of the 19th century. But in 1869, Polish supplanted German in the function of the official language in Austria-Hungary’s Crownland of Galicia. In the second half of the 18th century, Magyar re-emerged as a language of literature and education, but it did not decisively replace Latin as the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary until the mid-1840s. Then it was accorded status equal to German only after the founding of Austria-Hungary in 1867.

138 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Obviously, the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy was reserved for Magyar, and the Austrian one for German. The birth of modern Czech, though steeped in the tradition of Hussitic Czechophone literacy, commenced at the turn of the 19th century and was not complete prior to the 1850s. In Bohemia and Moravia, Czech became a coofficial language vis-à-vis German only in the 1880s. And on the creation of the Czechoslovak nation-state in 1918, Czech became the leading official language in the country at the cost of marginalizing Slovak. But the de facto domination of Czech was muted by the official concept of the Czechoslovak language with its two equally legitimate variants in the form of Czech and Slovak. The Slovak language has no history of continuous literacy prior to the end of the 18th century, because there was no single written language identifiable as Slovak, and Slavophone documents produced in Upper Hungary were written in idiosyncratic mixtures of local dialects and Bohemian (chancery Czech). Even at the turn of the 19th century, whatever tradition of literacy the Slovak language enjoyed, it was closely intertwined with Bibliˇctina (or Hussitic Czech interlaced with Slovakisms) that survived in Upper Hungary as an auxiliary administrative language and as a written language of Slavophone Protestants in this region. The subsequent formation of Slovak as a language of literature was hampered by the competition between Protestant Bibliˇctina and Catholic Bernolaˇctina, which lasted until the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, another codification joined the quarrel and emerged as victorious standard Slovak because most of Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Catholics and Protestants accepted it as their written language. But the late codification of standard Slovak was not complete even in 1918. So, in Czechoslovakia, Slovak actually attained the status of a language co-official with Czech only after 1945, thanks to the formative experience of the first Slovak nation-state (1939–1945). But Slovak and Czech became the sole official languages of separate nation-states as late as 1993, when Czechoslovakia broke up into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Similarly, the history of Polish as the sole official language of a polity is connected to the founding of the Polish nation-state in 1918. It is worth mentioning, though, that Polish is the oldest, non-ecclesiastical, written Slavic language with a continuous tradition of literacy and official use, which has lasted unbroken from the 16th century to this day. After Poland-Lithuania was partitioned, in the 19th century, Polish-language literature amply made up for the decrease in the official use of this language. The period when Polish functioned as an international language was over in the first half of the 19th century. First, German took its place wherever the power of Vienna and Berlin extended. The ascendancy of Russian as an international language was connected to the rise of the Russian Empire. Russian was codified in the second half of the 18th century, but most of the empire’s narrow literate stratum were versed in Polish at the beginning of the 19th century, rather than in Russian. Hence, Polish remained

Language in Central Europe

139

the language of polite discourse in Russia’s Polish-Lithuanian territories until the mid-19th century. Similarly, German was the language of administration in Russia’s Latvian- and Estonian-speaking provinces until the 1880s. Although Magyar became the sole official language of the Kingdom of Hungary within Austria-Hungary, the Slavic and Romanian nationalisms extant in the area undermined its role either by sticking to Latin and German or by promoting their own vernaculars as written languages. Hence, the Magyar language never attained the status of a widely spoken international lingua franca. Until the mid-19th century, German shared this status with Latin. But the second half of that century and almost two decades hence until the end of World War I saw German reign as the paramount international language of Central Europe. Its supremacy survived even the creation of the plethora of Central European nation-states and remained largely unabated until the expulsion of the German-speaking population from Central Europe between 1945 and 1950.

Central European literacies The above picture of the rise of literacy and of various written languages in Central Europe necessarily concentrates on Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak, given this book’s focus. But, at the same time, one cannot ignore the context of other linguistic traditions that existed or continue to exist in Central Europe. Considering that these traditions were closely intertwined with the literacies in Polish, Czech, and Magyar at least until the mid-20th century, I believe justice has to be done to them. Religion and the social division between the estates (natio) and the populus (serfs, peasantry, and urban plebs) constituted the main cleavages of political importance in Central Europe during the Middle Ages and early modernity. In the field of literacy, the former cleavage was expressed not so much in terms of different languages, but by different scripts that were used to record and transmit the Holy Scriptures of Western and Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The Reformation preached the use of vernaculars in church and, by default, this appeal extended to public life too. However, it remained preferable for a Catholic or Protestant to employ the Latin alphabet if he wrote in German or Polish. Similarly, an Orthodox Christian employed Cyrillic to write in Walachian (Romanian) or Russian, and a Muslim used the Arabic alphabet to note something in Slavic or Ruthenian. A Jew wrote in Germanic Yiddish or Romance Ladino but with the use of Hebrew letters, and an Armenian stuck to the specific Armenian alphabet even if he noted information in Ottoman or Slavic. All these alphabets are connected to liturgical languages. In turn, these languages correspond to specific religions. The Latin language dominated in Catholic liturgy until the beginning of the 1970s. Although Protestants discarded Latin in favor of written vernaculars, their insistence on translating the

140 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Bible from the original languages spread among theologians in-depth knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic29 and Greek in addition to Latin. The Catholic CounterReformation also contributed to this trend but with the emphasis on the popular command of Latin among educated Catholics (mostly, male nobles). The Cyrillo-Methodian tradition left its decisive imprint among the Slavophone and Romance-speaking Orthodox and Greek Catholic (Uniate) Christians. They have consistently used Old Church Slavonic in Cyrillic letters as their language of liturgy and cultured discourse, often to this day. This language, however, being much closer to their vernaculars (except to that of Walachians) than was Latin to the idioms of Catholic Germanic- or Slavic-speakers, local Slavic speeches had a significant influence on Church Slavonic usage, just as Romance vernaculars had on Latin. As a consequence, various ‘recensions’ (or variants) of Old Church Slavonic appeared in the Balkans, Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy. Greek Catholics/Uniates30 (that is, Catholics using the Slavic rite in liturgy) began to introduce their national languages to liturgy during the first half of the 20th century. Beginning in the 18th century, Transylvania’s Romanian Greek Catholics had gradually moved away from Church Slavonic in favor of Latin, closer to their Romance vernacular, before introducing Romanian to liturgy. In 1924, in interwar Poland’s section of Belarus, the Catholic Church recreated the Uniate Church for Orthodox Belarusians willing to join it. Officially, this Church was known as ‘Byzantine-Slavic,’ but popularly it was referred to as ‘Neo-Uniate.’ The gradual introduction of Polish in this Church bred fears of Polonization and an imposition of Roman Catholicism, which convinced numerous Belarusians not to resign from their Orthodox faith. The Neo-Uniate liturgy was translated into Belarusian during the 1960s. The decision of the second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that vernaculars be employed in Catholic liturgy, indirectly influenced the shift toward vernacular liturgy among Greek Catholics and Uniates (especially in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine). But in most cases (except those of Slovak and Romanian) these vernaculars were written in Cyrillic characters. Old Church Slavonic still persists in Slavophone Orthodox autocephalous Churches (a rare exception is the several Orthodox parishes in Wrocław, Poland and the vicinity, where Polish is employed in liturgy), but usually in an archaized version of the local Slavic standard language. The basis of this usage is the 17th-century Russian recension that spread to all the Slavophone Orthodox autocephalous Churches when the Russian Empire was the only significant Orthodox Christian power prior to 1918. In Romania, the Romanian language replaced Church Slavonic in liturgy in the first quarter of the 19th century. The use of Cyrillic for writing in Romanian ceased in the 1850s, especially so after the unification of Walachia and Moldavia (1859) into Romania. Transylvania’s Greek Catholic Walachians strongly contributed to this change. In the 18th century, they had gradually switched from Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic to Latin and the Latin script, which entailed the experimental publication of the first

Language in Central Europe

141

Walachian- (Romanian-) language books in Latin characters. The Latin alphabet seized the day in Romania because it was associated with the West and modernity, as epitomized by France in Romanian eyes. However, Romanian (officially known as ‘Moldovan’) literacy in Cyrillic continued in Russia’s (and then Soviet) Moldavia (Bessarabia) until 1989. In post-Soviet Moldova’s eastern sliver, or separatist Transnistria, Moldovan is still written in Cyrillic letters (Adamczuk and ˙ Zdaniewicz 1991: 57–74; Hannan 2005a; Nadson 2006; Zelazny 2004). The resurgence of Greek literacy after the creation of independent Greece (1821–1832) also translated into the spread of Orthodox liturgy in Byzantine Greek. Obviously, this literacy was complete with its own specific Greek letters. This Greek influence was limited to pre-unification Romania, pre-1878 Bulgaria, and to Macedonia before this Ottoman land was split between Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece in 1912. The ecclesiastical usage of the Greek alphabet in Macedonia led, as well, to publication of Slavic-language books in the Greek alphabet rather than in Cyrillic during the 18th and 19th centuries. But following the division of Macedonia, Slavic literacies replaced Greek in the Serbian and Bulgarian sections of this land, while Byzantine Greek liturgy has continued in Greece’s section to this day. Slavic-speakers living in Athens’s part of historical Macedonia often employ the Greek script while writing in their vernaculars (Koneski 1981: 10–11; Todorova 1992). Armenians, like Jews, created an important diaspora in Central Europe. They have been present in the Balkans since the times of the Byzantine Empire, while the destruction of the Armenian state in 1064 at the hands of the Seljuk Turks caused some Armenians to flee to Kievan Rus. After the territories of the latter state were incorporated into Poland-Lithuania, important Armenian communities persisted in eastern Galicia. The destructive Ottoman-Persian wars played out in historical Armenia sent another wave of refugees to Central Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Modern estimates claim that at the beginning of the 19th century, 178,000 out of 250,000 Armenians in this region resided in the Ottoman Balkans and in Constantinople (Istanbul), 50,000 in Romania, 15,000 in Bulgaria, and 10,000 elsewhere in Central Europe. They enjoyed their own specific Armenian Christian Church, though in 1689 Poland-Lithuania’s Armenians established their separate Uniate Catholic Church. However, in both these Churches, Grabar has continued to serve as the language of liturgy. This Old Armenian standard was codified in the 5th century and endowed with its unique alphabet. Armenians wrote exclusively in this script, irrespective of which language they spoke. For instance, most Polish-Lithuanian Armenians spoke a Kipchak Turkic vernacular and wrote this language in the Armenian alphabet. Similarly, Ottoman Armenians wrote down their Turkish speech in Armenian characters, as well (Magocsi 2002: 98, 109–110; Pisowicz 2000: 136). Another diasporic people, the Jews, were even more significant for the culture and history of Central Europe. In some Balkan cities Jewish communities had

142 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

survived since the times of the Roman Empire. But most of them arrived in Central Europe much later. Some claim that the first Jews arrived in the region during the second half of the 10th century after the destruction of Khazaria, which was located between the Black and Caspian Seas. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, repeated waves of persecution and discrimination sent an eastward stream of Jewish refugees to Central Europe. With the rise of Poland-Lithuania, they settled all over this realm enjoying special privileges of religious, judiciary, and community autonomy. After the partition of the commonwealth, St Petersburg transformed its share of Polish-Lithuanian territories into the Jewish pale of settlement, outside which Jews would not be tolerated in this Orthodox empire. In Austria’s Galicia, as elsewhere in the Habsburg lands and in Central and Western Europe, for that matter, Jews suffered a degree of intolerance. But the process of emancipation made large strides in these areas during the 19th century, unlike in the Russian Empire. In 1867, Jews received the same rights as other Austro-Hungarian citizens. This opened the way to their assimilation with the emerging national communities of the Austrian Germans, the Magyars, the Poles, the Czechs and so on. Similar assimilation in Russia became possible only after the Bolshevik Revolution when Orthodox Christianity ceased to be the legitimizing ideology of this polity. In 1900, the Jews of Russia and Austria-Hungary constituted two-thirds of the 7.5 million-strong Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe. Almost half a million Ashkenazic Jews resided in Germany and 270,000 in Romania. The rest lived in the Balkans and Constantinople. They constituted the Sephardic Jewish community, whose ancestors had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. All of them continued to use Hebrew and Aramaic written in Hebrew letters as their liturgical languages, but in everyday life Sephardic Jews spoke in Romance Ladino (Spanyol), while their Ashkenazic counterparts used Germanic (or Germano-Slavic) Yiddish. As a rule, they wrote both languages in Hebrew letters, however, unlike in the case of Yiddish, Sephardic Jews employed Ladino as a lithurgical language, as well (Magocsi 2002: 97, 107–108; Wexler 1993: 1–82). Muslims have concentrated on the margins of Central Europe, that is, on the territories absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, mainly in the Balkans. Only with the Austro-Hungarian occupation (1878) and subsequent annexation (1908) of Bosnia did a sizeable compact Muslim community enter the mainstream of Central European life. A similar significant community of several tens of thousands of Muslim Tatars entered Poland-Lithuania in the 14th and 15th centuries. They made valued and loyal mounted soldiers and gradually entered the fold of the nobility. This meant that they lost their Kipchak Turkic vernacular (shared with the polity’s Armenians) and began to speak either in Polish or Ruthenian. However, they continued to write both the languages in Arabic letters, whereas in religious life they stuck to the Arabic language. This tradition continues to

Language in Central Europe

143

this day, and at least until the 1980s, there were Muslim religious leaders in Poland, who wrote in Polish with Arabic letters supplemented with specific Polish diacritical graphemes (Antonovich 1968; Stankievic 1954; Usien ´ 2001). The Arabic alphabet was of much common use within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans. Various books and documents in Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian were, first, written and rewritten in this script and, as of the second half of the 19th century, printed. In Bosnia, local Muslims also noted texts in their Slavic mother tongue with the use of Arabic characters. Earliest instances of such usage date back to the first half of the 15th century. They called their Slavic language noted in this manner as Adzamijski or Alhamijado. The second term is directly derived from the Spanish word aljamiado that denotes texts in the Romance vernacular(s) of the Iberian peninsula, written in Arabic (or Hebrew) letters. Iberian Muslims referred to such texts as al ‘ajamiyah, meaning ‘in foreigners’ idiom.’ The term ultimately comes from Arabic ‘ajam for ‘foreigners.’ Also known as ‘Mozarabic’ it was the language of Mozarabs (from Arabic musta’rib for ‘Arabicized’), or Iberia’s Romance-speaking Christians who converted to Islam. The Arabic alphabet attuned to the specific phonological needs of Bosanˇcica (Bosnian Slavic) was called Arebica. The first book in Arebica was published in at Constantinople in 1868, and 7 years later in Bosnia. All in all, 40 books of this kind were published, the last one in 1941.31 During Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia (1878–1918), also three newspapers were printed in Arebica. At that time, Bosnia was a true miniature reflection of multiethnic Austria-Hungary. Bosnian printing houses turned out books and newspapers in German, Magyar, and Bosnian (or Croatian) in the Latin alphabet; Ladino and Hebrew in the Hebrew script; Serbian and Old Church Slavonic in Cyrillic; as well as in Arabic and Ottoman in Arabic characters. Interestingly, the renowned United States scholar of Magyar origin, Peter F. Sugar (1920–2000), used the Arabic script as a secret code when he did research in communist Yugoslavia on the industrialization of Bosnia. To make the life of the secret police hard, he jotted down his notes in Magyar with the use of Arabic letters. In this way, he continued the illustrious tradition commenced by the 17th-century Hungarian historian István Szamosközi, who made notes in Magyar ‘Runes’ (Cook 2000: 92; Hukovi´c 1986: 20; Isakovi´c 1990: 249–270; Isakovi´c and Popadi´c 1982: 112–117, 257; Mentzel 2000; Schlösser 2005: 52–53; Omerdi´c 2006–2007). The religious inspiration for keeping various language literacies separate by the means of script became obsolete in Central Europe during the 19th century when language-based ethnic nationalisms took over from religion in this role. The overall divide between Orthodox and West Christian (Protestant and Catholic) nations remains marked by the use of Roman letters and Cyrillic. However, only specific languages (with their varying orthographies) are used to keep apart the Central European nations, such as the Czechs and the Poles, who write in

144 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Latin script, or the Ukrainians and the Russians, who note their languages in Cyrillic characters. In addition, modernization and Soviet-imposed atheism effectively excluded religion from the everyday life of state and politics. The situation, however, is quite different in the Balkans, where the premodern ideological use of religion and script has survived to this age of nationalism. The existence of the Serbo-Croatian language, as agreed upon by the Croats and the Serbs at Vienna in the Knijževni dogovor (Literary Accord, 1850), was perpetuated by the rise of the nation-state of the Southern Slavs, Yugoslavia (1918–1991/1995/2003). Its break-up, unlike that of Czechoslovakia, showed that religion, even if deeply secularized, remained the primus movens of Balkan nationalisms. The (re-)emergence of the nation-states of the Muslim Bosnians (Bosniaks), the Catholic Croats, and of the Orthodox nations of the Montenegrins and the Serbs was accompanied by the splitting of the SerboCroatian language. Its offspring include the Croatian language in the Catholic Latin script, the Bosnian language in the same script but with the ideological reference to Arabic-alphabet literacy, and the Serbian language in Orthodox Cyrillic. Only the rise of a separate Montenegrin language is hindered by the linguistic and religious closeness of the Montenegrins with the Serbs. In this case, the Central European model of national differentiation through linguistic means would suit the needs of Montenegrin nationalists, better than the Balkan one emphasizing script and religion. The Montenegrins seem to be already heading this way. Bowing to the Balkan model, they have traditionally claimed the Latin and Cyrillic scripts as their two inalienable national alphabets. Furthermore, using the Central European model, three additional characters, not employed in the Serbian version of this alphabet, were added to the Montenegrin Cyrillic. After 1995, and especially in the wake of the 2003 founding of the SerbiaMontenegro confederation, numerous documents and websites, produced by the Montenegrin government, have been marked as done in the Montenegrin language, though others are announced to be in Serbian. The movement for establishing Montenegrin as a language separate from Serbian grew in force after Montenegro gained independence in 2006 (Luˇci´c 2002; Okuka 1998). Besides the religion–script divide, the other cleavage that split Central European societies during the pre-national period and was expressed via literacy was that of social status. Between the 10th and 12th centuries, when most of Central Europe’s enduring polities emerged, literacy was the preserve of a handful of scribes, usually monks educated in Western Europe. Most of the rulers were illiterate. In the early modern period, the knowledge of writing was predominantly reserved for male nobles and burghers, as well as for clergy. They formed the estates that, in turn, constituted the ruling stratum privileged to control politics, resources, and labor of serfs and urban plebs, that is, populus, or the vast majority of the population. The share of the estates in the Central European kingdoms was quite high in comparison to Western Europe and

Language in Central Europe

145

amounted to around 10 percent of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Hungary and Poland-Lithuania. The difference was that, in practice, the nobility equated to the estate society in Central Europe. Cities and towns were few and far apart in both polities, which translated into a de facto exclusion of burghers from participating in statewide politics. Their influence was limited to the administrative boundaries of the self-governing localities. The decision-making power rested with the monarch in royal cities and with magnates in their own. The exception to this rule was Bohemia and Moravia, where cities and towns were as numerous as in Western Europe, and hence the nobility (less than 3–5 percent of the populace) could not ignore or subjugate the burghers. Except in the lands of the Czech Crown, burghers never amounted to a significant political factor in Central Europe prior to the age of nationalism beginning there in the mid19th century and the onset of rapid industrialization in the first half of the 20th century. But, indirectly, burghers made their voice heard by their unique economic power and manufacturing skills, which prevented nobles from crushing urban self-governance by force. Another phenomenon that distinguished Central from Western Europe was serfdom. The Western European peasantry gained legal and economic freedom at the end of the Middle Ages. In the eastern half of the continent, serfdom persisted and was abolished only during the first half of the 19th century in Prussia and the Austrian Empire, and in the 1860s in Russia. In the pre-national age, as a rule, the peasantry was excluded from education reserved exclusively for ‘their lords,’ that is, the male members of the estates. But even in the latter case, the inflated demographic size of the estates allowed only the richest layers of this stratum to acquire literacy. In the 1640s, 30 percent of men and only 10 percent of women were literate in England. In the course of industrialization, these numbers rose to 70 and 55 percent in 1850, and full literacy was achieved before 1911, with illiteracy reduced to a mere 1 percent of English society. Similarly, in France, the number of illiterate men decreased to 5 percent in 1900, and women to 6 percent. But the situation was quite different in Italy, where in 1901, 18 percent of the population could not read and write in the northern region of Piedmont, and even as many as 71 percent in Sicily. The liquidation of the phenomenon of illiteracy in (especially southern) Italy was achieved during the two decades after World War II. Between 1931 and 1971, it sank from 21 percent to 5 percent, though a 2005 research indicates as high rates of illiteracy as almost 14 percent in Basilicata and 11 percent in Sicily. In Central Europe, the rate of literacy remained consistently lower than in Western Europe but with vast inter-regional differences. At the beginning of the 19th century, Bohemia and Moravia along with Germany (that is, the northern half of the German Confederation, not included in the Austrian Empire) and Lower and Upper Austria largely participated in the Western pattern of economic and social development marked by rapid industrialization and urbanization. As

146 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

a consequence, the rate of illiteracy in these areas was not higher than 3 to 4 percent in 1900. The same low level of illiteracy prevailed in Scandinavia and Russia’s Baltic provinces, inhabited by the Estonians, the Latvians, and the German-speaking nobility and burghers. Apart from economic and political factors, the high level of literacy in these regions stemmed from the Protestant tradition of providing translations of the Bible, religious books, and elementary education in local vernaculars. In the other areas, where Protestantism was shortlived or never made an appearance, literacy in the liturgical languages removed from the vernaculars remained the preserve of the narrow group of privileged literati. Hence, at the turn of the 20th century, 56 percent of the inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian crownland of Galicia could neither read nor write, 66 percent in Bukovina, and 73 percent in Dalmatia. In the case of Dalmatia, the level rose to as high as 95 percent when the Slavophone population alone was considered. An interesting example of stratification in literacy rates induced by the unequal access of ethnolinguistically defined groups to education and state offices is supplied by the Kingdom of Hungary. This autonomous polity within Austria-Hungary was uniformly rural and undeveloped, compared to Western Europe, with the exception of Budapest and its vicinity. After 1867, the Magyars attempted to transform the kingdom into their nation-state by embarking on the policy of ethnolinguistic Magyarization. Only the Germans/German-speakers, as senior partners of the Magyars in the Dual Monarchy, were exempted from this treatment alongside the Croats, whose land enjoyed autonomy within Hungary. This linking of one’s ethnolinguistic background to socio-political status in Hungary showed clearly in literacy rates, which, in 1910, were 70 percent for Hungary’s Germans/German-speakers, 67 percent for the Magyars, and 62 percent for the kingdom’s Croats. Between 1870 and 1914, Budapest gradually limited the possibility of education in native languages for the Slovaks, Hungary’s Serbs and Romanians, and the Ruthenians (Rusyns). In 1910, the literacy rates for the four groups were 58 percent, 51 percent, 28 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Analyzing the rise of literacy in Central Europe on the temporal plane, it is advisable to have a glance at the region around Cracow, the capital of the Kingdom of Poland. At the end of the 16th century, 96 percent of the landed nobles owning several villages (generosi or magnifici) could read and write. But more than half of their wives were analphabets. They began to catch up with their husbands only during the next century when 78 percent of them gained literacy. The situation was different among the lower rank landed gentry owning one or, at most, two villages (nobilis). There were 22 percent illiterates among these male proprietors in the 16th century, and 16 percent in the following one. But in 1564, as many as 91 percent of nobles were illiterate if they did not possess any serfs.

Language in Central Europe

147

It seems that in the early modern period, literacy was much more common around Cracow than even in the best developed western regions of Royal Hungary. The regional differences, however, remained vast. During the 17th century, in the Voivodeship (Region) of Lublin only 65 percent of the wives of the generosi could write, and 30 percent of nobili were analphabets. In eastern Galicia, populated by Orthodox and Uniate peasants, and with nobles accounting for 2 to 4 percent of the population, illiteracy was prevalent. At the beginning of the 18th century, 11 percent of generosi remained illiterate and 72 percent of nobili. In 1764, only one-third of all the male members of the Polish-Lithuanian estates could read and write. Similar differences obtained in the various regions of the trisected Kingdom of Hungary. A qualitative jump in the ratio of literacy between Western and Central Europe should be contextualized by the situation in Russia and the Balkans. In Muscovy (renamed the Russian Empire in 1721), there was no special educational institution for preparing Orthodox priests until the mid-18th century. In 1719, literacy was decreed mandatory for the children of the nobility and the clergy, but the regulation was often observed in the breach, because 110 exclusively private elementary schools catered to the educational needs of about 2000 pupils in 1724. The construction of a state educational system began in the late 18th century. Between 1782 and 1800, the number of state elementary schools increased from 8 to 315. The number of students enrolled at Russia’s universities grew from 975 in 1808 to 34,500 in 1912. In 1801, when Russia’s population was 37.5 million, only 45,000 students attended all types of schools in the country. The ratio was 175 million to population 9.5 million students in 1914. According to the 1897 census, a mere 21 percent of the tsar’s subjects could read and write, or 29 percent of men and 13 percent of women. In the empire, literacy was quite high in the Vistula Land (Congress Poland, it was higher only in the Baltic gubernias) where 34 percent of men and 27 percent of women were literate, and lowest in Siberia and Central Asia with the relevant percentages of 19 and 5, and of 8 and 2, respectively. The situation improved prior to World War I. In 1880, three quarters of the conscripts were analphabets but only 32 percent in 1913. However, conscripts were not drawn from among all the ethno-religious communities and the creation of schools did not keep up with the growth of the population. Hence, the general average of literacy was not more than 20 to 25 percent in 1914. During the 17th century, literacy was a rare phenomenon in the Balkans. In Moldavia and Walachia, even some Orthodox bishops could read only with difficulty. The same situation prevailed in Dalmatia, Bosnia, and the Albanianspeaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Hardly any leader of the Serbian uprising (1804–1813) could read or write. The Serbian Prince Miloš Obrenovi´c (reigned 1815–1839), originally a cattle shepherd, was probably the sole illiterate head of state in Europe at that time. In 1866, 96 percent of the Serbian

148 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

population were analphabets, which improved to 83 percent at the end of the 19th century. Similarly, in 1900, the level of illiteracy was 87 percent in Bosnia, 78 percent in Romania, 72 percent in Bulgaria, and 60 percent in Greece. The gap in the degree of literacy between men and women was stupendous, for instance 50 and 18 percent, according to the Greek census in 1907. Apart from the western half of Central Europe where the ideal of full literacy was achieved before the 20th century, this success was repeated elsewhere in the region as well as in Eastern Europe and the Balkans only in the first half of the 1950s, mainly thanks to the communist ideology imposed by the Soviet Union. The totalitarian system of the communist state required control over all the population. This, in turn, entailed extensive bureaucracy and demanded citizens to comprehend a plethora of decisions issued by the authorities in writing. The communist ideology was to permeate every sphere of social, political and economic life, an impossible task without achieving the precondition of full literacy. Accordingly, in the Soviet Union, the rate of literacy jumped to 51 percent in 1926, and to 81 percent before the outbreak of World War II, an astounding achievement, even if one allows for the fact that Soviet statistics were frequently massaged to deliver what the leadership required. On the other hand, the disappearance of illiteracy was slower in Greece and Turkey, which did not fall under Soviet control. In 1981, 10 percent of the inhabitants of Greece were illiterate, and the Western European level of literacy was achieved there in 1991, when the number of illiterates dropped to 5 percent. In Turkey, literacy stood at a meagre 9 percent in 1924, but thanks to the Kemalist reforms it grew rapidly to 30 percent in 1937, 65 percent in 1975, and 87 percent in 2004. The persisting phenomenon of illiteracy is limited to Kurds and unschooled rural women. The female-to-male illiteracy ratio at 5 percent to 20 percent, as recorded in 2004, is quite surprising (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 173; Analfabetismo in Italia dal 2006; Brzezinski ´ 2002: 47, 239; Carmichael 2005; Comrie et al. 1996: 8; Gil 2005: 267; Grenoble 2003: 47; Johnson 1950: 30, 34–35, 173–174, 263, 283, 287, 290; Kuzmin 1981: 166; Raun 2003: 133, 136; Sedlar 1994: 458–475; Tóth 2000: 203–208).

3 The Broader Linguistic and Cultural Context of Central Europe

People belong to a nation because they believe so; and likewise, people simply speak a language they believe that they speak, and name it as it suits them or as they have become used to. (in Popiołek 2005: 129) Ranko Bugarski, Professor of Linguistics, University of Belgrade By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write ‘naturally.’ (Ong 1992: 82) [N]ational languages are [. . .] almost always semi-artificial constructs and occasionally, like modern Hebrew, virtually invented. (Hobsbawm 1990: 54) Is Macedonian really a language? Is there a Bosnian language which is distinct from Croatian and Serbian? Because of the discreteness and continuity problem, there is no way we can answer these questions on purely linguistic grounds. Ironically, it seems that it is only linguists who fully understand the extent to which these questions are not linguistic questions. (Trudgill 1995: 145) There is no real distinction to be drawn between ‘language’ and ‘dialect.’ (Hudson 1996: 36) [N]ationalist ethnography [and linguistics were] concerned not merely with codifying peasant custom, linguistic and other, so as to use it as the base for a new national culture which was in the process of construction, but also to establish that a given dialect really was a version of Ruritanian, and not, as was shamefully and meretriciously claimed by jealous and unscrupulous Braggadocian politicians and intellectuals (whose opportunist scholarship was matched only by their lack of political conscience), a dialect of Middle Braggadocian. (Gellner 1998: 131) 149

150 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

[T]he success of an orthographic scheme [or a new language reduced to writing] is a function less of its quality than of the extent to which it is promoted. (DeFrancis 1984: 255) Are you a Sorb? If yes, you should be happy, because it was God himself who gave [your nation] two languages! (in Jaworski and Ostrowski 1995: 5) Fryco Rocha (1863–1942), a Sorbian author writing in Lower Sorbian Central Europe is an extremely malleable concept. It denotes a region whose political shape has been changing dramatically throughout the last millennium since the emergence of the first polities. This work focuses on the rise and political uses of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. But this would mean tearing away the roots of the sociolinguistic reality that surrounds and has deeply interacted with the everyday realities of Slovak-, Polish-, Magyar- and Czech-speakers. The resulting picture would agree with the predominant ethnonational thinking about Central Europe as an area neatly divided among the nation-states that contain the corresponding nations speaking exclusively in their own languages. But despite the gigantic and tragic 20th-century feats of social engineering to this end, such an ideal has never been achieved. What is more, this tight overlapping of nation, nation-state, and language as proposed by Central European nationalists would baffle most of the Central European rulers, elites, and the population at large prior to the mid-19th century. Thus, if this work’s main goal is to analyze the patterns of nationalistic uses to which language has been put, it would be inexcusable not to have at least a cursory glance at the emergence of the other languages that have, to a varying degree, influenced Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak. As a caveat, I must add that the present-day correspondence: one person – one language is a gross overstatement, too. People neither are somehow inalienably bound to languages nor vice versa. And the phenomenon of multilingualism, rather than an exception, was the norm in Central Europe until 1945. Hopefully, this norm is coming back after the end of national homogenization policies, heralded, in 1989, by the fall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet bloc.

From Church Slavonic to Ruthenian The expansion of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Balkans and toward the east, as well as the rise of Poland-Lithuania, brought significant Orthodox populations into both states. Necessarily, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the intellectual life of the Orthodox world shifted to both the ideologically Catholic polities. The successful Ottoman subjugation of most of the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

151

Hungarian lands in the first half of the 16th century left the Catholic state of Poland-Lithuania as the major cultural and book-producing center of Orthodox Christianity. The Polish-Lithuanian monarchs did not choose to emphasize this status, while Muscovy was much interested in becoming the next leader of Orthodoxy and taking over Byzantium’s cultural and political role in order to legitimize its statehood and expansionist aspirations. In 1510, the monk Philotheus (Filothei, Filofei, 1450–1525) of Pskov, in his famous letter to the Grand Duke of Muscovy Basil (Vasily) III (reigned 1505–1533), addressed the monarch as ‘tsar’ (emperor).1 Philotheus claimed that the first Rome having been heretical and the second (Constantinople) captured by the Ottomans, Moscow remained the sole ‘third Rome’ of Orthodox Christianity, and no fourth Rome would ever follow. Basil’s son, Ivan IV the Terrible (reigned 1533–1584), was crowned tsar in 1547 according to the full Byzantine crowning ritual. Despite the gradual elevation of Muscovy as the political center of the Orthodox world,2 the first five Cyrillic liturgical book titles in Church Slavonic were printed at the Polish capital of Cracow in 1491. Only 8 years earlier, the first Church Slavonic book, a Glagolitic missal, had come off the press probably in Kosinj in Croatia (though some scholars claim that Venice or Vienna was the missal’s actual place of publication). In Vienna, a Slavonic book was printed in the Latin script in 1490. Then, in 1494, an early Church Slavonic book in Cyrillic was brought out in Otoikh (Cetinje) in Zeta (largely coterminous with later Montenegro). Also, titles in Church Slavonic and Cyrillic were the first books to come off the press in Tîrgovi¸ste (1507) in Walachia and in Moscow (1553). Between 1483 and 1575, a mere 12 book titles were published in Church Slavonic or vernacular Slavic in the Balkans with a further nine for consumption in this region published either in Venice or in the Holy Roman Empire. Interestingly, three of them were printed in Glagolitic, and seven in the Latin script, while the remaining 11 were in Cyrillic. In the second half of the 16th century, 62 Cyrillic book titles were published in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whereas only 18 came off the press in Muscovy. In the first half of the 17th century, 67 titles of this kind were produced in Muscovy and 288 in Poland-Lithuania. The numbers for both the states were equal at 150 during the years 1655–1686. Afterward, ever more Cyrillic publications were produced in Muscovy/Russia than in Poland-Lithuania. When the South Slavic centers of Orthodoxy remained under Ottoman domination, Russia was the only significant independent Orthodox state until the creation of independent Greece and autonomous Serbia at the beginning of the 19th century.3 By default, and thanks to its imperial ambitions, Muscovy/Russia became the sole political center of Orthodox ecclesiastical and secular life. However, most publications produced there were of religious character until the times of Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), when the first secular press was established

152 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in 1705. The book culture developed in Russia at a slow rate. In the first half of the 18th century, only 50 book titles per annum were published, whereas at the same time there were 70 Latin- and Polish-language publishing shops in Poland-Lithuania and a handful of others that brought out publications in German, Ruthenian, and Hebrew. Russia’s annual book output (in many languages and also in the Latin script) rose to 439 titles in 1759 and fell to 165 in 1797 before the publishing industry took off in earnest during the 19th century (Bienkowska ´ and Chamerska 1990: 15; Franoli´c 1994: 18; Martinovi´c 1994: 17, 38–76; Price 1998: 86, 425; Remnek 1991: 15–19, 23; Topolska 2002: 173). The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the first polity that made the local Slavic vernacular spoken by the Orthodox population, and written in Cyrillic, that is, Ruthenian, into an official language as early as the 14th century. The English name of this language stems from the Slavic word ruski (for the ‘Rus language’) as mediated via Latin. While the Slavic-speakers of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania referred to their official language as ruski (Ruthenian), their counterparts from Muscovy referred to it as litovskii (‘Lithuanian’). Although the Slavic-speaking Muscovians easily understood Ruthenian, they preferred to translate Ruthenian books into chancery Muscovian, that is Church Slavonic with a few local vernacular additions. The designation of Ruthenian was derived from the name of the medieval polity of Kievan (Kyivian) Rus. Ruthenian remained an official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (alongside Latin) until the end of the 17th century when Polish replaced it. Elsewhere in the areas inhabited by Slavophone Orthodox populations, the Church Slavonic language served the needs of written expression until the 18th and 19th centuries during when their vernacular languages began to be codified. This happened earliest in Russia during the 18th century when the emerging standard Russian gradually replaced Church Slavonic as the official language. Initially, the uses of Ruthenian and Church Slavonic were strongly intertwined, as in the case of Latin and the Western Romance languages (cf. Muller and Taylor 1932). It is difficult to decide where Church Slavonic stopped and Ruthenian began in manuscripts and printed books. However, the intensive administrative use of the local recension of Church Slavonic combined with a stream of vernacular, Polish, Latin, and German linguistic loans (that first entered the spoken language) facilitated the speedy emergence of Ruthenian as a separate language. Nowadays, scholars, wishing to rationalize the uses and differentiation of Ruthenian, maintain that it comprised four varieties. Ruthenized Church Slavonic came in two varieties used for ecclesiastical and lay uses. Chancery Ruthenian employed for the production of documents differed from region to region, as chanceries did not have at their disposal any officially accepted grammars or dictionaries of this language. The mostly spoken variant

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

153

of Ruthenian of official prestige was the speech of the grand ducal court and the Ruthenian magnates living in the grand duchy and the Kingdom of Poland. Some nobles left a few notes and memoirs written in this variety. The coexistence of Ruthenian with Polish caused considerable merging of both the languages in written use among the nobility in Poland-Lithuania’s Rus lands and even in the royal chancery of the Jagiellonians. Today, this phenomenon lets some scholars with dislike of Russia claim Ruthenian, Belarusian, and even Ukrainian as West Slavic languages. But there being no territorial divide between West and East Slavonic languages (unlike in the case of the South Slavonic ones separated from other Slavic languages by the territories populated by Magyar- and Romanian-speakers), the actual border is rather artificial as it solely amounts to the cultural markers of script and religion. Today, it is believed that the West Slavic languages are those written in Latin characters, while the East Slavic ones are written in Cyrillic. The speakers of the former overwhelmingly profess either Catholicism or Protestantism, whereas the latter follow Orthodox Christianity. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the initially Orthodox and pagan nobility adopted Catholicism, and then many nobles turned to Protestantism before returning, or turning, to Catholicism. The number of burghers (they professed either Catholicism or Protestantism) was never large. The majority of the Slavophone population, the peasantry, were Orthodox until the turn of the 17th century, when they were made to join the Uniate Church. Catholics, of whatever language, were referred to as ‘Lithuanians’ or ‘Poles,’ and Orthodox and Uniates as ‘Ruthenians.’ Similarly, Orthodox Christianity and Uniate Catholicism were popularly known as ‘Ruthenian or Greek’ faiths. Each of these changes in religion and self-identification influenced language choice in liturgy, schooling, and often in ecclesiastical and local temporal administration. Nowadays, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are simplistically seen as the badges of the Uniate Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. But Orthodox clergy and writers employed Greek also with its own specific script apart from Latin, as well as the Latin alphabet for writing in the local Slavic vernacular. On the other hand, the Lithuanian Statute, or the grand duchy’s foundation of law and administration, was binding on all the inhabitants, though written in Cyrillic-based Ruthenian. But in 1614, the third edition of this statute was translated into Polish and superseded the Ruthenian-language original. Similar processes unfolded in the Ruthenian section of the Kingdom of Poland, that is, the southern half of the grand duchy, transferred to Poland in 1569, and largely coterminous with present-day western and central Ukraine. Taking into consideration various combinations of the aforementioned factors, modern scholars interpret and justify the line purportedly separating the East and Slavic languages in many different ways. However, the popular, though not explicitly emphasized, consensus is that Cyrillic-based languages belong to the eastern group, and their Latin-based

154 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

counterparts to the western group. This is quite an arbitrary decision if one remembers how frequently the scripts used for writing the same vernacular were changed. Ruthenian was much closer to the local Slavic speech than Church Slavonic, which had sprung up from the 10th-century South Slavonic usage of Thessaloníki. But the undeniable link of Ruthenian to Church Slavonic kept the former from becoming a straightforward written reflection of the Slavic dialects of Wilno (Vilnius) or Kijów (Kyiv), where the chanceries of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s and Poland’s Ruthenian lands were respectively located. Frantsysk Skaryna (Franciscus Skoryna, 1486–1551) published his Ruthenian (or Ruthenianized Church Slavic) translation of the Bible in Prague during 1517–1519. The Orthodox hierarchy perceived it as heretical because he drew on the Catholic Vulgate in translating the Holy Writ. Skaryna continued to print more Ruthenian religious books at the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in 1519–1525. Later, he went to Moscow to spread his books in Muscovy and with the view of establishing a lucrative printing business there. But his Ruthenized Church Slavonic and the very technology of printing were deemed diabolical, and Skaryna’s books were publicly burnt. The law code (statute) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania promulgated in 1529, 1566, and 1588 was also done in Ruthenian, but its first two versions remained in manuscript. The third one was published in 1588 in Vilnius and its Polish translation came off the press in 1614. Beginning in 1562, Symon Budny (1530–1593), a radical Protestant preacher and printer, published religious books in the ‘simple language’ (prosty jazyk), or the local Slavic vernacular. Under his influence, between 1570 and 1580, another Protestant, Vasil Tsiapinskii (Ciapinski, Ciapinski, ´ Cjapinski, 1540–1603), wrote, translated, and published religious books and the Gospels in the version of Ruthenian that was much closer to the spoken vernacular than the language of Skaryna, who still employed numerous Church Slavonic usages. Tsiapinskii also published books in Church Slavonic, which clearly marked the border of usage between it and Ruthenian. Between 1581 and 1611, officially inspired pogroms, directed against Protestants and Orthodox Christians, terminated the fledgling popular tradition of Ruthenian literacy. Despite these setbacks, Ruthenian remained an official language of the grand duchy. Hence, the first grammars of Ruthenian (or rather Ruthenized Church Slavonic), referred to as ‘Slavic,’ were published in Wilno (1586, 1596, 1618) and Lwów (1591) for official use. The 1618 grammar authored by Meletii Smotrytskyi (Melecjusz Smotrycki, Theofil Ortholog, 1578–1633) served as the model for Russian grammars in the 18th century, including Mikhail Lomonosov’s famous grammar of 1755. The first Church Slavonic-Ruthenian dictionaries came off the press in Vilnius (1596) and Kyiv (1627). Both lexicographic works inspired a groundbreaking Church Slavonic-Greek-Latin dictionary published in Moscow (1704). In

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

155

secular Ruthenian literature, translations of popular Western European chivalric literature dominated. Most writings in Ruthenian remained in manuscript, and increasingly so from the second half of the 17th century when this language fell out of popular use, replaced by Polish and Latin. In addition, although Ruthenian books were printed in Cyrillic, the language was also written down in the Latin alphabet as early as the 1560s. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it meant the dominance of this script in the few Ruthenian manuscripts created during that period. The Counter-Reformation not only caused re-conversion of numerous Protestant nobles to Catholicism, but also exerted pressure on the Orthodox clergy and their parishioners either to join the Catholic Church, or retain mere liturgical autonomy within the Uniate Catholic Church. The rise of Ruthenian literacy and book publishing in this language, expertly used by Protestants for religious purposes, convinced Poland-Lithuania’s Orthodox hierarchy to overcome their dislike of the printed word that continued in Muscovy unabated until the 17th century. The Orthodox clergy had no other choice for the Orthodox faith to survive in this increasingly Catholic polity, especially after the 1596 Union of Brze´sc´ (today, Brest in Belarus) that aimed at bringing all the Orthodox subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian king into the Catholic Church’s fold as Uniates. The Orthodox Church fared better in Poland’s Palatinate of Kyiv ruled by the Orthodox Palatine, Prince Konstiantyn Ostroz’kyi (Konstanty Ostrogski, 1524–1608), than in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He protected this Church and supported Orthodox scholarship. Drawing on the tradition of the Church Slavonic translation of the Gospel conducted in 1056–1057 in Kievan Rus,4 the prince encouraged and financed the first full translation of the Greeklanguage Bible into Church Slavonic, which was printed in 1581 in Ostróg (today, Ostroh, Ostrih in Ukraine). Herasym Smotryts’kyi (Herasym Smotrycki, died in 1594) was the chief editor of this translation, and along with the prince, the main champion of the revival of Church Slavonic literacy. Ostróg, the seat of Ostroz’kyi’s estate, became the intellectual center of Orthodox life in Poland-Lithuania and the Orthodox Slavophone world, following the founding of the secondary school (academy) in 1578. In methodology and curriculum, the school was modeled on Jesuit colleges. Its language of instruction was Byzantine Greek, but Latin and Church Slavonic were taught as well, which facilitated the renewal of Orthodox scholarship, including the reconnection of Byzantine Greek and Church Slavonic literacies with the use of the Counter-Reformation models of schooling and scholarship that espoused Latin. The fruits of this cultural cross-pollination were disseminated by the printshop, which was active in Ostróg between 1578 and 1612. Furthermore, two grammars of Church Slavonic were published in Vilnius and Lwów (Lviv, Lemberg) in 1586 and 1591, respectively. The above-mentioned bilingual dictionaries of Ruthenian were necessarily

156 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

paired with Church Slavonic. With the disappearance of Ruthenian as an official language in the grand duchy (1697), the first Polish-Church Slavonic dictionary was published in 1722 and its second edition came off the press in 1772. Obviously, local dialectal linguistic loans made inroads into Church Slavonic as employed in Poland’s Ruthenian lands, and the Ruthenian chancery, active in Kyiv until 1569 (when the Ruthenian lands5 were transferred from the grand duchy to the Kingdom of Poland), also exerted its influence on the Church Slavonic of the local Orthodox Church and the Ostróg press. In addition, after 1569, Polish replaced Ruthenian as the main source of linguistic influence on Church Slavonic in this region. But the graphic difference of Polish written in the Latin script, and its association with Catholicism, reaffirmed the boundary between this language and Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic, which was unambiguously bound to the Orthodox Church. Prior to 1569, Cyrillic-based Ruthenian, employed in the administration, acted as a bridge between the Orthodox clergy and the ideologically Catholic polity. This bridge survived in the territorially smaller, post-1569 grand duchy until the end of the 17th century, which fostered the continuation of the vernacular tradition of Ruthenian literacy. On the contrary, in Poland’s Ruthenian lands, Church Slavonic literacy developed as an opposition to Roman and Uniate Catholicism ideologically bound up with Polish and Latin, both written in the Latin script. The excesses of the Counter-Reformation, which unfolded at the turn of the 17th century, were finally moderated and, in 1632, the existence of the Orthodox Church, which did not merge with the Catholic Church in the 1569 union, was officially accepted. Also in 1632, Archimandrite Petro Mohyla (Petru Movil˘ a, Piotr Mohyła, 1596–1647), son of Hospodar (ruler) of Moldavia and Walachia Simion (Simon) Movil˘ a (reigned 1600–1602, 1606–1607), was nominated Orthodox Metropolitan of Kyiv. In 1633, to counteract the religious and cultural influence of the Jesuits, he founded, on the Jesuit model, the Orthodox academy with Greek, Church Slavonic, and Latin as the media of instruction. It was the sole university-level institution of Orthodox education in Poland-Lithuania. This so-called Kyiv-Mohyla Academy educated clergy for Poland-Lithuania’s Orthodox Church until the close of the 18th century, though Kyiv was finally incorporated into Muscovy in 1686. In the 17th century, the school was also the most renowned academy in the Orthodox Slavophone world, which provided necessary cadres for the reform of Muscovy’s Orthodox Church between the 1650s and 1680s. The differences in language and politics brought about by the transfer of the southern Ruthenian lands from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Kingdom of Poland deepened the regional differences in Ruthenian literacy as practiced in the north in Vilnius and in the south in Kyiv. In the 20th century, Belarusian and Ukrainian linguists interpreted these differences in

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

157

an anachronistic manner, claiming that northern Ruthenian was ‘really’ Old Belarusian, and southern Ruthenian was ‘really’ Old Ukrainian. Concomitantly, and also in the 20th century, the 1569 border, separating Poland’s Ruthenian gains from the grand duchy, was translated into the border between present-day Ukraine and Belarus. On the other hand, in the 19th century, Russian scholars re-interpreted Ruthenian as ‘West Russian.’ This name was derived from the Russian official name of ‘West Russia’ applied to Russia’s share of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania (with the exception of Congress Poland) beginning in the mid-1860s. The concept of ‘West Russian’ allowed for bypassing the still weak Little and White Russian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) claims to the tradition of Ruthenian literacy, and for appropriating it for the then constructed history of the (Great) Russian language, imagined as a continuous phenomenon at least from the times of Kievan Rus. Another complication to the continuing ideological struggles over the tradition of Ruthenian literacy is added by kitabs (manuscripts in Arabic characters), that is, the written records of Muslim Tatars and Karaims. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, they employed the Arabic alphabet for writing in the Slavic vernaculars of their communities, located in the region that today straddles the adjacent borderland areas of Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine. Drawing from this phenomenon, in the mid-20th century, Belarusian nationalists claimed the language of the kitabs for the tradition of Belarusian national literacy, and announced the Arabic script to be the third national alphabet of the Belarusians, alongside Cyrillic and the Latin script. On the other hand, the proponents of the codification of the (West) Polesian language consider the language of the kitabs to be the tradition of Polesian national literacy based on the dialects of southwestern Belarus and northwestern Ukraine. As of recently, the Polesian claim is countered by Ukrainian linguists, who tend to state that the language of at least these kitabs written south of the 1569 frontier of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was none other but Ukrainian. Polish scholars also point to the fact that because all Tatars living in Poland-Lithuania were nobles, they belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian natio. This meant that they also participated in the gradual Polonization of this social group. The process progressed rapidly irrespective of the variegated ethnolinguistic origins of the group’s members. Hence, the language of some kitabs is quite close to chancery Polish, including fragmentary translations of the Koran during 1780s (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 644–647, 767–770; Danylenko 2006; Issatschenko 1980: 129–130; Kamusella 2005; Łesiów 2000; Lizisowa 2000: 37; Magocsi 1996: 157, 159, 167, 189, 212; Martel 1938; McMillin 1977: 54, 1980: 107, 113; Moszynski ´ 2006: 370–372; Picchio 1980: 30–31; Price 1998: 86; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 464, 473; Sahanowicz 2002: 182, 188, 212, 231–232, 236, 292; Snyder 2003: 48; Stang 1932; Topolska 2002: 77–83, 167, 175, 293–295).

158 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Russian language Contemporary scholars often connect the beginnings of the Russian language to the 11th-century documents written in a hybrid of Church Slavonic and the vernacular. The Ruskaia Pravda (Rus Law Code) of the 1020s features most prominently among them as committed to parchment mostly in the vernacular. This law code was produced in Kyiv, at the court of Iaroslav I the Wise (reigned 1019– 1054), the ruler of Kievan Rus. It became the foundation of law in all post-Kievan Rus (Ruthenian) principalities, including the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where the Lithuanian Statute superseded it in 1529. But the Ruskaia Pravda and hybrid Church Slavonic-vernacular writings produced at Kyiv, Novgorod, Smolensk, Pskov, Staraia Russa, or Vitebsk (Vitsebsk) belong more to the tradition of literacy in Kievan Rus, where the law code was created, than to a single successor polity, and, for that matter, so peripheral as Muscovy. On the other hand, Church Slavonic literacy, originally based on the Slavic dialect of Byzantine Thessaloníki and developed for the sake of Christianizing Greater Moravia, cannot be defined as ‘Russian’ either. Practically, all the present-day Orthodox Slavophone states along with Catholic Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic can share claim to this language and its tradition of literacy. Similarly, the fledgling tradition of vernacular literacy in Kievan Rus was the font, from which, the Ruthenian literary tradition emerged directly in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After its decline at the turn of the 17th century in Poland-Lithuania, Ruthenian literacy inspired the gradual shift from Church Slavonic to the vernacular, which gave the beginning to the Russian language in the 18th century. The Belarusians and the Ukrainians also laid claim to the Church Slavonic literacy of Kievan Rus and the Ruthenian literacy, because the most significant centers of both these literacies (with the notable exception of Novgorod in the case of Church Slavonic) were located on the territories currently included within the borders of present-day Belarus and Ukraine. In Muscovy, the use of Church Slavonic was grounded in the ‘Bulgarizing’ South Slavic usage and not in the local vernacular. Between the 12th and 18th centuries, Church Slavonic was popularly referred to as ‘Slavic’ and ‘Bulgarian,’ or ‘Old Bulgarian.’ The two latter appellations referred to the second Bulgarian Empire, which was the center of Church Slavonic literacy until its destruction at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in the 1390s. The subsequent Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, completed in the 1480s, and the fall of Constantinople (1453) sent a wave of South Slavic clergymen and intellectuals northward, to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Muscovy, where the Orthodox faith could be professed and developed in an unrestrained manner. These immigrants enforced the South Slavic (Bulgarian) recension (version) of Church Slavonic as the standard in which religious books were to be written and administration conducted in Muscovy. This trend had commenced at the end of the 14th century when

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

159

a succession of South Slavic monks had been nominated to the position of the metropolitan of all Rus (sometimes, anachronistically translated as ‘all Russias’) with his seat at Moscow. The intermittent suppression of the Orthodox faith that began in PolandLithuania at the close of the 16th century meant emigration of more disgruntled Orthodox clergy to Muscovy. They brought along the tradition of Ruthenian literacy as well as the knowledge of Polish and Latin. Obviously, Latin as the ‘language of the devil’ did not exert any significant imprint on the forming of Russian vernacular, but it allowed educated intellectuals to maintain contact with Western Europe. For less educated individuals, this experience of the West and Latin was mediated via the Slavic languages of Polish and Ruthenian. Although early Russian borrowings from German and the Romance languages bear the distinct marks of Polish pronunciation, the influence of Ruthenian offered the model of vernacular literacy to be emulated. In Muscovy, the Orthodox tradition defined Church Slavonic as the language of the ‘true Christian faith.’ As a result, the Orthodox hierarchy watched the possibility of committing the Holy Scripture to the vernacular with horror. Similarly, they strongly opposed the introduction of printing as opposed to the well-established tradition of rewriting religious books by hand. Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681) championed minor changes in church rite and the spelling of biblical names. Tsar Alexis (reigned 1645–1676) gave him full support in this task. What ensued was the 1667 schism. Nikon’s opponents, known as ‘Old Believers’ (Starovery), had to escape from Muscovy (mainly to Poland-Lithuania), and many were exiled to Siberia as criminals. One of the leaders of the Old Believers was the popular preacher, Avvakum Petrov (1620–1682), born in the vicinity of Nizhniy Novgorod and burnt at the stake as a heretic. Among his 80 works, his autobiography in the Muscovian vernacular perhaps constitutes the first monument of the early Russian language. In the 17th century, a number of translations from Polish and Czech (Bohemian) into the Muscovian idiom and several anonymous ‘novels’ by Muscovy writers in this vernacular circulated in manuscript. The translations also included those of Italian, Latin, and French romances, stories, and fables, which were conducted from Polish versions. Ruthenian translations of such writings often made their way from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Muscovy, and inspired further development of literacy in the local vernacular, which was slow due to the official opposition of the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox clergy, whose authority as the custodians of Orthodox Christianity legitimized statehood in Muscovy, frowned at vernacular literacy, considering it ‘contamination’ of the ‘holy language’ of Church Slavonic, identified with the Cyrillic script. Thus, any use of Cyrillic characters for writing in an idiom, which did not sound like Church Slavonic, appeared to be sacrilegious.

160 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The aforementioned translations were usually written in vernacularized or Ruthenianized Church Slavonic labeled by contemporaries as ‘simple/peasant language’ (prostoi iazyk). The straightforward use of the vernacular, as that in Avvakum’s autobiography, dangerously smacked of heresy, and was better avoided. On the other hand, sticking to a local dialect made a translation less intelligible to the literati from other regions, who, by the sake of their education, shared the knowledge of Church Slavonic and/or Ruthenian with the translator. The officially espoused change in favor of the vernacular dates to the reign of Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725). The modernization he enforced on Muscovy also extended to literacy. The shapes of letters in the traditional Cyrillic were modified for the sake of legibility and simplicity as defined by Antiqua used for writing and printing in the Latin alphabet in the Romance languages and Polish. The Antiqua versions of the Latin and Greek scripts served as the model for a new Cyrillic. In addition, several letters, employed for the more faithful rendering of direct Greek loans in Church Slavonic, were discarded. In 1708, this reformed Cyrillic was introduced under the name of ‘civil script’ (grazhdanka), for writing and printing all non-religious texts. Despite the modern-day associations with the term ‘civil,’ most of the texts initially printed in Grazhdanka were textbooks for military use (Fojtíková et al. 1989: 280–281, 283, 514; Gagova et al. 1996: 11–12; Issatschenko 1980: 128–129; Janich and Greule 2002: 238; Price 1998: 397). The co-existence of two graphically differentiated versions of the same script or of two separate ones for writing the same language in the secular and religious contexts had a long tradition. For instance, the 5th-century Georgian alphabet is known as ‘ecclesiastical’ (khutsuri). The Georgian clergy continues to use it to this day. In the 11th century, it gave rise to the ‘military’ alphabet (mkhedruli) that has been employed for lay texts. Today, it is the regular script in which the Georgian language is written (Price 1998: 79). The Petrine reforms simplified spelling, yet introduced a degree of chaos. And this linguistic change obviously did not replace Church Slavonic, which, in its slightly Muscovianized version, remained the official language in ‘civil usage’ as well. The first Muscovian/Russian newspaper Vedomosti (News) reflected this linguistic-cum-script chaos. It was founded in 1703 in Moscow, and was published in Old Cyrillic. In 1710, it switched to Grazhdanka, and was moved to St Petersburg the following year. In the course of the 18th century, the tension continued between Moscow, as the center of Church Slavonic ecclesiastical literacy in Old Cyrillic, and the imperial capital of St Petersburg (endowed with this function in 1712), made into the center of lay vernacular literacy in Grazhdanka. The first grammar of the Russian language (Russkaia grammatika) was published in Oxford in 1696, but exerted no influence on language policy in Muscovy, for it was intended for Western European merchants wishing to communicate with their partners in Muscovy. Obviously, Muscovian merchants did

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

161

business in the vernacular, not Church Slavonic, which they used passively in church. The official switch to the vernacular as a written language began only with the linguistic works authored by Mikhail Vasilevich Lomonosov (1711– 1765), the reformer of the Russian Academy of Sciences (established in 1724 in St Petersburg) and the intellectual father of the University of Moscow (founded in 1755). Between 1736 and 1738, he studied at the world’s first Protestant University of Marburg (established in 1527) in Hesse-Kassel. One of his professors was the Prussian philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who, as the first Germanophone scholar dared to lecture consistently in German, instead of Latin, at the University of Halle between 1712 and 1723. Wolff also wrote many of his works in German, hence he was the main creator of German as the language of scholarly instruction and research. His novel insistence on teaching in German contributed to the 50 percent increase in matriculation figures at the University of Marburg between 1723 and 1728. In addition, in 1715, Peter the Great corresponded with Wolff in connection with the plan of founding an Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. The possibility of teaching and doing research in one’s native language was of formative influence on Lomonosov, who had to master Latin in order to obtain secondary and university education. In 1755, Lomonosov’s Rosiiskaia grammatika (Russian Grammar, St Petersburg) came off the press and was followed by a study titled, Predislovie o polze knig tserkovnykh v rossiiskom iazyke (On the Use of Church Books in the Russian Language, St Petersburg) 2 years later. The former work created the foundations for the further standardization of Russian as based on the Moscow dialect, while the latter settled the social status of this language. Lomonosov distinguished three ‘styles’ of Russian. The ‘high style’ was characterized by the dominance of Church Slavonic words, the ‘middle style’ was the vernacular usage with an admixture of Church Slavonicisms, while the ‘low style’ meant the vernacular. He intended the ‘high style’ for church and official use, the ‘middle style’ for education and literature, and the ‘low style’ for elementary education and popular literature. The six-volume Slovar Akademii Rossiiskoi (Dictionary of the Russian Academy [of Sciences], 1789–1794, St Petersburg) largely reflected Lomonosov’s high style with a few concessions to the middle style, and the second edition, published between 1806 and 1822, did not change much in this regard. The historian and writer, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826), replaced Lomonosov’s Germanizing syntax and Slavonicisms with French as the model to be emulated by the Russian language. He fell back on the twovolume Polnoi frantsuzskoi i rossiiskoi leksikon (Complete Lexicon of French and Russian, 1786, St Petersburg), based on the fourth edition (1762) of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Dictionary of the French Academy [of Sciences], Paris). The second edition of Polnoi frantsuzskoi i rossiiskoi leksikon rolled off the press in 1798. French linguistic loans were to distance Russian

162 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

from Church Slavonic and Latin, and to make it more similar to Western European languages, associated with progress and ‘being civilized.’ Karamzin chose Lomonosov’s middle style as most suitable for Russian. However, the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is credited with the feat of fusing the three historical elements of standard Russian – Church Slavonic, Western European literary practice, and the vernacular – into a balanced whole. This usage was reflected in Aleksandr Khristoforovich Vostokov’s (1781–1864) Russkaia grammatika (Russian Grammar, 1831, St Petersburg), republished many times, and in Vasilii Ivanovich Dal’s (1801–1872) four-volume Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Explanatory Dictionary of the Contemporary Great Russian Language, 1863–1866, Moscow), whose revised and enlarged editions followed in 1880–1882, 1903–1911, 1912–1914, and 1935 (Fojtíková et al. 1989: 322– 323, 626–627; Issatschenko 1980: 124–127, 133–140; Janich and Greule 2002: 237–238; Johnson 1950: 35; Price 1998: 396–398; Stankiewicz 1984: 124, 133, 143–144; Tornow 2005: 310). The establishment of Russian as the official language of the Russian Empire and its subjects commenced in earnest in the 1800s and continued until the beginning of the 20th century. In 1819, the first Russian translation of the Gospels came off the press and was sponsored by the Protestant Bible Society (founded in 1804 at London). But the Orthodox Church condemned this translation, and prohibited its use. Thus, the use of Church Slavonic, or Lomonosov’s high style, continued in the Russian Orthodox Church. On the territories of former Poland-Lithuania directly incorporated into Russia (between 1772 and 1795), Polish dominated as the language of administration and culture through the 1830s, though it was officially prohibited in 1797. Because the Lithuanian Statute (published in the bilingual Polish-Russian edition in 1811) remained in power in this area until 1840, St Petersburg used it as the legal basis for superseding Polish with Russian in the late 1820s and in the 1830s. In accordance with Article 37.1 in Chapter IV, administration and law courts should use the Ruthenian language written in the Ruthenian alphabet. Russian governors interpreted Ruthenian as the ‘Russian language.’ Ruthenian for ‘the Ruthenian language’ is ruski, and at the turn of the 19th century, Russian for ‘the Russian language’ was rossiisskii, or, much less frequently, russkii. The latter form allowed the authorities to claim that the Ruthenian and Russian terms were identical. The lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania were of crucial importance for the modernization of the empire, because most of the tsar’s literate subjects lived there. Thus, the attempt to legitimize the official use of Russian in the duchy in line with the Lithuanian Statute was an important step, which, in the wake of the crushing of the anti-Russian uprising staged by the Polish-Lithuanian nobility in 1830–1831, also brought the shift in the official name of the Russian language from rossiiskii to russkii. The shift began in earnest in the mid-1830s and was completed by the mid-19th century. In the same

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

163

period, Polish was finally banned from any official capacity in the erstwhile duchy. In the same anachronistic vein, the Ruthenian alphabet (Old or Church Cyrillic), as prescribed by the Lithuanian Statute for use in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was replaced with its Russian counterpart, or Grazhdanka. Interestingly, Polish continued to be employed in administration and education even in Kyiv (known by the popular sobriquet, as ‘the mother of all the Rus cities’), though this city and the territories east of the Dnieper and east of the Syniukha River had already passed from Poland-Lithuania to Muscovy in the second half of the 17th century. Only in 1854, Russian replaced Polish in education in the Polish-Lithuania areas incorporated between the mid-17th century and the end of the 18th century. Polish survived as the language of administration in Russia’s Congress Poland until the mid-1860s and in the region’s educational system until 1885. Polish then remained there in the functions of the language of culture and everyday speech. And as late as 1893, in Kiev (Kyiv), circulars were issued forbidding the city’s employees to speak Polish at work. A similar situation persisted in the Baltic provinces of Estonia, Livonia, and Courland, where Russian began to replace German in administration and public life during 1885 and the process continued until the turn of the 20th century. Nearly two decades later, the same measure was to be applied in Russia’s autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland following the 1900 decree that made Russian the official language of Finland. But the 1905 revolution prevented the replacement of official Swedish and Finnish with Russian. In the grand duchy, the social displeasure with this policy culminated in the assassination of Governor-General, Nikolai Ivanovich Bobrikov (1839–1904), who was entrusted with the tasks of Russifying Finland’s administration, education and public life, and of merging the Finnish army with its imperial counterpart. Ironically, the Russification campaign improved the status of Finnish, which in 1902, was decreed of equal importance to Swedish in agreement with Tsar Alexander II’s (reigned 1855–1881) 1863 pledge. Similarly, the officially decreed suppression of Polish and German as official languages permitted the gradual emancipation of Lithuanian in the former case, and of Estonian and Latvian in the latter case. But the replacement of other languages used in the administration of the Russian Empire, by Russian, was not the end of the story. There remained the question which of Lomonosov’s Russians should be the Russian. The middle style elevated by the popularity of Pushkin’s poetry became popularly accepted as standard Russian. It superseded Lomonosov’s high style and Church Slavonic in the Russian courts during the 1860s. Iakov Karlovich Grot’s (1812–1893) Russkoe pravopisane (Russian Grammar, 1885, St Petersburg) further regularized and stabilized the principles of syntax and spelling. In 1856, the first Russian translation of the Bible authorized by the Orthodox Church was published, but sermons continued to be preached in Church Slavonic as late as 1900. (In the Russian

164 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Orthodox Church, liturgy is said in Church Slavonic to this day.) The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought about another, presumably, simplifying reform of the alphabet and orthography. The Church and religion were suppressed and the use of Church Slavonic rapidly declined. With the introduction of popular education and the achievement of full literacy, Russian took over all the spheres of life in the Slavophone republics of the Soviet Union as well as in the cities in the non-Slavic-speaking republics. The Soviet usage of Russian was most fully reflected in the 17-volume Slovar sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Russian Language, 1950–1965, Moscow) (Beauvois 2005: 211–215; Comrie et al. 1996: 1; Hrycak 2000: 31; Issatschenko 1980: 125; Janich and Greule 2002: 237; Jussila et al. 2001: 77; Klemensiewicz 1976: 517, 521; Rodkiewicz 1998: 164, 166; cf. Stankiewicz 1984: 128–144).

What is in the name of a language? The story of the changes in the name of the Russian language is of particular interest as a reflection of Muscovian and Russian politics. In the 17th century, the vernacular was branded as ‘peasant, or simple speech’ (prostoi iazyk) in opposition to prestigious Church Slavonic or ‘church language’ (tserkievnyi iazyk). At the end of the 17th century, the Oxford grammar of the Russian language labels it russkii. But this adjective, spelled as ruski in Polish and Ruthenian, was reserved for the Ruthenian language. Therefore, in order to emphasize the difference between Poland-Lithuania’s Ruthenian and Russia’s Russian, throughout the 18th century, the official name of the Russian language was rossiiskii before being replaced through the adoption of the adjective russkii during the first decades of the 19th century. All of these labels were derived from the name of Kievan Rus.6 Ruski and russki come from the Slavic adjectival form of Rus. The former is written so in the Polish use of the Latin script and the Ruthenian use of Cyrillic, while the latter is a transliteration from the Cyrillic version current in Church Slavonic influenced by Byzantine Greek. This explains the difference in spelling, which also shows up in transliteration from Ruthenian and Church Slavonic. The name ‘Rus’ in Byzantine Greek was Rossia. The Constantinople patriarch’s documents relating to the Rus lands within the borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Muscovy were issued in Greek. As of the end of the 16th century, they referred to Lithuania’s share of Rus as Mikro Rossia and to that of Muscovy as Makro Rossia. These adjectives ‘little’ (mikro) and ‘great’ (makro) differentiated between the Grand Duchy as a Catholic state and Muscovy that remained the sole independent protector of Orthodox Christianity after the fall of Constantinople. In 1721, Peter the Great changed the name of Muscovy to that of the ‘Russian Empire’ (Rossiiskaia Imperia), preferring the Greek usage of Rossia to

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

165

the Church Slavonic of Rus.’ Peter’s decision drew on the popular alternative name of Muscovy, Rusiia (first attested in 1493), which conflated Slavic Rus’ with Greek Rossia. A similar form Roseia was employed for the first time in 1558, and Slavicized Greek Rossiia in 1517. Peter’s was a logical decision, which emphasized the role of Russia as the successor of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, enshrined in the ideology of Moscow as the third and last Rome. The shortened name of the Russian Empire, Rossiia, gave rise to Polish Rosja for ‘Russia.’ English ‘Russia’ is derived from Rusiia. Rossiia, or a re-Slavicized Greek rendering (Rossia) of the Church Slavonic place-name of Rus’ allowed to clearly distinguish the new empire from Poland-Lithuania’s Rus lands, and also the coalescing Russian language (rossiiskii) from declining Ruthenian (ruski, ruskii, russkii). Peter the Great, as the subsequent tsars, set out on the course of ‘in-gathering the lands of Rus.’ Their task mostly completed after the final partition of Poland-Lithuania (1795), the Russian language could be safely renamed russkii in order to reflect St Petersburg’s claim to the entire political, ecclesiastical and cultural heritage of Kievan Rus. The Russian language is rosyjski in Polish, which stems from erstwhile rossiiskii. On the contrary, Czech and Slovak Rusko for Russia is derived from Rusiia, like English ‘Russia.’ The 19th-century process of the emergence of new standard languages from vernaculars did not leave Russia untouched. The increase in literacy as well as in linguistic research created the intellectual basis for the codification of Belarusian and Ukrainian. However, at that time, the users of these still not standardized languages kept calling them either ruski (Ruthenian) or ‘simple/peasant speech’ (prostaia mova). The latter term stood in opposition to the ‘speech of lords’ (mowa panów, mova panov), that is, the Polish language. Originally, ‘Ukraine’ was a geographical term for denoting the region extending from the middle Dnieper to the Southern Bug. As of 1569, this ‘regional Ukraine’ together with Volhynia and Podlasia were transferred from the Grand Duchy to the Kingdom of Poland. The rest of Poland-Lithuania’s Rus lands remained with Lithuania together with Białoru´s (Belarus, White Ruthenia) that denoted a region between the Berezina ´ (Minsk/Mensk) in its center. The very term Belarus and Neman rivers with Minsk for denoting this region emerged at the turn of the 17th century. By extension, the land’s Slavophone Orthodox inhabitants were referred to as Białorusini litewscy (Lithuanian Belarusians or White Ruthenians), or Litwini białoruscy (Belarusian or White Ruthenian Lithuanians). This usage emphasized the fact that this territory belonged to the Grand Duchy Lithuania, as opposed to the Ruthenian lands transferred to the Kingdom of Poland (1569), where the Slavophone Orthodox population continued to be known by the traditional name of Rusini (Ruthenians) or ludzie ruscy (Ruthenian people). Before the 1569 transfer, the same terms had been applied to the Grand Duchy’s Slavophone Orthodox population.

166 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the period from the mid-17th century to 1795, Russia gradually seized Poland’s and Lithuania’s shares of Kievan Rus (with the exception of Galicia, granted to Austria in 1772). In Muscovy/Russia, during the second half of the 18th century, the kingdom’s Ruthenian lands were re-named ‘Little Russia’ (Malorossiia) and the grand duchy’s lands ‘White Russia’ (Belorossiia). But because of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility’s anti-Russian uprising of 1831–1832, St Petersburg renamed White Russia ‘Northwestern Russia.’ The disappearance of the administrative name historically related to Poland-Lithuania fortified the legitimacy of Russia’s ownership of this territory. Although the name ‘Little Russia’ was not used in Poland-Lithuania, by parallel, the region became known as ‘Southwestern Russia.’ These technocratic designations (emulating the French model of state centralization) centered on Russia, did away with any historical connotations to Ruthenia, which had been included in Poland-Lithuania. (Similarly, Vienna did not preserve the term ‘Ruthenia/Rus’ or ‘Little Poland’ in the name of Galicia in order to dissociate this territory from its historical and political link with Poland-Lithuania.) Northwestern and Southwestern Russias were frequently lumped together, and, as a consequence, referred to as ‘Western Russia’ in contrast to ‘New or Southern Russia,’ that is, the northern shores of the Black Sea gained from the Ottoman Empire between 1774 and 1812. In the context of the persisting historical designations of Little and White Russia, the need arose to emphasize the elevated status of the traditional Muscovy lands in the Russian Empire. The obvious choice was ‘Great Russia’ (Velikorossiia). That is why, beginning in the mid-19th century, Russian elites started speaking of their language as ‘Great Russian’ (velikorusskii), which imperial linguists deftly, though anachronistically, linked with the speech of Kievan Rus, dubbing it ‘Old Russian’ (drevnorusskii). In line with the imperial ideology, there should be only one indivisible Russia, and no other russkii (Ruthenian) languages would be allowed on its territory. The precious few dictionaries of Ukrainian or Belarusian that appeared before 1918 in Russia denoted these languages as Little/South/Southwestern Russian or White/Western/Northwestern Russian dialects (narechia). In the mid-19th century, the terms Ruthenisch in German or rusinski/ruski ´ in Polish for denoting the Ukrainian population and language developed in the Austrian crownland of Galicia. The Polish term ruski had been earlier used in the same capacity in Poland-Lithuania. The German term Ruthenisch was derived from it and, in turn, prodded the new Polish designation of rusinski, ´ derived from older Rusini (Ruthenians) and the very close self-ethnonym of Galicia’s Ruthenians, Rusyny. (Upper Hungary’s Ruthenians tended to employ another self-ethnonym, Rusnaky.) The bilingual pair Ruthenisch/rusinski ´ let to draw the ethnolinguistic line, which separated Galicia’s Slavophone Greek Catholics (Uniates) from Russia’s Orthodox Little Russians. Moreover, in Polish and German terminology, there was also a tendency to speak of Weißruthenisch and białoruski/ruski in the case of the Belarusian language.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

167

However, the Ukrainian- and the Belarusian-speakers began to more consistently refer to their languages as ‘Ukrainian’ (ukrains’kii) and ‘Belarusian’ (belaruskii) and to themselves as ‘Ukrainians’ and ‘Belarusians’ only at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, respectively. In the case of the Ruthenians (Ukrainians) of Galicia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and Bukovina, the process was completed by the beginning of the 1940s. The self-designation of Tutejsi (‘Local People’), widespread in interwar Poland’s Belarus, also disappeared in the course of World War II (Hrushevsky 1965; Issatschenko 1980: 126; Jakowenko 2000: 347; McMillin 1980: 112; Milner-Gulland 1997: 1–3; Ostrowski 1975; Racheva et al. 2002: 352; Rodkiewicz 1998: 16–17; Sahanowicz 2002: 189; Shevelov 1980: 150–151; cf. Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918; Simpson 1951: 18; Smith 1998: 21; Struve 2001: 347; Vakar 1956: 3–4; Vasmer 1971: 505, 520, 522). To wrap up these remarks on the changes in the name of the Russian language (and their ideological implications), it is worthwhile having a look at how they are reflected in the languages that form the focus of this study. In Polish, the shift from rossiiskii to russkii has never been reflected, as the Russian language continues to be known in Poland as rosyjski, which is the former term rendered in Polish spelling. That is so because Warsaw took over the Galician usage during the interwar period and continued to call the Ukrainian language ruski or rusinski. ´ On the other hand, Polish linguists did not agree to concede the Polish-Lithuanian tradition of Ruthenian (ruski) literacy to the Russians. These considerations were absent among the Czechs and the Slovaks who, through their support for Pan-Slavism, actually played into the hands of St Petersburg’s imperial policies. The Magyars did not have any significant territorial or cultural conflicts with Russia either. Hence, all the three national languages accepted the adjective russkii as an appropriate name for the Russian language. Accordingly, Russian is known as ruský in Czech and Slovak, and orosz in Hungarian. But as Slavophone Greek Catholic population resided in the Northeast of the Kingdom of Hungary (today, Ukraine’s Transcarpathia), Budapest adopted the terms ruthén/ruszin (derived from German Ruthenisch and Polish rusinski). ´ Similarly, the common Czech and Slovak counterpart, rusínsky, developed too, for the region, known as Subcarpathian Ruthenia, was incorporated into interwar Czechoslovakia.

Belarusian and Ukrainian In pre-modern times, there were no permanent polities that could be associated exclusively with present-day Belarus or Ukraine. The Ukrainians, however, claim the tradition of the sometime independent (but more frequently only autonomous) Hetmanate as their early state, more readily identifiable with Ukraine than medieval Kievan Rus. The Hetmanate coalesced after 1648 and persisted under

168 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Muscovy’s/Russia’s control from 1654 to 1722. Finally, these lands were directly incorporated into Russia in 1786. Belarusian national historians point to the medieval Kievan Principality of Polatsk and the post-1569 Grand Duchy of Lithuania as the historical predecessors of Belarusian statehood. What mattered most for the establishment of the contemporary separate states of Belarus and Ukraine was the 1569 division of the Rus lands between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. This internal border within Poland-Lithuania survived unchanged till the dissolution of this state at the close of the 18th century. Then it continued in the Russian Empire as the divide between the northwestern and southwestern gubernias. During World War I, the establishment of the German administrative region of the Land Ober Ost composed from the territories of the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania reinforced this division. After 1918, this old administrative boundary was translated into the border between the Soviet Republics of Belorussia and Ukraine. This border continued westward across the Polish-Soviet frontier as an administrative one between the voivodeships (regions) of Polesia in the north and Volhynia in the south. An international border that split the Belarusian ethnic area was a new phenomenon, while the Ukrainian ethnic area had been divided like that since the partitions of Poland-Lithuania, in the course of which Galicia had been awarded to Austria. The ‘ethnic areas’ were a novel concept that was defined only after the first Russian imperial census of 1897. It registered ‘mother tongue’ (rodnoi iazyk) as a potential indicator of nationality. Obviously, Byelorussian (White Russian)7 and Little Russian were noted as dialects of the Great Russian language. However, that was enough to give numerical arguments to the Belarusian and Ukrainian national movements. In addition, the ethnic boundary thus constructed between the Belarusians and Ukrainians reinforced the old administrative-cum-political border, which was of much importance as no significant mountain range separated the territory of future Belarus from that of Ukraine-to-be. Actually, dialects gradually changed from the Belarusian ethnic area to the Ukrainian one without any obvious discontinuity as they still do today. The penetration of literacy and national identity was the slowest in the impoverished and sparsely populated region of the Pripet marshes. Because of this, there was no way to say which village was Belarusian and which Ukrainian. That is why, after World War I, this area was claimed both for Belarusian and Ukrainian nation-states (Silver 1986: 72–73; Snyder 2003: 42–44; Subtelny 1994: 168–181; Sukiennicki 1984: 137–172; Vakar 1956: 12–13). Furthermore, prior to 1918, an attachment to Lithuania as a historical region coinciding with the borders of the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania still survived. The Belarusian-speaking intelligentsia still referred to their region as Litva (that is, ‘Lithuania’ in Slavic) rather than ‘Belarus’ at the beginning of the 20th century. The Slavic-speakers from the territory of the erstwhile grand duchy

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

169

tended to refer to themselves as Litsviny or Litovtsy (‘Lithuanians’). A reflection of this phenomenon survived among the Belarusian emigration in North America who sometimes call their language velikalitauski (‘Great Lithuanian’). That set them against ethnolinguistic Lithuanian nationalists who hoped to establish their ethnic Lietuva (‘Lithuania’ in the Lithuanian language) for the ethnic nation of the Lithuanians (Lietuviai) with the capital in Vilnius, which at that time was an overwhelmingly Slavophone and Yiddish-speaking city. The local Jews talked about themselves as Litvaks (‘Lithuanians’) in opposition to their brethren from the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Poloners (‘Poles’) and from Galicia, Galizianers (‘Galicians’) (Snyder 2003: 40–42; Stankevich 1982). There was also a serious evolution of scholarly views about what the ruski (Ruthenian) dialect of the former Grand Duchy was. Until the mid-19th century, Russian and Polish scholars considered it a dialect of Polish as amply reflected in the name je˛zyk polsko-ruski (Polish-Ruthenian language). Others called it litovskoruska mova (Lithuanian-Ruthenian idiom), especially in relation to Ruthenian manuscripts and publications in Cyrillic created between the 15th and 17th centuries. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most texts, nowadays defined as ‘Belarusian,’ were written or printed in the Latin script known as the ‘Polish alphabet’ in opposition to Cyrillic or the ‘Russian alphabet.’ The 1859 prohibition of the use of the Latin script to publish anything in Belarusian (and also in Ukrainian) was accompanied by the official pronouncement that marked the switch in classification of Belarusian from a dialect of Polish to a dialect of Russian. But despite the 19th-century tradition of classifying Polish as a ‘Western Slavic language’ and Russian as an ‘East Slavic’ one, there is no sharp linguistic discontinuity between them. Actually, the Belarusian-speaking area is the transitory dialectal region between Polish and Russian. In the absence of any obvious linguistic or geographical border, it is the extralinguistic features of Orthodox Christianity and Cyrillic that are implicitly used to separate the East Slavic languages from the West Slavic ones, written in the Latin script by populations that are predominantly Catholic (or Protestant). Accordingly, an official tendency developed to regard peasants speaking the same local Slavic idiom as ‘Poles’ when they confessed Catholicism or as ‘White Russians’ if they were Orthodox Christians. After the Polish uprising against Russia in 1863–1864, St Petersburg chose to treat the White Russian and Little Russian dialects of the (Great) Russian language as ‘Polish intrigues,’ or Russian dialects, which Poles wanted to separate from their ‘Russian mother’ by infusing them with Polish linguistic loans and attempting to write them in Latin characters. The use of the White and Little Russian dialects in public and in print was suppressed (though between 1859 and 1863, production of Cyrillic books in both dialects had been actually encouraged). This official ban (which excluded belles-lettres) was applied to Little Russian in 1863 and to White Russian 2 years later. The immediate cause of the 1863 ban on Little Russian prints was the publication of the Little Russian

170 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

translation of the New Testament in 1862, much to the outrage of the Orthodox hierarchy, who, only 3 years earlier, had grudgingly accepted the publication of the Russian translation of the Bible, and had no wish to allow another translation of the Holy Writ for the single Russian Orthodox Church, let alone one into a ‘legally non-existing language.’ In the case of Little Russian, the earlier ban was appended by the 1876 proscription on the importation of ‘Little Russian publications’ from Austria-Hungary’s Galicia, where Ruthenian took off as a written language in public life and even in administration already in the late 1860s. The 1876 decision also banned the use of Ukrainian orthography, Kulishovka, developed by Panteleimon Kulish (1819–1897), who authored the first Little Russian (Ukrainian) novel, published in 1857 in Moscow. The ban on the public use of Little Russian was broadened in 1881, when the organization of exclusively Little Russian theaters and actor troupes was prohibited; in 1892, when the ban on translations from Russian into Little Russian was introduced; and in 1895, when henceforth the publication of children books in Little Russian was not allowed any longer. White Russian was not subjected to such restrictive regulations because there was no White Russian national movement comparable to that of the Little Russians, or any centers of White Russian book production outside the Russian Empire, which would merit a succession of bans. In 1863, the press opined that the Little Russian language ‘has not, does not, and cannot exist’ (in Magocsi 1996: 370). In the 1880s, a similar opinion claimed that the White Russian language ‘does not and has never existed,’ and that to ‘create it artificially’ would be nothing else but doctrinairism (in Rodkiewicz 1998: 212). Unlike in the case of Little Russian, the popular belief was that White Russian would disappear soon, so there was no need to hasten this process with official bans. When an issue of some rare White Russian book appeared, a local censor usually barred it from publication (Anichenka 1969: 13; Ioffe 2003: 1024; Magocsi 1996: 269–270; McMillin 1985: 229; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 220, 473; Rodkiewicz 1998: 192–212; Romanowski 2000: 128; Shevelov 1980: 153; Tomanek 2000: 114; Vakar 1956: 69; Wexler 1974: 207). In 1905, St Petersburg lifted these restrictions on the use of Belarusian and Ukrainian in public and the publishing industry. The following year, the crucial periodical of the Belarusian national movement started appearing, Nasha niva (Our Land). From its inception until 1912, the periodical was published in two versions, in Cyrillic for Orthodox readers and in Latin characters for Catholic ones. Beginning in 1909, not unlike earlier in Lithuanian, the Polish diagraphs [sz] and [cz] for /sh/ and /ch/ were replaced with Czech graphemes [š] and [ˇc] so as to make the Belarusian version of the Latin script alphabet different from the ‘Polish alphabet.’ Later, Cyrillic won the day, especially following the split of Belarus between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1918. In Poland, the Cyrillic script allowed Belarusian nationalists to emphasize their difference vis-à-vis the Polish language and culture invariably associated with the Latin alphabet, while

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

171

across the border the Soviet authorities used the Cyrillic to make Belarusian ever more similar to Russian (Lemtsiuhov 2003: 7; McMillin 1980: 113; Romanowski 2000: 130). Arguably, the first modern book in the Belarusian language was printed in 1835 in the Latin script, though Belarusian linguists tend to claim for their language the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s Church Slavonic and Ruthenian tradition of literacy that dates back to the 13th century. They maintain that documents and books from those times were written in the ‘Old Belarusian’ (starobelaruski) language. But those linguists who worked in the Soviet Union necessarily gave priority to the All-Russian (obscherusskii) language. The entire corpus of writings in Church Slavonic and Ruthenian, created between the 11th and 17th centuries, on the territory of Kievan Rus (notwithstanding the fragmentation of this polity at the close of the 12th century, and the incorporation of its western section in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), was anachronistically claimed for an ‘Old Russian language,’ a concept originally developed in the 19th century. The scheme has it that modern Russian is the direct continuation of this Old Russian language, while Belarusian and Ukrainian constitute its modest offshoots that eventually might be ‘re-united’ with Russian in its role of the ‘language of communication among nationalities’ in the Soviet Union. It was Russian that was to become the only language of the first communist nation/people, the Soviets. This opinion survives to this day in the popular belief widespread in Russia, Belarus, and eastern Ukraine that Belarusian and Ukrainian are peasant idioms, which should not be used by the educated and in cities. Thus, Russian is the ‘true language of culture and civilization,’ which by default makes Belarusian and Ukrainian into Russian’s dialects, slated for extinction, when most of the population achieve secondary or university education, and move to cities (Avanesau 1961; Fojtíková et al. 1989: 655–656; Isayev 1977: 20; McMillin 1985: 229; Tymoshenko 1959). The two significant dictionaries of the ‘White Russian dialect (nareche)’ appeared in 1845 and 1870. In the field of literature, Eneida navyvrat (Aeneid Inside Out) had preceded these dictionaries. This anonymous work was the first one wholly composed in the Belarusian vernacular. It appeared at the beginning of the 19th century and circulated widely in painstakingly rewritten manuscripts. Only a small part was published in 1840. This parody of Virgil’s (70–19 BCE) Aeneid was an emulation of a similar humorous epic poem Eneida (Aeneid) by Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s (1769–1838), which was published in Russian and Little Russian in St Petersburg in 1791–1796 and 1803, respectively. The Little Russian version was hailed as the first book in ‘modern Ukrainian.’ The author, however, committed most of his other writings to papers exclusively in Russian. It seems that Kotliarevskyi considered Little Russian appropriate merely for jocular writings, a quality easily evoked, as the cultivated reader was astounded to find the speech of his serfs recorded

172 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

on the printed page. Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz (1807–1884), known as Vikientsi Dunin-Martsinkievich in the history of Belarusian literature, wrote mostly in Polish. Significantly, he translated the Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz (Lord Thaddeus) by Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) into Belarusian. Unfortunately, in 1851, the Russian authorities seized this work when still in the printing shop, so it could not leave any significant imprint on standard Belarusian. The offence was that it was printed in ‘Polish’ (Latin) letters (Magocsi 1996: 358; McMillin 1977: 79–80, 90–94, 1980: 112; Subtelny 1994: 230; Szybieka 2002: 91). After 1905, the trickle of Belarusian publications created the basis for the German occupation administration of the Land Ober Ost (largely coterminous with the post-1569 Grand Duchy of Lithuania) to recognize ‘White Ruthenian’ (Weißruthenisch) as an official language of this territory alongside German, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Yiddish. All the languages were written in the Latin script, with the exception of Yiddish noted in Hebrew characters. Russian and its ‘Russian script,’ or Cyrillic were prohibited. Interestingly, the Gothic script was recommended for German and Latvian, whereas Antiqua was used in Polish, Belarusian, and Latvian publications. But despite official pressure, Belarusian publications in Cyrillic continued to be produced. For the first time in history, Belarusian became a language of instruction in schools in 1915–1918. Not surprisingly, Russia being the enemy of Germany, the exclusive use of the Latin script was prescribed for this language. Belarusian orthography mainly followed the Polish model with a few graphemes borrowed from Czech ([ˇc], [š], [ž]), and the specific Belarusian letter [˘ u]. The first grammar of the Belarusian language appeared in 1918, the first edition in Latin characters (latsinka), and the second one in Cyrillic (hrazhdanka). After the incorporation of briefly independent Belarus (1918) into the Soviet Union, Cyrillic won the day, and in turn, the Latin script was banned. But Belarusian nationalists staged their small revenge when, safely beyond Soviet control, a Belarusian-Muscovian dictionary was published in Vilnius in 1919, and a Muscovian-Belarusian dictionary followed 3 years later. Obviously, ‘Muscovian’ meant the Russian language. A group of these nationalists also proposed to distance the name of their language from Russian through the use of the novel glottonym ‘Kryvichan.’ It was derived from the early Slavic ethnic group of the Kryvichans to whom some historians traced the lineage of the Belarusians. This glottonym was in rare use among Belarusian émigrés in interwar Lithuania and until the 1950s in North America. The period of cultivating the national specificity (korenizatsiia, or nativization) as allowed and encouraged by Moscow lasted from the early 1920s to 1933. The 1933 reform aimed at ‘weeding’ Polonisms,8 and overhauled the Belarusian spelling and syntax to make the language similar to Russian. In addition to that, Polish and Yiddish functioned along Belarusian and Russian as co-official languages of Soviet Byelorussia between 1920 and 1938.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

173

What followed was the gradual replacement of Belarusian with Russian in administration, schools, and cultural and public life. The process was complete by the mid-1950s. In interwar Poland’s section of Belarus, the pre-1933 version of Belarusian in Cyrillic (as codified in the 1918 grammar) persisted, but Warsaw also suppressed the use of this language, while the Neo-Uniate and Catholic clergy encouraged the use of the Latin over Cyrillic script, for writing in Belarusian. In 1929, a Belarusian-Polish dictionary (Vilnius) was published, in which the Belarusian words were given in both Cyrillic and Latin forms. Between 1941 and 1944, when the Third Reich occupied entire Belarus, the paradoxical revival of Belarusian was observed. The occupation allowed the Belarusians from both Polish and Soviet sections of prewar Belarus to cooperate, and freed their language from the Polonizing and Russifying pressure. The German authorities only encouraged the production of Belarusian publications in the Latin script, which, in 1943, was duly reflected in the new wartime principles of orthography and grammar, published exclusively in Latin characters. Cyrillic smacked too much of Russian, the language of the Third Reich’s Soviet archenemy. This brief flowering of Belarusian under German occupation actually sealed the language’s postwar fate, when it was branded as the ‘language of traitors.’ After World War II, entire Belarus was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Although the League of Nations referred to this country as ‘White Ruthenia’ during the interwar period, the organization’s successor, the United Nations, adopted the Romanized transliteration of the Russian term ‘Byelorussia’ as the name of this Soviet republic. In the postwar years, like in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, Russification gathered speed in Byelorussia as well. The goal was the merger of the Soviet nationalities into a Soviet nation (or people) united by communism and the ‘common classless language’ of Russian. Thus in 1954, 428 Belarusian and 305 Russian book titles appeared in Byelorussia. But, by 1960, the ratio had already been in favor of Russian with 425 book titles in Belarusian and 1175 in Russian. After having achieved its goals, Russification was slightly reversed in the 1962 dictionary and the 1966 grammar of the Belarusian language. Moscow allowed the maintenance of a modicum of difference between standard Belarusian and Russian. The first authoritative multi-volume dictionary of Belarusian was finally published between 1977 and 1984. Although official communication between language communities in the Soviet Union was to be channeled exclusively via Russian, the first Ukrainian-Belarusian dictionary came off the press in Minsk/Mensk in 1980 (Bemporad 2007: 92; Drucki-Podbereski 1929; Haretski 1919, 1920; Ioffe 2003: 1014; Janich and Greule 2002: 329; Lastouski 1924; Lemtsiugova 1980; Losik 1943; McMillin 1980: 116; Romanowski 2000: 131; Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918; Smith 1990: 7–9; Stankevich 1936: 5, 1994: 20; Stankievic 1954; Vakar 1956: 4).

174 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In 1990, Belarusian was announced as the state language of the Soviet Republic of Byelorussia. Two years later, independent Belarus adopted a Constitution, which reaffirmed the singular official status of this language. The 1973 Belarusian translation of the Bible (conducted under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society) could at last be distributed in Belarus. But this did not amount to much in a thoroughly atheistic country. In 1995, Russian was granted the status of a second state language that, for all practical purposes, excluded Belarusian from political, administrative, public, and cultural life. In 1999, only one-tenth of book production was in Belarusian and the rest in Russian. In 2006, there was just one state-wide Belarusian-language daily, and only one-fifth schoolchildren attended Belarusian-medium schools. On a sobering note, however, it seems that no more than 10,000 persons speak standard Belarusian in Belarus. The overwhelming majority use Russian or, much more rarely, standard Belarusian in public life. At home, an increasingly Russified local Slavic dialect is spoken, but educated parents and city-dwellers tend to speak with their children in Russian because it is perceived as the language of social advancement and cultural refinement. The intensive interaction between such dialects and prestigious Russian gave rise to the Belarusian-Russian creole called trasianka (more rarely this term is also applied to the Belarusian-Polish creole in western Belarus), originally an agricultural term denoting a mixture of grass and hay. Today, when the authoritarian President Aleksandr Lukashenka (1954–) and other Belarusian officials unabashedly give speeches in Trasianka, this linguistic form seems to be slated to become the Belarusian language of the future, unless Russian fully replaces Belarusian. At present, opposition Belarusian-language publications and periodicals employ the 1918 (so-called ‘classical’) spelling (which survived among the Belarusian émigrés), and their pro-governmental counterparts the Russifying 1933 Soviet spelling. This ideological cleavage is aptly reflected in two separate Belarusian Wikipedias in both varieties of the language. In 1998, the authorities unsuccessfully attempted to close down the oldest Belarusian periodical, Nasha Niva, for using classical orthography. In 2006, Lukashenka proposed a new language reform, which, if implemented, would make classical spelling illegal and infuse official Soviet orthography with more Russifying elements. In addition, beginning in the school year 2006/2007, students of the last, tenth, grade of Belarusian-medium elementary schools are required to learn Belarusian geography and history from Russian-language textbooks. It seems to be the first step to making the surviving Belarusian-language schools into bilingual, Belarusian-Russian institutions (Ethnologue 2003; Golinski ´ 2006: 104; Ioffe 2003: 1016–1018, 1031–1032; Łukaszenko 2006; Romanowski 2000: 1932). ∗∗∗ Ukrainian linguists tend to emphasize that the 1581 Ostróg (Ostroh) Bible in Church Slavonic commenced the established tradition of Ukrainian literature,

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

175

not unlike their Belarusian colleagues, who for the same reason, single out Skaryna’s 1516–1519 Bible in vernacularized (Ruthenized) Church Slavonic. Scholars from both nations tend to split Poland-Lithuania’s Ruthenian and Church Slavonic tradition of literacy along the 1569 border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Manuscripts and books written and printed south of the line are said to ‘belong’ to Ukrainian literature, and those originating in the north to Belarusian culture. During the Soviet times, some Belarusian and Ukrainian authors emphasized the inherent unity of this early literacy from which modern Belarusian and Ukrainian emerged in the 19th century, but their voices remained in a minority. If accepted, this theory would clash head-on with the dominant imperial and Soviet dogma that the entire tradition of literacy produced on the territories of Rus ‘belonged’ to the (Great) Russian language (Anichenka 1969; McMillin 1977: 51; Snyder 2003: 108). Thus, what prevailed in the case of Belarusian and Ukrainian linguistics was the low-key political use of philology to split the legacy of pre-national literacies in agreement with the borders of the modern nation-states. In the context of the Soviet Union, the national republics were perceived to function like nationstates. The first ‘national struggle’ fought out with the novel instrument of philology erupted during the 1860s, when German and French scholars began to battle over Frankish texts in order to ‘prove’ that they ‘rightfully belonged’ to the tradition either of ‘Old German’ or ‘Old French’ literacy. This anachronistic and nationalist approach to texts, written prior to the rise of the nation-states, spilled into Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, and continues to be the forte of ‘philological science’ in this region to this day (Bloch 1990: 39–42). The beginning of modern Ukrainian literature is connected to Ivan Kotliarevskyi’s Eneida. The first sections of the Little Russian text were published in 1798, but the whole poem circulated widely in manuscript before it was finally published in its entirety in 1842. The development of the Ukrainian national movement was complicated by the fact that the land proposed to be inhabited by the nation of the Ukrainian-speakers, was divided between the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary (Galicia, Bukovina, and easternmost Upper Hungary). In 1837, the first book of poems in the vernacular was published in Galicia. Three years later, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) repeated the same feat with his Kobzar (The Bard) on the other side of the border. This collection of poems became the national epos of the Ukrainians and earned Shevchenko the title of the ‘father’ of Ukrainian literature. In 1818, the first grammar of the ‘Little Russian dialect (nareche)’ came off the press in Russia, and 5 years later, a small dictionary. The suppression of the Little Russian dialect in Russia between the late 1850s and 1905 shifted the development of the Ukrainian language to Galicia (Pritsak 1984: 6–7; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 208–209; Subtelny 1994: 230; Tomanek 2000: 110).

176 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In Galicia, the language was called ‘Ruthenian’ (Ruthenisch in German). This official name survived until 1918, also among the speakers of the language, who consistently referred to themselves as ‘Ruthenians.’ In Vienna’s perception, Austria’s Greek Catholic Ruthenians were a separate people, different from Russia’s Orthodox Little Russians, who spoke their own Little Russian language, known as Kleinrussisch (Little Russian), or Kleinruthenisch (Little Ruthenian) in German. In the first half of the 19th century, there were repeated efforts to make the Latin script (latinitsa) into the main one in which Ruthenian publications would be printed. The last endeavor of this kind was undertaken in 1859 by the Polish Viceroy of Galicia, Agenor Gołuchowski (1812–1875), who tried to introduce a Czech-based Latin alphabet for Ruthenian. Another problem was that unlike in the Russian Empire, the Church Slavonic script (kyrylitsia) persisted before the Petrine grazhdanka superseded it in the late 1850s. Interestingly, the Church Slavonic script persisted until the interwar period in Ruthenian publications produced for Slavophone Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians in easternmost Upper Hungary and Bukovina. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Russophile faction of Galicia’s Ruthenians identified Church Slavonic as their ‘Ruthenian language.’ They gradually replaced the Galician localisms in this language with borrowings from Russian. Such Ruthenian or ‘Slaveno-Ruthenian’ (Rutheno-Russian) persisted at schools in eastern Galicia. (The development was similar to the emergence of Slaveno-Serbian [Serbo-Russian] in the 1780s. This language dominated among the Serbs in non-ecclesiastical contexts until the mid-19th century.) The proponents of replacing Slaveno-Ruthenian with the spoken vernacular as heard in the streets, disparagingly called the Russophiles’ Slaveno-Ruthenian iazychie, or a macaronic jargon. Russophiles themselves called their Slaveno-Ruthenian language, first, ruskyi and, later, russkyi. In Cyrillic spelling, the reader associated the first version with Ruthenian, while the latter with Russian. In the 1890s, the Russophile tendency and support for Slaveno-Ruthenian largely petered out in Galicia. Vernacular Ruthenian began to dominate in all spheres of Ruthenian social life, with the exception of the Greek Catholic Church, where Church Slavonic in Ruthenian pronunciation remained in use. (In Bukovina, Ruthenian was adopted alongside Romanian, as a language of church administration in 1873.) The proponents of grounding Ruthenian in the vernacular published the first grammar in 1862, which was followed by a German-Ruthenian dictionary 5 years later. Ievhen Zhelikhivskyi’s (1844–1885) two-volume Ruthenian-German dictionary (1886) codified standard Ruthenian. Meanwhile, between 1862 and 1873, four school textbooks of Ruthenian were published. In 1893, these developments allowed the Austrian school authorities to approve a single standard of Ruthenian, whose proponents made it intentionally closer to Russia’s Little Russian, hoping for the final merger of the all-Ukrainian national life. After much

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

177

bitter discussion among the Ruthenian intellectuals and readers, Stepan Smal’Stots’kyi (1859–1938) and Fedir Gartner’s (1843–1925) school grammar helped to fulfill this decision. It was published in Lwów (Lviv) in 1893, 1907, 1914, and 1928, which ensured that the vast majority of literate Ukrainians wrote and spoke in ‘Galician Ruthenian (Ukrainian)’ until a considerable degree of literacy in the Soviet version of Ukrainian was achieved in Soviet Ukraine by the late 1920s. Having been introduced into Ruthenian schools in 1893, the finishing touch to Galician Ruthenian was given in 1903, when the British Bible Society published the first full Ruthenian translation of the Bible at Vienna. One of the three translators was P Kulish, whose 1862 translation of the New Testament provoked a volley of restrictive regulations directed against Little Russian in Russia. The lifting of the ban on the Little Russian language in Russia (1905) allowed for the mutually beneficial exchange with Galicia. Between 1907 and 1909, Borys Hrinchenko’s (1863–1910) authoritative four-volume dictionary was published in Kiev (Kyiv). Importantly, in the work’s title the phrase ‘Ukrainian language’ (ukrains’ka mova) featured, the Little Russian dialect was already a thing of the past. (It was P Kulish who initiated the compilation of this dictionary in 1861, and the significance of this work for the development of the unified Ukrainian language and Ukrainian nationalism was such that it was reprinted in 1969 and 1997.) In short-lived independent Ukraine,9 it was the Russian language that had to take the second place, as visible in the title of the bilingual Muscovian-Ukrainian (moskovsko-ukrains’kyi) dictionary (Dubrovs’kyi 1918). ‘Muscovian’ for Russian was the Ukrainian revenge for St Petersburg’s former ‘Little Russian’ for designating their own language and claiming the entire tradition of Kievan Rus for Russia alone (Dulichenko 2003: 349; Korovytsky and Vavryk 2003; Magocsi 1984: 59, 1996: 439; Price 1998: 480; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 473–474; Shevelov 1989: 15–18, 45). After World War I, the division of Ukraine continued, this time with Galicia in Poland and the rest of the land in Soviet Russia. In addition, on the basis of their own vision of the ethnolinguistic area of the Ukrainian nation, Ukrainian nationalists also claimed for their future nation-state, easternmost Upper Hungary, incorporated as Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia, and the former Austrian crownland of Bukovina, granted to Romania. In the Soviet Union, Moscow granted the Ukrainians their own republic and recognized their language as ‘Ukrainian.’ In Poland, the territories inhabited by Ukrainians were split among four voivodeships and in official documents Warsaw referred to their language as ‘Ruthenian’ (ruski or rusinski). ´ After the 1926 coup that terminated democracy in Poland, Polish swiftly replaced Ruthenian in Ruthenian schools, which mostly had been made bilingual in the early 1920s. Ruthenian organizations replied with intensified cultural life, and between 1924 and 1938, the number of Ruthenian book titles published in Poland increased from 195 to 476. In defiance of Polonization, and hoping for a united Ukraine, in 1929,

178 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Poland’s Ruthenians adopted the 1927 spelling of Soviet Ukrainian. Following the Polish example, Bucharest gradually suppressed Ukrainian-language schools and cultural life in Bukovina, officially treating Ukrainians, as ‘Romanians who forgot their mother tongue’ (in Chojnowski and Bruski 2006: 87–88; Shevelov 1989: 195). In the interwar period, a mere 39 Ukrainian book titles were published in Romania. The special status of national autonomy enjoyed by Subcarpathian Ruthenia produced muddled results, as Prague veered between Russian, Galician Ukrainian, and the vernacular as the language of administration and education. In the latter half of the 20th century, this mixed experience contributed to the rise of the new Rusyn nation and their separate language (see Chapters 6 and 7). The Soviet policy of korenizatsia actively encouraged the development of the Ukrainian nation and its language until the mid-1930s, as in the case of the Belarusian nation and its language in Soviet Belarus. The gravity of Ukrainian cultural life moved from Poland’s Galician capital of Lwów to the Soviet Union. The limits of korenizatsia appeared as early as 1924, when the fourth volume of the five-volume comprehensive Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (1924–1933, Kyiv) edited by Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi (1871–1941) was destroyed before it could be sent to the press. The Soviet authorities deemed it ‘too Ukrainian.’ A similar fate struck the updated edition of Hrinchenko’s authoritative monolingual dictionary of Ukrainian (1927–1929, Kyiv), whose publication had to be terminated with Volume III. Whatever the slogans of korenizatsia might be, Moscow, like St Petersburg before 1917, wanted Ukrainian to gradually converge into Russian, and not to evolve into a starkly different language. In 1933, the new, officially espoused, principles of Ukrainian orthography and grammar were published, with the intention to make this language more similar to Russian. A new 1937 Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (Kyiv) reflected this line and presented Ukrainian as a language very close to Russian, but it did not spare the editors repressions, because the authorities still saw the dictionary as an ‘unjustified expression of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.’ The share of Ukrainian book titles in the overall production (mainly, vis-à-vis Russian titles) jumped to unprecedented 64.4 percent in 1918 in independent Ukraine. In Soviet Russia, it first tumbled down to 29.3 percent in 1922, before soaring to 76.9 percent in 1931, and falling to 43 percent in 1939. After World War II, this Russifying trend continued unabated as amply reflected in the new extensive (eleven-volume) monolingual dictionary of the contemporary Ukrainian literary language’ published between 1970 and 1980. The tradition of Ruthenian in eastern Galicia and of the vernacular in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (renamed, Transcarpathia) were extinguished, because both region’s along with Bukovina were incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. An Orthodox translation of the Bible into Ukrainian came off the press in 1962 and a Greek Catholic one followed a year later. Both were published in the West. The Bible was a banned book in the Soviet Union, while the officially recognized

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

179

Russian Orthodox Church proscribed the use of the Orthodox Ukrainian translation of the Holy Writ. The change came with the fall of communism in 1989. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church re-emerged and introduced the 1962 translation into use. The Greek Catholic Church, banned in eastern Galicia and Transcarpathia during the latter half of the 1940s, revived, and decided to employ the 1963 translation. In 1990, Ukrainian was elevated to the rank of the official language in the still Soviet Ukraine. The following year, the Ukrainians gained their own independent nation-state. At the beginning of the 1990s, the early 1930s reforms, which had made Ukrainian more similar to Russian, were overturned. The most visible sign of the re-Ukrainization of Soviet Ukrainian was the 1992 reintroduction of the specifically Ukrainian letter [ґ] for the sound /g/, as distinct from [г] for /h/. During the Soviet times the Russian character [г] had ambiguously represented both Ukrainian phonemes, /g/ and /h/. In Russian, the sound /h/ hardly ever occurs, so there is no need to distinguish between /g/ and /h/ in writing. The 1996 Ukrainian Constitution reaffirmed the official status of Ukrainian as state language, and Kyiv did not give in to Moscow’s pressure that Russian should be recognized as a second official language in Ukraine, as it had already been in Belarus. Ukrainian is the sole language of communication in western Ukraine (Galicia and Transcarpathia). But politicians all over the country do their best to master it, and make point to speak exclusively in Ukrainian, when delivering official speeches. Gradually, Ukrainian is not perceived as a ‘peasant idiom,’ but a language, thanks to the command of which, one can secure an attractive career. However, Russian still remains the main language of business and book production. It is also preferred in public and private life in eastern and southern Ukraine. The continuing diglossia of Ukrainian and Russian, so much visible in central Ukraine, is also reflected in the phenomenon of surzhyk. Not unlike Belarusian trasianka, surzhyk used to be an agricultural term for denoting wheat with an admixture of rye or barley. Today, the term describes the Ukrainian-Russian creole, which functions as the colloquial register of the Ukrainian language. In this dyad, standard Ukrainian plays the role of the written register and of the language form employed in official contexts. Nowadays, the social status of Ukrainian uplifted, Surzhyk is as much despised, as Ukrainian used to be prior to 1989. This attitude, accompanied by the official dominance of standard Ukrainian, and the social dominance of Ukrainian and Russian, is bound to eradicate Surzhyk. Quite a different fate from Trasianka, poised to become a future Belarusian, unless the pressure of Russian is lifted in Belarus, and the use of standard Belarusian is encouraged by state (Janich and Greule 2002: 317, 319; Korovytsky and Vavryk 2003; Panochko 1999: 5–9; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 474; Shevelov 1989: 100, 103, 118, 129–130, 152, 163–164, 179–180, 184, 190, 195–196; Tomanek 2000: 116–117).

180 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Lithuanian The Lithuanian language was the vernacular the Jagiellonian dynasty of PolandLithuania used in the family, through the reign of Kazimierz IV (1446–1492). Also the aristocracy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania deliberated in this language in the Council of the Lords, and the language was used orally in the duchy’s government, administration, and diplomatic relations until the turn of the 16th century. These uses never found their reflection on parchment or paper, since the official written languages of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were Ruthenian, Polish, and Latin. Ruthenian (initially, the Rus recension of Church Slavonic) achieved this status when at the turn of the 14th century, illiterate Lithuanian rulers began to annex large tracts of the Rus lands, where the Slavophone Orthodox population employed Cyrillic-based Church Slavonic for writing. The official employment of Latin came with the 1385/1386 personal union of Lithuania with the Kingdom of Poland, which also entailed the Christianization of Lithuania, conducted by the Catholic Church. Polish became especially popular in the grand duchy between 1544 and 1548, when Zygmunt II August (ruled 1548–1572) took up residence in Vilnius in the capacity of Grand Duke before becoming Polish King in 1548, and moving to Cracow. Finally, Polish became an official language in the grand duchy following the 1569 union of the duchy with the Kingdom of Poland into a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lithuanian made an appearance in court testimonies; the oldest one dates back to 1624. After the 1697 ban on the official use of Ruthenian, Polish became the sole official language of the grand duchy, though Latin remained the language of scholarship and international diplomatic correspondence, while German continued to be a co-official language of urban self-governments. The Reformation spread the use of Polish in the grand duchy at the expense of Latin. The success of the Counter-Reformation tipped the balance in favor of Latin beginning in the mid-17th century.10 For instance, in 1651–1660, 111 Latin book titles were published for the consumption in the grand duchy (53 in the duchy and 58 abroad) and 46 Polish. The tendency changed in favor of Polish in the first half of the 18th century. As a result of the expansion of the Teutonic Order, the Lithuanian-speaking area extending along the southeastern littoral of the Baltic Sea was divided between the State of the Teutonic Order (East Prussia) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania already in the second half of the 13th century. The Lithuanian national histories refer to the part included in the grand duchy as Lithuania Major while to the other within the Prussian borders as Lithuania Minor. Lithuanian and Latvian remain the only Baltic languages11 to survive to this day. Yatvingian and Couronian disappeared in the 16th century without leaving any written traces. The last speakers of Pruthenian (Old Prussian) that gave the name to Prussia, died in the 17th century. But thanks to the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

181

zeal of the proponents of the Reformation two bilingual German-Pruthenian Catechisms were printed in Königsberg in 1545 and a third one 16 years later (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 329; Ostrówka 2005: 104; Price 1998: 110, 498, 371–372; Snyder 2003: 19; Trautmann 1910; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 75–76, 83– 84). The area where Baltic languages were spoken shrank in Prussia because of the spread of prestigious German, and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania due to the official use of the Slavic languages of Polish and Ruthenian. Following the partition of Poland-Lithuania in the second half of the 18th century, Russian joined the picture as another prestigious written language. The situation became even more complicated with the rise of Congress Poland, which contained the southwestern sliver of Lithuania Major with the town of Suwałki (Suvalkai in Lithuanian). Similarly, as in the case of the Baltic languages, the use of the FinnoUgric languages that extend north of the Baltic-speaking areas, also declined. Of the Finno-Ugric languages spoken in this area, only Finnish and Estonian are sure to survive, as their kin languages of Ingrian, Karelian,12 Livonian, Veps, and Votic were used at the end of the 20th century only by tiny speech communities ranging from several tens to several thousand people (Hajdu 1975: 177–203; Price 1998: passim). The rise of Lithuanian as a written language is connected to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, which made ethnic Lithuanians living in Lithuania Minor into Lutherans, and left their co-ethnics in Lithuania Major as Catholics, though some Calvinists remained there, as well. The first printed Lithuanian book, a catechism, rolled off the press in 1547 in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad in Russia, Królewiec in Polish, Karaliauˇcius in Lithuanian), where a large Lithuanian-speaking Protestant parish survived until the end of the 18th century. The book was in the Samogitian (Žemaitija) dialect recorded with the use of Polish orthography, because its author, Martynas Mažvydas (Martinus Masvidius, Marcin Maszwidas, 1510–1563) came to Prussia from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. (Later, Lithuanian books published in Prussia were in the western Aukštaitijan [upper country] dialect spoken by the majority of Prussia’s Lithuanian-speakers.) Samogitia or the ‘low country’ in Lithuanian, formed a distinctive administrative unit in the Grand Duchy at the Baltic littoral. The official title of the monarch of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the ‘Duke of Lithuania, Samogitia, and Rus.’ Originally, Lithuania was another historical region that extended east of Samogitia, but the latter appellation fell into disuse when the post-1918 Lithuanian state decided on its official name as ‘Lithuania.’13 It is believed that this name was derived from the small river Lietauka, a tributary of the Neris (Wilia in Polish). Earlier, now largely abandoned etymologies of this ethnonym, derived it from Lithuanian lietus for ‘rain,’ Celtic Letha for the ‘Atlantic coast of western Gaul,’ or Latin litus for ‘seashore.’ The last etymology

182 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

attempted to salvage the late medieval myth that the Lithuanians’ ancestors were Romans, which had been ‘proved’ with the spurious form L’Italia, from which Lithuanian Lietuva for ‘Lithuania’ was said to have sprung. Obviously the definite article did not exist in Latin, and it is a late development connected to the rise of the present-day Romance languages of Italian, French or Spanish. The Catholic Church replied to the Protestant translation initiatives in Prussia with its own catechism in Lithuanian, published in Wilno (Vilnius) in 1595. It was the first Lithuanian book printed in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and like its Prussian predecessor of 1547 employed Samogitian in Polish spelling. The first full-fledged dictionary of Lithuanian (Latin-Polish-Lithuanian) was published in 1631 (no copy of the probable 1629 edition survives), also in the capital of the grand duchy. Its three further enlarged editions were printed in 1642, 1677, and 1713. The lexicographer, Konstantinas Sirvydas (Constantinus Szyrwid, 1578–1631) employed the eastern Aukštaitijan dialect of Vilnius, in which the first book (a catechism) had been published in 1605. Due to the rapid Polonization of the grand duchy’s capital and its vicinity, no more original books in this dialect came off the press after 1705. The first grammar of (Prussian, or western Aukštaitijan) Lithuanian (written in Latin) was published in 1653 in Königsberg. A fragment of the first Lithuanian translation of the New Testament (conducted from Luther’s German Bible into eastern Aukštaitijan) came off the press 10 years later in Oxford, and was followed by another (in Samogitian) in 1701, published in Königsberg. In 1727, the first full Lithuanian translation of the Bible was published, also in the Prussian capital, but it employed the western Aukštaitijan dialect. The Catholic Church replied with the first Catholic translation of the New Testament (in Samogitian) in 1816, which came off the press in Vilnius. In the same year, a new edition of the Protestant Bible in (western Aukštaitijan) Lithuanian was published in Prussia. Another Catholic translation, and the first one conducted from the original languages into standard Lithuanian, appeared piecemeal between 1911 and 1937. To this day, it remains the standard Lithuanian translation of the Holy Writ (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 1–21; Kiaupa et al. 2000: 40, 299, 301; Lithuanian Bible 2003; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 469–470; Topolska 2002: 306–309; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 206, 228, 230–231, 240–242, 246, 251–252, 255; Zinkeviˇcius et al. 2005: 118–119). By the end of the 18th century, 268 Lithuanian book titles had been published, 40 percent of them in Poland-Lithuania and 60 percent in Prussia; the former mostly in Samogitian (also known as the Central dialect of Lithuanian) and the latter in western Aukštaitijan. The ratio stood largely unchanged during 1854–1865, when 171 Lithuanian book titles came off the press in Vilnius. Religious publications predominated, Protestant in Lithuania Minor and Catholic in Lithuania Major. Until World War I, the divide was reinforced by the use of the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

183

Gothic type in Lithuanian books and periodicals produced in Prussia. Beginning in the second half of the 17th century, Antiqua was employed for producing Lithuanian books in Poland-Lithuania. Also, the varieties of the Lithuanian language employed in these publications varied. This showed in the official Russian nomenclature variably referring to the Lithuanian language as ‘Lithuanian,’ ‘Samogitian,’ and ‘Samogitian-Lithuanian.’ The last name occurred most often in official documents and in state-approved Lithuanian-language textbooks printed in Cyrillic. Until the mid-19th century, Polish authors and lexicographers preferred to speak of the ‘Samogitian language,’ and there was even a movement for standardizing ‘Catholic Samogitian’ as opposed to the ‘Lutheran Lithuanian’ language based on the western Aukštaitijan dialect, and employed in East Prussia. In Lithuania Minor, the German authorities consistently used the term ‘Lithuanian language.’ Lithuanian books produced in Germany featured numerous Germanic loans. On the other hand, the influx of Polish linguistic borrowings into texts produced in Lithuania Major was so considerable that in extreme cases it was Polish lexemes embedded in the Lithuanian syntax, that is, a kind of Lithuanian-Polish creole (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 330; Kiaupa et al. 2000: 300, 2002: 116; Price 1998: 307; Sawaniewska-Mochowa 2002: 27; Stražas 1996: 13; Topolska 2002: 329). Although the beginnings of ethnolinguistic Lithuanian nationalism date back to the early 19th century, the space for Lithuania nationalism opened more widely in the wake of the Polish uprising against Russia (1863–1864). In 1863, St Petersburg banned the Polish language as a medium of education from schools in the Lithuanian-speaking areas. Russian replaced it and Lithuanian was added to the curriculum as a subject. After 1872, Polish replaced Lithuanian as a subject in schools for Lithuanians in the Vistula Land (Congress Poland), and both Lithuanian and Polish as subjects were banned from the exclusively Russianmedium schools for Lithuanians in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Thus, Lithuanian was marginalized once again. In Lithuania Minor (following the founding of the German Empire, 1871), the use of Lithuanian was limited to church life and private book publishing after 1873. In this empire, similar Germanizing measures were directed at other minority languages, Bohemian (Czech), Danish, French, Kashubian, Mazurian, Moravian, Polish, and Sorbian. The success of the Germanizing policy was a significant source of inspiration for Russifying measures in the Russian Empire. The aforementioned overture toward Lithuanian between 1863 and 1872 was dictated by St Petersburg’s desire to check the spread of Polonization. But the goal was not promotion of Lithuanian language and culture. Hence in 1864, the ban on the use of the ‘Polish alphabet’ (that is, the Latin script) in Lithuanian publications was introduced in Russia. The following year, the authorities prohibited the importing of Lithuanian books in ‘Polish letters’ from abroad. Since 1864, Lithuanian publications could be published exclusively in Cyrillic, the script of the empire and the Russian

184 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Orthodox Church. The clear aim was to use Cyrillic as an ideological bridge for a future Russification of the Lithuanian- and Samogitian-speaking population. Although at least 54 Cyrillic volumes came off the press in SamogitianLithuanian, Lithuanian-speaking Catholics reacted adversely and resorted to the mass smuggling of Lithuanian books from Germany. They were produced in Antiqua either on the spot in East Prussia or by the Lithuanian community in the United States, from where they were sent to Germany to be smuggled to Russia. A few of the smuggled volumes were in the Gothic type, which was technically still legal in Russia. Hence, in 1872, the ban on imports was extended to Gothic-type books in Lithuanian as well. The smuggling continued in blatant defiance of the Russian authorities. Significantly, the inflow of books in Prussian (western Aukštaitijan) Lithuanian introduced Russia’s Lithuanians to this language, after the long-standing Catholic tradition of Samogitian-based publications was truncated.14 This facilitated the emergence of standard Lithuanian based on western Aukštaitijan at the turn of the 20th century. In Lithuania Major, Polish dominated in politics, education, and culture until the mid-1860s, and henceforth, Polish alongside Russian.15 Although the Polonization of Lithuanians in this region slowed down at the end of the 19th century, it did not stop altogether. The imposition of Russian as the sole official language of the empire did not entail any widespread Russification of Lithuanians. However, those few, who finished secondary school, acquired a good command of Russian. The ban on Lithuanian books accompanied by the dual pressure of traditional Polonization and state-imposed Russification, did not leave space for unfettered development of the Lithuanian language. Despite the official policy of Germanization introduced in the German Empire in the first half of the 1870s, the situation of Lithuanian in Lithuania Minor was much better. First, the Protestant Churches remained faithful to the Reformation ideal of evangelization in vernaculars. Conversely, in Russia’s Polish-Lithuanian territories, the Catholic Church was the redoubt of the Polish language, and the Orthodox Church played the same role in regard of the Russian language. Not surprisingly then, the first modern lexicographic description of Lithuanian originated in Lithuania Minor in the form of two extensive bilingual dictionaries, German-Lithuanian (1870–1874) and Lithuanian-German (1883), compiled by Frydrychas Kuršaitis (Friedrich Kurschat, 1806–1884). In addition, in the German Empire, the Lithuanian language was known under the unambiguous glottonym of Litauisch (Lithuanian), unlike in Russia, where it continued to be known as Samogitian-Lithuanian until the Bolshevik Revolution. Between 1820 and 1860s, local Polish-speaking authors compiled at least 14, quite extensive, bi- and multilingual dictionaries of Lithuanian/Samogitian, paired usually with Polish, and more rarely with Latin, Latvian, or Russian. As Catholics, they did not use German in these dictionaries because they deemed German as much a ‘Lutheran language’ as Russian, an ‘Orthodox language;’

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

185

but on the other hand, Polish remained the main language of interethnic communication in Lithuania Major despite Russification. Already in the 1820s, a lexicographer from Lithuania Major postulated the need to compile an authoritative dictionary of Lithuanian, modeled on Samuel Bogumił Linde’s Polish dictionary, and his colleagues renewed the call in the mid-19th century, adding the brothers Grimm’s German dictionary as a model to be emulated. But the ban on Lithuanian books in the Latin script, combined with the mainly anti-Polish character of the official policy of Russification in this region made it impossible to publish lexicographic works devoted to Lithuanian, which remained in manuscript. The most extensive of all of them is a three-volume Polish-Lithuanian dictionary, compiled between 1850 and 1856. (It was finally published in Vilnius in 1993–1996, as a historical document of interest for scholars.) Hence, unlike their German-Lithuanian counterparts, these dictionaries did not bear any direct influence on the development of standard Lithuanian. A partial exception to this rule was an extensive Lithuanian-Polish-Russian dictionary. Half of it was published in three volumes in St Petersburg/Petrograd between 1897 and 1922. Interestingly, despite the 1864 ban, Lithuanian words in the dictionary were written in the Latin script (Daukantas 1993–1996; Janich and Greule 2002: 162– 163; Rodkiewicz 1998: 173; Sawaniewska-Mochowa 2002: 40, 51, 224; Snyder 2003: 33–34, 35; Stražas 1996: 3, 12–13; Subaˇcius 1999: 14–15, 2005, 2007). The rise of modern Lithuanian language and nationalism is connected to the short-lived periodical Auszra (later, Aušra,16 Dawn, 1883–1886, Ragnit [Neman], East Prussia), published in Antiqua in Germany and smuggled to Russia. (After it went defunct, its national mission was carried by Varpas [The Bell, 1889–1906, Ragnit].) It was Jonas Basanaviˇcius (1851–1927) who established this periodical, impressed by the successes of Bulgarian and Czech nationalisms. He befriended Bulgarian nationalists, while studying medicine in Moscow during the late 1870s. After graduation, he emigrated to Bulgaria in 1879, and moved to Prague 3 years later. At that time, his surname was spelled ‘Jonas (Jan) Basanowicz’ in agreement with Polish orthography. The language in which he preferred to write was still Polish, and in it Basanaviˇcius authored numerous articles on Lithuanian history. As the main foundation of Lithuanian nationalism, he chose the thesis that the 1569 union of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the Kingdom of Poland was a ‘national tragedy,’ because it led to the decline and Polonization of the Lithuanian nation. This ethnic reading of the pre-national past made all things Polish into an enemy of the Lithuanian national idea. In order to differentiate between the Polish language and Lithuanian written in line with Polish spelling, Lithuanian national activists replaced Lithuanian’s Polish-based orthography with a spelling system derived from the Czech orthography, as originally proposed in 1861 by Jonas Juška (Juszkiewicz, 1819–1880).17 Hence, at the end of the 19th century, the [w] and [cz] in Basanaviˇcius’s surname were replaced with [v] and [ˇc], and [sz] in the title of Auszra with [š]. The modern Lithuanian

186 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

orthography, however, still preserves the characteristic Polish diacritic of the ‘hook’ (ogonek, literally ‘little tail’) attached to the bottom of the font, in the following letters, [a˛], [e˛], [l˛], and [u˛]. But the two last characters do not exist in the Polish alphabet, and the two former, though shared with Polish, have different phonetic values (Price 1998: 307; Snyder 2003: 34–36; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 269, 280, 284). In the 1880s, when freshly formed Lithuanian nationalism turned as much against Russian influence as against Polish, the old myths came in handy to legitimize the existence and the standardization of Lithuanian as a language in its own right. In the 15th century, the nobility of the Kingdom of Poland traced their origin back to the Sarmatians, an Iranian people who had reached the Danubian border of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BCE. In PolandLithuania, during the second half of the 15th century, the boyars (nobles) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania replied by fashioning themselves into the descendants of Romans who had fled Julius Cesar’s tyranny. By extension, the Lithuanian language was identified as a direct offshoot of Latin, or even as Latin in ‘its pure state.’ This late medieval myth, which emphasized the Roman origin of Lithuanian in conjunction with the Indo-European linguistic theory, caused Adam Mickiewicz,18 in 1843, to repeat and popularize the opinion that Lithuanian was derived directly from Sanskrit. Eventually, a scholarly thesis arose, which proclaimed Lithuanian as ‘the oldest language spoken on the European mainland.’ As a result, if anyone dared to snub Lithuanian by dubbing it as a ‘peasant speech,’ Lithuanian nationalists could react by claiming for their language the cultural and historical legacy of Latin and Sanskrit. Others maintained that Lithuanian was closer than any other language to Greek and Hebrew, and that the Lithuanians descended from the ancient Sarmatians and the ancient Thracians. Thus, the Lithuanian language was also believed to be either ‘modern Sarmatian’ or ‘modern Thracian’ (The latter was Basanaviˇcius’s theory, which no scholar seriously considered.) (Borowski 2001: 172–173; Snyder 2003: 37; Spires 1999: 492–496; Stone 2001: 25; Subaˇcius 2007). Standard Lithuanian is based on the dialect of Aukštaitija as spoken in the region around Suwałki, known as Suvalkija or Užnemune˙ (and also perceived as the southern fragment of the larger region of Sudovia), where the majority of early Lithuanian nationalists stemmed from. Other national activists championed their local dialects for standard Lithuanian, but lost the competition. As a result, the winning dialect from the southwesternmost corner of the Lithuanian-speaking area conveniently distanced standard Lithuanian from standard Latvian based on the dialect of Riga (Central Dialect), which is coterminous with the larger part of the western half of the Latvian-speaking area, and borders directly on the northern Samogitian and western Aukštaitijan dialects of Lithuanian. This reinforced the linguistic borderland of graded incomprehensibility between the Lithuanian and Latvian dialects. Unlike in

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

187

the case of the Slavic dialects, the separation provided by semi-comprehension or mutual incomprehension is starker in the case of the Lithuanian and Latvian groups of the Baltic dialects. The 1569 border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was of utmost importance for the modern-day (that is, retroactive) separation of the dialect areas of Ukrainian and Belarusian, prior to the transformation of these areas into the Ukrainian and Belarusian nation-states. In the case of Lithuanian and Latvian, however, the historical border between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Ecclesiastical State of the Livonian Order (merely separated by Samogitia from the similar Ecclesiastical State of the Teutonic Order, or future Prussia) simply reinforced the dialectal border of semi-comprehensibility, which had already been there. In 1561, the State of the Livonian Order was incorporated into Poland-Lithuania, but the administrative border remained and separated the grand duchy from the Duchy of Courland. Following the partitions of Poland-Lithuania, the border continued to separate Russia’s gubernias (provinces) of Kovno (Kaunas) and Courland, until it was translated into the international border between Lithuania and Latvia in 1918. The development of planned standard Lithuanian was facilitated by the fact that Daniel Klein (Danielius Kleinas, 1609–1666), whose two first scholarly grammars of (Prussian) Lithuanian were published in Königsberg in 1653 and 1654, chose the dialect of Aukštaitija for his codification. Most scholars, lexicographers, and authors writing in Lithuanian, who were active in Prussia, respected Klein’s decision. In Poland-Lithuania, and later in Russia, no single standard of Lithuanian developed, and books appeared in the Samogitian (Žemaitija) and Aukštaitijan dialects; however, beginning in the early 18th century, the former prevailed. Those who knew Lithuanian, frequently conceptualized the two dialects as two different languages, Samogitian and Lithuanian, due to the persisting historical and regional difference between Samogitia and the rest of Lithuania Major. The aforementioned ban on imports of Lithuanian books, combined with the ban on production of Lithuanian books in Latin character proved selfdefeating. The smuggling of Lithuanian books from East Prussia to Russia was unstoppable. Between 1865 and 1904, 1153 book titles were printed in East Prussia for the Russian market. The Russian border guards intercepted 173,000 copies of these books in the period 1891–1902, and the police confiscated over 200,000 copies in Lithuanian homes and shops between 1891 and 1903. In 1904, St Petersburg decided to lift all the restrictions on the imports and publication of Lithuanian books. The main obstacle the Russian administration faced in the Lithuanian-speaking area on the way to final Russification was the continued cultural domination of Polish. The tactical encouragement of Lithuanian-language culture and book production was to contribute to the de-Polonization (raspoliachenie) of this region. And it did, but

188 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

later, Russian did not replace Lithuanian, as had been planned. The 1904 lifting of the ban on publishing and importing Lithuanian books in Antiqua or the Gothic script did not revive the moribund tradition of literacy in Samogitian, but reaffirmed Prussian Lithuanian as the basis of standard Lithuanian. On the forefront of the momentous change was the first-ever Lithuanian daily, Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News, 1904–1909, Vilnius). A member of the daily’s editorial board, the linguist, Jonas Jablonskis (1860–1930), authored the influential grammar of Lithuanian (1901, Tilsit [Sovetsk]), which became the foundational normative grammar of standard Lithuanian. He also introduced the letters [¯ o] and [¯ u] to Lithuanian. Under his influence, a lot of Polish, German, and Russian loan words and syntactic constructions were also removed from Lithuanian in the utopian search of the žmoniu˛ kalba (‘language of the people’). Between 1915 and 1918, the German occupation administration of the Land Ober Ost (that is, the Northwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, excluding Congress Poland) allowed the use of Lithuanian in public and at schools. It became a co-official language along with German, Latvian, Polish, White Ruthenian (Belarusian), and Yiddish. At that time, the first ever Lithuanianmedium secondary school was founded. Lithuanian became the sole official language of Lithuania, when this new nation-state emerged in 1918, and the first-ever Lithuanian-language university opened in Kaunas in 1922. Ironically, newly independent Poland became the biggest foe of Lithuania. Southern Suvalkija (including the regional capital of Suwałki) passed into Poland though rest of the region, overwhelmingly Lithuanian-speaking and, where standard Lithuanian emerged, became part of Lithuania. Belarus, (shortly independent in 1918), Lithuania, and Poland clashed over the issue of Vilnius, the historical capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Belarusians and the Lithuanians claimed it because they saw the grand duchy as their ‘early Belarusian or Lithuanian nation-state,’ respectively.19 The Poles too laid a claim to the city, as they considered entire Poland-Lithuania as their own ‘early Polish nationstate’ with its two historical capitals in Warsaw and Vilnius. In 1920, Warsaw seized the Vilnius region and its vicinity by force. From the ethnolinguistic viewpoint, a mere 1 to 2 percent of the city’s inhabitants were Lithuanians, and they constituted 12.6 percent of the population in the region. Poles amounted to 69.1 percent of the city’s inhabitants, Jews to 12.6 percent, and Belarusians to 2.8 percent. Lithuania reacted by formally renouncing the 1569 union with Poland. Lithuania Minor remained in Germany, less the Memel (Klaip˙eda) region. In 1920, the Allies detached this region from Germany by the decree of the Treaty of Versailles, and placed it under international administration exercised by France. Three years later, Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants of Memelland rose in a revolt against the French seeking admission of this region to Lithuania as an autonomous territory. Their wish was granted, and the Allies accepted Lithuania’s annexation of the region in 1924. This gave the landlocked state

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

189

access to the Baltic and bolstered the patriotic feeling, which had slackened after the Allies had formally accepted the incorporation of the Vilnius region to Poland in 1923. The Memel region’s population of 140,000 consisted of Germans (47 percent), Lithuanians (28 percent), and Germanic-speaking Memellanders with a knowledge of Lithuanian (25 percent). Kaunas claimed the Memellanders as Lithuanians but those concerned did not always accept the imposition of Lithuanian national identity on them, which later translated into a strong pro-German feeling among them. The population of Lithuanians remaining in Germany shrank to 10,000. Not only did the political border separate them from Lithuanians in newly established Lithuania, but also confusion. The former predominantly professed Lutheranism and produced books in the Gothic script until the early 1940s, while the latter were Catholics and stuck to Antiqua. What created a tentative link between both groups was newly codified standard Lithuanian. In the mid-1920s, the preparatory work for the publication of the first authoritative dictionary of the Lithuanian language began under the initial editorship of Kazimieras B¯ uga (1879–1924). Between 1941 and 2002, its 20 volumes were published; the dictionary records all the Lithuanian words used in print and manuscripts from the publication of the first Lithuanian book (1547) to 2001. In March 1939, Lithuania lost the Klaipeda ˙ region (Memelland) to Germany, and a year later, the country, along with Latvia and Estonia, was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Moscow did not attempt to replace the Latin alphabet of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian with Cyrillic, which was a small price to be paid for a modicum of loyalty on the part of the subjected populations. (The sole change in standard Lithuanian imposed by the Soviet authorities was the scrapping of the letter [¯ o], which pops up in publications of the Lithuanian diaspora, but was not reintroduced to the Lithuanian alphabet after the country regained independence in 1991.) Lithuania also received the coveted national prize of the Vilnius region, which made it the more dependent on the Kremlin in view of the fact that the Poles wished to retake the city unless prevented from doing so by the Soviets. In 1944, the Soviets oversaw the expulsion of 200,000 ethnic Poles from the Vilnius region. The official Lithuanianization of the area was over in 1950, when the Kremlin decided to end a ‘nationalbourgeois deviation’ thereby turning numerous Lithuanian and Russian schools into Polish ones. In order to ethnolinguistically homogenize Soviet Byelorussia, Lithuanians residing in the north of the republic were made to declare themselves Belarusians, Poles, or Russians. In Soviet Lithuania, Russian was gradually imposed as the ‘true’ official language, without knowing which one could not count on achieving any real career in the Soviet Union. As a result, the vast majority of Lithuanians became bilingual, unlike in the case of Estonia and Latvia, where Estonian- and Latvian-speakers chose either not to acquire Russian or not to speak it. In 1989, Lithuanian as well as Estonian and Latvian were

190 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

elevated to the status of state languages in the three Soviet republics of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. A year later, the ill-fated Institute of the Lithuanian Language was re-established. (It was founded in independent Lithuania in 1939, and continued as a shadow of its former self in Soviet Lithuania until 1952 when it was dissolved.) When Lithuania regained independence in 1991 (after having proclaimed it in 1990 as the first one of all the Soviet republics), it was necessary to re-acquaint the population with standard Lithuanian, whose popular use had became seriously Slavicized during the Soviet period. Many companies run and staffed by ethnic Slavs also opposed the introduction of Lithuanian as the language of administration and records, but the shift was mostly completed by the mid-1990s. Interestingly, Samogitian was revived as a non-dominant variety of the Lithuanian language, as even reflected by Samogitian Wikipedia. The Russian language remained a popular second language (unlike in Estonia and Latvia), followed by Polish. In such an order, Lithuanian politicians and intellectuals still use both foreign tongues, which until recently were not actually ‘foreign’ in Lithuania, and are still used by the Russian and Polish minorities, who add up to 9.4 percent and 7 percent of Lithuania’s inhabitants, respectively. In Lithuania, Lithuanian-speakers form 80 percent of the population, unlike Estonian- and Latvian-speakers, who constitute, 68 percent and 58 percent, respectively, of the populace in their nation-states. (This is quite a change in comparison to 1989, when Estonian- and Latvian-speakers added up to 61.5 percent and 52 percent of the inhabitants in Soviet Estonia and Soviet Latvia, respectively.) In the interwar period, the percentages were 87.7 and 73.4, and the subsequent plunge in the numbers after 1945 was caused by massive in-migration of Russian-speakers (mostly Slavs), which was bigger in Soviet Estonia and Soviet Latvia than in Soviet Lithuania. To a degree, this explains why, unlike Vilnius, Tallinn, and Riga (R¯ıga in Latvian) purse the harsh policy of de-Russification, denying citizenship to those inhabitants who do not speak the national languages of Estonian and Latvian (Only those who held or whose ancestors held citizenship of independent Estonia and Latvia during the interwar period are excepted from meeting this requirement.) (Eberhardt 1996: 40–43, 45, 54–59; Hroch 1985: 93–94; Janich and Greule 2002: 45, 160; Kiaupa et al. 2002: 106, 164; Lešˇcinskiene˙ 2002: 3; Mertelsmann 2006; Price 1998: 296, 306; Rodkiewicz 1998: 176, 188–190; Snyder 2003: 53, 65; Subaˇcius 2007; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 293–297, 306, 316, 318, 329, 331–332). The end of communism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of independent Lithuania brought about the establishment of the Society of the Slavic-speaking Lithuanians. The society saw the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their early nation-state, and decided that if Lithuania is the grand duchy’s direct successor, the modern nation-state should be a home to the bilingual Lithuanian-Slavic nation of the Lithuanians. Unlike Russians,

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

191

who mostly arrived in Lithuania after 1940 and 1944 and are dispersed throughout the country, the indigenous Poles (0.3 million) and Belarusians (63,000) form the compact Slavophone group in the eastern section of the country, centered on Vilnius. They share the same local dialects, but Poles are Catholics and use the Latin script, while Belarusians are Orthodox and write in Cyrillic. These differences allow them to maintain that the former speak in prosty polski (‘simple Polish’) and the latter in prostaia mova (‘simple language’). The Society of the Slavic-speaking Lithuanians attempted to standardize the two vernaculars as languages, named as Vichian (viˇcski janzyk) and Halshanish (halšanski jazyk). The former name is derived from the ending ‘-wicz’ (pronounced /-vich/) popular in the surnames of Lithuania’s Poles (for instance, Mickiewicz), while the latter refers to medieval Halich Ruthenia. Until the 1240s, this polity separated the original ethnic Lithuania from Poland. By the mid-14th century, Lithuania absorbed the northern and central sections of Halich Ruthenia, while Poland the rest. The Belarusians believe that they are different from other Slavic nations, because though Slavic-speaking, they presumably stemmed from a mixed Balto-Slavic population. Both Vichian and Halshanish are written in Latin characters. Vichian differs from Polish, because Polish digraphs [cz], [rz], and [sz] for /ch/, /zh/, and /sh/ were replaced with [ˇc], [ž], and [š]. Polish letters [a˛], [´c], [e˛], and [´s] are not used because the phonemes, which they denote, do not exist in Vichian. As a bow toward Lithuanian, the character [e] ˙ is employed. Halshanish shares the script with Vichian, except for the specific Belarusian letter [˘ u], not used for writing in Vichian. The movement for the standardization of Halshnish and Vichian petered out by the end of the 1990s. The flaring-up of this initiative was similar to that for the standardization of a Cyrillic-based (West) Polesian language (zakhodyshnopoliska voloda), which unfolded in Belarus in the mid-1980s, but subsequently lost momentum in the first half of the 1990s. Like the proponents of Halshnish, the supporters of Polesian claimed that the speakers of this language were descendents of a mixed Baltic-Slavic population. In order to emphasize this proposed lineage, they preferred to use the Baltic (that is, Latvian) word voloda for ‘language’ than the usual Slavic counterparts of mova or iazyk. (In Latvian ‘language’ is valoda, but kalba in Lithuanian.) The dialect of Polesia, straddling the borderland between Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland is equally distant from standard Belarusian, standard Ukrainian, and standard Polish. As in the case of Vichian and Halshnish, the idea was that instead of struggling to acquire any of these three standard languages, the local population should be provided with publications and education in their own mother tongue. The proponents of Polesian claimed for the language the 16th- century Ruthenian manuscripts and books, produced in the region of Polesia, as well as the biscriptural (Latin-Cyrillic) Rusinsky lementar/Rusinski

192 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

lementar (Ruthenian Primer), published in Polesia in 1907. Between 1905 and 1915, this biscripturalism was typical of book and periodical production in Belarusian. Polesian is mostly written in Cyrillic, and its proponents produced many more periodicals and books in the language than the supporters of Halshnish and Vichian. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, all the three language projects seem to be slated for extinction. The attraction of the already well established standard languages of Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian proved irresistible. This, however, did not stop Jan Maksimiuk (Maksymiuk, 1958-), a leading writer and intellectual of Poland’s Belarusian minority and a translator of James Joyce’s (1882–1941) Ulysses into standard Belarusian, from proposing, in 2005, another Polesian language (pudla´ska mova) based on the dialect of Poland’s share of Polesia. It differs from the aforementioned earlier project, because of Maksimiuk’s preference for the Latin script. Other names used for referring to Maksimiuk’s Polesian language include svoja mova, po-našomu, or po-svojomu (all mean ‘in one’s own language’). However, Halshnish, Vichian, and Polesian (in its both varieties) will remain the spoken vernaculars of their respective rural populations. This apparently ensured return to exclusive oral use is bound to make them similar to Trasianka and Surzhyk. The former is a hybrid form between prestigious Russian (and, sometimes, Polish) spoken in Belarus’s cities and towns, and various rural dialects, defined as of the Belarusian language. In central Ukrainian cities, the interaction of Russian with rural dialects (seen as belonging to the Ukrainian language) produced Surzhyk. Currently, the social prestige of exclusively oral Surzhyk and Trasianka is lower than that of Halshnish, Vichian, and Polesian. But unless Halshnish, Vichian, and Polesian are revived as written languages, the growing linguistic interference of the prestigious urban languages of Belarusian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian, with time, may make Halshnish, Vichian, and Polesian into dialect-standard language hybrids as much disparaged as Surzhyk and Trasianka are today. Bearing it in mind, that Russian and Polish seem to be of the highest influence on Halshnish, Vichian, and Polesian, all the three may be redefined as Trasianka (Danylenko 2006; Dulichenko 2004: 227–281, 359–367; Eberhardt 1996: 57; Maksimiuk 2005; Subaˇcius 2007).

Latvian and Estonian The Baltic language of Latvian and the Finno-Ugric one of Estonian shared with Lithuanian a similar course of development. In a nutshell, their rise as written languages took place in the course of the Reformation and they never functioned as official languages before the founding of the Latvian and Estonian nation-states in 1918. The difference was, however, that in the 19th century, the German-speaking nobility encouraged the development of Estonian and

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

193

Latvian as written languages, while the Polish-speaking nobility suppressed the rise of written Lithuanian by aggressive promotion of Polonization. Present-day Estonia and Latvia are located on the historical territory of the crusading Livonian Order (Livonian Brothers of the Sword), founded in 1202. Following the near-annihilation of the order by the Lithuanians at the Battle of Saule (Schaulen, near Šiauliai in Lithuania, 1236), it was incorporated (as an autonomous entity) into the similar crusading Teutonic Order of Prussia the following year. By the end of the 13th century, the order had conquered Courland (Kurland in German, Kurseme in Latvian, and Kurlandia in Polish) and Livonia (Livland in German, Vidzeme in Latvian, and Inflanty in Polish). Also in the 13th century, the Danes conquered Estland (Eestii in Estonian), but sold this territory to the Livonian Order in 1346. In 1561, the Livonian Order was secularized under Poland-Lithuania’s protection. Its last master converted to Lutheranism and received Courland as his principality, which became a Polish-Lithuanian fief. Livonia was incorporated into Poland-Lithuania. Also in 1561, the Swedes annexed Estland. From the mid-16th century through the 17th century, PolandLithuania and Sweden clashed over the patrimony of the Livonian Order in Courland. In 1629, Sweden wrested Livonia away from Poland-Lithuania (except its southeastern quarter, or Latgalia), and the fact was eventually recognized in 1660. Accordingly, Swedish replaced Polish in Livonian administration. Swedish was the official language of Estland. German persisted in this function in Courland, but the territory’s status as a Polish-Lithuanian fief contributed to the use of Polish in diplomatic correspondence. On the whole, German remained the language of the local nobility in all the three regions, while Latin was retained as a useful lingua franca in situations when communication was required between Baltic-, Germanic-, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric-speakers. The line of ethnolinguistic division between Estonian and Latvian cut Livonia in half (though until the 13th century entire Livonia was Finno-Ugric-speaking), and was never reflected in any significant historical border. Latvian-speakers inhabited the region’s southern section as well as Courland, while Estonianspeakers concentrated in northern Livonia and Estland. Between 1561 and 1629, the Estonian-speaking north of Livonia coincided with Poland-Lithuania’s voivodeships (regions) of Dorpat (Tartu, Dorpad) and Parnawa (Pärnu, Pernau). At the turn of the 18th century, Muscovy joined the competition for the Baltic lands. Moscow seized Livonia from Sweden in 1721, and this victory bolstered Peter the Great to change the name of his state to that of the Russian Empire. As a result of the first and third partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772 and 1795), Russia obtained Latgalia and Courland as well. All these changes gradually purged the use of Swedish as an official language from Estland and Livonia and of Polish from Latgalia and Courland, but German remained the language of administration and education in the three Russian gubernias (provinces) of Estland, Livonia (less Latgalia split between the gubernias of

194 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Vitebsk [Vitsebsk] and Pskov) until 1885. Later, it was gradually replaced with Russian. (Russification of Latgalia began earlier in 1865, with the purging of Polish from administration and the ban on Latgalian publications in the Latin alphabet.) In spite of the changes in the official language, and the ethnolinguistic cleavage separating the Estonian- and Latvian-speaking peasantry from each other, and from the German-speaking nobility, practically the entire population of Estland, Livonia, and Courland was united in the shared Lutheran faith. The exception was southeastern Courland, or Latgalia, where Catholicism predominated, because the region belonged to Poland-Lithuania until the first partition of the polity in 1772 ( Janich and Greule 2002: 151; Raun 2001: 29, 66–67). The first Latvian printed book, of which no copies survive, was a Protestant manual with parallel texts in Estonian, German, and Latin (1525). A Catholic catechism was published in 1585 and a Protestant one followed a year later. A Latvian-German dictionary came off the press in 1638 and a Polish-LatinLatvian one in 1673. The first grammar of Latvian, written in Latin, followed in 1644. The Latvian translation of the Bible, sponsored by the Swedish King Karl XI (reigned 1660–1697), was published in parts between 1685 and 1692. But this language emerged from the cultural domination of German only in the second half of the 19th century. The expansion of its use in writing is associated with the rise of the Latvian national movement in the 1860s and 1870s, and with the prolific output of J¯anis Endzel¯ınis (1873–1961). On the other hand, the poetry of J¯anis Rainis (1865–1929) endowed this language and the national project connected to it, with a Romantic aura of ‘national revival’ (atmoda). This romanticism stemmed from folklore, which Andrejs Pumpurs (1841–1902) employed in the national verse epic L¯aˇcpl¯esis (Bear-slayer, 1888). Pumpurs drew on the example of a similar Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son, 1861). In 1865, the Russian administration banned the use of the Antiqua-style Latin script for publications in Latgalian, which, as in the case of Lithuanian and Samogitian publications, could be printed exclusively in Cyrillic. The continuous tradition of Latgalian publication, which had begun with the first printed Latgalian book in 1730, was severed. After 1885, the Russian authorities unsuccessfully attempted to impose the Cyrillic alphabet on the users of Latvian in Livonia. Like German, Latvian continued to be written and printed in Gothic. This tradition of employing Gothic letters also extended to Estonian, and in general, underscored the cultural and religious commonality of northern Europe, steeped in Lutheranism, from Denmark and Scandinavia via northern Germany to Russia’s Baltic provinces. After the ban on the use of the Latin alphabet was lifted in 1904, Catholic Latgalians resumed publishing in Antiqua, also used in the Catholic areas of former Poland-Lithuania for writing and publishing in Polish.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

195

In the first half of the 19th century, the rise of national movements led to the superseding of the Gothic script with Antiqua in all the non-German-speaking areas20 apart from Russia’s Baltic provinces. The confessional-cum-cultural commonality gave way to separate ethnic nationhoods also reflected in language and script. In the case of Latvian, Antiqua was gradually adopted for standard Latvian. The codifiers of this language followed the Lithuanian example and employed single graphemes (monographs) for each Latvian phoneme. In this, Latvian is as much different from German as Lithuanian from Polish, because both German and Polish use digraphs and multigraphs. Beginning in 1908, specifically Latvian sounds are represented with diacritics borrowed mostly from Czech and Polish, [¯a], [ˇc], [¯e], [˘ g], [¯ı], [k‚], [l‚ ], [n‚], [š], [¯ u], and [ž]. This resignation from the Gothic script for writing Latvian, and the adoption of unified Latvian orthography, instead of German-style spelling previously used by Latvian-speakers and Polish-style spelling earlier employed by Latgalianspeakers, contributed to the making of Latvian and Latgalian more similar to each other. The Gothic type of Latin letters used for writing Latvian re-emerged in the Land Ober Ost (1915–1918). As in the case of Lithuanian, the German occupation administration recognized Latvian as one of the official languages obtaining on this territory. The official status of Latvian was reaffirmed, when it was made into the sole official language of independent Latvia in 1918. Standard Latvian was codified on the basis of the Central dialect with its center at the capital of Riga. The four-volume Latvian-German dictionary, published between 1923 and 1932, followed the Czech, Slovak, and Lithuanian examples of employing extensive bi- or multilingual dictionaries for the task of language standardization. In 1937, the Latvian orthography was reformed and remains in an unchanged shape to this day. The authoritative eight-volume dictionary of the Latvian language was published between 1972 and 1996. The modern Latvian translation of the New Testament came off the press in 1936. The new translation of the Old Testament was printed abroad in 1965. In the Soviet Union, the publication of the Holy Scripts of any living religion was banned, for the ideological reasons. The state promoted atheism as an ‘antidote’ to religion, defined as ‘opium for the masses.’ Following the period of Russification when Latvia was annexed to the Soviet Union (1940–1991), Latvian once again functions as the sole official language of the Latvian nation-state. Apart from the tradition of literacy in the Central dialect, which spawned standard Latvian, a parallel tradition continued in Eastern (High Latvian) dialect, or Latgalian. The regional group of the Latgalians speaks it. The difference between them and the rest of Latvians is similar to that which existed between the Samogitians and the Lithuanians before the latter ethnoregional identity became dominant among all Lithuanian-speakers at the end of the 19th century. Nowadays, there is a movement for a separate Samogitian language in Lithuania.

196 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Likewise, the Latgalians, who constitute 30 to 40 percent of the Latvians, have supported the vigorous revival of their dialect/language since the late 1980s. Latgalian survives to this day, perhaps, because the Latgalians, unlike other Latvians (who profess Lutheranism), are Catholics. No similar religious cleavage separated the Samogitians from the Lithuanians, as both groups were Catholic, so it was the historical border between Samogitia and Lithuania that played this role. Until the founding of independent Latvia, history and culture more closely connected the Latgalians with the Lithuanians and the Samogitians than with the Latvians. Latgalia was part of Poland-Lithuania until Russia annexed it in 1772. From its inception as a written language, Latgalian was recorded in Antiqua with the use of Polish spelling. The first book in Latgalian, a Catholic hymnal, was published in 1730. The fledgling tradition of Latgalian literacy was cut short in 1864, like that of Lithuanian, when a ban was imposed on the use of the Latin alphabet for writing in ‘local idioms’ in Northwestern Russia, or the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian lands directly incorporated in the empire, including those in the gubernias of Vitebsk (Vitsebsk) and Pskov, between which Latgalia was divided. By default, the publication of Lutheran Latvian books in Gothic characters continued in Livonia and Courland largely unhindered. Catholic Latgalians refused to use Cyrillic, but were much less successful than the Lithuanians in producing books abroad and smuggling them into Latgalia. After lifting the ban on Latgalian publications in Antiqua (1904) and the incorporation of Latgalia into independent Latvia (1918), Latgalian literature and publications developed as a parallel variety of the Latvian language. Between 1920 and 1934, Latgalian was used as a co-official language in local self-government and education in Latgalia. The tradition was crowned with the Latgalian translation of the New Testament in 1933. After a coup in 1934, this revival was cut short, because the authoritarian regime, which overthrew democracy, castigated Latgalian as an obstacle to the full ethnolinguistic unity of the Latvian nation, although this language does not differ much from standard Latvian. For the Kremlin, which annexed Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, in 1940, Latgalian presented an unwanted complication on the way to building the national republic of Soviet Latvia. Between 1959 and 1989, no publications in Latgalian rolled off the press, except those published abroad. Today, publications in Latgalian are produced for the surviving 150,000 speakers of this language (the number of self-conscious Latgalians is estimated at 350,000), mostly thanks to the efforts of the Publishing House of the Culture Center of Latgalia in R¯ezekne (R¯ezne in Latgalian, Rezekne in Russian, Rositten in German, Rzezyca ˙ in Polish), which was founded in 1990. The speakers of Latgalian mostly consider it a dialect of Latvian and identify themselves as Latvians. The Latvian Language Law of 1999 obliges the state to ensure the preservation, protection, and development of Latgalian literary language, defined as a ‘historical variant of the Latvian language.’

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

197

In Latvia, the moribund Finno-Ugric language of Livonian (with no more than ten fluent speakers, all of whom are elderly), precariously survives in the vicinity of the coastal town of Kolka (Kuolka in Livonian), which faces the Estonian island of Saaremaa. Ironically, in the 13th century, the speakers of this language lived in the place, which is the northern half of Latvia today. The Livonian translation of the New Testament was published in 1942. Riga recognizes the Livonians as an indigenous people of Latvia, and proclaimed the strip of the Livonian Coast, with the 12 villages inhabited by 1700 ethnic Livonians, a cultural, historic, and protected territory (L¯ıvõd Rãnda) in 1992. Ethnic Latvians and other non-Livonians are discouraged from settling in the area and establishing businesses there. In addition, the Language Law of 1999 also recognized Livonian as an indigenous language of Latvia, which allows the state to support its maintenance (Grimes 1996: 494; Jääts 2000: 667; Janich and Greule 2002: 151; Kiaupa et al. 2002: 123, 144–145; Latvian Bible Society 2004; Price 1998: 294–297; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 323, 469, 534; Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918; Topolska 2002: 330). The ethnonym ‘Estonian’ gained currency only in the 19th century, unlike ‘Latvian,’ which had become widespread already at the beginning of the 17th century. Earlier, Estonians referred to themselves as maarahvas (‘country people’), and to their language as maakeel (‘country language’). Russian sources referred to them also as Chudes until the beginning of the 20th century, and the term was sometimes adopted in Polish as Czudowie. Its etymology is unclear. For the first time, the ethnonym made its appearance in 6th-century Latin histories on the Goths. Rus Slavic chroniclers recognized the Chudes as one of the founders of the Rus polity, alongside the Germanic Varangians (Swedes) and Slavs. Folk Slavic etymologies claim that the ethnonym came from Slavic chuzhoi (‘foreign’), chud (‘weird’), or chudnyi (‘miraculous’). The Slavic-speakers of Rus tended to ascribe the ethnonym Chudes to the Finno-Ugric peoples, in general. Interestingly, in 2002, in the Russian Federation, a Finno-Ugric nationality named as Chudes was officially registered. They live in the northern region of Arkhangelsk. Latin Estonia, or German Estland is derived from the Germanic name of this region, Ostland, or the ‘Eastern land,’ as used by Danish and Livonian Order invaders. Later, in the spirit of classicism, and in order to make the territorial gains more dignified, Latin scribes maintained that the name of Estland meant the ‘land of the Aestii.’ Tacitus mentioned an ethnic group named so in his Germania, and located it on the southeastern shores of the Baltic. The ethnonym ‘Latvian’ stems from Latin for ‘Latgalia,’ which was rendered variably as Lattgalia, Lethigalli, Lettowia, or Lettia. Hence, German Lettland, Latvian Latvija, Polish Łotwa, Russian Latviia, and English ‘Latvia.’ Latvian for ‘Latgalia,’ Daugavpils, is derived from the River Daugava (Dvina), which crosses the region. Because Riga, the center of Latvian culture, developed in the originally Finno-Ugric-speaking area, in the 17th century, the Livonian

198 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(Finno-Ugric) term Latwis emerged for referring to Latvians. At the same time, it gave rise to Ruthenian Latysh and Polish Łotysz for Latvian, and the corresponding Latwiska zem(ie) for Latvia. It was an informal term, as what today is Latvia, was then known as Livonia and Courland. Under this influence, in the 18th century, Latvian Latvju (Latviešu) zemi for ‘Latvia’ emerged, and developed into contemporary Latwija (Latvija), in the first half of the 19th century. The Russian administration used Latyshi for ‘Latvians,’ which Latvian national activists preferred to German Lett, as at that time the already established self-ethnonym for ‘Latvians’ was Latvijetis. To provide the Latvians with a classical genealogy, in the mid-19th century, some claimed that their ancestors emigrated from Latium, or L¯aciju in Latvian. This also deftly countered the Lithuanian claim that the Lithuanian language was the direct descendant of Latin. The Estonian self-glottonym maakeel corresponded to Orthodox Slavic prostaia mova (‘simple language’) for local vernaculars as opposed to Church Slavonic or Ruthenian. Since the early 13th century, Denmark, the Livonian (Teutonic) Order, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania had dominated the Estonian-speaking areas before Russia incorporated them after 1710. The name of the Estonian capital of Tallinn is a clear evidence of these early influences, because it means the ‘city of Danes’ (though some authorities disagree and claim that the etymology of this name is unclear). The political upheavals changed the ethnolinguistic makeup of the region. In the 13th century, Finno-Ugric Livonians lived as far south as modern-day Riga and the southern shores of the Gulf of Riga. As in the case of Latvian, the first continuous Estonian text appeared in a now-lost-quadrilingual Protestant missal (1525). The earliest surviving text is a German-Estonian Protestant catechism published in Wittenberg in 1535. The first grammar of the Estonian language was written in German and was printed in 1637. The translation of the New Testament that came off the press in 1683 was written in the southern or Dorpat (Tartu) dialect of Estonian. In 1715, a new translation was published but in the northern or Reval (Tallinn) dialect. The entire translation of the Bible (1739) was printed in the latter dialect as well. The first rudimentary glossary of Estonian was included in a German-language grammar of this language (1632); however, the manuscript of Salomo Heinrich Vestring’s (1663–1749) Estonian-German dictionary circulated widely. In 1803, a lectureship of the Estonian language was founded at the University of Dorpat (Tartu). Once again paralleling the Latvians, the Estonian national movement took off in the mid-19th century. The intellectual center of this movement was Russia’s sole German-medium University of Dorpat, which also supplied the Latvian national movement with intellectuals and activists. (Similarly, the Polish-speaking cultural center of Vilnius produced the leaders of the Lithuanian and Belarusian national movements). The first modern grammar of the standard (that is, Northern) Estonian language, written in German, rolled off the press in 1843. Its author, Eduard Ahrens (1803–1863), advised in the grammar’s second

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

199

edition (1853) that the German model of spelling used for writing Estonian should be replaced with a Finnish-style orthography. In this framework, a single grapheme (monograph) was to represent a single phoneme with the exception of long vowels indicated by the doubling of an appropriate letter, for instance, [aa] or [oo]. The German letters of [ä], [ö], [ü] were retained for writing the corresponding Estonian sounds, as had happened earlier in Magyar in the cases of [ö] and [ü]. Also, the Czech letters [š] and [ž] were borrowed for Estonian. (The former letter is shared by Finnish.) For his orthographic system Ahrens adopted a specific grapheme [õ], introduced by Otto Wilhelm Massing (1763– 1832) in 1818 for an Estonian phoneme that is not shared by German. Although Ahrens codified the present-day Estonian orthography in the mid-19th century, it eventually entered popular use in the three final decades of that century. (The employment of German-style [w] for /v/, instead of [v] favored by Ahrens, continued well into the 1930s.) Instrumental to this end was the Union of Estonian Writers (founded in 1871), which undertook the task of standardizing Estonian. They decided to graft this planned standard on the tradition of literacy in the Tallinn dialect, because it was more accepted than that of Dorpat. This standard was eventually codified thanks to the extensive Estonian-German dictionary (1869) and the multi-volume descriptive grammar of Estonian (1875). Southern Estonian disappeared as a written language by the end of the 19th century. In 1861, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) published his definitive rendition of the national Estonian epic Kalevipoeg (Son of Kalev), modeled on Finnish Kalevala (1835). The codifiers of Estonian also took over the radical outlook of their Finnish colleagues that all the foreign words in Estonian should be replaced with Estonian-based neologisms. In 1880, 90 percent of all the books published in Estonian appeared in the new standard complete with its distinctive orthography. The achievement was crowned with the publication of the New Testament (1886) edited in agreement with the rules of standard Estonian. The example of the cultural and economic autonomy that the Finns enjoyed in Russia’s Grand Duchy of Finland was enticing. In 1900, St Petersburg attempted to impose Russian as the official language on this grand duchy, but the aggressive Finnish resistance and the 1905 Revolution caused the revocation of this decision. The Russification of previously German-language education (with some concession for Estonian and Latvian in elementary schools) in Estland, Livonia, and Courland in 1885, rounded up with the Russification of the University of Dorpat (1893), entailed an officially induced slump in the rate of literacy. In 1886, 98 percent of recruits conscripted from Estland could read and write, because they were asked whether they were literate in German or Estonian. By 1901, the figure had fallen to 80 percent, because the recruits were enquired about their ability to read and write in Russian.21 (A lasting legacy of the Russification is the fact that one-fifth of the Estonians and Latvians profess Orthodox Christianity.) In 1905, Estonian activists caused the Estonian language to be introduced as the medium of instruction in elementary schools.

200 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Russification had failed, because, like the Lithuanians and the Latvians, the Estonians did not wish to accept either the ‘tsar’s faith’ (Orthodox Christianity) or Cyrillic as a script for writing their language. On the other hand, Russification weakened the significance of German language and culture, which opened a window of opportunity for developing Estonian as a written language. In 1918, Estonia gained independence and, as a consequence, Estonian was elevated to the rank of the official language in this nation-state, but with provisions for official use of German, Russian, and Swedish in the parliament and the local self-government. Efforts to distance the Estonian nation from their former German and Russian ‘lords,’ translated into the introduction of English as the most important foreign language taught in Estonian schools. But the German influence persisted, hence the use of the Gothic type in Estonian publications continued along with Antiqua in the interwar period. Unlike in the case of Latgalian in Latvia, the marked decline of South Estonian, which had begun in the 1880s, was not halted. The developing movement of the Orthodox and South Estonian-speaking Setus (15,000) was suppressed after the introduction of the authoritarian system of government in 1934. The prevailing agreement was that the nation must be unified linguistically. Between 1925 and 1937, the first monolingual authoritative dictionary of Estonian was published in three volumes. Two new multi-volume dictionaries began to be published in 1988 and 1994. The former is planned to include six volumes, and the latter, twelve. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union (1991), which had annexed Estonia alongside Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, Estonian was reinstated as the nationstate’s official language. The commonality of socio-political experience with Latvia and Lithuania is emphasized by the fact that all the three states became members of the European Union in 2004. By default, their languages joined the club of the Union’s official languages as well. As in the case of Latvia’s Latgalian and Lithuania’s Samogitian, South Estonian (with 60,000 speakers) revived as a written language in the 1990s. (During the Soviet period, it had become similar to standard Estonian, and the authorities had imposed the Estonian identity on the Setus by not allowing them to declare themselves as such.) The present-day South Estonian language is based not on the dialect of Tartu, but on that of the city of Võro, which spawned the new glottonym of Võro language. The enthusiasm for the celebration of linguistic difference not yet satiated, Seto (Setu) (with 10,000 speakers) is also claimed to be a language in its own right though others consider it to be a (sub)dialect of Võro. However, the speakers of Võro and Seto usually identify themselves as Estonians. Religion separated the Võro- and Setospeakers in the past, because the former are Lutherans and the latter Orthodox. But at present, when three-quarters of Estonia’s inhabitants claim not to profess any faith at all, the old difference disappeared and in 1995, a common standard orthography was adopted for Võro and Seto, which some interpret as the founding of a common Võro-Seto language.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

201

Seto, Võro and Estonian’s other dialects are often not mutually intelligible, which is the reflection of dialectal differentiation that has unfolded for two millennia or more. By comparison, it is assumed that the Slavic languages began to drift apart only 1000 years ago. In addition, it is proposed that the original Finno-Ugric community fragmented over 10,000 years ago. Hence, unlike in the case of the Slavic languages, the EU’s three official Finno-Ugric languages of Estonian, Finnish, and Magyar are utterly unintelligible, though Estonian is much closer to Finnish, as Swedish to German. The largest Finno-Ugricspeaking communities speak these three languages whereas other Finno-Ugric languages are spoken by much smaller groups and face the danger of extinction. Practically, the speakers of all these endangered languages live in the Russian Federation, where they are subjected to the continuing pressure of Russification. In order to offset this fate, Finland and Estonia actively support the preservation of the languages and specific ethnic cultures of Russia’s FinnoUgric-speakers. Hungary participates in these activities less actively, because Budapest traditionally invested its ideological stakes with Latin and Western Christianity rather than with the peoples, whom the Magyar critics of the Finno-Ugric theory accused of ‘reeking of fish.’ The lack of attraction of the idea of Finno-Ugric commonality in Hungary did not prevent the development of scholarly links between Hungary and Finland, justified by the shared FinnoUgric linguistic background. A modicum of international political support to the cultural Pan-Finno-Ugric idea was given by five Finno-Ugric cultural congresses held in the interwar period. After the fall of communism, they were revived as World Congresses of Finno-Ugric Peoples; and by 2004, four of them had been held in Estonia, Finland, Hungary and the Autonomous Republic of Komi, the Russian Federation (Aus lauluraamat 1926; Dying Fish Swims in Water 2005; Grimes 1996: 475; Honzák et al. 2001: 188, 332, 353; Jääts 2000; Jähnig and Biewer 1991: 55; Janich and Greule 2002: 46–49; Karulis 2001: 504–507; Lešˇcinskiene 2002: 3; Mertelsmann 2006; National Awekening 2006; Price 1998: 151–152; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 466; Raun 2003: 132; Seilenthal 2002; Sutrop 2000).

Romanian, Moldovan, and other East Romance languages After having had a cursory glance at the main languages that developed at the eastern flank of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania, the chapter’s focus shifts to the southern and southeastern reaches of the former Kingdom of Hungary. The origins of the Romanian language are difficult to trace, on several counts. First, the national historiographers of Romania and Hungary propose two starkly different visions of the past of the Romanians. Romanian scholars maintain that the Roman Province of Dacia (106–271) created a Romanized population that was to spawn the Romanians in future. In this vision, Dacia’s Romans

202 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

continued to live in their region despite political instability, which set in after the Roman legions abandoned the province leaving it open to the succession of numerous invasions of Goths, Slavs, Huns, or Avars. On the other hand, Magyar historians maintain that most, if not all, of the Latin-speaking population of Roman Dacia moved south of the Danube, when the Romans decided to evacuate this province. This would mean that the Magyars seized Transylvania as an empty country, with no legitimate owners. The logic of ethnic nationalism dictates that continuous settlement of a population ethnically identified with a contemporary nation means that this nation should be the ‘rightful owner’ of Transylvania. In fact, there are no documents to decide what ‘really’ happened. Probably, some inhabitants of Roman Dacia remained in the province and, likewise, the Magyars did not arrive into a region completely denuded of population. It is likely that, as in other areas of the Balkans, the Latin-speaking (or more appropriately, Romance-speaking) population faced with steppe nomadic populations sought protection in fortified coastal cities and in inaccessible mountain villages. The former being absent in Transylvania, the latter solution was more workable. Living in a difficult mountainous environment required adapting to a new way of winning a livelihood. From then on till the 19th century, the transhumant version of pastoral economy dominated in the region. Under the impact of renewed instability connected to the northward advance of the Ottoman Empire, this economy spread northward along the arch of Carpathians. The population engaged in this kind of economy used to be known as ‘Vlachs’ or ‘Walachians,’ irrespective of what language they might use. In the southern Carpathians, it was usually a Romance speech, while Slavic in the north of these mountains. Perhaps, Slavophone peasants have remained in close contact with Romance-speaking shepherds since the 6th century, when Slavs arrived in Central Europe and the Balkans. Later, economic symbiosis allowed the Slavic-speaking villagers to emulate the Romance-speakers’ transhumant way of life, when cultivating land proved too dangerous. In the 16th century, the Romance language of Dalmatian (known as the ‘Ancient Language’ [lingua veteri] in Ragusa [Dubrovnik]) disappeared.22 The agricultural economy of Slavic-, Greek-, and Albanian-speakers proved more effective at producing growing populations, which engulfed the static populace of Romance-speaking shepherds. As a result, the formerly larger area of their residence shrank to demographic islands located in the mountains of the Balkans. These islands evolved into the Aromanians in Greece, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria; the Istro-Romanians in Croatia’s section of Istria; and to the Megleno-Romanians in northern Greece. The Aromanians, also known as ‘Macedo-Romanians,’ traditionally were referred to as ‘Vlachs,’ like the Romance-speaking forefathers of the contemporary Romanians. The latter called themselves ‘Walachians,’ which was also

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

203

the ethnonym popular among the Slavophone transhumant pastoralists of the northern Carpathians, for instance, Vlasi in Slavic; Wołosi, Wałasi, or Wałachowie in Polish; Vlaší or Valaší in Czech; oláh or oláhok in Magyar, and Walachen in German. The English word ‘Walachian’ as well as its other forms enumerated above are derived from the Germanic word Welsch, which means ‘foreigners,’ that is, ‘non-Germanic-speakers.’ (Linguists reconstructed the Germanic word *walcha, meaning ‘foreigner,’ as the original root of all these terms.) The Germanic-speakers applied this label to denote peoples in some way associated with the Roman Empire, namely the Cymry (Welsh) of Wales, the Romanized Franks and Lombards, and the Walachians. Slavic-speakers and Magyars took over this Germanic tradition, as attested by Polish Włochy and Magyar Olaszország for ‘Italy.’ Today, when attempts are undertaken to standardize the Romani (Gypsy) language, the term Vlach or Vlax has re-surfaced as the label for denoting the Romani dialects spoken in Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, and Serbia. Of all Roma, Vlax-speakers are most widely spread worldwide, hence the Vlax dialects are proposed by some Roma activists as the basis for a future standard Romani. The Roma speaking these dialects tend to refer to themselves as ‘Vlach Roma’ too. This reflects the fact that from the 14th century to 1864, they were slaves in Walachia and Moldavia. Already in the 1850s, but especially after that year, Roma from both Danubian principalities dispersed into the Balkans and Central Europe in search of better life.23 The ethnonym ‘Walachian’ for denoting the Romance-speaking population of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia initially spread through the chancery language of Greek (Vlachoi, Unkdovlachoi, Maudovlachoi), and later through that of Latin (Blasi, Blaki, Voloh). But already in 1404, 1514, and 1536, Latin writers suggested that Walachians are descendants of Romans, and speak in the ‘vulgar Roman language’ (that is, vulgar Latin). Seemingly, the Walachians’ self-ethnonym Romani (români, rumâni in standard Romanian), or ‘Romans’ supported this thesis. But this self-designation stems from the Greek name ‘Romans’ (Romani, Romei)24 for all the Christian inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire. Prior to the arrival of the Slavs, this term mainly applied to Greek- and Latin(Romance-) speakers, and its meaning was never extended to include Magyars. The preservation of this self-ethnonym among the Walachians perhaps supports the thesis that the population originated south of the Danube, before they began to penetrate the Carpathians in the 10th and 11th centuries. When the entities of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia were established, the regional and local identities developed among the Walachian peasants residing in these three provinces. Obviously, the name of Walachia originated from the ethnonym of ‘Walachian.’ The etymology of Moldavia is more contested, but usually it is accepted that the name stems from the River Moldova, a tributary of the Siret. Eventually, it was the Hungarian kings, who controlled the territories inhabited by the Romance-speaking Walachians. The area north of the southern

204 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

ranges of the Carpathians, known as Transylvania, was incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary. Walachians displeased with Hungarian rule migrated south and east of the Carpathians into the territories, which coalesced into Walachia and Moldavia, respectively, during the first half of the 14th century. The Hungarian monarch was not averse to this emigration of Walachians, because it created a buffer zone between the kingdom’s embattled eastern border and Turkic-speaking steppe nomads. For some time, Hungarian control also extended over these Walachian settlers, as evidenced by the earliest recorded name of Walachia, Ungro-Wlachia (Hungarian-Walachia). The relative isolation of Walachians in their mountainous settlements contributed to the folklorization of their Byzantine Christianity; on the other hand, when they settled in Transylvania, they were drawn closer to Western Christianity. On this account, Byzantine hierarchs criticized Walachians as ‘heretics’ given to speaking exclusively in their ‘Latin language.’ This opinion was also a reflection of the growing rift between the Orthodox (Greek, Byzantine) Church and the Catholic (Latin) Church, which turned into a chasm in the wake of the Great Schism of 1054. Despite their language, which was often perceived as ‘Latin,’ the Walachians of Walachia and Moldavia decided to side with the Orthodox Church in order to lessen the influence of Catholic Hungary in their principalities. In 1359, an Orthodox ecclesiastical province was founded in Walachia, and in 1401, another one in Moldavia. Although no significant structures of the Orthodox Church were established in Hungary’s Transylvania, the example of Moldavia and Walachia was enough to instill Orthodox Christianity among the province’s Walachians. Later, such structures gradually developed, especially after the Ottomans extended their control over Transylvania. Between 1683 and 1699, Vienna wrested from the Ottomans numerous territories, including those inhabited by Serbs. In 1691, they were granted a set of privileges, including their own acephalous Orthodox Church with its metropolitan seat in Karlowitz (Karlóca, Sremski Karlovci). When the process of establishing the Uniate Church in Transylvania was completed in 1701, the Orthodox Church was dissolved. Vienna allowed the re-establishment of the latter Church in 1761, and it was subjected to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Finally in 1864, the remaining Orthodox Romanians of Transylvania received their own autonomous Church with the metropolitan seat in Hermannstadt (Nagyszeben in Magyar, today, Sibiu in Romania). Until the 18th century, the Walachians in their own principalities, as well as in Transylvania, remained part of the Orthodox religious and cultural world despite the serious incursions of Western Christianity and Ottoman Islam. Since the 14th century, as the written language of liturgy and administration they employed Old Church Slavonic in the prestigious Old Bulgarian recension (variety). In Moldavia this language was mediated via the Kievan Rus (Ruthenian) recension, and in Walachia via the Serbian recension; hence, Walachians frequently referred to Church Slavonic as ‘Serbian.’ These peculiarities of the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

205

usage prompted some scholars to term this Church Slavonic of the Walachians ‘Daco-Slavonic.’ In Transylvania, the first documents in Church Slavonic appeared at the turn of the 16th century. But Walachians must have come in touch with Church Slavonic literacy as early as the 11th century in Hungary, where it had survived following the Magyar destruction of Greater Moravia. Perhaps, this hypothetical experience convinced Walachians to select Church Slavonic as their written language, which emphasized their sovereignty visà-vis Hungary with its official Latin, and the Byzantine Empire with Greek. Furthermore, the close political and economic contacts with Poland-Lithuania prompted the acceptance of Ruthenian and Polish for diplomatic and cultural uses, especially in Moldavia, which was the Polish-Lithuanian monarch’s fief between 1387 and 1456. The Ottoman domination over Walachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia established in 1492, 1526, and 1552, respectively, lasted until the end of the 17th century in the case of Transylvania, and by 1878 (though in practice by 1829) in the two other principalities. The Ottoman administration, with its toleration of Christians and Jews, largely preserved the religious and economic shape of the Romance-speaking Walachians as it had been at the time of conquest. After Vienna regained most of the territories of the Kingdom of Hungary (including Transylvania), Walachia and Moldavia became the Ottoman Empire’s bulwark against the incursion of Christian Austria and Russia. To ensure that the largely autonomous principalities of Moldavia and Walachia meet the military demands, the sultan appointed loyal Romans (Greeks) from the Phanar district of Constantinople as administrators in 1711 in Moldavia, and in 1715 in Walachia. The Phanariot regime lasted until the beginning of the 1821, when the War (or Revolt) of Greek Independence (1821–1827) discredited Orthodox Greek-speakers as loyal subjects of the Ottoman Empire. But during the time of the Phanariot regime, Byzantine Greek was frequently used as the language of administration and liturgy in Moldavia and Walachia. The Greek influence was even stronger among the Aromanians, who wrote down their Romance language in Greek characters during the 18th century, before they switched to the Latin alphabet in the following century. The Aromanians resigned from the Greek script, because they did not wish the Ottoman authorities to associate them with rebellious Greeks. At that time, the script and religion were the main basis of group identification in the Balkans, not the actual vernacular, which a group happened to speak (Brown 1996: xiv; Bryce 1919: 364; Crowe 1996: 96, 120–121; Hancock 1995; Hannan 1996: 13–14, 65–72, 79–81; Honzák et al. 2001: 400, 585, 687; Janich and Greule 2002: 224; Jelavich and Barbara 1977: 89; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 181; King 1999: 13–14; Magocsi 2002: 5, 44, 116–117; Price 1998: 18; Zach 1977: 10–14, 30–31, 185). The Romance ‘Walachian language’ as it was known then, was written in Cyrillic characters, which allowed maintaining the ideological (mainly religious)

206 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

unity with Church Slavonic employed by Walachians in church and for temporal purposes. The first document in Walachian, a letter written in Walachia, dates back to 1521. Another piece of writing, a deed of sale, appeared only in 1563. In the second half of the 16th century, the continuous tradition of writing in Walachian developed under the influence of the Reformation in Transylvania. Translations from Slavic religious texts predominated. The first Walachian-language book, which came off the press, was a bilingual (Church Slavonic-Walachian) Gospels produced in Hermannstadt in Transylvania (1544), but no copy of this remains. So the tradition of printing in Walachian commenced in earnest only during the years 1559–1580, when 11 religious texts were published in Kronstadt (Brassó, Bra¸sov) in the same region. At that time, Walachia’s first capital of Tîrgovi¸ste emerged as an early center of printing in this polity. The first book produced there in 1508, was followed by others, but they were printed in Church Slavonic. In the princely chancelleries of Moldavia and Walachia, Walachian began to be used for issuing documents in 1574 and 1593, respectively. The Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania, Simeon (Simion) S¸ tefan, was the first to make a case for a common written language for all the Walachian-speaking provinces in his introduction to the first complete Walachian translation of the New Testament published in 1648 in Karlsburg (Gyulafehérvár, Alba Iulia), Transylvania. Later, the Orthodox hierarchy in Walachia also sided with this view, because they noticed that Church Slavonic was not understood not only by people, but by popes (Orthodox priests) as well. The first complete Walachian translation of the Bible was published in 1688 in Bükre¸s (Bucharest) in Walachia. Meanwhile, translations of some books of the Church Slavonic liturgy were also printed in the second half of the 17th century. As a result, Walachian was introduced to Orthodox liturgy in Transylvania in 1675. The change was more gradual in Walachia and Moldavia. The published set of Walachian-language liturgical books was completed in Walachia by 1714. In 1736, the last Church Slavonic liturgical book was printed in Walachia. A year earlier, the Phanariot administration had brought these Walachian liturgical books to Moldavia, where they were locally reprinted in the 1740s. At the end of the 18th century, exclusively Walachian was employed in Orthodox liturgy in Walachia and Moldavia. The two Greek tertiary-level school, known as ‘academies,’ and modeled on Jesuit academies proliferating, in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, across Central Europe, opened in the capitals of Walachia and Moldavia, Bucharest (1689) and Ya¸s (Ia¸si, 1707), respectively. Both schools and the Phanariot administrations of Walachia and Moldavia were served by the schools’ printshops, which produced mostly Greek-language books. But both academies also taught Italian (Tuscanian) and French as foreign languages, and beginning in the mid-18th century, Greek-language education mediated the introduction of numerous Italian and French words into Walachian. Since 1810,

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

207

the academies had taught Russian and German, which was a reflection of the growing Russian and Austrian influence in Walachia and Moldavia. As a result, numerous Russian and German linguistic loans entered Walachian. In addition, the Phanariot administration, introduced numerous Ottoman (Old Turkish) terms in the sphere of politics, administration, and military affairs, which were also mediated via official Greek, and replaced Church Slavonic counterparts. However, the conscious and increasingly planned codification of the Walachian language progressed mainly in Transylvania. Between 1697 and 1700, the union of the Province’s Walachian-speaking Orthodox faithful with Rome was completed. From this time, Uniate priests received education in Vienna and Rome. The exposure to the Latinate culture of Catholicism clearly indicated to them that their speech was close to Latin and that of the Italians. In addition, as early as the 1560s, some Walachian texts produced in Transylvania were published in the Latin script with the use of Magyar orthography. This forming new Latinate tradition drew on the novel experience which Uniate clergymen obtained in Western Europe. As a result, the Orthodox culture, complete with the Cyrillic script, as represented by Ottoman-dominated Walachia or Moldavia, appeared unattractive in their eyes. This caused Transylvania’s Walachian-speaking Uniate clergy to look for the legitimization of their political claims in the sphere of the Latinate culture. Their leaders, known as the ‘Transylvanian School’ (¸Scoala ardeleanˇa),25 elaborated the basic thesis of Romanian nationalism that the Romanians are of Roman origin and their presence in Dacia (Transylvania and Walachia) has been continuous since Trajan’s conquest in 106. Thus, they presented the freshly re-discovered Latinate commonality of the Walachian language in the ideological overlay of Roman history. This allowed them to draw the line between Transylvania’s Uniate and Orthodox Walachians and the province’s Catholic and Protestant Magyars and Germanspeakers, on the one hand, while on the other, to emphasize the commonality with Orthodox Walachians in Walachia and Moldavia. The main leader of the Transylvanian School was the Uniate Bishop of Transylvania, Ion Inochentie Micu-Klein (1692–1768, in office 1729–1751). He and his successors struggled to obtain an improved status for Walachianspeaking Uniates as a natio equal to Transylvania’s officially recognized nationes of the Magyars, the Szkelers, and the Saxons. This never happened. The followers of the bishop’s intellectual vision for the Walachians published the first ever Walachian book in Latin characters in Vienna in 1779. A year later, the first printed grammar of the ‘Daco-Romanian or Walachian language’ (written in Walachian) came off the press in the same city. It was reprinted in a revised edition in 1805. The first authoritative Walachian-Latin-Magyar-German dictionary was printed in 1825 in Buda. Importantly, in the Walachian version of the Latin title, the Walachian language was unambiguously denoted as ‘Romanian.’ This dictionary employed the system of Latin-script spelling similar

208 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

to the modern one, which is characterized by the one-to-one correspondence of graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds). Although the term ‘T‚ara Românesc˘ a’ (Romanian lands) had been in use among Walachians for denoting Walachia since the16th century, the preference for the term ‘Walachia’ continued. The Uniate clergy often treated their Church as an inherently alien institution imposed from without, but with time they began to perceive it as a peculiarly Walachian institution. Beginning in the 1740s, they used the term ‘Romano-Vlachus’ for those Walachian-speaking Orthodox Christians who joined the union. On the other hand, Transylvania’s Walachian-speaking Uniates opposed any further absorption of their Uniate Church into the Roman Catholic Church. This created an ideological paradox, for the clergy claimed the direct descent of the Walachian-speakers from the ancient Romans. The Uniate clergymen perceived the ‘Roman’ connection as something that set them apart from the Orthodox Slavic-speakers, especially the Serbs, to whose Church Transylvania’s remaining Orthodox Walachians were subjected. The attachment to the Eastern rite of Christianity, however, remained the defining factor of what it meant to be a Walachian until the beginning of the 19th century. For instance, in the 1760s, the Walachian-speaking Orthodox of Transylvania drew a line between themselves and the Uniates, referring to themselves as ‘We, Walachians, not Uniates’ or ‘Orthodox Romanians.’ But the self-ethnonym ‘Romanian’ for referring to all the Walachian-speakers as a nation, and to their language, became popular only in the 1820s. Perhaps, Orthodox Walachians and Moldovans were not opposed to it too much either, because their leaders (having become acquainted with Greek during the 18th century, when Phanariot Greeks administered both Danubian Principalities) realized that ‘Romania’ was also the Greek name of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. Quite a pedigree in itself (Byzantine Empire 2006; Gaster 1891: I 1–44; Hitchins 1986: 551–558; Janich and Greule 2002: 274; Magocsi 2002: 56; Price 1998: 386; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 471; Schroeder 1987: 198–205; Seton-Watson 1934: 176–191; Verdery 1999: 58–65; Zach 1977: 18–19, 185–187). In the course of the wars waged by Austria and Russia on the Ottoman Empire, Moldavia was partitioned. In 1775, Vienna gained the northernmost corner of this land, named Bukovina for its beech forests (buk is ‘beech’ in Slavic). The extensive eastern section of Moldavia between the Rivers Prut and Dniester, known as Bessarabia (in honor of the Besarab family credited with the making of Walachia into a unified polity at the turn of the 14th century), fell under St Petersburg’s rule in 1812. The Russian pressure made the sultan reintroduce autonomy to Walachia (1831) and truncated Ottoman Moldavia (1832). Romanian nationalism took off at that time in emulation of Greek and Central European nationalisms as well as thanks to the university education the Romanian administrators and intellectuals received in France and Russia.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

209

Following the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Russian and Ottoman control over the two Romanian principalities weakened. With the support of Napoleon III (1808–1873), Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1820–1873) overcame Austrian and Ottoman opposition to personal union, hence in 1859, the Romanians elected Cuza as prince in both Walachia and Moldavia. Cuza was one of the revolutionaries who, in 1848, had participated in the aborted national revolution in Moldavia. The national government had been established in Walachia, but St Petersburg had promptly occupied Bucharest and re-established the old order in the same year. The de facto union of the two principalities was reaffirmed in 1862, when the nation-state of Romania was founded with its capital at Bucharest. As in the case of Serbia and Montenegro, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the Western powers recognized the independence of Romania in 1878. Three years later, the European powers agreed to elevate the status of the Principality of Romania to a kingdom. Meanwhile, under Cuza’s rule, peasants were finally freed from serfdom in 1863, and the Greek monasteries were nationalized. The latter event wrapped up the 150 years, when the Greek language had dominated in politics, culture, and religion of Walachia and Moldavia. In 1864, the first Romanianlanguage university was founded in Bucharest (Dyer 1999: 3; Frucht 2000: 178; Seton-Watson 1934: 192–219). Along with these political changes, the codification of the Romanian language continued in accordance with the specifically Central European coupling of nationalism with language. In 1829, the poet and journalist Ion Heliade R˘ adulescu (1802–1872), published a Romanian grammar in a simplified version of Cyrillic modeled on Russian Grazhdanka. Nine years later, he introduced the new Romanian alphabet consisting of 19 Cyrillic and 10 Latin letters as well as [i] and [o] that could be both. To the script, today dubbed as ‘transitional orthography,’ contemporaries referred to as alfabet civil (‘civilian alphabet,’ which was a literal translation of the Russian term Grazhdanka), and used it widely until the official adoption of the Latin alphabet in Walachia (1860) and Moldavia (1863). The Romanian intellectuals of Transylvania advocated cleansing the language of non-Latin elements (Greek, Magyar, Slavic, and Ottoman [Turkish]), and to replace them with counterparts derived from French. Romanian scholars in Walachia and Moldavia agreed, hence the process had been largely completed by the 1860s, and included even partial remodeling of Romanian syntax in emulation of French. Transylvania’s Romanian linguists advocated the writing of Romanian in an etymological fashion to emphasize Romanian’s genetic link with Latin. Radulescu, however, stood for phonetic spelling based on Italian orthography. In 1866, the Romanian Academic Society was founded with its main mission to standardize the Romanian language. Three years later, the society came out in favor of an etymological and Latinized spelling. In 1879, this society was elevated to the rank of the Romanian

210 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Academy of Sciences. Two years later, this academy decided on a phonetically based system with some concessions to etymology. Between 1770 and 1881, as many as 43 different systems of spelling (Cyrillic, Lastin, or mixed) were employed to write Walachian/Romanian. This massive ‘linguistic engineering’ distanced the written language from the people’s vernacular, creating a communication gap that was even wider than that between standard French and the Romance dialects in southern France. In the 1870s, German and Magyar observers, who disliked the rise of standard Romanian as a linguistic competitor vis-à-vis official Magyar and German in Transylvania, called the Romanian language a ‘swindle,’ because it was used and easily comprehended only by a handful of the Romanian intellectuals, who ran the administration and politics of newly created Romania, and Transylvania’s Romanian national movement. The argument was similar to the conclusion of the Russian administration, which, between the 1860s and 1905, banned publishing in Little Russian (Ukrainian) and imports of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) books from abroad, on the ground that the language was a ‘Polish intrigue (invention),’ and actually did not exist. The radically phonetic orthography was introduced for writing Romanian in 1953, which made Romanian unique in this respect compared to other Romance languages and thus similar to Slavic spelling systems. For instance, the letter [â] was scrapped and replaced with [î], because both denoted the same phoneme. During the Stalinist period, the ideologized Soviet influence on humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences was overpowering in the Soviet bloc. Romania, branded as an ‘enemy state’ due to its wartime alliance with the Third Reich, was more eager than Czechoslovakia or Poland to adopt the Soviet model to wash away the stigma as soon as possible. The changes introduced to Romanian orthography allowed for distancing the ‘new’ Romanian of socialist Romania from the language of the ‘fascist kingdom.’ In 1966, the rise of Romanian national communism, in the wake of de-Stalinization, required, however, the reinstating of [â] in place names, because the etymological spelling of România (Romania) more clearly referred to the country’s ideological link with ancient Rome than the phonetic version of its name, Romînia. Some of the phoneticizing changes (especially, the full-scale reintroduction of [â]) were reversed in 1993 in order to mark cultural and linguistic continuity with the pre-communist period. The standardization of Romanian proceeded on the basis of the Walachian dialect with Bucharest at its center. But, like Magyar, the Romanian language displays weak dialectal differentiation. In both cases, this was the effect of the relative spatial mobility of the population well into the 19th century, as required by the transhumant economy of the Romanians and the pastoral economy of the Magyars. This provided Romanian nationalists with the linguistic argument to claim the Istro-Romanians, the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians as

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

211

belonging to the greater Romanian nation and their languages as ‘dialects of Romanian.’ This claim has been voiced since the last decades of the 19th century. In this scheme, standard Romanian, renamed as ‘Daco-Romanian’ was made into the leading dialect of the ‘Pan-Romanian’ language, supposedly spoken by all the Romance-speakers of the Balkans. This model was similar to the Pan-Slav proposals that all the Slavic languages are dialects of a single Slavic language, or to St Petersburg’s official theory, which maintained that Little Russian (Ukrainian) and White Russian (Belarusian) were dialects of Great Russian (Russian). Between 1871 and 1876, the first authoritative, two-volume dictionary of the Romanian language came off the press. In 1912, a Romanian translation of the Koran was published for the Muslims of Dobruja (Dobrogea). A year later, the Romanian Academy of Sciences commenced the publication of a multi-volume authoritative dictionary, but the effort faltered after a few volumes. The dictionary was resumed in 1958, but it has not been completed yet. In the 20th century, numerous changes in orthography, motivated by ideological reasons, time and again made earlier volumes of this ill-fated dictionary obsolete. The most extensive and complete authoritative dictionary of the Romanian language so far was printed between 1955 and 1957. It consists of four volumes (Faulmann 1880: 189; Gaster 1891 vol. 2: 258–287; Janich and Greule 2002: 223–226; Price 1998: 383, 386–387; Schlösser 2005: 111–112; Schroeder 1987: 206–209). The further political developments in the 20th century left their imprint on Romanian too. After World War I, the Western powers facilitated the emergence of the greater Romanian nation-state. Transylvania, Banat, Máramaros (Maramure¸s), and Bukovina were transferred from Austria-Hungary to Romania along with Bessarabia from the Russian Empire. In Hungary’s former provinces of Transylvania, Máramaros, and Banat, the use of other languages than Magyar (with the tentative exception of German) was harshly (though unsuccessfully) suppressed in the period 1867–1918. The situation of Romanian was better in Bukovina, which belonged to the Austrian half of the Dual Empire, so the province enjoyed Vienna’s liberal linguistic policy. However, Germans and Yiddish-/German-speaking Jews, who amounted to 9 and 11 percent of the population, dominated the crownland’s economy and culture. In 1875, the German-medium university was founded in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi). After intensive post-1918 emigration, in Transylvania, Magyars, Germans, and Jews amounted to 29, 8, and 2.4 percent of the population; in Banat the respective percentages were 10.4, 23.7, and 11.2; and in Maramure¸s 23.1, 4.8, and 6.4. The situation of the Romance vernacular and the Walachian language in Russia’s Bessarabia was different. The Russian authorities encouraged the glottonym of ‘Moldovan language,’ both for the local vernacular and Walachian, in order to reinforce the political border between Romania and Russia with that of language. The early chronicler of Moldavia, Grigore Ureche (1590–1647), was

212 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the first to use the term ‘Moldavian language,’ though he emphasized that the idioms of the inhabitants of Walachia and Moldavia, as well as of Transylvania’s Walachians were part of a single language. In 1714, The Moldavian scholar, Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), reinstated Ureche’s thesis, and remarked that the common language stemmed from ancient Dacian. In 1827, St Petersburg abrogated the autonomous status of Bessarabia, and in the following years, Russian was made the sole language of administration. In 1842, Russian replaced ‘Moldovan’ in education. In official documents and books in Moldovan, the language was variably referred to as ‘MoldavianWalachian,’ ‘Walachian-Moldavian,’ ‘Moldavian,’ and ‘Walachian-Romanian.’ After the mid-1860s, the term ‘Moldavian’ predominated, which, in the case of Bessarabia, was the reflection of the onset of the official policy of Russification in the entire Russian Empire. It was easier to ban a language that went by one name, not several. In 1863, Moldavian taught as a subject, was removed from schools. Three years later, the same fate met Moldavian taught as a foreign language in Bessarabia’s sole secondary school. In 1867, classes in Moldavian as a foreign language were removed from the divinity seminary, and in 1871, an official law banned teaching of and in Moldavian. The justification of this decision was, as in the case of Samogitian (Lithuanian), Lithuanian, White Russian (Belarusian), or Little Russian (Ukrainian), that ‘local idioms’ (narechia) are not used for teaching and administrative purposes in the Russian Empire. In 1872, Moldovan was removed from the administration of the Orthodox Church in Bessarabia, and in 1882, the Moscow Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church closed its printshop in Kishinev (Chi¸sin˘ au) to prevent further production of books in Moldavian. The 1905 relaxation in the official policy of Russification, allowed for the founding of several Moldavian-language newspapers beginning in 1906. In 1913, the Moscow Synod permitted the use of Moldavian in Bessarabia’s Orthodox churches. Unlike in Romania, where the Latin alphabet replaced Cyrillic for writing in Romanian in the first half of the 1860s, the Grazhdankastyle Cyrillic was used for Moldavian. In 1918, when Bessarabia was incorporated into Romania, Romanian replaced Russian as the official language, Moldavian was renamed as ‘Romanian,’ and Cyrillic was replaced with the Latin script. In 1930, Romanians constituted 90 percent of the province’s population. Cyrillic-based Moldavian was retained east of the Dniester on the territories inhabited by a Romanian-speaking minority, and organized into the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR, 1924–1940), which formed part of Soviet Ukraine. Moldavian-speakers constituted 30 percent of the population, and it was Ukrainians who added up to the autonomous republic’s plurality at 48.5 percent. The existence of MASSR facilitated the Soviet Union’s claim to Romania’s Bessarabia. ‘Moldova’ is the name of the country as its Romancespeaking inhabitants write and pronounce it. But in Slavonic, the name was transformed into ‘Moldavia’ and as such, it entered the Western European

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

213

languages via Latin. In addition to that, when this country formed part of the Soviet Union, its name was transliterated into other languages via Russian, which fortified the internationally accepted Slavicized usage of ‘Moldavia.’ The international adoption of the form ‘Moldova’ took place only when requested by the Republic of Moldova, after it had gained independence in 1991. During World War II, Bucharest allied with Germany. Thanks to this, Berlin made up, in 1941, for Romania’s loss of northern and central Transylvania to Hungary as well as of southern Dobruja to Bulgaria with Transnistria, that is, the Soviet territory between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers, including entire MASSR. After 1945, Romania’s prewar borders with Hungary were re-established. However, southern Dobruja was lost to Bulgaria, and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. Northern Bukovina and the coastal region of Bessarabia were incorporated into Soviet Ukraine along with almost the entire Transnistria. The territory of the prewar MASSR was limited to the ethnically Romanian-speaking sliver along the Dniester and made (with the rest of Bessarabia) into the Moldovan Socialist Republic (MSR). Eventually, following the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, Soviet Moldavia, renamed ‘Moldova,’ and made into the independent nation-state of the Romance-speaking Moldovans, came into being. A year later, after a brief war, Moldova’s Transnistrian sliver (or Pridnestrovia in Russian, and sometimes, ‘Transdniestria’ in English) seceded. The local Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers accounting for 54 percent of the area’s population, established their unrecognized Dniester Moldovan Republic (Eberhardt 1996: 231, 237; History of the Moldovan Language 2006; King 1999: xxxi, 178–208; Magocsi 2002: 149). After the incorporation of Bessarabia into Romania, the Cyrillic used for writing in Moldavian was replaced with the Latin alphabet. In MASSR, within the broader framework of Soviet-wide korenizatsia (nativization), the decision was made to create a separate Moldavian language. The initial stage of this process was crowned with the publication of a grammar of this language in 1929. This reference introduced a plethora of Slavicisms and Slavic neologisms in order to make the language as different from Romanian as possible. In the course of the all-Soviet policy of modernization, the Latin alphabet was elevated to the symbol of progress in the sphere of culture. Furthermore, it was opposed to Cyrillic, dubbed as the ‘Russian alphabet’ and associated with ‘Great Russian chauvinism and imperialism.’ The korenizatsia entailed a revival of local ethnic cultures and languages, which were made into the attributes of nations, which Moscow allowed to operate, or built from scratch, and endowed with autonomous national territories. This was intended to nullify the tsarist policy of Russification, and to attract the ethnolinguistic minorities to communism. Between 1922 and 1932, almost all the languages used in print in the Soviet Union were Latinized, with the exception of Armenian, Belarusian, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. The Latin script was adopted for Moldovan in

214 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

1932, which left it different from Romanian only in name, apart from a few Slavicisms and regionalisms. But when Moscow declared that the ‘deviation of Great Russian chauvinism’ had been successfully liquidated, the process of Cyrillicization commenced. A new Russian-based Cyrillic alphabet for Moldavian came into force in 1938. The Latin alphabet returned in 1941–1944 when Bucharest controlled this area. Later, the Moldavian language written in Cyrillic replaced Romanian in Transnistria, and also in postwar Bessarabia, where it became the national language of the MSR. The name of Chi¸sin˘ au, made into the new Soviet national republic’s capital, was transliterated from Moldavian Cyrillic, as Kishineu. ˙ The pronunciation of both versions remained identical, though the city became popularly known under the Russian variety of its name, Kishinev, due to the growing dominance of Russian in the postwar Soviet Union (Dyer 1999: 5; King 1999: 67–69, 81–86; Martin 2001: 203). The codification of the Moldavian language was completed with the publication of a four-volume orthographic dictionary in 1965, and of a two-volume authoritative dictionary between 1977 and 1985. Extensive projects of translating world literature (mainly from Russian-language versions) into Moldavian were undertaken. Romanian scholars claimed that this was a thinly disguised case of large-scale plagiarism with Moldavian translations being mere transliterations from Latin-based Romanian into the Moldavian Cyrillic. Since the mid-1950s, some Western linguists supportive of the Soviet Union have recognized Moldavian as a second East Romance language alongside Romanian. Others stood fast by Bucharest, which denied the existence of Moldavian, even when Romania constituted part of the Soviet bloc. In 1989–1990, the Latin alphabet began to be used along with Cyrillic for writing and publishing in Moldavian. When Moldavia obtained independence in 1991 and became Moldova, the former script replaced the latter, and Moldavian has been known as Moldovan since that moment. Since then, there has been no obvious difference between Moldovan and Romanian, apart from a handful of regionalisms and the constitutional recognition of Moldovan as the official language of Moldova. But Bucharest’s repeated claims that Moldovan was simply Romanian under a different name caused the 2003 publication of the first ever Moldovan-Romanian dictionary. At 350 pages, and with 19,000 headwords, this dictionary may mark the final divergence of Moldavian and Romanian into two different languages. The process of diversification continues reaffirming the ethnolinguistically justified existence of the Moldovans and the Romanians as two separate nations. Their respective nation-states, as foci of two different centers of politics and culture, fortify this process. For all practical purposes, Moldovan emigrants in Romania are treated as Romanians, and they do not form any minority organizations. This, however, is similar to the behavior of Slovak immigrants in the Czech Republic, which does not make them into Czechs (Dyer 1999: 7, 13, 26; Janich and Greule 2002: 228–229; Moldovan-Romanian Ditcionary 2004; Stati 2003).

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

215

The 1992 war that led to the de facto secession of Transnistria was caused by the fears of the Slavophone population that Moldova might unite with Romania. Moldovans constitute 39 percent of the Transnistria’s population as opposed to the Slavophone plurality of Ukrainians and Russians, who add up to 28 and 23 percent of the inhabitants. To alleviate this tension, in the 1994 Constitution, Chi¸sin˘ au declared that Moldovan is the official language of Moldova. Earlier, Moldova’s Slavic-speakers had perceived the seemingly unstoppable drive to the unification of Moldovan with Romanian, as a prelude to the union of Moldova with Romania. The Slavophones dreaded this prospect. They feel more attached to the tradition of Soviet multilingualism with the dominance of Russian, and were afraid that with no top-notch command of Romanian in a monolingual Greater ‘Romania-Moldova,’ they would become second-class citizens. Some Moldovan-speakers were repelled from the idea of espousing Romanian as their language as well, because in the first half of the 1990s, proponents of this solution launched the action to teach Moldovans how to ‘speak correctly in their Romanian language.’ Instead of reaching its planned goal, the action convinced numerous Moldovans that they speak a language different from Romanian. Chi¸sin˘ au’s decision to recognize Moldovan as the official language of Moldova emphasizes the separateness of the Moldovans and their nation-state vis-à-vis the Romanians, in an effort not to alienate the Slavophones as well as to allow for the future reintegration of Transnistria with Moldova. Although miniscule in size, Transnistria is responsible for most of Moldova’s industrial output. This, and Russia’s tacit support, keep Transnistria afloat. In Transnistria, alongside official Russian, Moldovan is accepted in minority education and for limited purposes in administration. But it is still written exclusively in Cyrillic unlike in the rest of Moldova. The Slavophone elites do not permit Transnistria’s Moldovanspeakers to use Latin letters for writing in their language, fearing it would erase the cultural difference, which separates Transnistria from Moldavia and justifies the postulated existence of Transnistria as a separate nation-state. What is more, the use of Cyrillic by Russian- and Moldovan-speakers ensures a modicum of ethno-scriptural unity for the tentative Transnistrian nation (Caraus 2003; Eberhardt 1996: 254; King 1999: 186; Price 1998: 325; Zawadzki 2004). In the 1990s, a new disagreement over an ethnonym emerged along Bucharest’s traditional insistence on terming Romance-speaking Moldovans as Romanians, and their Romance language of Moldovan as ‘Romanian’. The period after the fall of communism saw the politicization of the Roma (Gypsy) population throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Previously, they were treated as an underclass of ‘pariahs, parasites or lumpenproletariat,’ whom the socialist state had to make ‘productive.’ The idea that they could be considered a national or ethnic minority group did not cross the minds of the communist legislators. But after the 1989 replacement of communist regimes with democracies, the Roma could not be disregarded or marginalized too easily. They

216 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

number about 10 million in Central and Eastern Europe, though the official statistics record a mere 2 million for the entire region. This discrepancy is the result of the Roma’s fear to declare themselves as Roma, which comes part and parcel with social rejection and marginalization. Hence, the 1992 census recorded 0.4 million Roman in Romania, though more reliable estimates range between 1.8 million and 2.5 million. In this country, where Roma were held as slaves as recently as 150 years ago, the wish of the public at large not to be associated with them is even stronger than in other states. It vexed many Romanian politicians and intellectuals that Roma activists decided to refer to all the Roma in Europe with one of their specific ethnonyms. Etymologically, the Romani word ‘Roma’ has nothing to do with Rome or Romania. But the graphic similarity is anathema enough. Bucharest proposes that to mark the difference clearly the activists should use the Romani spelling of the word Roma, that is, Rroma. Ironically, in the 1820s, Walachian intellectuals settled on ‘Romania’ as their ethnonym in order to stress their presumed historical and cultural link with ancient Rome. And during the 1960s and 1970s, Bucharest insisted that the English form of ‘Rumania’ be dropped in favor of ‘Romania,’ obviously more similar to that of Rome (Crowe 1996: 144; Hancock 1995: 17; Magocsi 2002: 200; State of Impunity 2001: 7). The Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians refer to themselves and their language as Vlah or Vlach. The Istro-Romanians tend to speak about themselves as Rumeri, which is usually translated as ‘Romanians,’ though the ethnonym unambiguously stems from the Byzantines’ name for themselves, ‘Romans.’ The imposition of the ethnonym ‘Romanian’ on the international names of these groups reflects the Romanian efforts that have aimed at making these peoples part of a greater Romanian nation. Strangely, Rome did not forward any ethnolinguistically justified claims to these ethnic groups for the Italian nation. Perhaps the fact that they professed Orthodox Christianity was off-putting to Catholic Italy, or the Italian government was more interested in securing the ethnically Croatian littoral of the Adriatic and Greek islands, which had belonged to Venice. This left to Romania alone the self-imposed task of ‘gathering’ all the Romance-speaking peoples of the Balkans in an effort to build a Greater Romanian nation. Although a basic glossary for Istro-Romanian was published in Leipzig in 1899, the three-volume dictionary of Megleno-Romanian (1935) and the dictionary of Aromanian (1963) came off the press in Bucharest. Interestingly, in the case of Aromanian, the Romanian authorities took care to label it as a ‘dialect of the Romanian language.’ The Istro-Romanians amount to a mere 1000 persons, and the Megleno-Romanians to 5000. Thus, only the 0.3 million- to 0.6 millionstrong Aromanians constitute a group sizeable enough to make a qualitative difference if it joined the Romanian nation or chose separate nationhood. Despite the discussion going on among the Aromanians whether to write their

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

217

language in Cyrillic, Greek, or Latin characters, it seems that they have set out on the path to constructing their separate nationhood. The Aromanians also maintain that their language is closer to some Italian dialects than to Romanian, which poses Aromanian as a ‘lost link’ between West and East Romance languages. In Macedonia, for the first time in history, Aromanians received the official status of a separate nationality. Although they are known as Vlasi (a variant of Vlach) in Macedonia, they go by the name Tsintsari in Serbia, and Greeks label them with the somewhat pejorative term Kutzovlachs; the Aromanians themselves settled on the ethnonym Armân. In the Tosk (southern) dialect of Albanian, they are known as rëmër, which stems from the ethnonym ‘Romans,’ but actually means ‘shepherd’ (Janich and Greule 2002: 229–230; Kara 2001; Price 1998: 18, 250, 323; Skok 1973: 608). To this day, language remains the main instrument of building and defending national identity in Romania and Moldavia. Even more importantly, political elites and inhabitants of the two countries, at large, continue to believe that language alone justifies the emergence and maintenance of national statehood. In the 19th century, the insistence on the Roman-Dacian character of the Romanians and their language, made the Magyars into ‘newcomers,’ and, thus delegitimized their right to Transylvania. Apart from well documented Magyar denials of the Romanian theory of ethnolinguistic continuity between the present-day Romanians and their supposed Dacian and Roman forefathers, this ethnolinguistic struggle caused some nationally-minded Magyar scholars to seriously propose that the Magyars are descendants of Sumerian settlers who arrived in Central Europe five millennia ago. Ergo, the Sumerian language was Old Magyar. The ‘capturing’ of the Dacians for the Romanian national idea also put Bucharest at loggerheads with Bulgarian nationalists, who claimed the Thracians as their forefathers. (The Dacians constituted part of the larger Thracian ethnic group.) Last but not least, even today some nationalist groupings propagate ideas, which extol mythical qualities of the Romanian language. For instance, they maintain that the language spoken in France in antiquity was Old Romanian and some extend this claim back in time saying that IndoEuropean was none other but ‘Pre-Romanian.’ Luckily, mainstream politicians refrain to act on the basis of these ideas (Antohi 1998: 315; Weaver 2006: 113–114, 116).

From Slavic to Croatian and Serbian to Serbo-Croatian to Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian West and south of the East Romance-speaking lands and the Magyar-speaking area, the South Slavic languages developed. The beginnings of the written tradition among the Croats and the Serbs date back to the 9th century, when they adopted Christianity and their first significant polities emerged. Approximately,

218 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

these polities extended from the northeastern Adriatic coast to the Sava River in the case of the former, and from the southeastern Adriatic coast to the Morava River in the case of the latter. In the earlier period it is difficult even to differentiate between the Croats and the Serbs as distinctive peoples. Their Slavic commonality was enough to make them appear as similar groups of Slavs in the eyes of Byzantine and Frankish observers. In the late 8th century, the ethnonyms ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ appeared in documents for the first time, mostly in the context of the area extending from the Northern Carpathians to the Sudeten Mountains. It is usually interpreted as a trace of the early travels of both groups, perhaps induced by the politics of the Avar Kaghanate. The Sorbs of Lusatia (today in eastern Germany) are considered to be a remnant of these early (White) Serbs, and the modern-day Rusyns are identified as the descendants of the White Croatians. None of these two ethnonyms, ‘Croat’ or ‘Serb,’ is explicitly Slavic, which bred numerous contentious views regarding their etymologies. The main ideological cleavage runs between the proponents of Slavic and non-Slavic etymologies. If the latter are right, it would mean that Croats and Serbs participated in mixed ethnic alliances before they became Slavicized. The proved instance of such a phenomenon is the Slavic Bulgarians, whose early statehood was built by Turkic Bulgars. Similarly, though Magyars are nowadays homogenously Finno-Ugric, it was a Turkic-Finno-Ugric coalition, which invaded the Danubian basin. Last but not least, a group of Scandinavians founded the Slavic polity of Kievan Rus. Supporters of the Slavonic school of etymology, among others, claim that the name Serb stems from Old Slavic for ‘free villager,’ and Croat meant ‘those who have a lot of land.’ Proponents of the non-Slavic etymology of both ethnonyms, believe that ‘Serb’ is derived from the Indo-Iranian phrase for ‘those who fight by hitting others with their heads,’ while ‘Croat’ stems from the Iranian word either for ‘shepherd’ or ‘man who has many wives.’26 Initially, Greek and Latin were used among the Croats and the Serbs for few written purposes, depending whether missionaries or other ecclesiastical functionaries arrived from Byzantium or the Frankish Empire. Old Church Slavonic as a language of administration, liturgy and ecclesiastical writings developed in Greater Moravia between 863 and 885. In 885, the polity accepted Latin, and the supporters of Church Slavonic were expelled. They continued their project in the Bulgarian Empire, where Church Slavonic replaced Greek as the official language. The Serbian lands were in the empire’s sphere of influence, and Bulgaria incorporated them in 960. This contributed to the acceptance of Church Slavonic as the official language among the Serbs. Between the 10th and 12th centuries, Cyrillic replaced Glagolitic for writing in Church Slavonic, but Serbian priests employed Glagolitic for limited liturgical needs until the 15th century. Croatia remained in the Frankish and Byzantine spheres of influence (which had commenced with the baptism of a Croatian ‘prince’ Porna of Dalmatia [reigned 810–820]), but literacy in Glagolitic-based Church Slavonic

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

219

spread there too, due to the language’s closeness to the Slavophone population’s vernacular. Croatia gained full independence in 910. In the 960s, Bulgaria declined, and in 1018, Byzantium reincorporated it. Hence the invention of the Cyrillic script, which probably took place in Bulgaria, did not reach Croatia, while Venice’s increasing penetration of the Adriatic coast and Hungary’s southward expansion spread Latin literacy in Croatia. Thus the Kingdom of Croatia looked to Rome in religious matters. The political and cultural division between it and Serbia deepened after the Great Schism of 1054. In 1089, the Croatian Crown passed to Hungary, and two years later, Croatia was incorporated as an autonomous province to the Catholic Kingdom of Hungary. In 1102, the Hungarian King Koloman (reigned 1095–1116) was crowned as King of Croatia, which formally commenced the personal union between Croatia and Hungary. This event reaffirmed the Catholic character of Croatia. In 1014, Serbia passed from Bulgarian to Byzantine control. Between 1035 and 1081, Serbian statelets regained a modicum of independence, before they were reincorporated into Byzantium until 1159. In that year, the independent Kingdom of Serbia emerged, but it continued to look toward Orthodox Constantinople for cultural, political, and ecclesiastical models. The weakness of Byzantium became apparent, when the second Bulgarian Empire coalesced in 1185. The resultant development of Slavonic literacy in both Slavic polities ensured the final switch from Glagolitic to Cyrillic. In the 13th century, this change also spread to Croatia’s southern Dalmatia. In the 14th century, the Latin alphabet began to be used in Slavophone documents especially at the Dalmatian littoral and soon replaced in this role Glagolitic and Cyrillic in the Croatian lands, though the tradition of Glagolitic writing survived in some locations in northern Dalmatia until the beginning of the 20th century. Bosnia, which initially was the core of Croatia, changed hands among Hungary, Serbia, and Byzantium until it emerged as a separate polity in the late 13th century and grew into an independent kingdom in 1377. Bosnia became a buffer zone between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, reinforced by the development of the separate Bosnian Church, which drew on the heretic teachings of the Bogomils. The tradition of separate statehoods and of the religious difference led to the emergence of the specific Croatian and Serbian recensions (varieties) of Church Slavonic, deepened by the use of different scripts. In addition, the use of Latin and Italian in the Croatian areas as opposed to Byzantine Greek influence in Serbia, also kept the two recensions apart. Among the Serbs, Church Slavonic survived as the language of liturgy and temporal writing until the 18th century, like in other Orthodox Slavophone areas, namely Bulgaria, Muscovy, and Poland-Lithuania. The oldest surviving Croatian manuscripts in Church Slavonic date back to the 11th century, while the Serbian ones to the turn of the 13th century. In the 14th century, the Cyrillic alphabet underwent reform under Bulgarian and Greek influence, but in inaccessible Bosnia, isolated from

220 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the outer world by mountain ranges, the Cyrillic developed into a special form known as Bosanˇcica, or the ‘Bosnian script.’ Earlier, a special kind of Glagolitic had emerged there as well. The first printed Glagolitic and Cyrillic books in Church Slavonic were published at the end of the 15th century, Glagolitic ones in Hungary’s Croatia, and Cyrillic in Serbian Zeta and Poland-Lithuania. The tradition of Glagolitic-based Slavonic literacy never developed curbed by the use of official Latin in Catholic Hungary (Gluhak 1993: 267–270, 572–573; Honzák et al. 2001: 105–106, 133, 269–270, 625; Magocsi 2002: 9, 11, 54, 56; Pelikán et al. 2004: 22–25, 39–41; Pop 2005b: 31; Price 1998: 424–425; Skok 1971: 690–692, 1973: 315–317; Urbanczyk ´ 2000: 143). By 1396, the Ottoman Empire had incorporated Bulgaria, then seized Serbia and Bosnia by the mid-15th century. Independent Bosnia (the name originated from the Bosut stream, a tributary of the Sava), however, had existed long enough to spawn the ethnonym ‘Bosnian’ and the glottonym ‘Bosnian language,’ which have been frequently used in Ottoman documents done in (Ottoman) Old Turkish and Arabic since the 15th century. After 1526, the Ottoman conquered most of the Kingdom of Hungary, including almost all of Croatia, by the mid-16th century. The northwestern sliver of Croatia centered on Agram (Zagreb) remained in the hands of the Habsburgs. Venice dominated virtually all the Dalmatian littoral with the exception of the independent merchant republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The situation insulated the Serbian Orthodox cultural tradition, barring it from adopting the vernacular. Following the Ottoman destruction of Serbia, one century of Constantinople’s direct ecclesiastical jurisdiction that spread Greek cultural influence set in. The autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church re-emerged in 1557 and functioned as an ersatz Serbian state until 1766. The renewed Greek ecclesiastical dominance never spread to Montenegro and was over in the second half of the 1820s when the modern Serbian state was created. In 1832, when Greece formally gained independence, the sultan reinstated the separate Serbian Orthodox Church. After the fall of Constantinople, Muscovy remained the sole independent political center of Orthodox Christianity. The persistence of Church Slavonic as the official language of this polity set the standard for other Orthodox areas. And prior to the 1830s, the political and cultural influence of the Orthodox Church prevailed among the Serbs. Unlike the Serbs, the Croats participated in the Reformation and the CounterReformation that, as in other areas, resulted in the emergence of vernaculars as written languages. First, these vernaculars were used to translate the Bible, but soon secular literature was created in these new languages too. In 1560–1563, the New Testament in Croatian was published in both Glagolitic and Cyrillic characters in Tübingen, and in 1595, a five-language Latin-Italian-GermanDalmatian-Hungarian dictionary came off the press in Venice, where the future Croatian language went by the name of ‘Dalmatian,’ and was delivered in Latin

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

221

letters. In the 16th century, religious and secular literature was written and prin´ ted in the Štokavian, Cakavian, and Kajkavian dialects. The first one was used in Ragusa, the second in Dalmatia, and the third in central and northwestern Croatia. Philologists developed the names of these dialects only in the 19th century drawing on the interrogative pronoun ‘what?’: što, c´ a, and kaj, respectively. The actual users writing in these dialects or language(s) called their written vernacular(s) by a plethora of various names. In the 16th century, they referred to it as ‘Slavic,’ which meant that they did not clearly distinguish it from Church Slavonic yet. In 1661, the term ‘Croatian language’ appeared and was followed by the glottonyms of ‘Slavic Bosnian’ in 1683, ‘Illyrian’ in 1732, and ‘Slavonian’ in 1776. Three of these glottonyms referred to regions, from which the authors stemmed, namely, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slavonia. The glottonym ‘Illyrian’ was the sign of the spread of the knowledge of antiquity, because it alluded to the Roman prefecture of Illyricum, which coincided with most of the present-day Balkans, but ironically, did not include Bosnia, Croatia, Dalmatia, or Slovenia, which formed part of the prefecture of Italy. In addition, those Slavophone Catholics who lived in the Kingdom of Hungary tended to write their language with the use of Magyar spelling, while Italian-based orthography came naturally to those in Venice-held Dalmatia and in Ragusa. The commonality of Catholicism and the Slavic vernacular now committed to paper in Latin characters was not enough. The Slavophone Catholics lived in the regions of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. At the beginning of the 18th century, the Habsburgs took back Slavonia as well as most of the Ottoman-held Hungarian territories from Ottoman hands. Slavonia together with Croatia was made into an autonomous province of the Kingdom of Hungary again. In 1797, the French troops seized Venice with its territories, including Dalmatia. Later, France also took most of Croatia up to the Sava River and incorporated it into the French Province of Illyria together with Dalmatia in 1807. Ragusa was added to this province in the following year. After 1815, all of Croatia returned to the Kingdom of Hungary, but Dalmatia with Ragusa was made into an Austrian province. The political and administrative disunity of the lands that would be made into future Croatia was not only reflected in various names for the Slavic written vernacular but also in the lack of any common ethnonym for all the Slavophone Catholics. There were ‘Croats,’ ‘Dalmatians,’ ‘Ragusans,’ ‘Slavonians’ and so on. On top of that, in different regions, they tended to use for writing all the three ´ dialects mentioned above, Štokavian, Cakavian, and Kajkavian. And to complicate matters further, writers championed different orthographies. For instance, the sound represented by present-day Croatian letter [´c] used to be noted as [c], [ç], [z], [cz], and [cs]. In 1784, German replaced Latin as the administrative language in the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. During the first half of the 19th century, Magyar gradually took the place of Latin in the Kingdom of Hungary.

222 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

These developments, together with the experience of the Napoleonic province of Illyria, brought about the rise of the national movement of the Croats. Under the influence of Pan-Slavism, Croatian nationalists developed the program of Illyrianism during the 1830s and 1840s. It advocated cultural and political unity for all South Slavs and adoption of a standard for the Croatian language based on Štokavian, spoken by Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins, and Muslim Bosnians (Cox 2002: xv–xvi; Frucht 2000: 379; Janich and Greule 2002: 135; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 261; Kontler 1999: 63–64; Kornhauser 2000: 155–156; Magocsi 2002: 6; Naylor 1980: 75–78; Price 1998: 423, 426; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 465; Schaff 2004; Skok 1971: 191; Velagi´c 1999: 167–173). Borders split the Serbs in a similar manner. During the 1690s and in the first decades of the 18th century, 60,000 to 70,000 of them moved from Ottoman-held Serbia (northern Bosnia, and present-day Kosovo and Macedonia) to southern Hungary; that is, contemporary Vojvodina, and modern Croatia’s Slavonia. Some moved to Venice’s Dalmatia, as well. Despite the Serbian clergy’s request, Vienna did not provide them with Cyrillic books or allowed Orthodox schools. So they turned to the Russian tsar. In the 1720s, books and teachers from Russia began to arrive in the new Serbian areas of Hungary. They brought along the Ruthenized tradition of Church Slavonic, known as the Russian recension (version). This recension superseded the Serbian one in the written language. Later, the newly standardized Russian also influenced the region and introduced the idea that Orthodox Christians can also write in their vernaculars. That is why, from the 1730s, some started writing in the ‘simple language’ ( prost jezik) or ‘simple dialect’ ( prost dijalekat), as they called the Serbian vernacular. In the 1780s, all three languages (Church Slavonic, Russian, and the Serbian vernacular) amalgamated into ‘Slaveno-Serbian’ (also named as ‘Serbo-Russian’). The new written language was used for secular writing, so some called it ‘civil language.’ Nobody spoke in Slaveno-Serbian and no grammars or dictionaries were written to codify this language (Albijani´c 1985; Janich and Greule 2002: 262; Jovanovich et al. 2004: 61; Mladenovi´c 1989; Pelikán et al. 2004: 144–145; Price 1998: 426; Rychlík and Kouba 2003: 340–341). This situation was different from that of Croatian. The 16th-century tradition of compiling dictionaries of the Croatian language continued. In 1649–1651, a dictionary of the ‘Slavic language’ came off the press in Loreto and Ancona (the Papal States). Two Italian-Latin-Illyrian dictionaries published in 1728 and 1805 in Venice and Ragusa, respectively, followed it. This lexicographical tradition ´ privileged the Štokavian and Cakavian dialects. The latter is spoken in western Bosnia, eastern Istria, and the northern half of Dalmatia, as far south as Split. Although nowadays Štokavian is the dialectal basis of the present-day standard languages of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, the dialect was spoken, originally, in the center of the historical province of Croatia (between the rivers Sava and Kupa), and in what today is Bosnia, southern Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Serbia.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

223

(Kajkavian is used in the northwestern corner of Croatia, between Zagreb and Varaždin, and in northeastern Istria.) In the case of Serbian, the switch from Slaveno-Serbian to the vernacular and the beginning of the codification of the latter dates back to Dositej Obradovi´c (Dositheus or Demetrius Obradowitsch, 1739–1811) and Vuk Karadži´c (Wuk Karadchitsch, 1787–1864). Obradovi´c studied to be a monk in a Serbian Orthodox monastery of Hopovo on the mountain Tarcal (Fruška Gora, Vojvodina). Displeased with this education, he fled the monastery and traveled in Anatolia and Western Europe. He gained Orthodox education in Corfu, Mt Athos,27 and ˙ Smyrna (Izmir). In the last place, he came across the movement, which strove to modernize Orthodox Christianity in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Afterward, Obradovi´c studied philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences in Vienna, Halle, and Leipzig. During the last two decades of the 18th century, he published his autobiography and other writings, in which he gradually replaced SlavenoSerbian with vernacular Serbian. Under the influence of Herderian thought and the French Revolution, he was the first to state that not the Serbian Orthodox Church, but the vernacular Serbian language should become the basis of the unity of the Serbian nation. During the first Serbian (anti-Ottoman) Uprising (1807–1813), he became the first Serbian Minister of Education (1811) in the de facto independent Eyalet (Ottoman administrative region) of Serbia. Despite his untimely death, he inspired the founding of the network of 50 schools. Most Serbian teachers arrived from Hungary’s Vojvodina, which conveniently faced the Serbian capital of Belgrade across the border River Sava. In 1808, the first ever secular Serbian university-level institution, the Higher School, was founded in Belgrade. These achievements were lost with the return of Ottoman rule in 1813. The second Serbian Uprising (1815) reestablished autonomous Serbia (1816), but the warfare deepened the destruction. In 1826, there were a mere 26 schools. Their number grew to 72 ten years later. In 1831, the first ever Serbian printshop was founded, and 3 years later, the first Serbian newspaper came off the press. In 1835, the first secondary school was established, but the first Serbian university sprang up in Belgrade as late as 1863. Education and administration were mainly carried out through the medium of Slaveno-Serbian and Church Slavonic. In the first half of the 19th century, secular Serbian intellectuals, especially those based in Vojvodina in the Austrian Empire, supported Obradovi´c’s choice of the vernacular as the basis for standard Serbian. The Serbian Orthodox Church in the Habsburg Monarchy, with its center in Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci, Slavonia), opposed this trend, wishing to maintain the cultural and political domination among the Serbs by the use of Slaveno-Serbian, which also allowed for emphasizing a certain commonality with Russia. In the 1830s, the renewed Orthodox Church of autonomous Serbia usually tuned in. The Serbian poet, Lukijan Mušicki (1777–1837), who became a monk in 1802, and was

224 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

nominated the Orthodox Bishop of Buda in 1828, proposed a compromise solution. He alluded to Lomonosov’s ‘three styles’ of Russian, by proposing that standard Serbian should be composed from the ‘high style’ of Slaveno-Serbian employed for written purposes, and of ‘low style’ of the vernacular appropriate for everyday spoken and written communication. The high style Serbian was to be written in the Church Slavonic Cyrillic, and the low style Serbian in the Russian-style Grazhdanka, known in Serbian as gradjanka. The poet, Sima Milutinovi´c Sarajlija (1791–1847), one of the tutors of the Montenegrin Vladika (temporal and ecclesiastical monarch), Petar II Petrovi´c Njegoš (reigned 1830–1851), instilled in his pupil a love for folk poetry. During his reign, Njegoš authored four epic poems and a collection of poetry, written in a vernacularized form of Slaveno-Serbian. The most famous of these epic poems, The Mountain Wreath (1847), on the extermination of Montenegrins who converted to Islam, became the Serbian national poem, and made its writer into a Serbian national hero. Njegoš enthusiastically espoused the Serbian politician, Ilja Garašanin’s (1812–1874) Great Serbian project of the union of Serbia and Montenegro (1844), as a necessary step to the eventual expulsion of the Ottomans from the lands of the South Slavs. Garašanin’s project and vision merged well with the synthesis of the ecclesiastical and linguistic definitions of the Serbian nation, popularized in the mid-19th century, namely that it is composed from all the Štokavian-speakers, who profess Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and Islam. This plan of building a Great Serbian nation drew on the same ethnocultural features, as that of Illyrianism. The difference was that in the former vision a Pan-Serbian identity was to dominate, instead of forging a common new (Illyrian) identity for all the South Slavs. Njegoš’s politics and the specific Serbian language of his writings were popularized by the first Montenegrin printshop, founded in 1834, and the system of schools developed in the latter half of the 1830s. Karadži´c is the most famous graduate of Obradovi´c’s short-lived Higher School in Belgrade. In Vienna he came to the attention of the Slovene scholar, Bartholomäus (Jernej) Kopitar (1780–1844), the imperial censor for Slavic, Greek, Walachian, and Albanian books, who, beginning in 1808, corresponded with Josef Dobrovský on Slavic philology. Due to his peasant origins and education in linguistics (received in Jena), Karadži´c had a sound grasp of the differences between Slaveno-Serbian and the vernacular. He followed the guidelines of Johann Christoph Adelung, a codifier of the German language, who advised ‘to write as you speak.’ In 1818, thanks to Kopitar’s help, Karadži´c’s dictionary and grammar of the Serbian language were published in Vienna. Although in the two works he codified ‘the idiom of the simple people’ (govor prostoga naroda) as the Serbian language, he could not help writing the grammar in SlavenoSerbian. In his phonetic Cyrillic spelling he dropped the ligatures of [ю] and [Я], as well as replaced the Cyrillic character of [й] with the Latin one of [j]. The last

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

225

intervention was probably due to the influence of the Catholic Kopitar known for his anti-Orthodox prejudices. Orthodox hierarchs perceived [j] as a ‘devil letter,’ planted in the Serbian Cyrillic to destroy its purity. (Similarly, the Muscovite Orthodox clergy dubbed the Latin alphabet as a ‘devil script.’) This, in addition to unsettling Church Slavonic and Slaveno-Serbian from their privileged position of the sole written languages of the Serbs, made Karadži´c’s codification of the Serbian language the more unacceptable to the Serbian Orthodox Church (Dulichenko 2004: 69, 100; Gil 2005: 91, 93, 264–266; Janich and Greule 2002: 135; Naylor 1980: 70–72; Pelikán et al. 2004: 202–204; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 287; Tornow 2005: 425–426). In 1830, Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) wrote a book in Kajkavian and German, in which he proposed to accept the Czech orthography for the Croatian language, which he called ‘Croato-Slavonian.’ Impressed by the flowering of 16thand 17th-century Ragusan literature in vernacular (Štokavian) Slavic, Gaj and his followers switched in 1836 from Kajkavian to Štokavian as the dialectal base of Croatian, and adopted Czech orthography. In that year, Gaj’s close friend Vjekoslav Babuki´c (1812–1875) published an appropriate grammar of this Štokavian-based Croatian, which he labeled as the ‘Illyrian dialect of the Slavic language.’ At that time, the South Slavic (Illyrian) movement, like its CzechoSlovak counterpart, sought legitimacy in the broader idea of Pan-Slavism. Bubki´c’s grammar was translated into German (1839) and Italian (1846). Croatian intellectuals supported the Illyrian idea that claimed common origin for all the Slavs of the jug, or South (hence, ‘Yug-’ in the name of Yugoslavia). Serbian scholars active in Austria also saw the possibility of the South Slav (Yugoslav) national movement as a counterbalance to German and Magyar nationalisms in the empire. Although keeping to the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, respectively, the Croat and Serbian language codifiers had already settled on Štokavian as the dialectal base of standard Croatian and Serbian. This political and linguistic commonality was enough to coax the Croatian and Serbian intellectuals to sign the ‘Literary Agreement’ in 1850 in Vienna. It was a modest event, not noticed at that time, but the vicissitudes of history made it into the ideological cornerstone of Yugoslavism in its linguistic and state-building aspects. As a result of this agreement, the existence of the Serbo-Croatian language was announced, but the language was not named to prevent any ideological squabbles. They settled for the ‘southern dialect of the Old Dubrovnik.’ However, the document provided that this language should be written in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The name of Serbo-Croatian was derived from Kopitar’s 1836 Latin phrase ‘Illyrian dialect [of the Slavic language], that is, Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian.’ The Štokavian (I)jekavian28 dialect of Herzegovina that borders Montenegro and southern Dalmatia with Ragusa, was elevated into the linguistic framework ´ of the new standard. This compromise discarded the Cakavian and Kajkavian

226 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

literary traditions of the Croats, and distanced the new standard from Belgrade’s Serbian based on the Ekavian variant of the Štokavian dialect. As mentioned above, the signatories could not agree on the common name of the language, and referred to it euphemistically as ‘our language.’ In official use, the terms ‘Bosnian, ‘Croatian,’ and ‘Serbian’ persisted for denoting this language. In 1861, the Croatian Sabor (Diet) voted to name this language ‘Yugoslav,’ but Vienna overturned this decision and promulgated the cumbersome dual name ‘SerbianIllyrian (Cyrillic)’ and ‘Serbian-Illyrian (Latin).’ Following the founding of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Agram (Zagreb) (1867), its members spoke of ‘Croatian or Serbian.’ The Croatian linguist employed by this academy, Petar Budmani (1835–1914), was the first to use the term ‘Serbocroatian (Illyrian)’ in his 1867 grammar of this language, written in Italian, and published in Vienna. Later, he served as the initial editor of the authoritative dictionary of ‘Croatian or Serbian’ language (1880–1975), published by this academy. In 1868, Vojvodina’s Serbs accepted Karadži´c’s Ekavian orthography. Two decades later, in independent Serbia, the Belgrade-Novi Sad (Ekavian) dialect was officially championed as the linguistic basis of the common language. But in addition to the aforementioned dictionary, in 1899, the Yugoslav Academy published the first authoritative grammar of the ‘Croatian or Serbian language,’ authored by Tomislav Mareti´c (1854–1938), which assured the supremacy of the (I)jekavian (southern) dialect (Greenberg 2001: 19–20, 2004: 20–21, 27, 168, 170; Naylor 1980: 76–79; Okuka 1998: 16; Price 1998: 423; Rusinow 2003: 12–13; Tornow 2005: 445, 593). Since 1688, Montenegro, ruled by the vladika (prince-bishop), had survived into the 19th century as an autonomous, though de facto independent, state in the Ottoman Empire. Serbia received a similar status in 1817. In 1878, both states gained independence, while Vienna occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina and made it into Corpus Separratum, or a territory that did not belong to Austria or Hungary, and de jure remained part of the Ottoman Empire. Serbo-Croatian (although differently named) was accepted as an official language in Croatia (1867) and Serbia (1886) and as a semi-official (minority) language in Hungary’s Vojvodina (1868). Serbo-Croatian gained a similar official status much later in Bosnia (1907) and Montenegro (1923). In Bosnia the occupation administration, apart from using German and Magyar for internal matters and communication with Vienna and Budapest, could not decide on an appropriate name of the local Slavic language. In 1879, they settled for ‘Croatian,’ but then switched for a noncommittal designation of the ‘language of the region’ (Landessprache) written in the Latin script. In schools, the language was known as ‘language of the region (Croatian, Serbian).’ In 1880, the language of schools was changed to ‘Bosnian or Serbocroatian language of the region’ and ‘Croatian’ in administration. In 1882, the Hungarian aristocrat Benjamin (Béni) Kállay (1839–1903) was nominated the common Austro-Hungarian minister of finance and administrator of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

227

Bosnia. He encouraged the rise of Bosnian national and linguistic identity as distinct from Croatian and Serbian nationalisms, and from the Serbo-Croatian language. Although the following year he promulgated the adoption of the common Serbo-Croatian orthography, Kállay championed the exclusive use of the Latin script, encouraged referring to this language as ‘Bosnian,’ and preferred to speak about it as the national language of the Muslim Bosnian nation. After 1890, ‘Bosnian’ was the dominant glottonym, and was replaced with that of ‘Serbo-Croatian’ in 1907, 4 years after Kállay’s death. During World War I, between 1915 and 1918, the use of Cyrillic (as symbolic of Serbia and its protector, Russia) was banned from writing and printing in Serbo-Croatian in Bosnia. In Montenegro, where Njegoš-style Serbian replaced Church Slavic and Slaveno-Serbian in the 1830s, Serbo-Croatian was not introduced as the official language until 1923. It was possible after the last recognized Montenegrin King had died in 1921. Despite the espousal of Serbo-Croatian in Croatia and Serbia, the separate traditions of Croatian and Serbian literacies persisted. The second edition of Karadži´c’s dictionary of Serbian came off the press in 1852; 8 years later a significant German-Croatian dictionary was published and, in 1901, a two-volume dictionary of the Croatian language followed. The opposition to Serbo-Croatian was especially strong in Croatian-speaking Dalmatia and among the Serbs. In addition, Slavophone Muslim Bosnians continued to write their Slavic vernacular in the Arabic script. Neither did they endorse the Serbo-Croatian translation of the Koran in Cyrillic characters published in 1895. Bosnia’s Slavic-speaking Muslims had to wait until 1937, when the Slavic translation of the Holy Book of Islam came out in the Arabic script. Karadži´c translated the New Testament from the Church Slavonic, Russian, and German versions. In 1847, the British and Foreign Bible Society published it in Vienna. The Orthodox Church did not espouse this translation, citing it was not done from the original languages, the translator was not a theologian, and he translated the Holy Script into a ‘peasant jargon.’ Karadži´c responded to this criticism by saying that if the Bible could be translated into the language of the shepherds, that language could certainly be used for other purposes. The easy comprehensibility of the translation made Karadži´c’s translation into a popular book despite the Church’s opposition. His pupil, Djura Daniˇci´c (1825–1882), a graduate of the revived Higher School in Belgrade, translated the Old Testament, and in 1868, the entire Serbo-Croatian Bible was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in Budapest. (As a prominent member of the Yugoslavian Academy of Sciences and Arts, he inspired the compilation of the authoritative 23-volume dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian Language [1880–1976, Zagreb], printed in the Latin alphabet.) Another full Serbian (that is, Orthodox Cyrillicbased Serbo-Croatian) translation of the Bible came off the press in 1933, but the Serbian Orthodox Church espoused as canonical only the next translation published in 1984.

228 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Croatian Catholic hierarchy objected to Karadži´c and Daniˇci´c’s translation of the Bible on several counts. First, it began as a Serbian, not Serbo-Croatian translation. Second, it was intended for Orthodox Serbs as indicated by the fact that, among others, this translation was done from the Church Slavonic Bible. Third, the Serbian Orthodox Church itself rejected this translation. And most importantly, the first full Croatian translation of the Bible was published in 1821, obviously in Latin characters. It was the work of the Franciscan, Petar Katanˇci´c (1750–1825), so there were no theological objections. The translation was done from the canonical Latin text of the Vulgate. This text was printed side by side the Croatian translation, which made it into a popular book, because Latin still held sway among the Catholic Croatians. (Another Croatian translation of the Bible into Latin script-based Serbo-Croatian was published in 1968.) In opposition to Germanization and Magyarization, they continued to use this language in administration and public life until 1868. During the second half of the 19th century, the Croatian versions of Serbo-Croatian Turkisms and foreign words were replaced with Czech and other Slavic loan words as well as with Serbo-Croatian neologisms, obviously all in the Latin-script. Despite this effort, quite a handful of lexemes of German and Magyar origins remained. On the contrary, the Serbs were happy to retain Turkisms and adopted international terms (derived from classical Greek and Latin) in their Cyrillic-script variant of the new standard (Greenberg 2004: 140–141; Janich and Greule 2002: 135–136, 266; Naylor 1980: 80; Okuka 1998: 59; Pelikán et al. 2004: 212; Price 1998: 427– 428; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 465, 471–472; Qarai 2004; Schaff 2004; Šipka 1999: 7–8, 49; Spaginska-Pruszak ´ 1997: 61; Tornow 2005: 596). This lexical and script dualism continued even in the efforts to standardize Serbo-Croatian. The aforementioned extensive dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian language printed in the Latin alphabet in Zagreb, was popularly perceived as the authoritative dictionary of the Croatian language. In 1959, the Serbian Cyrillic-based dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian literary and national language started publishing in Belgrade. So far, 15 volumes have been published, the last one covering half way the letter N. Popularly, it was seen as the authoritative dictionary of the Serbian language. However, in official vocabulary, the Serbo-Croatian language was known as ‘Serbo-Croatian among the Serbs and ‘Croato-Serbian’ among the Croats. In order to emphasize the soughtfor unity of this bi-scriptural language, beginning in the 1970s, scholars and school textbooks spoke of the ‘Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian language.’ The 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia probably sealed the fate of this political-cumlexicographic effort. In the meantime, at the end of World War I, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes came into being. Article 2 of the 1921 Constitution proclaimed ‘Serbocroatoslovenian’ as the official language of this kingdom. The efforts to amalgamate Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian into a ‘Yugoslav language’ were stepped up after 1929 when the royal dictatorship was instituted and

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

229

the state was renamed as ‘Yugoslavia.’ Officially, the name ‘Serbocroatoslovenian’ was maintained and the de facto separate status of Slovenian and the bi-scriptural character of Serbo-Croatian were preserved. But the Štokavian (I)jekavian dialect of Bosnia, Dubrovnik, and Montenegro, which the Literary Agreement made into the compromise basis of Serbo-Croatian, was replaced with Štokavian Ekavian of Belgrade, another unmistakable sign that Yugoslavia was to become a Greater Serbia.29 The Slavic dialects of Macedonia, akin to Serbian and Bulgarian, were dubbed as ‘southern Serbian,’ and, sometimes, as ‘southern Serbo-Croatian’ or ‘southern Yugoslavian.’ The tradition of separate Slovenian literacy was strong enough to prevent the actual subsuming of this language into a common ‘Serbocroatoslovenian.’ However, the use of Slovenian was limited even in Slovenia where Serbo-Croatian (Yugoslav), as the official language of Yugoslavia, was gradually used in state institutions and offices, especially in the 1930s. Scholars mindful of official Yugoslavism and the Constitution, as well as of this linguistic reality, spoke of the ‘Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian literary language,’ and emphasized that Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs are a single, unified nation, ‘of one blood and one language.’ During World War II (that is, between 1941 and 1945 in the case of Yugoslavia), parts of Yugoslavia were annexed by the neighboring states, while the rest turned into separate polities of Croatia (together with Bosnia), Serbia, and Montenegro. At that time, the existence of the separate Croatian language was reaffirmed by the publication of various grammars and dictionaries. In wartime Croatia, Cyrillic and the glottonym ‘Serbo-Croatian’ were banned. Also, administrative steps were undertaken to cleanse Croatian of Serbianisms and other linguistic loans perceived as ‘foreign,’ or ‘un-Croatian.’ After the war, the communist leadership re-unified Yugoslavia and tried to defuse the previous politicization of language. In 1944, they agreed to the codification of ‘South Serbian’ into a separate language of Macedonian, and reaffirmed the existence of Slovenian as a separate language by dropping from the new Constitution the fiction of the Serbocroatoslovenian language. The latter decision calmed the fears of Slovenian nationalists, while the former allowed forestalling the Bulgarian claims to Yugoslav Macedonia on the grounds that Macedonian was a ‘dialect of Bulgarian.’ During the war, interwar Yugoslavia’s southern Serbia (that is, future Macedonia) found itself under Bulgarian occupation. Sofia’s official position was that the region’s Slavs were Bulgarians and they spoke Bulgarian.30 Obviously, the existence of a separate Croatian language written in Latin characters was denied. Interwar Yugoslavia’s official language of Serbocroatoslovenian was replaced with Serbo-Croatian. It was the bi-scriptural language, which actually had played the role of official Serbocroatoslovenian (Yugoslav) before 1941. Similarly, the fiction of the Serbo-Croatian (Yugoslav) nation was dropped from official documents, and in its stead, the kindred but separate nations of Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Serbs were recognized. In 1954, the

230 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Novi Sad agreement was signed, a re-confirmation of the Literary Agreement of 1850. The new document stated that the Štokavian-based language of the Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins was united, as well as reaffirmed the equality of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, and of the (I)jekavian and Ekavian pronunciation variants. Unlike in the Literary Agreement, the question of the name of the language was not avoided. The two official variants of the ‘unified language’ were to be known as ‘Croato-Serbian’ (Western, Latin script-based) and ‘Serbo-Croatian’ (Eastern, Cyrillic-based). In this manner, Serbo-Croatian united the three separate nations of Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs in their shared national language. In comparison with the interwar period, the Macedonians were allowed to leave the linguistic-cum-supra-national commonality of Serbo-Croatian. After 1948, Slavophone Muslims could declare themselves as ‘Muslim/Croatian,’ ‘Muslim/Serbian,’ or ‘Muslim/nationality undefined,’ but in 1953 the possibility was abolished, so there was no need to specify the Bosnian/Muslim nation in the Novi Sad agreement. (For the time being, those who did not feel themselves members of any of communist Yugoslavia’s recognized nations, could declare themselves as ‘Yugoslav/nationality undefined.’) New dictionaries and grammars were written to fortify the officially reinstated unity of the Serbo-Croatian language. In order to satisfy all the parties to this agreement, a plethora of official and semi-official designations appeared, ‘our language,’ ‘Serbo-Croatian,’ ‘Croato-Serbian,’ the ‘Croatian or Serbian language,’ or the ‘Serbian or Croatian language.’ The Croatian and Serbian variants were also termed as ‘western and eastern Serbo-Croatian,’ respectively. It happened that books bore notices that they were translated from Serbian into Croatian or vice versa. This, however, amounted rather to transliteration from one alphabet into another rather than to genuine translation (as in the case of translations done between Cyrillic-style Moldovan and Latin Script-based Romanian before 1989). All that was not enough. In 1967, Croatian scholars and intellectuals issued a ‘Declaration on the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language,’ which, in denial of the Novi Sad Agreement, stated that Croatian and Serbian were separate languages. Since the 1970s, the Croats have continued to use the term ‘Croatian literary language.’ The 1974 Constitution made Yugoslavia into a genuine federation composed of national republics. The republican Constitution of Croatia, promulgated in 1974, recognized the ‘Croatian literary language’ as the official name of the Croatian version of Serbo-Croatian. In popular speech, the term ‘Croatian’ frequently replaced ‘Serbo-Croatian’ in Croatia. The republican Constitutions of Bosnia and Montenegro also proclaimed their own Bosnian and Montenegrin sub-variants of Serbo-Croatian based on local dialects. The Serbs did not follow suit, satisfied with the Novi Sad Agreement. Hence, the unofficial glottonym ‘Serbian’ appeared less frequently in Serbia than ‘Croatian’ in Croatia. In sum, the 1974 constitutional recognition of the republican sub-varieties of Serbo-Croatian, on the one hand, respected the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

231

linguistic and national differences of Serbo-Croatian-speakers, but on the other, offered the possibility of dividing this language into new ones, should a political situation require this. Not surprisingly, as of the turn of the 1980s, all the official documents of the federal parliament in Belgrade were issued in Albanian, Macedonian, Magyar, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian. But in the spirit of the Novi Sad agreement and the 1974 Constitution, Serbo-Croatian documents had to be produced in three different dialectal and orthographic variants, typical of Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia (Bougarel 2003: 106; Carmichael 2000: 237; Frucht 2000: 518; Greenberg 2001: 21–23, 40; Janich and Greule 2002: 134, 167, 265–266, 284; Jaroszewicz 2004: 149; Markovi´c 2001; Naylor 1980: 82; Price 1998: 428–429; Šipka 1999: 69). The 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia reinforced the nationally motivated movements to reaffirm the separate existence of Croatian and Serbian. The most forgotten victim of these events were self-declared Yugoslavs, who numbered as many as 1.2 million. Not only were they deprived of their country, but of their ‘Yugoslav’ language too. Upon the 1991 declaration of the independence of Croatia, Štokavian (I)jekavian-based Croatian written in Latin characters was made into this polity’s official language. Appropriate dictionaries and grammars of the language followed. Yet, no multi-volume dictionary of the new standard has been published so far and no bilingual Croatian-Serbian dictionaries exist. To know the difference between Croatian and Serbian, users refer to the usually new school dictionaries that record lexical, pronunciation, and morphological differences between these two languages. In 1992, the New Yugoslavia (Serbian) authorities adopted the name ‘Serbian’ for the official language based on Ekavian and (I)jekavian Štokavian and written both in the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The Ekavian variant in Cyrillic was earmarked for Serbia and the (I)jekavian in both scripts for Montenegro. In Serbia, the glottonym ‘Serbo-Croatian’ persisted in the first half of the 1990s, but the term ‘Serbian’ took over in popular usage in the second half of this decade. The growing post-1991 international recognition of the split of Serbo-Croatian into Croatian and Serbian only reaffirmed this linguistic divorce. In addition, the breakaway Serbian Republics in Bosnia and Croatia’s Krajina declared in 1992 Štokavian Ekavian-based Serbian of Belgrade, written exclusively in Cyrillic, as their official language. This was an entirely politically motivated change because the dialect spoken by Bosnia’s and Krajina’s populations, whatever their religion or national identification, is (I)jekavian Štokavian. In this manner, the official Serbian of Bosnia’s and Krajina’s Serbs was twice removed as the official language of their Muslim (Bosniak) and Croatian neighbors, based on (I)jekavian Štokavian and written in Latin and Cyrillic characters. The new Serbian language of rump Yugoslavia and Bosnia’s and Krajina’s Serbs simply took over the Cyrillic-based tradition of Serbo-Croatian, so there has been no urgent need to produce new authoritative dictionaries of the Serbian

232 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

language. In Croatia, Croatian, written exclusively in the Latin script, was announced as the official language in 1990. Zagreb distanced their new Croatian language from the commonality of Serbo-Croatian by a concerted action of ‘linguistic purification.’ Hence, Serbo-Croatian studiously shunned by the Croats, became Serbian by default, and the Serbs did not have to Serbianize formerly common Serbo-Croatian in order to make it into a Serbian language. Furthermore, Cyrillic is quite enough to make Serbian different from Croatian written in Latin characters. With the privilege of hindsight, one may infer that the use of two different scripts for writing a single language eventually tends to make this language into two separate ones.31 In 1995, a Croatian offensive sent a wave of Serbian refugees from Krajina, sealing the fate of the unrecognized Serbian Republic in this region. The war in Bosnia ended in the same year upon the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. This document was prepared in English and in the three variants of the SerboCroatian, namely Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. All four idioms remain the official languages of this state to this day. Bosnian and Croatian share (I)jekavian pronunciation, whereas Bosnia’s Serbian Republic switched from Ekavian to (I)jekavian pronunciation in 1998. The codifiers of the Bosnian language refer to Bosanˇcica32 (local type of Cyrillic influenced by Glagolitic) and to the tradition of writing in Slavic with the use of the Arabic script (Arebica) as the roots of the contemporary Bosnian language. They also emphasize the Latin-script literacy that commenced during the times of the Austro-Hungarian occupation. The occupation authorities termed the local Slavic vernacular the ‘Bosnian language,’ especially after 1890 when the anonymously published grammar of the Bosnian language written by Frane Vuleti´c appeared anonymously in Sarajevo. When Serbo-Croatian was made into the official language of Bosnia in 1907, this grammar was reissued the following year but ‘Serbo-Croatian’ replaced ‘Bosnian’ in the title. As of 1918, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes/Yugoslavia Bosnia ceased to exist as a separate administrative unit. But the 1946 Constitution re-created Bosnia as a republic in the communist federation of Yugoslavia. In the meantime, the Slavic translation of the Koran was published in Arabic characters in Mostar in 1937 and 5 years later in Sarajevo. In 1968, Slavophone Muslims were given the opportunity to declare themselves as ‘Muslims in the ethnic sense.’ The 1971 census introduced the new national category ‘Muslim,’ but Muslims living outside Bosnia were discouraged from using this new category. The 1974 federal Constitution recognized the Slavophone Bosnian Muslims as a nation, and included them in the privileged set of the ‘Yugoslav nations,’ which also included the Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. This group perfectly coincided with the prewar group of the officially defined speakers of Serbocroatoslovenian. The 1974 republican Constitution of Bosnia also stipulated that Bosnia’s official language was the ‘(I)jekavian variant of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

233

Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian.’ (In 1984, the newly legislated existence of the Bosnian Muslim nation speaking their own sub-variant of Serbo-Croatian was popularized worldwide, when the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympic Games.) This seemingly innocent designation helped the dramatic rise of a new language during the 1990s. The 1992–1995 war in Bosnia reaffirmed the separateness of the Bosnian Muslim nation, now renamed as the Bosniaks, when neither local Croats nor Serbs wished any commonality with their Muslim neighbors or kin. The Bosniaks had no choice but to fight for their own nation-state and to steep their nationalism in language as their Croatian and Serbian neighbors did. In 1992, a dictionary of the characteristic vocabulary of the Bosnian language was published and 3 years later, its fourth edition was reissued as the dictionary of the Bosnian language. The Bosnian language is written in the Latin script. The Bosnian Muslim tradition of writing in Ottoman (Old Turkish), Arabic, and Persian that deeply infiltrated the Slavic vernacular allowed for making the Bosnian vocabulary different from Serbian and Croatian. In pronunciation, it is the fricative velar consonant /h/, which makes Bosnian distinctive, because this phoneme has been largely lost in Serbian, and to a lesser degree in Croatian. The persisting cultural dualism of Bosnian found its fullest expression in 2002, when the first Bosnian translations of the Koran and the Bible were published. As in the case of the absence of any bilingual dictionaries, which would pair Croatian and Serbian, no dictionaries pair Bosnian with these two languages either (Bougarel 2003: 106–107; Carmichael 2000: 238; Frucht 2000: 518, 891; Greenberg 2001: 25, 29, 2004: 86, 137–138, 145; Holywood Bible Translation for Bosnia 2003; Jahi´c 1999; Janich and Greule 2002: 13, 136–136, 262–263; Jaroszewicz 2004: 147, 216–220; Kuran 2003; Magaš 2003; Maxwell 2003; Okuka 1998: 54–55; Qarai 2004; Spaginska-Pruszak ´ 1997: 59; Šipka 1999: 15–17; Views 1999. It seems that the devolution of Serbo-Croatian has not finished yet. The breakup of Yugoslavia led the Montenegrin politicians and population to leave the commonality of the Serbian culture and language shared with the Serbs. Initially, the Montenegrins reaffirmed themselves as a separate nation on the economic plane. Podgorica replaced the inflationary Yugoslav Dinar with the Deutsche Mark and, after 2002, with the Euro. A year later rump Yugoslavia was overhauled into a loose confederation of the two nation-states of Serbia and Montenegro. Already in the 1970s, there were voices that the Montenegrins33 speak a language different from Serbian or Serbo-Croatian, that is, Montenegrin. The 1974 republican Constitution of Montenegro defined the official language of the Montenegrins as the ‘(I)jekavian variant of Serbo-Croatian.’ In 1992, the name of Montenegro’s official language was changed to the ‘(I)jekavian variant of Serbian,’ but officially written in Cyrillic and the Latin alphabet, unlike Serbia’s exclusively Cyrillic-based official language. The actual encroachments of Serbia’s

234 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Ekavian variant of the Serbian language in Montenegro, encouraged by Belgrade, brought about the protests of Montenegrin intellectuals under the slogan ‘our language is our fatherland.’ In 1994, they organized a conference that prevented the removal of (I)jekavian as a recognized sub-variant from official Serbian. In the same year, the Montenegrin branch of the international Pen Club declared that the language of Montenegro is Montenegrin. Since 1993, Vojislav Nikˇcevi´c (1935–) (University of Montenegro, Nikši´c) has published three 500-page volumes titled The Montenegrin Language, which contain a multifaceted description of this new standard-in-making. In 1997, his grammar of Montenegrin came off the press. The cultural-cum-national organization of the Montenegrins, Matica crnogorska (Montenegrin Cultural Society, established in 1993) proclaimed its support for the Montenegrin language in 1997. The proponents of this new language emphasize that it is based on the (I)jekavian version of the Štokavian dialect, which makes it different from Serbian based on Ekavian Štokavian. The Montenegrins also claim both the Latin script and Cyrillic as their national alphabets, unlike the Croats and the Bosniaks, who settled for the Latin alphabet. In the Montenegrin Cyrillic, there are 33 letters, while three less in the Serbian variety of this alphabet. The three additional Montenegrin letters for representing specifically Montenegrin phonemes /palatal ch/, /palatal zh/, and /dz/, are, [´s], [´z], and [з] in the Latin alphabet, and [´c], [з’], and [s] in Cyrillic. Montenegrin nationalists also claim that the epic poem, The Mountain Wreath (1847), written by the Montenegrin Vladika Petar II Petrovi´c Njegoš (ruled 1830– 1851), rightfully belongs to the Montenegrin nation, not to the Serbs. They also see Njegoš’s poetry as the beginning of the Montenegrin language. However, not a single extensive dictionary of the Montenegrin language has been published yet. Likewise, Podgorica has not announced it as the official language of Montenegro and international organizations do not recognize Montenegrin as a distinct language. During the 1999 Kosovo crisis (forced expulsion of Kosovo’s Albanians), which compromised Belgrade, Podgorica eager to distance Montenegro from another ‘Serbian war,’ issued some official Montenegrin documents described as done ‘in the Montenegrin language.’ A year later, the Matica crnogorska issued a declaration on the separate status of the Montenegrin language. In 2003, democratization swept Serbia, which Podgorica hoped to use in order to declare the independence of Montenegro. Under international pressure, the Montenegrin government relented and entered the confederal agreement with Serbia, valid for 3 years until 2006. In the 2003 census, 21.5 percent of Montenegro’s population declared Montenegrin as their native language. However, because many Serbs live in the country, the number of the declarations amounted to as much as 31.5 percent, when only the ethnic Montenegrins were taken into consideration. In the following year, Montenegro’s independence-minded Prime Minister, Milo Dukanovi´c (1962–),

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

235

declared himself as a speaker of Montenegrin. Also in 2004, the name of the compulsory school subject ‘Serbian Language’ was changed to ‘Mother Tongue (Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, Bosnian).’ Nowadays, about half of the contents posted on Montenegro’s governmental websites is labeled as ‘in Montenegrin.’ In 2006, Montenegro separated from Serbia, and both states became independent of each other. The question of the official language of Montenegro still remains to be decided in future. Ironically, Prince Nikola Petrovi´c Njegoš (1994–), the pretender to the Montenegrin throne who lives in Paris, speaks better French than Serbo-Croatian (Greenberg 2001: 33, 37–38, 2004: 103, 161; Montenegrin Language 2004, 2006; Okuka 2002; Spaginska-Pruszak ´ 1997: 61; Stegner 2006: 66). There have appeared a plethora of bilingual dictionaries of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in which these languages are paired with English, French or German. However, no bilingual dictionaries exist where Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian lexicons would be placed side by side. The partial exception to this rule is extensive school dictionaries of the Croatian language that point out Serbianisms to be avoided by learners. School dictionaries of Serbian and Bosnian tend to follow the same line. The former caution students to avoid Croatianisms, while the latter urge students to employ approved Bosnian words (often Turkicisms and Arabianisms). The extensive 2001 Norwegian-Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian dictionary utilizes Latin-script and Cyrillic versions of the words as well as notes the currently adopted lexical differences between the three post-Yugoslav languages. In this manner, the compilers endorse the political changes, while their work reflects the largely undifferentiated and common corpus of words. Interestingly, it is the third edition of the dictionary, which in its first edition (1990) described the ‘Serbocroatian’ language, and 5 years later, the ‘Serbian/Croatian’ languages in the second edition (Haugen et al. 2001). Dr Šipka’s 2002 slim dictionary notes a handful of significant lexical differences that exist between Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian at present. The gradual breakup of Yugoslavia brought about the elevation of new official languages. Croatian in Croatia, Serbian in Serbia and Montenegro, and also the two and Bosnian in Bosnia. The descriptions of the linguistic situation would not be complete without mentioning that the international administration of Bosnia also brought along English, while the 2006 breakup of Serbia-Montenegro may eventually entail the rise of the official language of Montenegrin. The international acceptance of the new linguistic pattern in the post-Yugoslav states is reflected in the publication of Ronelle Alexander and Ellen Elisa-Bursa´c’s comprehensive Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A textbook and Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar (Madison WI 2006). Furthermore, Wikipedia is available in all the three languages, and the Serbian Wikipedia, in the two scriptural versions, preferred Cyrillic and Latin. The Latin version of the Serbian Wikipedia is an open gate to the possible declaration of Montenegrin as a separate language. Should this

236 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

happen, the Latin version of the Serbian Wikipedia could be easily transformed into a Montenegrin Wikipedia. Significantly, the number of articles featured in the aforementioned Wikipedias was the largest in the Serbian one (at 43,000 in February 2007), which was followed by the Croatian Wikipedia (28,500 articles), and the Bosnian one (14,000 articles). The growth of the separatist Croatian national movement steeped in the idea of the separate Croatian language, which followed the 1967 Declaration, ´ also incited the revival of Croatian literacy in Cakavian and Kajkavian, as the clearest symbol of the movement’s intention of withdrawing Croatian from the Štokavian-based linguistic commonality of Serbo-Croatian. The proponents ´ of Cakavian pointed to the fact that the earliest Croatian writings were created in this language. Like historians of the Croatian language, they conflated ´ Cakavian with Church Slavonic, because the earliest Croatian writings in Slavic (written in Glagolitic, Bosanˇcica, and the Italian-style Latin script) were created ´ in northern and central Dalmatia, inhabited by Cakavian-speakers. Hence, the first printed book in Croatian (1483, in Glagolitic) was also the first printed ´ book in Cakavian, the first printed dictionary of Croatian (1595) was also that ´ of Cakavian, and the first grammar of Croatian (1604, written in Latin) was that ´ ´ of Cakavian. In a nutshell, the first centuries of Croatian literacy were Cakavian´ based. The early flowering of Cakavian-Croatian literacy was possible thanks to the close links of Dalmatia with Italy, which were not severed by the Ottoman advance in the Balkans. The Kajkavian-speakers did not enjoy a similar position, their region between the Drava and Sava rivers squeezed into the war borderland between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. The written Kajkavian language developed thanks to the Reformation in the shape of Hungarian Calvinism. Hence, the language was written in the Magyar version of the Latin script. The first printed Kajkavian book came off the press in 1574, the first dictionary was published in 1740, and the first grammar was printed in 1783, to be followed by four further ones. ´ Cakavian-speaking intellectuals constituted the core of the Croatian national movement, so they accepted Gaj’s 1836 linguistic reform, which produced the Štokavian-based Croatian language written in a Czech-style Latin script. ´ Cakavian publications in the Italian-style Latin alphabet ceased to be published by the mid-19th century. On the contrary, many Kajkavian-speaking intellectuals were alienated from the Croatian national movement by its close ideological ties with Catholicism and preferred to identify as members of the Hungarian political nation. That is why the last Kajkavian grammar, published in 1837, was written in the Magyar-style orthography to emphasize the Kajkavian opposition to Gaj’s new Croatian language. The pro-Hungarian attitude among the Kajkavian-speakers was extinguished by the excesses of Magyarization in the 1870s, when the last Kajkavian publications were re-printed. (The last Kajkavian book came off the press in 1859.) Despite their Calvinism, Kajkavian

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

237

intellectuals entered the mainstream of the Croatian national movement, so strongly connected to Catholicism. ´ The revival of Cakavian and Kajkavian at the beginning of the 20th century is associated with the poetry of Vladimir Nazor (1876–1949) and Antun Gustav Matoš (1873–1914), respectively. The insistence on the linguistic-cum-national unity in interwar and communist Yugoslavia hindered further development of ´ Cakavian and Kajkavian literacy. The 1967 Declaration was the turning point. In 1968, a Kajkavian periodical began to publish, and 6 years later, a Kajkavian soci´ ´ ety was founded in Zagreb. Similarly, a Cakavian society and its Cakavian journal were established in 1969 in Split. Like in the case of the regional languages (or ´ dialects) of Italian, the function of Cakavian and Kajkavian is limited to literary expression. Both are written in the regular Croatian Latin script, as codified by ´ Gaj in 1836. There are no normative dictionaries and grammars of Cakavian and Kajkavian, so authors write in their local dialects. The first volume of the dictionary of Croatian Kajkavian literary language came off the press in 1984 (Zagreb), ´ but the initiative got stalled. Practically, all Cakavianand Kajkavian-speakers are bi-dialectal (bilingual), and they are fully literate in standard (Štokavian) Croatian, not in their dialects (languages). Also, all of them identify as Croatians and sometimes use the dialectal (language) difference to present themselves as ‘better Croatians’ than regular Štokavian-speaking compatriots. ´ This Croatian increase of interest in Kajkavian and Cakavian, also led to Zagreb’s insistence on the Croatian character of Burgenland Croatian and Molisean Slavic. The former speech community is composed from the descendants ´ of mostly Cakavian-speaking Catholic refugees (40,000 to 50,000) who, at the turn of the 16th century, fled from Ottoman-held western Slavonia and northwestern Bosnia to Royal Hungary’s westernmost region of Burgenland, which was Vienna’s last bastion of protection against Ottoman onslaught. The name of the region (literally, ‘land of castles’) was translated into Croatian as ‘Gradišce.’ Burgenland’s Croats refer to their vernacular variably, as ‘Burgenland Croatian,’ ‘Burgenlandian,’ or ‘Croatian.’ The first manuscripts in this language were composed already in the 16th century and the first printed book was published in 1732. Father Juraj Mulih (1694–1754) was an early significant writer in Burgenland Croatian and the Barock poet, Father Josef Ficko (1772–1843), actually a Slovene, was another. At that time, Magyar orthography was employed to write the language. In the 19th century, lay literature made an appearance and Burgenland Croats adopted the Croatian-style Latin script during the last three decades of this century. The activist and linguist, Mate Merši´c Miloradi´c (1850–1928), established the first organization of Burgenland Croats, which began to publish the first newspaper in Burgenland Croatian (1910) and published Miloradi´c’s first grammar of this language (1919). After the Great War, mostly Germanspeaking Burgenland was divided between Hungary and Austria in 1921. This event left 35,000 Burgenland Croats in Austria and several thousand in Hungary.

238 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In 1952, the Burgenland Croatian translation of the New Testament came off the press, and was followed by a German-Burgenland Croatian-Croatian dictionary (1982) and a Burgenland Croatian-Croatian-German dictionary (1991). In Austria, Burgenland Croatian is employed in radio, television, Catholic masses, and is taught as a subject at school. Most Burgenland Croats do not know standard (Štokavian) Croatian and their vernacular of everyday communication is significantly Germanized. It was also the turn of the 16th century, when the Štokavian-speaking ancestors of the present-day Molisean Slavs, endangered by the Ottomans, left Dalmatia for the Adriatic coast of the Kingdom of Naples. Most of these Slavophone refugees and their descendants became Italianized by the end of the 18th century. But less than 4000 speakers of Molisean Slavic survive in three villages located in Italy’s region of Molise. Italians refer to them as ‘Slavs’ and to their vernacular as ‘Slavic.’ Only scholars speak of ‘Molisean Slavic,’ or ‘Molisean Croatian.’ The concerned Slavic-speakers themselves refer to their idiom as ‘speaking in our own manner.’ Giovanni de Rubertis (1813–1889) wrote poetry in the vernacular and translated into it from Italian, which commenced the language’s written tradition. In 1967, the first periodical in Molisean Slavic (tellingly titled Our Language) began publishing. It was bilingual, Italian-Slavic. The first grammar of ‘Molisean Croatian’ came off the press in 1968, and was followed by a small dictionary 4 years later. Nowadays, Zagreb claims both speech communities of Molisean Slavs and Burgenland Croats as part of the ethnolinguistically-defined Croatian nation. In the case of the former, it perhaps will not prevent their eventual Italianization, whereas Burgenland Croats mostly agree with Zagreb’s position, though have no intention of emphasizing their Croatianness by giving up German (or Magyar in Hungary) and mastering standard Croatian. Inevitably, the linguistically justified breakup of Yugoslavia into separate ethnolinguistic nation-states, followed by the parallel fragmentation of the Serbo-Croatian language, evoked renewed interest in language as an instrument of ideology among Serbian intellectuals. Even earlier, it was a commonplace to hear that Serbian is the ‘most perfect language in the world,’ because it presumably enjoys ‘perfect’ one-to-one matching between letters and phonemes. In the 1990s, there were published extensive scholarly works, which aim to ‘prove’ that the Serbs are the ‘oldest nation on Earth,’ they are the ‘lost tribes of Israel,’ Serbian, not Greek, culture spawned the pantheon of ‘Olympic gods,’ Serbian is the ‘oldest language of the Bible,’ and actually it is the ‘oldest human language’ from which all other languages sprang up. The last proposal is uncannily reminiscent of the ‘Sun Theory’ (Güne¸s Dil Teorisi) of the Turkish language, which was officially espoused in Turkey during the latter half of the 1930s in order to justify borrowing words from Western languages. If these languages sprang up from Old Turkish, such borrowing did not contradict the overall drive to purify Turkish of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

239

all ‘foreign’ (mainly Arabic and Persian) words. Worryingly, Serbian academic circles seem to support the aforementioned ethnolinguistic myths, which are presented to public at large as ‘scientific findings.’ In addition, in 2005, Belgrade entered the annals of language- and nationbuilding again, when the republican authorities of Vojvodina recognized the region’s Bunjevci and Šokci as nations, and their right to education in their own national languages. Zagreb has traditionally claimed the members of both ethnic groups as part of the Croatian minority in Serbia, hence this official recognition, much to Croatia’s anger, subtracted them from this minority. With time, the step may generate two new Slavic languages, or more likely a single Bunjevcian-Šokcian language, because, in the 2002 Serbian census, the former group numbered 20,000 members and the latter 1800. (In the 2001 Hungarian census, 1500 people also declared themselves to be Bunjevci, or bunyevácok in Magyar.) They are descendants of (I)jekavian Štokavian-speaking Catholic refugees from Ottoman-held Herzegovina and Dalmatia, who, at the turn of the 18th century, arrived in Hungary’s Vojvodina alongside more numerous emigration of (I)jekavian and Ekavian Štokavian-speaking Orthodox Serbs. The Bunjevci and the Šokci were included as separate national categories in the Hungarian censuses from 1880 to 1947, initially in order to prevent the possibility of the penetration of Croatian nationalism from eastern Slavonia to Vojvodina. After World War I, the inclusion of both groups in statistics allowed for lessening the number of Croats and Serbs in interwar Hungary. Vojvodina’s Bunjevci and Šokci were often referred to as ‘Catholic Serbs,’ and to make good on this sobriquet, 1200 Šokci converted to Orthodoxy in 1899, which led to the Šokci’s gradual merger with the Serbs. The Bunjevci preserved a clearer separate ethnolinguistic identity. In 1880, they organized their party, and in 1913, their school association. In 1918, it was the Great National Assembly of Serbs, Bunjevci, and Other Slavs, which gathered in Szabadka (Subotica) and demanded the incorporation of Vojvodina into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In interwar Yugoslavia, Magyar orthography still used in handwritten documents was replaced with the Latin script variety of Serbo-Croatian spelling for writing the Bunjevcian language, however, Bunjevcian publications had utilized this script since the 1860s. After having become similar to SerboCroatian, the language was gradually suppressed, though the aforementioned Bunjevcian school association survived until the early 1930s. Between 1925 and 1935, the teacher of the Subotica secondary school, Milivoj V Kneževi´c (1899–1973), published a cultural monthly, which encouraged the Bunjevcian identification. In 1931, his crowning achievement, a chrestomathy of Bunjevician texts created between 1790 and 1927, came off the press. Significantly, it included a chapter on the Bunjevician language and orthography. In communist Yugoslavia, it was announced that the Bunjevci and Šokci are part of the Croatian nation, but they preferred to send their children to Serbian

240 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

schools instead. Hence, beginning with the 1953 census, the Bunjevci and Šokci were listed separately, with the exception of the 1971 census. The Bunjevcian national movement became active in the 1990s and its views were expressed in a quarterly. In 2005, the National Committee of the Bunjevcian National Minority was founded, and a Bunjevcian monthly began publishing. In the following year, their cultural-cum-national association (Bunjevacka matica) opened in Subotica, and Hungary’s Bunjevci requested Budapest to recognize them as a national minority. Beginning in the school year 2006/2007, the subject ‘Bunjevcian language and national culture’ was introduced to schools. Bunjevcian and Šokcian schools employ a slightly vernacularized version of (I)jekavian Štokavian more frequently written in Latin than Cyrillic characters, which makes this language-under-construction quite similar to Croatian and Bosnian. The Bunjevcian leadership’s most pressing goal is to codify the Bunjevcian language (Bunjevaˇcke novine 2006; Dulichenko 2003: 85–86, 128–129, 2004: 69–71, 100–102, 380; Ethnic Groups of Vojvodina 2005; Janich and Greule 2002: 270–272; Jaroszewicz 2004: 290; Jovanovich et al. 2004: 71; Kornhauser 2000; Miroljub et al. 2005; Todosijevi´c 2002; Tornow 2005: 448, 459; Weaver 2006: 116–120).

Albanian NATO’s 1999 intervention in Serbia’s Kosovo (or Kosova in Albanian) caused the de facto replacement of the official Serbian (Cyrillic-based Serbo-Croatian) language with Albanian. (Like in Bosnia, English is a co-official language of the international administration of this province, while Serbian is retained in official capacity in a handful of Serbian villages.) In this manner, following Albania, Kosovo(a) became the second polity, where Albanian functions as an official language. This is an Indo-European language but not related to any other languages in this family (like Greek and Armenian). The self-ethnonym of the Albanians is Shqiptarë. The name ‘Albanian’ is believed to derive from the Albanoi, an Illyrian tribe who lived in what is now north-central Albania. Ptolemy (100–170) mentioned this group. Because his map of the world provided until the 18th century the usual point of reference for Western Europeans to describe and analyze the geographic and ethnic realities of Europe, Africa, and Asia; the 13th century Latin writers began to refer to the Shqiptarë as ‘Albanians.’ As in the First Millennium BCE, the Indo-European Illyrians settled in the Western Balkans, some claim that Albanians are their descendants and explain that their ethnonym stems from Illyrian alba for ‘settlement’ or ‘locality.’ But it seems a farfetched guess, as there are no extant continuous texts in Illyrian. Similarly, apart from a handful of words, no texts in Thracian are surviving, which makes improbable the Bulgarian and Romanian claims of having identified Thracian linguistic influences in both languages. To complicate matters

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

241

more, some scholars also proposed that the Albanians are of Thracian, or mixed Thracian-Illyrian origin. In addition, the confusion continues between Albania and Caucasian Aghvania (Albania). Although it seems improbable that the Albanians stem from the Aghvanians, an Aghvanian influence might reach the Albanians in the 9th and 10th centuries. In the 9th century, the Byzantine authorities resettled many proponents of Paulicianism (a Manichean heresy that arose in the 7th century) from the Caucasus to the Balkans to weaken this heresy in the borderland exposed to the Islamic conquest of Arabs. From the ethnolinguistic viewpoint, Paulicians were Armenians and Aghvanians. In the Balkans, in the 11th century, Paulicianism evolved into Bogomilism, which was the beginning of the specific Bosnian Church. Prior to the emergence of the modern self-ethnonym Shqiptarë in the mid-16th century (for the first time it was recorded in 1555 by the Catholic Gheg, Gjon Buzuku, in his missal), North Albanians (Ghegs) refereed to themselves as Arbën, and South Albanians (Tosks) Arbër. Hence, the self-ethnonym Arbëreshë of the present-day Italo-Albanians (numbering about 100,000) in southern Italy and Sicily, whose ancestors, in the wake of the Ottoman wars, emigrated from their homeland in the 14th century. These self-ethnonyms perhaps influenced the Byzantine Greek Arvanites for ‘Albanians,’ which was followed by similar ones in Bulgarian and Serbian (Arbanasi), Ottoman (Arnaut), Romanian (Arb˘ anas), and Aromanian (Arbine¸s). This convinced some linguists that the ethnonym may be derived from Greek orfos for ‘dark,’ Greek orfanos for ‘orphan,’ Latin arvum for ‘arable field,’ or the Illyrian place-name Arbona. Serbian scholars also maintain that the name is basically Albanian and means ‘inhabitant of the town of Krujë’ (located in modern-day Albania), which, in the mid-15th century, was the capital of a short-lived Albanian statelet that won independence from the Ottoman Empire. It is clear that scholars and Albanians themselves agree that they do not agree on any single etymology of the ethnonym ‘Albanian.’ A similar predicament is faced by the self-ethnonym Shqiptarë. The most popular scholarly explanation is that it was formed by analogy to ‘Slavs’ (*Slovene), believed to be derived from slovo (‘word’), and by extension, from *sluti (‘to speak clearly.’) The last explanation semantically contrasts with Slavic Niemiec (‘mute,’ ‘stammering,’ ‘babbling’), and Greek ‘barbarian’ (from barbaros ‘those who stammer, babble’), Hence, Shqiptarë could be derived from Albanian shqipoi (from Latin excipere) for ‘to speak clearly, to understand.’ The Albanian public favors the belief that their self-ethnonym stems from shqipe (‘eagle’) found on the Albanian national flag. Others believe that it is derived from shqep (‘to rip, to tear’), or qipi (‘heap’), which alludes to a ‘gathering of people.’ Likewise, the etymologies of the regional self-ethnonyms of the Albanians, ‘Gheg’ and ‘Tosk’ are merely tentative. Tosk (Toskë) is claimed to stem from Italian Tuscan for ‘Tuscanian’ (that is, ‘inhabitant of Tuscany’). The etymology

242 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of the Italian word is Latin Tuscus for ‘Etruscan.’ The question is why the Tosks, who are Muslim and Orthodox, would adopt the name of a Catholic region from the Apennine Peninsula. Gheg (Gegë) seems to be derived from an onomatopoeic word for ‘babbling,’ as contrasted with Shqiptarë, or ‘those who speak clearly, correctly.’ If the explanation holds, by default, it would mean that the Tosks are those who ‘speak clearly.’ But this is an illogical proposal, for the self-ethnonym Shqiptarë seems to have originated among the Ghegs. Hence, this explanation probably was dictated by the purging of the Gheg dialect (language) and culture in communist Albania, carried out by the anti-Gheg and predominantly Tosk leadership of the communist party (Honzák et al. 2001: 23, 25; Livingstone 1977: 67, 387–388; Mojdl 2005: 24; Orel 1998: 7, 112, 434, 460; Pipa 1989: 150–160, 165, 188–189; Prifti 1978: 11–12; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 57; Skok 1971: 55; Stegner 2006: 61, 67). The two significantly different (even to the point of unintelligibility in speech) groups of Albanian dialects were separated by the River Shkumbin. The situation between Gheg- and Tosk-speakers can be likened to that between Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia. Before the division of Czechoslovakia, Czechs and Slovaks tended to easily communicate with each other speaking their languages. Ghegs and Tosks can easily communicate in such a fashion, but it is a hard job for a Gheg to acquire Tosk Albanian, and vice versa. Hence, the controversy (as in the case of Czech and Slovak before 1945) whether Gheg and Tosk are dialects or separate languages. The border between Ghegs and Tosks is a reflection of cultural division. Following the division of the Roman Empire in 395, the Albanian-speaking areas found themselves in the Eastern Empire (Byzantium), but the ecclesiastical organization remained under Rome’s jurisdiction in this region. The Great Schism of 1054 placed Southern Albanians (Tosks) under Constantinople’s (Orthodox) ecclesiastical jurisdiction, while North Albanians (Ghegs) remained within Rome’s Catholic Church. At the same time, the homeland of Albanianspeakers frequently changed hands among different polities. At the turn of the 8th century, the first Bulgarian Empire incorporated it. In 1014, it returned to the Byzantine Empire, but in 1081, Normans (Norsemen) seized the littoral, which passed to Venice at the end of the 12th century. In 1183, a local Albanian polity emerged, but was incorporated into the (ethnically Byzantine Greek) Despotate of Epirus (founded in 1205), following the establishment of the Latin Empire (Romania) in Constantinople in 1204. Like the Latin Empire, this despotate was controlled by crusaders from Western Europe. In the mid-13th century, the second Bulgarian Empire seized the control of the northern half of the Albanian homeland, and a century later, the entire homeland was incorporated into Serbia. Meanwhile, Venice had to share the littoral with Ragusa and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. This kingdom controlled the vicinity of the port of Dyrrhachium (Durrës), which emerged as a separate Albanian crusader statelet at the turn of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

243

the 14th century. In the second half of the century, its center moved inland to Skutari (Shkodër). At the beginning of the 15th century, the Ottoman conquest of the Albanian homeland commenced. In 1443, an Albanian noble, Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu (Skanderberg, 1405–1468), won back from the Ottomans the land between Dyrrhachium and Skutari, and established the capital in Krujë. Albanian nationalists made Skënderbeu into the most hailed Albanian national hero, and his symbol of black eagle became the Albanian national coat-of-arms. After Skënderbeu’s death, the Ottomans reincorporated his statelet. In addition, Venice lost the port of Butrinto (Butrint) to the Ottoman Empire. In the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous Albanian-speakers converted to Islam. This shaped their final confessional division. The Ghegs are Muslim and Catholic, with a smattering of Orthodox, while the Tosks profess Islam and Orthodox Christianity. Significantly, the Tosks account for one-third of Albanians, whereas the Ghegs for two-thirds. The division between the Ghegs and the Tosks deepened within the Ottoman Empire, when they found themselves split between two different administrative regions, which, under the leadership of local magnates, became semi-independent between the mid-18th century and the 1820s. Unlike other Balkan national movements, the Albanians, divided confessionally and with no tradition of some great statehood, had no choice but to rally exclusively under the banner of their specific language. In 1913, Albania emerged as an independent nation-state, but half of the Ghegs were left out in neighboring Serbia (Kosovo, Macedonia) and Montenegro. As a result, Albania’s population was in half composed from Tosks and in half from Ghegs. Due to their confessional diversification, in the past, Albanian scribes used five variants of the Latin alphabet, the Serbian variety of Cyrillic, two versions of the Greek alphabet, and the Arabic script to write in their vernacular. The oldest extant handwritten Albanian text (1462) is in Latin characters as well as the first printed book, a missal (1555). The first dictionary of Albanian (1635) paired this language with Latin, and labeled the former as ‘Epirean’ (epiroticum), but later the usual adjective ‘Albanian’ prevailed. All the three works were in Gheg and in the Latin script. The first extant Tosk text (done in Greek characters) dates back to the late 15th century, and the first book (in the Latin script) came off the press in 1562, though actually it is in Arbëresh, the idiom of the Italo-Albanians (Arbëreshë), which is a form of Tosk. Later, not only the Gheg, Tosk, and Arbëresh traditions of writing developed separately, but also split along confessional lines. Muslim Ghegs and Tosks wrote in Arabic characters, Catholic Tosks and Arbëreshë in the Latin script, Orthodox Tosks in the Greek alphabet, and Orthodox Ghegs in Cyrillic. In the 18th century, this staggering disunity in script and literacy contributed to the rise of the theory on the lost Illyro-Thracian ‘Old Albanian script,’ in which, once upon a time, all Albanians wrote. It inspired the Albanian (Gheg) intellectuals in

244 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Elbasan to develop a brand new Albanian script based on the Greek running hand but specifically modified under the influence of Glagolitic, and with letters also borrowed from the Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Instead of unifying, the new alphabet further diversified Albanian literacy. Another specifically Albanian script based on the Greek hand was developed in the first half of the 19th century. In the 1850s, Konstandin Nelko Kristoforidhi (1827–1895) traveled around the West and in the Middle East thanks to an Austrian vice-consul’s help. The British and Foreign Bible Society commissioned him to translate the New Testament into Albanian. His Gheg translation in the Latin script (1872) and Tosk in the Greek alphabet (1879) published in Istanbul, drew on Vangel Meksi’s 1827 Tosk translation in Greek characters, which was printed in Corfu, and reprinted in 1852 in the Greek capital of Athens. Kristoforidhi authored a grammar of Albanian written in Greek (1882), and an Albanian-Greek dictionary (1904). In the 1880s, the Albanian society Dritë (Light), based in Bucharest and sponsored by the Romanian government, developed a brand new script, which was a combination of Greek and Latin letters. Kristoforidhi supported this effort fearing that sticking to the Greek script would result in the eventual Hellenization of the Albanians. The Albanian national movement did not take the Arabic script into consideration, because the West deemed it, like all things Ottoman, backward and antithetical to the Western idea of progress. In 1908, at a congress in Monastir (today, Bitola in Macedonia), Gheg and Tosk leaders adopted an exclusively Latin alphabet for Albanian, called Bakshimi (Unity). It is used to this day. The script contains two diacritical letters and nine digraphs, which made it different from the Latin (Croatian) alphabet of Serbo-Croatian, which employed diacritical letters in preference to diagraphs. Five years later, the Albanian nation-state came into being. During World War I, when Albania was under Austro-Hungarian occupation, the Literary Committee, which convened in Shkodër in 1916, decided to base standard Albanian on the south Gheg dialect of Elbasan. But the provision was not implemented, so Albanian literature and publications continued to be written both in Gheg and Tosk during the interwar period. The tradition of the equal status of the two varieties had commenced with the journal Albania (1897–1909), which contained Gheg and Tosk texts. Between 1908 and 1944, the average Albanian book production was 21 titles per year. The publishing industry took off in earnest only in communist Albania, when following the Soviet model, the ideal of full literacy was harnessed in the service of propaganda. In 1944, Albanian (mainly Tosk) communist forces freed the country from German occupation. However, many Ghegs perceived this event as the Tosk conquest of the Gheg lands. The interwar King of Albania, Zog I (reigned 1928– 1939), and many of his retainers were Ghegs. Thus, the brunt of the communist regime’s reform was mostly directed against Ghegs. Suitably, in 1952, Gheg

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

245

denigrated as a ‘class enemy language’ was replaced with Tosk as the basis of standard Albanian. The Toskicization of Albanian proceeded with the publication of the official principles of grammar and orthography in 1956 and 1967. This put Ghegs at a pronounced disadvantage as those who could not speak ‘proper Albanian.’ To alleviate this situation, special textbooks were published to teach Ghegs this ‘proper Albanian.’ The cultural revolution (1966–1969), not only abolished any religion (1967), but also wiped out the last remaining Gheg traces from Albanian language and culture. Gheg-based Albanian continued to be employed in Yugoslavia (Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro). Yugoslavia’s Albanians disliked Belgrade’s refusal to grant them a full-fledged national republic. In 1968, as a protest and a form of pressure on Yugoslavia’s communist leadership, Kosovo’s Albanian scholars gathered in Priština (Prishtinë in Albanian) and resolved to adopt Albania’s Tosk-based standard. Interestingly, only in 1972, Tirana officially elevated this standard under the name of ‘unified literary Albanian.’ It happened at the Congress of Orthography, convened under the slogan ‘one nation, one literary language.’ Three years later, in order to fortify the ethnolinguistic homogeneity of the nation, the Albanization campaign of Greek, Slavic and other non-Albanian personal names was undertaken. Until the mid-20th century, there had been no monolingual dictionaries of Albanian published. The codification of the language’s lexicon was possible thanks to bilingual dictionaries with explanations in German (1853), Greek (1904), Italian (1909), and English (1948). The first monolingual dictionary of the Albanian language came off the press in 1954, and was followed by two others in 1980 and 1985. But to this day, no multi-volume authoritative dictionary of Albanian has been published. The communist regime collapsed in Albania in 1990. This allowed for the renewal of contacts with Albanians in Yugoslavia. In 1992, Gheg writers issued a declaration that literacy in their dialect should continue. One-third of the Albanian-speakers (that is, 2 million) live outside Albania, in Kosovo, southern Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Because they speak Gheg, the discussion on what should be the dialectal foundation of standard Albanian, still continues. The expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo in 1999, intensified Albanian-Kosovo ties, and although de jure Kosovo(a) remained a Serbian province, de facto it was an international protectorate, before it gained a separate statehood in 2008. Skopje’s blatant disregard for the cultural and political rights of Albanians in Macedonia, triggered a near-civil war in 2001, which brought about an aggressive international reaction (with Tirana’s participation) to forestall the outbreak of another war in the Balkans. Eventually, when the political and economic concerns are settled, the renewed language question will have to be dealt with. In this regard, the Albanian (Gheg) universities in Priština (Kosovo) and Tetovo (Tetova in Albanian, Macedonia) will constitute a force to be counted with. The world-famous Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare, opined that an Albanian of the

246 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

future would have to make some concessions to Gheg in order to remain a unified language. If it does not happen, and the international community does not permit an independent Kosova to join Albania, a new nation of the Kosovans may emerge, complete with its own Gheg-based Kosovan language. This would make Kosova into a seventh post-Yugoslav ethnolinguistic nation-state in the wake of Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. The near suppression of religion in communist Albania resulted in the replacement of the erstwhile religious differences (Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic) with the politicization of the Gheg-Tosk linguistic cleavage. Not surprisingly then, the first Albanian translation of the Koran was published in 1992, and the first full translation of the Bible came off the press a year later. Obviously, both Holy Books were translated into Tosk-based standard Albanian. Perhaps, in the near future, they will be followed by translations into a new compromise GhegTosk standard, or a separate Gheg standard (Dedes 2000: 85; Faulmann 1880: 181–182; Frucht 2000: 14, 292; Grimes 1996: 465; Hetzer 1984: 48–49, 89–90, 125; Honzák et al. 2001: 24–25; Janich and Greule 2002: 2–5; Magocsi 2002: 85, 200; Mojdl 2005: 24–27; Pipa 1989: xii, 1–6, 14, 40, 100, 246–247; Price 1998: 6–7; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 246; Qarai 2004; Riis 2002: 11).

Macedonian Another language that is connected to the sad fate of Yugoslavia, or the failed nation-state of the South Slavs, is Macedonian. The Macedonian national movement was that of Orthodox Slavs living in the last sizeable Ottoman region in the Balkans squeezed between Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. This national movement originated through the emulation of the successful nationalisms that had earlier spawned the aforementioned nation-states. Neither did the Macedonian nationalists wish to become part of the already established neighboring nations nor to accept Islam. As a result, early Macedonian nationalists started appealing for their own nation-state during the last three decades of the 19th century. The 1912 division of Ottoman Macedonia among Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece shattered their hopes. The position of a distant borderland, contested by several polities had been characteristic of Macedonia since the arrival of Slavs in the Balkans during the 6th century. At that time, Macedonia with its capital in Thessalonicae (Thessaloníki) was a province in the East Roman Empire (Byzantium). In 837, the Bulgars seized most of the province. Upon the liquidation of the first Bulgarian Empire, Macedonia returned to Byzantium in 1018. In 1081 and 1096, Normans raided Macedonia, and in the 12th century, this land was continually contested by Bulgaria, the crusader Despotate of Epirus, the crusader Latin Empire, and Serbia. Between 1204 and 1246, the crusader Kingdom of Thessalonicae flourished in southern Macedonia. In 1206, the rest of Macedonia was incorporated in the second Bulgarian Empire. The

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

247

renewed Byzantine Empire regained Macedonia in 1256, but the Despotate of Epirus seized the western section of this province. In 1331, Byzantium lost Macedonia to Serbia, and the Ottomans conquered it in 1371. In the Ottoman Empire, all the orthodox Christians were grouped in the nonterritorial Roman (that is, Greek) millet, established in 1453. This translated into the growing influence of Greek language and culture in Slavophone Orthodox areas. The first ever printshop on the territory of what is present-day Macedonian nation-state, founded in 1710, produced exclusively books in Greek. Written Slavic survived in manuscripts, written and copied in monasteries. Beginning in the mid-16th century, local spoken Slavic infiltrated the Church Slavonic of these manuscripts, which also amounted to a Greek influence, because most Slavic books were translations from the Greek, and at the same time spoken Greek influenced the antiquated standard of Byzantine Greek. In the 18th century, the Russian cultural influence entered the Balkans’ Slavophone areas channeled via Church Slavonic religious books printed for the region in Moscow and Kiev (Kyiv). Some of these books were produced in Venice and the Habsburgs’ Croatia, as well. The decisive thrust of Hellenization commenced with the liquidation of the Slavic Archbishopric of Ohrid in 1792. (The Slavic place-name was replaced with Greek, Lychnidus.) The Phanariot administration, which, to a degree, encouraged Romanian-language culture in Walachia and Moldavia, saw the Balkans south of the Danube as ‘rightfully belonging’ to the Constantinople Patriarchate, because these lands had constituted part of the Eastern Roman Empire. This empire (Byzantium) was Greek in language and culture, hence Greek nationalists saw it as ‘their’ state, which they aspired to ‘re-establish’ in the form of a Greek nation-state. In the Ottoman Empire, Greek nationalists deemed the patriarchate and the Orthodox millet to be an ersatz of Greek state, and the guideline in accordance with which the future Greek national polity should be built. Given the coalescing ethnolinguistic-cum-religious character of fledgling Greek nationalism, the Orthodox Greek hierarchy saw to the destruction of numerous Slavic manuscripts in Slavic Orthodox monasteries located in Macedonia. Obviously, the Ottoman administration brought about Islamicization of the population in Macedonia (especially Albanians), and the growing influence of Turkic on the Slavic vernacular. Given the Greek influence, it is not surprising that in the 19th century, a handful of authors employed Greek letters to write in the Slavic vernacular, though the majority of Slavic manuscripts were written in Cyrillic. Some Slavic books were printed in the Greek script as well. The Slavic Gospel published in 1852 in Sel¯anik (Thessaloníki) is most famous. The 19th century writers from the then Ottoman territory coinciding with modern Macedonia called their language ‘Bulgarian,’ ‘Bulgaro-Serbian,’ and ‘Slavic.’ It is popular to trace the history of the modern Macedonian language to the Orthodox monk Daniel’s (Daniil Moschopolitis) Lexikon Tetraglosson, or dictionary of four languages, Greek, Albanian,

248 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Valachian (Aromanian), and Slavic (irrespective of language, all the entries were written in Greek letters), published in 1794 (Moscopole/Moschopolis, today, Voskopojë in Albania), reprinted in 1802, and re-published as a dictionary of three languages in 1841. But the main aim of this dictionary was to spread the knowledge of Greek among the Balkans’ non-Greek-speaking Orthodox. However, numerous handwritten copies of this dictionary, which circulated on the territory of present-day Macedonia, facilitated the development of Slavophone education, which continued in monastery schools, mostly established in the 18th century. The adjective ‘Macedonian’ for referring to the language and the people who spoke it appeared only in the 1850s. However, Macedonian linguists identify either Lexikon Tetraglosson, or a religious book in Slavic vernacular (1814) as the first printed book in ‘modern Macedonian.’ The first elementary schools with Slavic as the medium of instruction opened in the 1830s, but Greeklanguage schools predominated. Hence, each Slavic-speaker with a smattering of education could write better Greek than the not yet standardized Slavic vernacular. (Similarly, until the mid-19th century, in the Austrian Empire, Czech, Ruthenian [Rusyn and Ukrainian], Slovak, and Slovenian nationalists wrote better German than their national languages.) The trend changed during the 1870s. The idea of a separate Macedonian language can be traced back to G’or’gija (Georgija) Pulevski’s (1820/1828–1895) grammar of Macedonian, written in 1865, and eventually published in Belgrade in 1880. Meanwhile, his textbook, Dictionary of Four Languages, remained in print in Belgrade. In this work, he paired Macedonian under the name of ‘Serbo-Albanian’ with Serbian, Greek, Ottoman, and ‘Arbano-Arnautian’ (Albanian). Pulevski’s temporary pro-Serbian attitude was countered by his contemporary Kuzman Shapkarev (1834–1909), who in the 1860s and 1870s, published textbooks of the ‘Western Macedonian (Ohrid) dialect united with the written dialect of Bulgarian.’ In the 1890s, when Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian had been established as standard languages, the Macedonian linguistic question flared up in earnest. Four competing concepts emerged. Shapkarev, in emulation of the example of dualistic Serbo-Croatian, proposed there should be a united MacedonianBulgarian language common for the two closely related nations of Macedonians and Bulgarians. The Serbian scholar and diplomat, Stojan Novakovi´c (1842– 1915), proposed that Macedonian should be constructed from three-quarters of local vernacular linguistic elements and one-quarter of Serbian. Grigor Prlichev (1830–1893), an intellectual writing in Bulgarian and Greek, hoped to counter the dominance of Greek culture and language by creating a common Slavic language steeped in the Russian and Bulgarian recensions (varieties) of Church Slavonic. The intellectual father of separate Macedonian language was Pulevski, who composed his works in the local Slavic vernacular of Macedonia. Bulgarian intellectuals rejected the concept of common MacedonianBulgarian language, proposed in the spirit of Yugoslavism (Illyrianism), which

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

249

sought to mold all the South Slavs into a single nation. They considered the Macedonians part of the Bulgarian nation, and the Macedonian language a dialect of Bulgarian. This Bulgarian conviction was learned by the great success, which Bulgarian nationalism achieved in 1870. Sultan Abdülaziz (reigned 1861– 1876) eager to stem Greek irredentism, agreed to the creation of Bulgarian Exarchate. It was an intermediate entity between archbishopric and patriarchate, but for all practical purposes, the autocephalous Bulgarian Orthodox Church. What differed it from a full-fledged patriarchate was the location of the seat of the exarchate outside its territory, in Constantinople. Bulgarian leaders saw the exarchate as a cross of millet and national Church, and identified the exarchate’s territory as a future Bulgarian nation-state. The exarchate coincided with present-day Bulgaria, Macedonia, and southern Serbia. Bulgarian national leaders justified the territorial extent of the exarchate in two ways. First, they took over the Greek concept of identifying all the Orthodox living on the territory of the East Roman Empire (mainly the Balkans south of the Danube) as the Greek nation, but limited it to Orthodox Slavs. Second, they argued that the exarchate coincided with the core of the first Bulgarian Empire, and most importantly, included Ohrid. In 893, Symeon I (reigned 893–927), the first Bulgarian ruler to use the title of Tsar (Emperor), founded the Bulgarian Patriarchate with the seat in this town, and replaced Greek with Church Slavonic as the official language. St Cyril and St Methodius’s pupils expelled from Greater Moravia after the latter’s death (885), had found safe haven in Bulgaria. From among them, St Clement (Kliment, 830–916) was nominated the first Bulgarian Patriarch. Soon, Ohrid developed into the first significant center of Slavonic literacy, scholarship, and education. In the 970s, Kievan Rus and Byzantium defeated the Bulgarian Empire, and the territories coinciding with the present-day Bulgaria (along with the capital of Preslav) were annexed by both invading polities. After a period of chaos, in 997, Bulgarian Emperor Samuel (reigned 976–1014) moved the capital to Ohrid, and with the help of the Holy Roman Empire, reestablished the truncated Bulgarian Empire, which historians dub the ‘Western Bulgarian Empire.’ Nationally-minded Macedonian historians name this polity as the ‘Macedonian Empire,’ and perceive it as the first state of the Slavophone Macedonians. However, contemporary Byzantine and Church Slavonic documents consistently referred to Samuel’s empire as ‘Bulgarian.’ Later, in the Ottoman Empire, the designation ‘Bulgarian’ referred to all the Slavs living in Rumelia, or the Ottoman Balkans. In 1878, Russia imposed on the Ottoman Empire the Treaty of San Stefano (Ye¸siliköy, Ayastefanos in Greek), which created a Bulgarian nation-state whose borders reflected those of the Bulgarian Exarchate, and included almost entire historical Macedonia, less the region’s capital of Sel¯anik (Thessaloníki). The subsequent Treaty of Berlin (1878) overturned the terms of San Stefano. Much to the outcry of Bulgarian nationalists, Bulgaria was confined to a much smaller territory, and Macedonia was returned to the Ottomans. Subsequently, Bulgaria,

250 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Greece, and Serbia contested Macedonia. The Ottoman authorities tacitly recognized the Bulgarian and Greek ‘cultural right’ to this region, and did not hinder the establishment of Bulgarian- and Greek-language schools, which numbered 748 and 800, respectively, in 1886. Serbia had no ecclesiastical or political rights to claim Macedonia, yet did so anyway in its drive to ‘free southern Serbia.’ The Ottomans did not allow for any Serbian schools in this region. Obviously, the local Macedonian Slavic vernacular was neither a medium of instruction, nor was taught as a subject in Macedonian schools. The playwright, Vojdan Pop Georgiev Chernodrinski (1875–1951), who wrote in Macedonian and lived in Bulgaria, founded a Macedonian cultural society in 1890. Between 1890 and 1894, the first periodical in Macedonian was published in Sofia. In 1903, Krste Petkov Misirkov (1874–1926) advised, in his book published at Sofia, that a separate Macedonian language should be established on the basis of the Macedonian dialect of Monastir that is as far as possible removed from Bulgarian and Serbian. In the same year, an unsuccessful anti-Ottoman uprising broke out in Monastir. Subsequently, Macedonian historians made it into founding national myth of the Macedonian nation. The Russian Revolution of 1905, then presence of European financial controllers and gendarmerie in Macedonia imposed by Austro-Hungary and Russia, and the British-Russian secret agreement on the division of Macedonia (1908) triggered the Young Turk Revolution, which spread from Sel¯anik. Subsequently, the 1876 Constitution was restored and the political life became more relaxed. The liberalization allowed for the establishment of several Macedonianlanguage periodicals in Üsküb (Skopje), which grew into the center of Macedonian national movement. Obviously, at the same time, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Ottoman (Old Turkish) periodicals were published in the city as well. Even the publication of a Serbian magazine was permitted. At the turn of the 19th century, the uneducated Macedonian Slavic-speaker declared himself as a Bugarin, or Raja. The former appellation is a dialectal version of ‘Bulgarian’ and reflected the Ottoman use of ‘Bulgarian’ for denoting all Orthodox Slavic-speakers. The Ottoman term Raya referred to the empire’s entire (Muslim and non-Muslim) population, who did not participate in politics and decision-making, a privilege reserved for a narrow stratum of almost exclusively Muslim notables (Orthodox Greek-speaking Phanariots joined them in the 17th and 18th centuries), similar to the European nobility or estates. The self-designation ‘Raja,’ uttered by a Macedonian Slavic-speaker, basically meant ‘peasant.’ In the wake of the Balkan Wars, in 1913, Macedonia was divided among Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia. The division of Macedonia brought about the suppression of the Macedonian vernacular. While the existence of this language was simply denied in the Greek part of this region, it was treated as

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

251

a dialect of Serbo-Croatian/Serbian and Bulgarian, respectively, in Serbia and Bulgaria. Even as the Slavophone population of Macedonia was referred to as ‘Bulgarian’ in Ottoman censuses, Belgrade renamed its share of Macedonia as ‘Southern Serbia.’ After 1918, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Macedonians, alongside Slavophone Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Montenegrins, and Serbs, were subsumed in the category of the Serbo-Croats. The ban on the use of Macedonian was maintained in interwar Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia. However, in the Serbian national theater in Skopje (1914–1936), plays were produced in ‘southern Serbian,’ that is, in the Macedonian vernacular. Greece downplayed the existence of Slavic-speakers in its northern borderlands, but allowed for the publication of a Latin-script Slavic primer in Athens (1926). It was an answer to the educational needs of mainly French Catholic missions in Belgrade’s Macedonia, and conveniently allowed Athens to hinder the emergence of a unified Macedonian national identity by propagating confessional and scriptural dualism. A decisive change came in the course of World War II. The Macedonians sided with the Yugoslav anti-fascist forces and despised the incorporation of Yugoslav Macedonia into wartime Greater Bulgaria. Most Macedonians considered this event a Bulgarian occupation, which fortified the ethnic boundary between them and the Bulgarians despite the commonality of language and Orthodox Christianity. This anti-Bulgarian feeling was crucial for the Yugoslav resistance forces. Hence, the existence of the Macedonian nation was recognized in 1943 (this decision drew from the official announcement that Slavophone Macedonians were a nation in its own right, made by Comintern in Moscow in 1934). In 1944, Macedonia was proclaimed as a separate state in the postwar Federation of Yugoslavia; obviously, complete with its own official language, Macedonian. Also in 1944, the codification of standard Macedonian commenced. The young philologist and poet, Blaže Koneski (1921–1993), was put in charge of this project. The Macedonian version of Cyrillic and orthography were adopted in 1945, and at the same time, the standard was based on the ‘Central Macedonian dialect,’ that is, spoken in the center of Yugoslavia’s Macedonia (Bitola – Prilep – Strumica). In 1946, the first primer in this language was published, and an official anthology of Macedonian texts from the 19th and 20th centuries, which established the canon of Macedonian as a literary language. These were followed by the officially espoused grammatical and orthographic principles of Macedonian (1948, 1950) and a full-fledged academic grammar (1952–1954). Until 1948, standard Macedonian was used in schools located in the Bulgarian section of this region, but the end of the Greek Civil War and the ideological split of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union ended Belgrade’s dream of uniting the entire historical Macedonia as Yugoslavia’s ‘Greater Macedonia.’ Weary of possible Macedonian irredentism supported by Yugoslavia, Sofia re-introduced Bulgarian into education and reaffirmed the Bulgarianness of its section of Macedonia.

252 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

However, under the Kremlin’s pressure to improve relations with Yugoslavia, the Bulgarian authorities included, in 1956, Macedonians as a separate category in the census for the first and the last time so far. That census established the number of Bulgaria’s Macedonians at 188,000. Later, Sofia subsumed Bulgaria’s Macedonians in the category ‘Bulgarians,’ though Macedonian scholars continued to identify the population of Bulgaria’s share of historical Macedonia as ‘Macedonians.’ According to these estimates, they numbered 0.25 million in 1985. Similarly, Macedonian researchers claim that most of Greece’s ‘Slavophone Greeks’ are none other but Macedonians, whose number was estimated at the level of 0.2 million in 1995. Church Slavonic remained the official language of the Bulgarian court until the end of the 14th century, when the last vestiges of Bulgarian statehood were extinguished in the course of the Ottoman conquest. Bulgaria disappeared but Church Slavonic survived in Slavophone Orthodox churches and monasteries. On this strength, Bulgarian philologists maintain that Church Slavonic was none other than ‘Old Bulgarian.’ In support of their thesis, they cite the fact that in Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy/Russia, one tended to dub Church Slavonic ‘(Old) Bulgarian’ through the 18th century. Macedonian scholars disagree because they identify Samuel’s (West) Bulgarian Empire as ‘Macedonian Empire.’ Ergo, they conclude that the Church Slavonic of Samuel’s Ohrid court was ‘Old Macedonian,’ or, at least, the ‘Macedonian recension’ of Church Slavonic. Another argument Macedonian academics forward in support of their thesis is the fact that Saints Cyril and Methodius were citizens of Thessalonicae, and based their codification of Old Church Slavonic on the local Slavic dialect spoken in the vicinity of this capital of historical Macedonia. The institutional separateness of the Macedonians and their language was fortified in 1958, when the Orthodox archbishopric of Ohrid was revived as a diocese coterminous with Macedonia and with its seat in the Macedonian capital of Skopje. Nine years later, the autocephalous status of the Macedonian Orthodox Church was declared. Other autocephalous Orthodox Churches have declined to recognize this declaration to this day. Significantly, the first ever Macedonian translation of the New Testament came off the press in London in 1976, courtesy of the British and Foreign Bible Society. But the Macedonian Church tends to use the standard Bulgarian translation of the Bible (1925), approved by the Bulgarian Holy Synod. A Macedonian edition of this translation was printed in 1967. Macedonian scholars and hierarchs usually refer to Bulgarian translations of the Bible as ‘Macedonian,’ extending the thesis that Church Slavonic is ‘Old Macedonian’ to Bulgarian, construed as a dialect of the Macedonian language. Meanwhile, a three-volume dictionary of the Macedonian language with explanations in Serbo-Croatian (1961–1966) came off the press. In 1968, a Bulgarian-Macedonian dictionary was printed. Both works reaffirmed the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

253

distinctiveness of Macedonian vis-à-vis Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian, and the former remains the authoritative dictionary of Macedonian, since no extensive monolingual dictionary of this language has been published so far. Macedonian and Bulgarian are even closer to each other than Czech and Slovak, the lexical difference being a result of Russian loanwords in Bulgarian, and SerboCroatian in Macedonian. To emphasize the difference between Macedonian and Bulgarian, a Serbian-style Cyrillic is used for writing in the former language. The latest stepping-stone in the molding of the Macedonian language into a language separate from Bulgarian was laid in 1990, when the first complete Macedonian translation of the Bible was published. A year later, Macedonia became the sole post-Yugoslav state in the 1990s to gain independence without bloodshed. Macedonian was proclaimed the sole official language of this new nation-state. However, the process of international recognition of this nation, its nation-state, and language still continues. Athens does not recognize the name of Macedonia, which it considers an inalienable part of Greek national history.34 Hence, due to the political clout of Greece, Macedonia is known as the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ or FYROM in the official documents of NATO or the European Union, while in Greece, the state is termed the ‘Skopje Republic.’ Hence, in Greece, the Macedonians are referred to as the ‘Skopjeans’ (Skopiani), which is considered insulting in Macedonia, so some Greek documents adopt the term ‘Slavomacedonians.’ Another bone of contention is the use of the Macedonian King Philip II’s (382–336 BCE) so-called ‘Vergina Sun’ as the Macedonian national flag. (The symbol features prominently in the king’s tomb which, in 1977, was discovered in the north Greek [Macedonian] town of Vergina.) Philip II’s son, Alexander the Great (356– 323 BCE), also used this symbol. In Greek eyes, Skopje’s decision about this flag amounted to unwarrantable appropriation of the past of the Macedonia of Antiquity for present-day Macedonia’s own national history. In 1993, Macedonia was accepted as a member of the United Nations under the name of FYROM. Athens had no choice but to recognize the Macedonian borders in 1994. Yet, Greece clamped a 20-month-long economic embargo on Macedonia, which was terminated in 1995. In that year, Athens also established diplomatic ties with Macedonia. Bulgaria was the first state to recognize the independence of Macedonia (1992), but Sofia continued to deny the existence of the Macedonian nation and its language, deeming the Macedonians a regional group of the Bulgarian nation, and Macedonian the second written variety (‘Western Bulgarian) of the Bulgarian language. The treaties contracted between Macedonia and Bulgaria reflect this disagreement in the quaint qualification added at their end, ‘done in the official languages of the two states, the Macedonian language, in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia, and the Bulgarian language, in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria.’ Macedonia was the poorest Yugoslav republic, hence the possibility that Bulgaria will become a

254 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

member of the European Union in 2007 caused 63,000 Macedonians to apply for Bulgarian citizenship and passports by late 2005. Macedonia’s border with Serbia-Montenegro was settled in 2001, and in the same year, a near-civil war erupted, when Macedonia’s Albanians displeased with their second-class-citizen status, started an uprising. It is worthwhile to remark, however, that despite the various setbacks and frustrations on their way to recognized national statehood, the Macedonians never succumbed to unreflective Islamo- and Turko-phobia. Hence, apart from the European section of Turkey, Macedonia is a rare area in the Balkans, where mosques, minarets, and other monuments of the Ottoman past largely escaped wholesale destruction gleefully perpetrated elsewhere in an effort to erase ‘half a millennium of Turkish yoke.’ In Bosnia and Kosovo, the situation was similar until, in the 1990s, the post-Yugoslav wars and their aftermath wreaked havoc, also in regard of the Islamic and Ottoman monuments, in both regions. These monuments stood a good chance of survival in predominantly Muslim Albania, if Tirana had not abolished religion in 1967. The incessant struggle for the possession of historical Macedonia played out among Bulgaria, Serbia (Yugoslavia), Greece, and the Ottoman Empire, left 0.25 million to 0.35 million bewildered Slavophone peasants, who became subjects of the Greek king in 1913. Until that time, the region around Thessaloníki was mostly Slavophone. Athens dubbed them as ‘Slavic-speaking Greeks,’ Sofia claimed as ‘Bulgarians,’ Belgrade as ‘south Serbians,’ and the Macedonian national movement as ‘Macedonians.’ A discontent with the Greek linguistic domination had already been stoked up in the 1860s. French Catholic missionaries had promised them freedom of worship in their Slavic language. When these peasants’ appeals to the Orthodox hierarchy for liturgy in Church Slavonic had fallen on flat ears, they had started one after another to declare themselves for Rome. Their principled stance came to nothing, because their region was not included in the Bulgarian Exarchate, hence Greek remained the sole language of social mobility for the Orthodox populace. One way out of this dilemma was conversion to Islam. In the 1940s, there were 41,000 Slavic-speakers in northern Greece. But beginning in the mid-19th century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople allowed for the publication of Slavic religious books in Greek letters, which were printed mainly in Sel¯anik (Thessaloníki). A vernacular Slavic translation of the Gospels came off the press in 1852. In this manner, an unexpected Greek script-based Aegean Macedonian language coalesced. French Catholic missionaries hoped to turn this situation to their advantage, and in 1925, published a Slavic primer in the Latin script in Athens. But the Orthodox hierarchy did not allow use of this textbook in schools, and the Slavophone Orthodox faithful were not interested in it either. Having observed this failure, the Greek communist movement (which concentrated in the north thanks to aid flowing from the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

255

Yugoslav communists), published Aegean Macedonian brochures and periodicals in Cyrillic. After a savage civil war, the anti-communist government defeated the communist guerillas in 1949. Greek- and Aegean Macedonian-speaking communist refugees fled to the Soviet bloc. They could not go to Yugoslavia because of the country’s ideological conflict with the Soviet Union, which had unfolded in 1948. The communist guerillas from Greece sided with the Soviets. During the 1950s, the cultural life of the Aegean Macedonians revived in Poland and Romania. Grammars of their language were published in Bucharest (1953) and Warsaw (1956). Besides a different dialectal basis, the Bulgarian-style Cyrillic also differentiated Aegean Macedonian from standard Macedonian. In the 1970s, many of Aegean Macedonian refugees left for Yugoslavia’s Macedonia, and after Greece joined the European Communities in 1981, also for this country. In 1985, the Latin-based primer of 1925 was reprinted in Skopje. Yugoslav Macedonia successfully claimed the tradition of Aegean Macedonian for standard Macedonian. An Aegean Macedonian periodical, which published in Greece between 1996 and 1998, was printed one issue in Greek and another in standard Macedonian (Banac 1984: 328; Dimitrovski et al. 1978: 57; Dulichenko 2004: 8–9, 376; Dzhukeski 1981; Eberhardt 1996: 283, 312; Frucht 2000: 264, 308–309, 889; Honzák et al. 2001: 373–374; Janich and Greule 2002: 31, 166– 168; Koneski 1980; Lehr-Spławinski ´ 1949: 44; Magocsi 2002: 6, 12, 85, 87, 98, 115, 200; Mazower 2005: 243; McCarthy 1997: 109–110, 316–317; Miodynski ´ 2000: 197, 202–203; Moszynski ´ 2006: 37; Poulton 2003: 120–122; Price 1998: 314–315; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 189, 470; Rychlík and Kouba 2003: 56–58, 71, 224–227, 235, 326–327, 331–332, 339–340, 343–348, 353–354, 356, 359–364, 378–379; Siatkowska 1992: 288; Sugar 1977: 32, 44–45).

Greek An overview of the Balkan languages and their uses at the hands of nationalists would not be complete without a short glance at Greek and Turkish. Greek was the official language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire and then of Byzantium until the fall of Constantinople (1453). Latin, as the official language of the entire empire, survived in Byzantium until the 8th century. It was an uneasy ‘cohabitation,’ as Greeks used their language as the measure of cultural and political excellence since the Antiquity. Those who could not speak it were ‘barbarians,’ or literally, ‘babblers.’ The Roman conquerors of Greek city-states adopted this Greek conception of cultural superiority as their own, but retained Greek as the ultimate symbol of sophistication after the subsequent elevation of Latin to the unprecedented position of the official language of the Roman Empire. In the course of the 9th century, when Church Slavonic replaced Greek in the first Bulgarian Empire (893), Greek was made into the symbol of cultural superiority of Byzantium over Latin Western

256 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Christianity. After the Ottoman takeover, Greek survived as a language of the Orthodox Church, commerce and administration in Greek-speaking areas from Egypt to western Anatolia, the southern littoral of the Black Sea and the Crimea, from Attica to Crete and Cyprus, and from Epirus to Sicily. In the 1710s, Greek also became the official language of Walachia and Moldavia, following the establishment of the Phanariot administration in the provinces. Greek also encroached at the cost of Church Slavonic in the Orthodox Slavophone areas of the Balkans, after the abolishment of the Slavophone Archbishoprics of Pe´c ˙ (Ipek) and Ohrid (Ohri) in 1766 and 1767, respectively. The former preserved the last vestiges of the Serbian Patriarchate and the latter of Bulgarian. Practically, by the end of the 18th century, Greek had become the sole official language of the Orthodox millet (all Orthodox Christians [whatever their ethnolinguistic background might be] subjected to the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople) in the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, all the members of the millet, including Arab Christians, were recorded as ‘Greeks’ (literally, ‘Romans’) in Ottoman censuses. Apart from replacing Orthodox Christianity with Islam as the state religion, the Ottoman Empire, which succeeded Byzantium, kept the ideas of empire and caesaropapism, elements of the Byzantine administration, and often the Greek versions of place-names. The name of Constantinople remained the same, though rendered as ‘Konstantiniyya’ in agreement with Ottoman (Old Turkish) pronunciation. (It was changed into Istanbul only in 1930 after the Republic of Turkey had replaced the Ottoman Empire.) Similarly, the European section of the empire (largely coterminous with the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum) was known as ‘Rumeli,’ and the traditional Turkic name of Anatolia was ‘Rum,’ alluding to the Rum Empire of the Turkic Seljuks, which was weakened by a Mongolian onslaught in the 1240s and disappeared at the beginning of the 14th century. Both names, Rumeli and Rum meant the ‘country of the Romans.’ Romioi (‘Romans’) was the self-ethnonym of the Byzantine Greeks, not the ancient appellation ‘Hellenes,’ which, beginning in the 3rd century, had come to mean ‘pagans.’ By extension, all the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, organized into a separate millet, were termed ‘Romans,’ despite the different idioms they happened to speak. In Ottoman, the Orthodox millet was known as the Rum millet, or the ‘Roman millet,’ though in Western literature it is simplistically referred to as the ‘Orthodox millet.’ In the legalese of the Byzantine Empire, Romnaioi was preferred to Romioi. The former term is the literal Greek translation of the Latin sobriquet ‘Romans,’ while the latter its corrupted form, used in the vernacular. The Byzantines drew the line between themselves and the inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire or Western Christians in general, calling the latter ‘Latins.’ The appellation ‘Hellenes’ was reintroduced in the 1820s, during the Greek Revolt (or Greek Revolution from the Greek point of view), and in the name

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

257

of independent Greece (Hellada, 1832). It was the aptly named ‘Philhellenes’ of Western Europe and Russia, enchanted by the long-gone glories of ancient Greece, who inspired and aided the founding of the first ever independent Balkan nation-state. The ethnonym ‘Hellenes’ was officially used in the name of independent Greece, which, in 1833, was overhauled into a Hellenic kingdom (ironically, with a Catholic monarch at its helm) and received its autocephalous Orthodox Eastern Apostolic Church of Greece. But the self-ethnonym ‘Romans,’ championed by the Patriarch of Constantinople for denoting Greeks (and other non-Greek-speaking Orthodox under the patriarchate’s jurisdiction) living outside independent Greece, survived among the Greeks well into the 20th century, and can be heard even today. The usage also came handy to the proponents of the Megale Idea (‘Great Idea’), which emerged in the 1830s. They hoped to create a ‘true’ Greek nation-state with the capital in Constantinople, which would coincide with the territory of the Hellenic empire of Alexander the Great, and of Byzantium. The Ottoman designation of the empire’s all Orthodox Christians as ‘Romans’ seemed to legitimize these Greek national hopes of expansion nicely. Understandably, the Constitutions of independent Greece invariably identified Hellenes as the native Orthodox population, irrespective of language. Hence, for all practical purposes, beginning in the 1830s, the ethnonyms Hellenes and Romans became largely synonymous in Greek political vocabulary. However, among Greek-speakers, ‘Hellene’ became the synonym of an active pro-independence urbanite, while ‘Roman’ of a passive peasant or a supporter of Ottomanism. Initially, Greeks used numerous names to refer to themselves, often regional and derived from the names of their respective city-states, and regions.35 What separated them were different dialects (closely-related languages), produced by the successive waves of Greek (Indo-European) settlement in the first half of the Second Millennium BCE. ‘Hellene’ was the name of the chief of a Thessalian tribe, first recorded in Homeric writings, dated to the 9th century BCE. Later, this tribe went by his name, and by the 6th century BCE, ‘Hellenes’ evolved into the overreaching self-ethnonym employed by all the Greeks in the Antiquity. (Earlier, as recorded in Homer’s Iliad, the Greek allied forces had gone under three different, though synonymous names of Achaeans, Argeioi, and Danaans.) Similarly, the self-ethnonym of ‘Ottomans,’ stems from the name of Sultan Osman I (reigned 1281–1324), who, in northwestern Anatolia, founded his polity squeezed between Byzantium and the Mongol-controlled ˇ Sultanate of Iconium of the Seljuk Turks. English ‘Greeks,’ Czech Rekové, German Griechen, Magyar Görög, Polish Grecy, or Slovak Grékí stem from Latin Graeci, which the Romans of Rome employed to refer to Greeks. The etymology of this ethnonym is unclear. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) opined that it was derived from Graikoi, or the original self-ethnonym of the Greeks of Epirus. It is probable that Greek colonists from Euboea brought this appellation to Italy (Graecia

258 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Magna, or ‘Greater Greece’).36 A Boeotian tribe, which migrated to Italy in the 8th century BCE, went by the name Graikos. The Latin usage of Graeci became the usual appellation for Greeks in Western Christianity. By contrast, people living east of the Greeks dub them as Houna (Armenian), Yawan (Hebrew), Yavan (Modern Hebrew), Yavana (Sanskrit), Yunan (Arabic, Syriac, Hindi), Yunani (Turkish, Indonesian). This ethnonym is derived from ‘Ionia,’ the Greekspeaking coast of Asia Minor, which, in Antiquity, was the theater of GreekPersian wars, and became the Persian designation for Greeks, Yauna. From this Persian form, the other were derived. ‘Hellene’ became the ethnonym from which the name of Greeks was coined in these languages that did not have a name for them, or which were standardized in the 20th century. For example, Hellas in Norwegian, Hy Lap in Vietnamese, or Xila in Chinese. Georgian Berdzeni for ‘Greeks’ is a rare example of local neologism, coined from Georgian word ‘wise.’ This coinage reflected the fact that Greeks had the technology of writing, which Georgians borrowed from them. In later Antiquity, not only did one have to speak in Greek, not to appear a ‘barbarian’ to Greeks, but also be able to write, preferably in Greek characters. The Greek Revolt of the 1820s, which simultaneously erupted in the Peloponnesus (Attica) and the Danubian principalities of Walachia and Moldavia, though concluded with the successful founding of independent Greece, marked the onset of the decline of the Phanariots and the Greek language in the Ottoman Empire. The Phanariot administration was terminated in Walachia and Moldavia, where Walachian (Romanian) replaced Greek as the official language. In Constantinople, Armenians supplanted Greeks as the predominant element in banking. The Greek merchant communities lost their special position, often to Bulgarian merchants, increasingly commissioned to supply for state and military needs. The final blow was dealt to the Greek dream of uniting most of the lands encompassed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in a future Greater Greece, when in 1870, the sultan agreed to the establishment of an extensive Bulgarian Exarchate. At the same time, the Hellenization of the Kingdom of Greece proceeded apace. For instance, the predominantly Albanian-speaking character on the Peloponnesus was altered by the 1830s. Albanian-speakers were mostly Muslim, so many were massacred, expelled and harassed to leave, on a par with Muslim Turks. As all Orthodox usually appeared to the Ottoman eye as ‘Greeks,’ and Western Europeans as ‘Franks,’ Greeks saw all Turks, Albanians, and Arabs united in Islam as ‘Turks.’ Despite this ethnic cleansing, the number of remaining Orthodox Albanian-speakers necessitated the 1858 reprint of the 1827 Tosk Albanian translation of the New Testament in Greek letters. The Ottoman Empire brought to the Balkans the tradition of trilingual literacy unified by the common Arabic script. In matters religious, Muslims used Arabic, the holy language of the Koran. For pleasure, they wrote, recited, and read poems and stories in Persian, which enjoyed the highest prestige among the urban elite

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

259

of the Ottoman state. Administration was carried out in Ottoman (Old Turkish). ‘Ottoman’ (Osmanlica) was the official designation of this language. First, due to a plethora of lexical and syntactical loans from Arabic and Persian, Ottoman was far removed from the Turkish vernacular of the Anatolian peasants. Second, the Ottoman administrators did not consider it appropriate to compare their Ottoman language with the ‘base’ speech (Turkish) of the common folk. The prestige of Ottoman, the slow influx of Turkic-speakers to the Balkans, and concomitant Islamicization of many non-Turkic-speakers translated into numerous Turkic, Arabic, and Persian linguistic loans in other languages spoken in the European section of the Ottoman Empire, including Greek. Greek is an Indo-European language, an isolate like Albanian or Armenian. Although the first remaining Greek texts date back to the second half of the Second Millennium BCE, Greek as a codified written language (complete with its own specific Greek script) emerged in Attica (the region of Athens) during the 5th century BCE, when the city gained the dominant position among the Greek city-states. Attic rapidly gained prominence and overshadowed other Greek dialects and their nascent traditions of literacy, due to Athens’s economic, military, and political power. Attic became Koine (common dialect) of all the Greeks. Later, Attic Greek was accepted as the language of the court in the Kingdom of Macedonia, and in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests, it evolved into the lingua franca of the Hellenic East. With centuries, ‘literary Attic’ used for writing books ossified and the written Koine used for everyday administration changed following the spoken vernacular. This resulted in diglossia that persists among the Greeks to this day. In the 3rd century BCE, the Old Testament was translated into Attic Greek for the sake of Greek-speaking Jews outside Palestine, who were no longer able to read their Scriptures in the original Hebrew. This translation is known as the Septuagint. In Latin septuaginta means ‘seventy,’ because the legend holds that 70 translators were commissioned to do this translation. When Christianity was accepted as the state religion in the Roman Empire in 380 AD, this fortified the divergence between written and spoken Greek in the Eastern Empire. The New Testament was written in re-vernacularized Koine, but Attic persisted as the official language of the court and aristocracy in Byzantium. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Greek replaced Latin in most official usages. Books continued to be written in Atticizing Greek, while saints’ lives, intended for popular reading, were committed to parchment in contemporary though archaizing Koine. Meanwhile, the vernacular diverged from the two written standards ever more. After the fall of Constantinople, written Atticizing (Byzantine) Greek remained a language of the Orthodox Church and of the Greekspeaking elite in Constantinople. The first printed book in this language was published in 1526. Spoken Greek changed rapidly, absorbing numerous

260 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Italian and Ottoman lexical and even syntactical loans. Greek-speaking Muslims also wrote in their vernacular, but with the use of Arabic letters. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the first paraphrases of the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular appeared in the Greek-speaking areas controlled by Venice and Genoa. In 1536, one of them was published in Venice. At that time, the Greek of the Septuagint was 1800 years old, and that of the New Testament 1500. Thus, to understand the Bible, a Greek-speaker had to study the Greek of the Holy Writ as a foreign language. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Catholic and Protestant missionaries translated the New Testament into the vernacular for the purposes of proselytizing, which obviously entailed the Orthodox Church’s condemnation of such translations. Under the influence of Protestant thought, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Kirillos Loukaris (Cyril Lucaris, 1572–1638), recognized the need of translating the Bible into the vernacular. He encouraged the monk Maximos of Gallipoli (Maximus Callipolites, died in 1633) to undertake this translation. In 1638, this translation was published in Genoa, at the expense of the Dutch government, with a preface in the vernacular by Loukaris. The learned monk, Meletios Sirigos (1590–1664) vehemently opposed Maximos’s translation, remarking that any vernacular translation of the original Greek Bible was not canonical. On the same ground, the Catholic Church discouraged translating the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible done in the 4th century) into vernaculars until the Reformation (15th–16th centuries), the Church Slavonic translation of the Holy Scripture retained its paramount position until the end of the 18th century in Walachia and Moldavia, and by the second half of the 19th century among Orthodox Slavs, and to this day, solely the Arabic original of the Koran is canonical among Muslims, whatever languages they may happen to speak. Other translations followed that of Maximos, but they never gained similar popularity. That is why, the monk, Seraphim of Mytilene, presented his translation as a revision of that by Maximos. It was published in London (1703), and eventually cost him his life, because his Orthodox opponents had him arrested and exiled to Siberia, where he died in 1735. A genuine revised edition of Maxiomos’s translation, done under the supervision of the Royal Society of Prussia, came off the press in Halle (1710). In 1810, the British and Foreign Bible Society republished it in London for the sake of missionary campaign, conducted by Protestant Churches among the Ottoman Empire’s Greeks during the first two decades of the 19th century. The Orthodox hierarchy condemned it as the ‘Protestant Bible.’ The founding of independent Greece with its center in Attica intensified the controversy over the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. In line with the logic of ethnic nationalism, it was obvious that Greek was to replace Ottoman as the official language of the new nation-state. The question was: which kind of Greek. The Phanariot elite of Constantinople, who seized control of Greece, introduced Byzantine Greek as the official language.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

261

The Paris-based Greek nationalist and scholar, Adamantios Korais (Adamandios Koraës, 1743–1833), who despised the Orthodox Byzantine tradition, followed Western European Philhellenes in their belief that modern Greece should be ‘rebuilt’ on the basis of ancient Greece’s classical tradition seen as the ‘cradle of European civilization’ and ‘embodiment of liberty.’ To this end, Korais commenced in 1805 the publication of exemplary editions of Greek classics. (In his efforts, he fell back on the corpus of Greek ancient writing translated into Latin between the 14th and 16th centuries, and often published in bilingual editions.) Inevitably, he saw classical Attic Greek of the 5th century BCE as the only appropriate model for standard Greek. But he also realized the wide gap of incomprehensibility between it and Demotic (Dhimotiki, or the ‘language of the common people’), which in Greek was referred to then as Romaic, or the ‘Roman language.’ Korais proposed that standard Greek should be formed gradually by taking the vernacular and ‘purifying’ it of Turkish loans and regional dialect features, because he believed that only classicizing (Atticizing) form of Greek would express and preserve ‘eternal values’ of ancient Greece. This normative approach produced Katharévousa (‘purifying language’), but this influential form of Greek has never been properly codified. The tradition of Demotic Greek dates back to the first Demotic grammar (1814, Rome) that laid down norms for a standard Greek based on spoken dialects. Then, only in 1888, the first novel written in Demotic was published. The Greek Orthodox Church and the Phanariot elite perceived users of both Katharévousa and Demotic as enemies of Christianity and the Greek nationstate. Korais’s protégé, Neofitos Vamvas (1770–1855), translated the Bible. The Holy Synod of the Church summarily condemned this translation published by the British and Foreign Bible Society (the New Testament in 1832, and the Old Testament in 1840), and Vamvas found himself an outcast, branded as a ‘Protestant.’ During the 1870s, Queen Olga of Greece (1851–1926), with the tacit agreement of the Synod, commissioned a slightly Demoticized Katharévousa translation of the Bible to improve the chances that an average Greek could read it. Eventually, the Synod denied its approval, but this translation was published in 1900. The first ever Demotic translation of the Gospels, carried out by Alexander Pallis (1851–1835) and published in 1901, triggered the infamous Gospel riots (Evangelika). This served as an excuse to impose a ban on the use of any translations of the Bible, which was not repealed until 1924. Despite thirty further renderings of the Bible produced in the 20th century, the Greek Orthodox Church still prescribes the use of the ancient Greek translation of the Bible. It is as if the Vulgate were the only translation of the Bible officially available to French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Catholics. Not surprisingly, the Greek Orthodox Church is the preserve of Byzantine Greek and Katharévousa. Interestingly, no negative emotions were raised by the 1878 Demotic translation of the Koran for the use of Greek-speaking Muslims. This agreed with the line of

262 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Greek nationalism; it was preferable that Muslims living in Greece should use more Greek in mosques than Arabic or Ottoman. Most poetry and fiction has been written in Demotic since the 1880s, but Katharévousa prevailed in administration and public life. In 1909, it replaced Byzantine Greek in the educational system. The use of Demotic was allowed in elementary schools in the periods 1917–1921, 1923–1935, and 1936–1964. In 1964, Demotic replaced Katharévousa in the entire educational system, and was put on equal footing with the latter in public life. The imposition of the military dictatorship 3 years later reversed all these changes and led to the banishment of Demotic even from elementary education. The dictatorship ended in 1974, and 2 years later, Demotic became the language of administration and the sole language of instruction in schools. The period of diglossia ended, as well as the 20th century penchant for associating Katharévousa with the political right and Demotic with the political left. However, Katharévousa persists in the law, the army, and the Church. Also Byzantine Greek has not disappeared yet, as the Greek Orthodox liturgy is conducted in this language. But the future belongs to Demotic. Greece acceded to the European Communities in 1981, and since then Demotic has been one of the official languages of the Communities, overhauled into the European Union in 1993. In 1901, a four-volume dictionary of Demotic came off the press, and after a long gap of 40 years an officially endorsed extensive grammar of Demotic came up in 1941. So far, however, no authoritative multi-volume dictionary of Demotic has been published. In this respect, Greek shares the situation with many other official languages of the Balkans. From the political vantage, the territory of the Greek nation-state expanded in stages. In 1864, the British passed the Ionian Islands to Athens. In 1881, 1913 and 1920, Athens gained most of contemporary northern Greece and the Aegean Islands from the Ottoman Empire. Crete gained independence from the Ottomans in 1898 and joined Greece in 1913. Finally, Italy transferred the Dodocanese Islands to Athens in 1947. The construction of the Greek nation-state with the use of the ethnic principle of religious and linguistic homogeneity meant a policy of national and linguistic assimilation directed at the speakers of Albanian, Slavic, Vlach, and Turkish, to whom Athens refers as ‘nonGreek-speaking Greeks.’ After the 1923 failure of the Greek offensive in western Anatolia (known as the ‘Catastrophe’ in Greek national historiography), which was intended to deliver a Greater Greece in agreement with the Great Idea, the use of Greek in Turkey shrank to some districts in Istanbul. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) provided for the expulsion of Orthodox (usually Greekspeaking, but some spoke Turkish too) from Turkey to Greece, and of Muslims (mostly Turkish-speaking, though some spoke in Greek) from Greece to Turkey. As a follow-up, an action of the Hellenization of Slavic personal names was undertaken in 1936. The Greek language gradually became another badge of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

263

Greek national identity, but its utility was limited by the ongoing disagreement on which version of Greek is ‘real Greek.’ Although the question has been largely settled by now, it is Orthodoxy, which continues to be the basis of the ‘HellenoChristian civilization,’ as the Greek Prime Minister stated in 1981. Only under the European Union’s pressure, the indication of one’s religion was removed from Greek ID cards and passports as late as 2001. This happened despite the vociferous opposition of the Greek Orthodox Church, which likes to present itself as the ‘savior of the Greek language during the four centuries of slavery suffered by the Greek people under Turks.’ All the extant dialects of Greek stem from the Attic Koine. The only survivor of other ancient Greek dialects is Tsakonian (name derived from Laconia, or the region of Sparta), or the Doric vernacular of Sparta (today, Sparti), still spoken by 200 to 3000 persons. Spartan and Attic were different already 2500 years ago, so Tsakonian and modern Greek are mutually incomprehensible, and for all practical purposes, separate languages. The decline of other ancient city-states vis-à-vis Athens, accompanied by the rise of Attic as the virtually sole (despite the brief, 67-year-long standoff between Katharévousa and Demotic) standard of all the Greek-speakers, accounts for the fact that, unlike Latin, Greek survived as a unified language. Only if several alternative Greek centers of power had arisen on the ashes of Byzantium, as France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal did when the Western Roman Empire disappeared, new languages could have stemmed from Byzantine Greek. The special case is posed by Cyprus. This linguistically mixed, Greek-Turkish island was a British colony between 1878 and 1960. Greek and Turkish became co-official languages of independent Cyprus. The Constitution defined Orthodox Cypriots as ‘Greeks’ and Muslim Cypriots as ‘Turks,’ irrespective of language. The archbishop of the Cyprus Orthodox Church became president of independent Cyprus, and was referred to in Greek as the Ethnarch, meaning the ‘father of the [Greek] nation [in Cyprus].’ The ensuing Greek-Turkish tension flared up in military conflict in 1963, 1965, and 1967. In 1974, the last gamble at creating a Greater Greece brought down the dictatorship in Athens, and precipitated a Turkish intervention, which has left Cyprus divided to this day. Until 1989, English remained the language of law courts in Greek Cyprus, and the translation of Cyprus laws from English into Greek lasted from 1988 to 1996. Cyprus’s Greek vernacular is a Greek dialect that differs most from standard Greek, which Greek Cypriots have to learn at school. Although entire Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, in practice, solely the Greek section enjoys this membership. In addition, Turkish has not been made into another official language of the Union, which downplays the official bilingualism of undivided Cyprus (Bible in Modern Greek 2004; Burke 2004: x; Chrysoloras 2004: 42, 46, 55, 59; Dedes 2000; Drews 1988: 39–40, 198–199; Frucht 2000: 309; Hradeˇcný 1999; Janich and Greule 2002: 93, 98; Jelavich and Barbara 1977: 40, 48, 51, 71, 77–78, 316; Lewis 1963: x; Magocsi 2002: 6, 58, 172; Mazower 2005: 21, 244;

264 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

McCarthy 1997: 37–38, 45, 73, 129, 338–339; Names of the Greeks 2006; Oxford English Dictionary Online 2004; Politikos & geofusikos khartis Elladas 1999; Price 1998: 215–221, 472; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 200–201, 467–469; Rahner 1986: 283–284; Riis 2002: 11; Sugar 1977: 45–46; Qarai 2004; Trudgill 2000: 243, 247–250, 255).

Turkish, Gagauz, Tatar, and Karaim Turkish belongs to a group of about forty Turkic languages all of which are closely related to one another. They are spoken by 155 million people as native languages, spreading over a landscape extending from Eastern Europe (southern Russia, Moldova), the Balkans and Anatolia to Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Siberia and Northwestern China. The Turkic languages are as close to one another as the Slavic ones, which makes the question of whether they are languages or dialects into a heated political issue. Thus, there is a considerable degree of mutual comprehensibility between the Turkic languages. Turkish (and Ottoman) with Azeri (spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran’s region of Azerbaijan), Gagauz (spoken in Moldova and the Balkans), and Turkmen of Turkmenistan form the Oghuz (derived from Turkic ok for ‘arrow’ or ‘tribe’), or Southern group of the Turkic languages. The Kipchak (derived from Iranian kip- for ‘red’ or ‘blonde’ and -çak for ‘Scyth’), or Western group comprises Tatar and Karaim, among others (and Cumans in the past). The speakers of Central, Northern, and Eastern Turkic languages live mostly in Asia and are of no interest to us in this study. The earliest Turkic inscriptions written in the (Sogdian) Runic script survive in Mongolia and date back to the 8th century. From the 9th to the 13th century, Turkic texts were produced in the Brahmi, Tibetan and Uighur scripts. The subsequent conversion of the majority of the Turkic peoples to Islam entailed the use of the Arabic alphabet. Until the 20th century, the role of religion in deciding which script one employed for writing had been most significant. That is why, in Anatolia and elsewhere on the territory of the former Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim speakers and users of Turkic left a considerable body of writings committed to parchment and paper in the Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Syriac alphabets as well. The significance of the Turkish languages for Europe and Asia is emphasized by the fact that, for instance, Turkish is spoken by 50 million persons, Azeri by 23 million, Tatar by 7 million, and Turkmen by 6 million. However, the etymology of the ethnonym ‘Turk’ (Türk in Turkic) recorded for the first time by a Chinese scribe in the 6th century, remains as obscure as that of ‘Albanian.’ Turkic-speakers like to derive their ethnonym from the Turkish word türk for ‘strength, might, power,’ but most linguists disagree. They presented a staggering variety of alternatives, which, among others, propose that ‘Turk’ stems from Turkic words for ‘the most honorable place in a yurt,’ ‘law,’ ‘custom,’ ‘idol,’ ‘to be

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

265

born,’ ‘headdress,’ or ‘helmet.’ In 1190, a crusader chronicle referred to the territories gained by the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia at the cost of Byzantium, as ‘Turkey.’ Since that time, Christian Europeans colloquially applied this designation to the Seljuk Empire of Rum (Rome), and its successor, the Ottoman Empire. Not unlike in the case of Greek, there existed similar diglossia in the use of Turkish in the Ottoman Empire. The elite used the heavily Arabianized and Persianized Ottoman (Old Turkish) for administration and politics. This language stood in stark contrast to the Turkic vernacular of the Anatolian peasant. The retreat of the Ottoman Empire from its richest provinces in the Balkans took place under the combined pressure of the modernized European powers and the ethnic nationalisms of the non-Turkish-speaking peoples. Since the mid19th century, the Ottoman elite had realized that they needed to reform and industrialize the empire to save it from dissolution. At that time, they warmed to the technique of printing. Although the first printed Ottoman (Old Turkish) book was published in 1729, the religiously-motivated high value placed on handwritten manuscripts prevented any earlier rise of printing in Ottoman. (Until the mid-20th century, it was believed that the ‘true’ Koran could be copied exclusively by hand.) The reforms instituted by the Ottoman government did not provide any clear answer what to do about nationalism. The founding of the ethnolinguisticcum-religious nation-states of the Serbs, the Greeks, the Montenegrins, the Romanians, and the Bulgarians made this issue into an acute question, which could not be disregarded any longer. Some Ottoman officials proposed to overhaul the Ottoman subjects into the Ottoman nation on the basis of the common religion of Islam. This would still leave a considerable number of Christians and Jews outside the pale. In reply to this ideological predicament, at the beginning of the 20th century, ethnically construed Turkish nationalism came into the fore with the program of creating the Turkish nation complete with its homogenously Turkish-speaking nation-state. Instead of working out an attractive alternative, which would preserve the empire, an influential section of the Ottoman ruling stratum-turned-Turkish nationalists took as their goal the model of ethnolinguistic nationalism already employed in the nation-states carved out from the empire’s territory in the course of the 19th century. In the field of language, the first step was taken in the direction of Turkish nationalism, when a dictionary of Ottoman was published in 1874. It denoted this language by the novel name of ‘Turkish.’ Earlier in 1842, the first Ottoman translation of the Koran was published in Cairo. It was possible because Egypt was merely under nominal Ottoman control at that time. Otherwise, the Sultan, in his religious role of Caliph, would not have allowed this heretical publication. Prior to the mid-20th century, any translation of the Koran was deemed heretical, because it was believed that the sole language of Allah and his revelation could be only the classical Arabic of his Prophet Mohammad

266 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(570–632). The Ottoman translation of the Holy Book emphasized the beginning of the emergence of the Turkish language from the confessional and cultural Islamic commonality grounded in the Arabic language and script. Perhaps the impulse to undertake such novel initiative (which sharply clashed with the religious tradition of reading the Koran exclusively in the Arabic original) came from British India, where a Persian translation of the Holy Book came off the press in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1837.37 The Ottoman translation of the Koran was also a reply to the infiltration of the empire by the Ottoman translation of the New Testament that was published in Arabic characters in Paris and Constantinople (1819, 1826) to be followed by the translation of the Bible that was printed in Paris (1827). Between 1875 and 1877, the two volumes of the officially approved Ottoman translation of the Koran came off the press in Constantinople. The gradual breakup of the Ottoman Empire took place at the end of World War I and immediately in its aftermath, when warfare continued throughout Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In 1922, the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate, or the secular part of the Ottoman statehood. In the following year, the Republic of Turkey was founded, and in 1924, the Caliphate, or the religious part of the Ottoman statehood, was done away with. The capital of the new republic was moved from Constantinople, occupied by the Western powers, to Ankara, strategically located in the middle of the country. The city displayed another advantage to the new nationally minded elite; it was surrounded by the homogenously Turkic-speaking and Muslim countryside, unlike Constantinople, populated by a medley of inhabitants speaking various languages and professing different religions. In addition, the multicultural Ottoman capital, found itself extremely vulnerable, placed so close to the borders with potentially hostile Greece and Bulgaria. Although the Turkish form ‘Istanbul’ had been popular since the 18th century, the official name of the city was changed from Constantinople to Istanbul only in 1930. Immediately, reforms commenced to overhaul Turkey into a modern and secular nation-state. One of the most important goals was to replace official Ottoman with the Turkish vernacular of the common people. At that time, it was thought that culture expressed through script and language determined development. In emulation of the Soviet Latinization campaign (which opened in 1923), the Arabic alphabet was replaced with the Latin one for writing the Turkish language (1928). In propaganda, Moscow vilified the Arabic script as the cause and symbol of ‘uncivilizedness,’ and also as an unnecessary hurdle on the way to ‘modernization and progress.’ Ankara agreed with this Soviet reasoning, and the script change was extended to the traditional version of Arabic numerals (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, :, ;), which were replaced with the Western version obtaining in Antiqua (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) (Burke 2004: xiii; Isaev 1979: 41–49; Martin 2001: 182–207; Price 1998: 472).

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

267

It was decided that besides changing the script, it was necessary to purify the Turkish language of Arabic and Persian elements, so as to truthfully reflect the vernacular. In 1932, the first congress of the Turkish language convened in Constantinople, and the Turkish Language Society was founded. This society, in agreement with the official line of Turkish nationalism, propounded in 1935 the so-called ‘Sun language theory’ that claimed Turkish as the ur-language, the original source of all the other extant languages. This extreme kind of ethnolinguistic nationalism subsided after the death of the founder of the Turkish nation-state, Kemal Atatürk38 (1881–1938). Between 1939 and 1952, the society published a six-volume dictionary of spoken Turkish, which included a collection of materials on the vernacular gathered throughout Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. This work provided the basis for compiling the standard one-volume dictionary of the Turkish language, which the society compiled and published in 1945. Numerous re-editions followed. The proclaimed secular character of the Turkish state did not exclude the sphere of religion from the stipulations of the language reform. In 1932, the Turkish translation of the Koran in Latin characters came off the press in Istanbul. Only in 1959, was it allowed to republish the classical Ottoman translation of 1875–1877, but with the text transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Considerably earlier, the 1826 Ottoman translation of the Bible had been republished in Latin characters in 1941. But the translation of the Christian Holy Script into modern Turkish was printed only in 2001. From the 1950s to 1970s, several grammars of modern Turkish were produced abroad in English, German, Italian, and Russian, but no authoritative grammar of this language has been published in Turkish yet. At that time, the profound difference between Ottoman and modern Turkish was acknowledged too, and the first Ottoman-Turkish dictionary came off the press in 1952. Further similar dictionaries have been published regularly with Ottoman entries in Arabic characters and Turkish ones in the Latin alphabet. To this day, Turkish lacks an authoritative multi-volume dictionary though the first attempts at this task were made in the 1990s when a four-volume dictionary was published between 1995 and 1996, and was followed by a two-volume one in 1998. The question of language codification remains a highly politicized issue in Turkey. The left always strives for further reform and ‘purification’ of the language, while the right and the military stand for the standard that stabilized in the mid-20th century (Heyd 1954: 25, 28; Janich and Greule 2002: 311–312; Laut 2000: 48–52). On the international plane, the existence of the Turkish nation-state, complete with its own national language of Turkish carried quite a weight, first in the 1920s, and again in the 1990s. In the first period, in 1926 and 1927, the Tatar intellectuals of Kazan, who had standardized their Turkic Tatar language earlier in the 1880s, proposed to create a New Turkic Alphabet on the basis of the Azeri Latin script, developed in 1923. This would have produced a unified

268 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

standard language for all the Turkic-speakers of the Soviet Union. As a result, they could become the second most numerous group after the Russians. To prevent this, the Kremlin ordered standardization of Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkmen, and Uzbek as separate languages, complete with their different kinds of the Latin alphabet. Not surprisingly, further national development led to the building of separate nations (which were officially called ‘nationalities’), not some unified (Pan-)Turkic nation. In 1928–1932, the Latinization of languages in the Soviet Union became ideologically suspect on many counts. In the case of the Turkic languages, the final straw was the adoption of the Latin script for writing newly standardized Turkish in Turkey, which bordered on the Soviet Union. The danger was that through the instrument of this largely common (excepting minor differences in diacritic characters) Latin script, Ankara could claim the still not constructed nations of the Azeris, the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyzes, the Turkmens, and the Uzbeks for a larger ‘Great Turkish’ nation. (The 1918 foray of Ottoman troops to the Russian Caucasus was still remembered.) Finally, Moscow stopped the Latinization campaign in 1933. Then the Soviet authorities replaced the new Latin alphabets devised for writing the languages of the Soviet Union with Cyrillic counterparts in the second half of the 1930s and at the beginning of the 1940s. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, with the notable exception of Kazakhstan, all the new Turkic-speaking nation-states of Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan adopted various kinds of the Latin script for their respective national languages in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 21st century. Ankara, seizing this opportunity, subsidized these changes, which brought back the languages closer to Latin-based Turkish. On the advice of the Turkish Language Society, the idea of creating a common Turkish-Turkic language for all the Turkic-speakers was rekindled in Turkey, and remained popular there until the mid-1990s. The Turkish government commenced a wide-ranging political and diplomatic campaign to this end, but this effort failed as the new nationstates stuck to their specific Turkic national languages. However, some grassroots groups still continue appealing for adoption of a Universal Turkish Alphabet for all the Turkic languages. Some interest in this project remains in Azerbaijan as the Azeri language is largely mutually comprehensible with Turkish. In the second half of the 1990s, Turkey resigned from its ambitious plans of a common Turkic language, and a common Turkic alphabet, recognizing that the post-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia remain Russia’s sphere of influence (‘near abroad’). Ankara’s Pan-Turkic rhetoric annoyed the Kremlin, and could entail a clamp on Turkish economic expansion in both regions. Turkey subsided, but as the richest Turkic state, it continues to subsidize cultural activities in other Turkic states, as well as welcomes students from these states to Turkish universities. However, when in 2002, the Russian Duma frustrated the decision of autonomous Tatarstan to adopt the Latin alphabet for the Tatar language by

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

269

legislating that languages native to the territory of the Russian Federation must be written exclusively in Cyrillic, Ankara did not demur. Turkey remains more vocative on the issue of divided Cyprus. Although this island state was divided in 1974, this fait accompli was not recognized by the international community. This means that the provision of decolonized Cyprus’s 1960 Constitution making Greek and Turkish into co-official languages, de jure remains in power. In practice, the use of Turkish remains limited to road signs in the Greek section of the island, but Turkish is the official language in the Turkish zone of Cyprus. Unfortunately, in breach of not recognizing the effects of the 1974 division, Turkish was not made into an official language of the European Union, after Cyprus acceded the Union in 2004 (Esposito et al. 1995: 241; Grimes 1996: 468, 792, 795; Landau and KellnerHeinkele 2001: 127–130; Lewis 1963: x, 10, 13; Majewicz 1989: 49–50; Martin 2001: 186–194, 207; Qarai 2004; Roy 2000: 76–77; Smith 1998: 128–129, 141; Tryjarski 1995: 71–74, 90–98). In Europe, the language closest to Turkish is Gagauz of Moldova. The Gagauzes are Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christians. There are many theories on the origin of the Gagauzes. The one most widely accepted by scholars maintains that they are descendants of the originally Oghuz Turkic population of Dobruja. In 1262, the Byzantine Emperor, Michael VIII Paleologus (reigned 1261–1282) gave control over a portion of this region to the Seljuk Sultan, Keykavus II (Izz al-Din Kay-Kaus), who had fled before the advancing Mongols. The ethnonym ‘Gagauz’ is perhaps derived from Keykavus. Because Keykavus’s ersatz polity was located within Byzantium’s borders, he had no choice, but in return recognized the dominant position of Orthodoxy, and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. Nowadays, Gagauzes live in Moldova, Ukraine and Bulgaria, numbering 160,000, 32,000, and 1500, respectively. Twenty thousand more are scattered in Macedonia and Greece. Although some texts in their vernacular (written with the use of Greek characters) survive, their language was used largely at home and in their local communities. In public life, they employed the official languages, which used to be Russian, Romanian, and Moldovan in the 19th and 20th century, depending on the period. Although the first Gagauz book was printed in Greek characters in Vienna in 1810, the continuous tradition of Gagauz literacy developed in Moldavia during the late tsarist period and under Romanian rule in the interwar period thanks to a dedicated Bessarabian Orthodox priest, Mihail Ciachir (Mikhail Chair, 1861–1938). He translated the Old Testament into Gaguz (published in 1907), and during the 1920s and 1930s, compiled the first Gagauz dictionary and grammar and wrote a brief history of the Gagauzes. Before 1918, he employed the Greek alphabet, and later, the Latin alphabet, also used for writing in Romanian and Turkish. After World War II, Romania’s Bessarabia was made into Soviet Moldavia. From the official perspective, Gagauz remained an unwritten language though

270 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Orthodox Gagauz priests and their few literate faithful preferred to write their language in the Greek alphabet, symbolic of their faith. (Similarly, the over-100,000-strong population of Orthodox Turkic-speakers from central and southern Anatolia, or the Karamanalis, jotted down their vernacular in Greek letters before they were expelled to Greece in 1924.) In 1957, the Soviet Moldavian authorities adopted a Cyrillic alphabet for writing the Gagauz language and it was even the medium of instruction in Gagauz schools for the short period between 1958 and 1961. The first book (collection of poetry) in Cyrillic-based Gagauz was published in 1964, and prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union forty more followed, including a Gagauz-Moldavian dictionary (1973, Moscow). A revival of Gagauz nationalism took place at the end of the 1980s. Its strongly linguistic dimension is visible in the title of the first ever Gagauz periodical, the weekly Ana sözü (Mother Tongue), which started publishing in 1988. In 1990, a surge in pro-independence Moldavian nationalism, which included a vague proposal of uniting the country with Romania, incited Gagauz irregulars to take up arms. But the swift intervention of Soviet interior ministry troops prevented any serious skirmishes. After the demise of the Soviet Union (1991), there were no troops of this kind to stop a full-scale war between Moldovans and Russianspeakers of separatist Transnistria (Transdniestria) in 1992. Gagauzes, like these Russian-speakers, were afraid of the imposition of Moldovan as the official language. Only 4 percent of Gagauzes could speak Moldovan, as opposed to 73 percent with a good command of Russian. Chi¸sin˘ au realized that only cultural and political concessions could restore peace in Moldavia’s poorest southern region. In 1991, the first ever Gagauz university was founded in Comrat, and a Latin script-based Gagauz-Turkish dictionary came off the press in Ankara. In 1993, the Moldovan authorities approved a Latin alphabet for Gagauz, as developed by the Turkish Language Society of Ankara (it was slightly altered in 2000). In 1995, the Gagauzes obtained their ‘territorial autonomous unit’ of Gagauz Yeri (literally, ‘Gagauz land’) with the capital in Comrat. They adopted Gagauz, Moldovan, and Russian as co-official languages of Gagauz Yeri. Most education in this region is conducted via the medium of Russian, but in 1993, Ankara facilitated the opening of a high school with Gagauz and English as the languages of instruction, and numerous Gagauz students continue their education at Turkish universities. Bearing in mind that Moldova is Europe’s poorest state, any development in Gagauz Yeri will have to be bankrolled by Turkey in the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, it was the Stockholm-based Institute for Bible Translation, which reprinted Ciachir’s 1907 translation of the Old Testament (transliterated into Cyrillic) during the early 1990s, and sponsored the translation of the New Testament, which was published in 2006 in Moscow in two versions, one in Latin characters and the other in Cyrillic (Grimes 1996: 497; King 1999: 209–223; Magocsi 2002: 201; McCarthy 1997: 22).

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

271

Tatar and Karaim belong to the Kipchak group of the Turkic languages. The Kipchaks were a nomadic ethnic group, who, during the 9th century, settled the steppe area extending east of the Carpathians, along the north coast of the Black Sea to the mouth of the Volga flowing into the Caspian Sea. In Church Slavonic sources they were known as Polovtsi (‘blond-, yellow-haired’), while in Latin they were referred to as ‘Cumans.’ The former name was given as Palócz in Magyar, and Valwen in Germanic. The Latin name ‘Cumans’ is derived from the self-ethnonym Qun, which in turn, stems from Turkic qu for ‘blondand yellow-haired.’ Hence, the Church Slavonic ethnonym is a direct translation of the Cumanic self-ethnonym. In the 13th century, Mongols conquered their lands and incorporated them into their Golden Horde. Some Cumans, who had already served as mercenaries in Hungary’s army, left for the country. The Hungarian King, Ladislas IV (reigned 1272–1290), was known as ‘the Cumanian,’ because he had been born to a Cumanian mother. In 1282 and 1283, he granted to the Cumanian refugees two autonomous regions, in what is present-day central and eastern Hungary. They quickly became Magyarized, but their autonomous regions survived until 1876. ‘Tatar’ might originally be a self-ethnonym of a Mongolian group, but later spread among Turkic-speakers who constituted the majority of Mongolian troops fighting in the West. It is claimed that the ethnonym is derived from the Mongolian self-ethnonym Tata. In Western sources, the Tatars were often referred to as ‘Tartars,’ by analogy with Latin Tartarus for ‘hell.’ It is a reflection of the destructive 13th century Mongolian raids in Central and Eastern Europe. The Karaims (Caraims, Karaites) stem from the Crimea. Their Hebrew self-ethnonym Q’raim (‘scripturalists’) is derived from the Hebrew verb qara (‘to read’). In the 8th century, they adopted Judaism as many other Turkic-speakers in the Khazar Empire. But unlike them, the Karaims rejected the rabbinical tradition of the Talmud. Their Holy Scripture is limited to the Old Testament, though they revere most the Pentateuch. Their insistence on sticking to the unchangeable canon of the revealed Holy Writ earned them the nickname of ‘scripturalists,’ and is the starting point of their origin as a distinctive ethnic group. In the 13th century, some Karaim merchants migrated from the Crimea to Halich Ruthenia (Galicia). They were also joined by Armenian merchants, whose migration from the Caucasus to Halich Ruthenia lasted several generations, and in its course, they lost Armenian and began to speak Kipchak Turkic. In the mid-14th century, Poland conquered Halich Ruthenia. In 1397 and 1398, Tatar and Karaim refugees from the Golden Horde (crumbling due to internal problems and under the military onslaught of Timur’s [reigned 1370–1405] armies) were settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on the border with the state of the Livonian Order. These Tatar settlers quickly assimilated with their Slavic-speaking neighbors, and adopted Ruthenian, and later Polish as their written language. However, until the 20th century, they had written both languages in Arabic characters. Islam and the use of Arabic in liturgy allowed them to survive as a separate

272 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

ethnic group. Nowadays, several thousands of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars live in Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland. Unlike these Tatars, the Karaim settlers preserved their language, and uniquely for the Turkic languages, noted it in Hebrew characters. Hence, both Tatars and Karaims were employed all through the 15th century in the Vilnius chancery to service Tatar-language diplomatic correspondence with the Crimean Khanate, later mainly Karaims worked in this capacity. They were active in the chancery through the 18th century, and became known as ‘Arabic scriveners’ because they wrote with the use of Arabic letters. In Poland-Lithuania, Karaims were considered to be a mere subgroup of Jews until the mid-17th century. Even their specific ethnonym was recorded in official Polish-Lithuanian documents for the first time quite late, in 1506. It was the Swedish King, Charles XI (ruled 1660–1697) who led to the ‘invention’ of the Karaims as a separate ethnic group. Wishing to learn more on the Karaims in 1690, he sent Gustav Peringer (1651–1710), an orientalist from the University of Uppsala, on a fact-finding mission to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Peringer’s information on the Karaims contributed to the gradual perception and treatment of them as an ethnoreligious group in its own right, separate from Jews. As a result, while the negative image of the Jew prevailed in the Polish-Lithuanian territories, the Karaims were seen as the positive opposite of Jews. The oldest Karaim texts date back to the 16th century. In the 19th century, they adopted the Russian Grazhdanka and the Polish version of the Latin script for writing in their language. In 1842, the Karaim translation of the Old Testament was published. After World War II, the intergenerational transmission of the Karaim language was broken. At the beginning of the 21st century, several hundreds of the Polish-Lithuanian Karaims live in Lithuania, Poland, and western Ukraine. Those Karaims who remained in the Crimea adopted Crimean Tatar originally written in Arabic characters, but they noted it in Hebrew characters, and made it into their own Judeo-Crimean Tatar (Krymchak) language, infused with a lot of Hebrew terms. They adopted the Karaim translation of the Old Testament for their religious needs. After the breakup of the Golden Horde at the beginning of the 15th century, the increasingly independent Crimean Khanate became an Ottoman protectorate in 1475. Russia conquered the Crimea in 1774 and formally incorporated it in 1783. A wave of 100,000 Tatar (mostly Muslim, not Karaim) refugees left for the safety of the Ottoman Empire. Twenty thousand of their descendants still live in Romania’s Dobruja, and it is claimed that 5 million Turks are of the Crimean Tatar origin. In 2001, less than 300 Karaims remained in the Crimea. In the Soviet Union, the Crimea’s Karaims were not recognized as a separate group, and for all practical purposes, they were treated as a subgroup of the Crimean Tatars. Thus, these Karaims shared the fate of the Crimean Tatars, including the Latinization and Cyrllicization of the Crimean Tatar language in 1928 and 1938, respectively, which were extended to Krymchak as well.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

273

Until the 19th century, Russia’s Tatars and other Muslim Turkic-speakers wrote in the Persianized Eastern Turkic language of Chaghatay, related to modern-day Uzbek and Uighur. Chaghatay emerged as a written language at the beginning of the 16th century in the Uzbek Khanate (with the capital in Samarkand), founded by descendants of Genghis Khan (1162–1227). (The glottonym is derived from the name of Chagatai Khan [reigned 1227–1242], Gengis Khan’s second son.) In the 19th century, Kazan, the third largest and most industrialized city in Russia after St Petersburg and Moscow, emerged as the center of Tatar and Muslim learning in the empire. Abdülkayyum Nsiri (Kaium Nasyri, 1825–1902) opined that the dialect of Kazan was ‘the most beautiful and purest Turkish language.’ Following this dictum, he standardized Tatar (written in a modified Arabic script) by his copious linguistic, pedagogical, ethnographic, theological and fictional works. In 1881, the Crimean Tatar, Ismail Bey Gas˙ prinskii (Ismail Gaspirali, 1851–1914), proposed replacing traditional Muslim religious schools with secular ones in Russia. This meant superseding Arabic and Chaghatay with local vernaculars as media of instruction, but in practice, it was initially mostly Nsiri’s Tatar. In 1884, the first secular Muslim school opened in the Crimea, with Islam reduced to one of the subjects. The religion was retained as an ethnocultural marker to prevent any merging of Russia’s Muslims with the Russians. (It was a legitimate worry, because after 1863 as many as 200,000 Tatars were forcefully converted to Orthodoxy, and could return to Islam only after 1905.) Soon after, many more secular Muslim schools were founded across Russia. The pillar of Gasparinskii’s secular type of Muslim school was the ‘new method’ (usul al-jadid in Arabic), or writing following the phonetic pattern of the local vernacular. From this phrase, the term ‘Jadidism’ developed for the modernizing and secularizing trend among Russia’s Muslims, which Gasparinskii fostered among Russia’s Muslims by his schools. In 1881, the first secular Muslim newspaper (bilingual, Tatar-Russian) started publication in Russia. It was widely perused in the Muslim world, from Egypt to India, and thus spread the message of Jadidism across the ummah, or the Muslim world. The modernizing and secularizing goals and aspirations of Jadidism were similar to those of the Jewish Haskalah (or Enlightenment), though the latter movement originated a century earlier in the Holy Roman Empire (especially in Prussia) and the former in the Russian Empire. Gasprinskii, who was an early proponent of Pan-Turkism, wanted to create a common vernacular Turkic language at least for all the Turkic-speakers in Russia. To this end, beginning in 1876, he employed the Crimean Tatar dialect infused with numerous Osmanlıca (Old Turkish) words and Osmanlıca- and Persianbased neologisms. Like Nsiri in the case of his Kazan Tatar, Gasprinskii also dubbed his language ‘Turkish (törki).’ He translated the Koran into Tatar with an eye to hindering the Orthodox proselytization. Gasprinskii also hoped that this translation would replace the Arabic original in mosques attended by Russia’s

274 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Turkic-speakers, but the clergy disagreed. The monopoly of Gasprinkii’s Tatar was broken in 1905–1907, when out of 50 newspapers and periodicals published in Arabic characters in Russia, 34 were in Tatar, meaning in Nsiri’s Kazan Tatar and 16 in Gasparinski’s Pan-Turkic Tatar. An uneasy compromise followed; Kazan Tatar and other regional Turkic varieties were employed in Muslim elementary schools, and Gasprinskii’s Tatar in Muslim secondary schools. However, prior to 1917, Arabic, specifically Crimean Tatar, Osmanlica, and Persian words had been removed from Gasprinskii’s Tatar, which meant that it became indistinguishable from Kazan Tatar. In this manner, Tatar became the written language not only of the Tatars but numerous other Turkic-speakers across the Russian Empire. The jadidist modernization was so successful that in 1897, 20.4 percent Tatars could read, while only 18.3 percent Russians. In the Soviet Union, Tatar was replaced with numerous other Turkic languages (Azeri, Bashkir, Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek, among others), speedily devised to offset the possibility of the ethnolinguistic unification of the communist polity’s Turkic-speakers as a single nation, which would have been the most numerous after the Russians. In 1919– 1920, the core Volga territory inhabited by Tatars was arbitrarily split between the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In the process, three-quarters of the Tatars were left outside the borders of their nominal republic; and they, not the Turkic-speaking Bashkirs, constituted the largest ethnic group in Bashkiria. The Latin alphabet was ordered to replace its Arabic counterpart for writing Tatar in 1927. The first-ever typewriter produced in the Soviet Union in Kazan in 1929, employed this Yanalif, or a ‘new (Latin) alphabet’ devised for writing Tatar. In 1939–1940, another change took place, Cyrillic superseded Tatar’s Latin script, and Russification followed. In 1930, 96 percent of all Tatar children were enrolled in Tatar-language schools, but in the late 1980s, only 7 percent. Not surprisingly, in 1989, 17 percent of Tatars could not speak their ethnic language. The fear of Christian proselytization returned with the 2001 publication of the Tatar translation of the New Testament. Today, out of 6.7 million Tatars, 2 million live in Russia’s autonomous Republic of Tatarstan (into which the Tatar ASSR was transformed), 3.5 million elsewhere in Russia, 0.85 million in Central Asia, and 0.33 million in Kazakhstan. At 3.8 percent of the Russian Federation’s population (2002), the Tatars constitute the second largest ethnolinguistic group in this state after the Russians. Tatar remains a co-official language (alongside Russian) in Tatarstan with the capital in Kazan. Apart from Chechnya, it is the most independent-minded out of all the Russian Federation’s autonomous republics and regions. In 1999, the parliament of Tatarstan legislated a switch from Cyrillic to the Latin script for writing Tatar, but the Russian Duma nullified this act in 2002 by forbidding the use of non-Cyrillic scripts for writing the languages of Russia’s

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

275

autochthonous nations and ethnic groups with their cultural and political centers located within the state’s borders. The decision is acutely unpopular among the Tatars, because they see the Latin script as a badge of pro-Tatar stance and Cyrillic as that of pro-Russian stance. Tatar national leaders like to claim that the tradition of ‘Tatar-Bulgar literacy’ dates back to the 5th century, predating the earliest Slavic texts by three centuries. At that time, the Turkic-speakers wrote in Runic characters before adopting the Arabic script after their conversion to Islam in the 9th century. In the Soviet Union, the history of the Kazan (Volga) Tatars was definitely separated from that of the Crimean Tatars.39 The Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic with the capital in Simferopol, established in 1921, was made into their ersatz nation-state, despite the fact that 180,000 Crimean Tatars constituted a quarter of the republic’s population. In 1925, the Frunze (today, Vernadskii Taurida National) University in Simferopol was entrusted with the codification of the Crimean Tatar language. In 1928, the language’s script was changed from the Arabic to Latin alphabet, and in 1938, Crimean Tatar was Cyrllicized. In 1941, Nazi Germany occupied the Crimea and preserved a degree of ethnolinguistic autonomy for the Crimean Tatars, while the same was denied to the Russian-speakers. When the Soviets re-conquered the Crimea from German hands (1944), Moscow summarily accused the Crimean Tatars of being an ‘enemy nation’ and they were expelled to Central Asia. Almost half of them died en route. In 1946, the Crimean ASSR was abolished (and transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954), which sealed the unmaking of the Crimean Tatars and their language. Although they were rehabilitated in 1967, they were not allowed to return to the Crimea until the breakup of the Soviet Union. School teaching in Crimean Tatar recommenced during the late 1980s in Soviet Uzbekistan. In the last Soviet census of 1989, the Crimean Tatars were anew recognized as a separate ‘nationality.’ (After 1946, they had been treated as a subgroup of the Tatars.) Today, 0.25 million Crimean Tatars live in Ukraine’s autonomous republic of Crimea, 150,000 in Central Asia, and 20,000 in Romania’s Dobruja. A mere 7 percent of them lost the command of their native language, which bodes well for the recreation of their national community in the Crimea. Unlike Moscow, in the case of Tatarstan, Kyiv did not oppose the Latnization of Crimean Tatar, which made this language more similar to Turkish (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 246– 247, 764; Benk˝ o et al. 1970: 667–668; Damm and Mikusinska 2000: 115, 165; Esposito et al. 1995a: 52–53, 351; Etymological Dictionary 2001; Gafarov 2002; Grenoble 2003: 70–73; Grimes 1996: 495, 510; Honzák et al. 2001: 239, 375, 698; McCarthy 1997: 331–332; Menges 1987: 30–31; Pisowicz 2000: 135; Price 1998: 108, 280, 473; Roy 2000: 7; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 908, 2012; Smith 1990: 228–229, 266, 278–280, 289, 325–328, 334; Stachowski 2003; Szamel 1998: 276–283, 289–293; Tornow 2005: 555–563; Tryjarski 1995: 73–74; World’s Scriptures 2006).

276 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Bulgarian Bulgarian was another language that developed in agreement with the pattern of diglossia set by Greek, Turkish, or Serbian. In 893, Old Church Slavonic written in Glagolitic replaced Greek as the usual written language of administration in the Bulgarian Empire. (This change also extended to the Greek alphabet, as contemporary sources claim that by the time some Slavic texts were recorded in it. However, no continuous Slavic text in Greek letters from the period has been discovered to this day.) Soon, probably the locally developed Cyrillic script replaced Glagolitic. The former was more practical as based on the Greek alphabet, more widely known among the empire’s literati. Although the oldest surviving translation of the fragments of the Gospels into Slavic, done in Bulgaria, dates back to the turn of the 10th century, the two full extant translations of the Gospels (one in Cyrillic, and the other in Glagolitic) were produced at the turn of the 11th century. There had to be translations of the Old Testament as well, but only tentative fragments were preserved. Greek was imposed as the official language, when Bulgaria was subjugated to the Byzantine rule between 1018 and 1185. Church Slavonic survived in ecclesiastical use because the Bulgarian Patriarchate with its seat in Ohrid survived, though demoted to an archbishopric. In 1185, when the second Bulgarian Empire was founded with its capital in T˘ urnovo, Slavonic resurfaced as the language of the court, the Church, and administration. In 1223, the Bulgarian Patriarchate was renewed with its seat in the capital. T˘ urnovo soon became the most important center of Church Slavonic in Bulgaria, as Ohrid had been in the first Bulgarian Empire. After 1370, the empire fragmented. Meanwhile, perhaps as many as three different redactions of the Slavonic translation of the Gospels were executed, gradually replacing Greek terms and syntactical constructions with Slavonic counterparts. In the 1370s, the T˘ urnovo Patriarchate accepted as standard the last redaction, perhaps carried out by Bulgarian scholars at Mount Athos. It became the codification basis of the Bulgarian recension (variety) of Church Slavonic, which maintained its elevated role until 1396, when the Ottomans overran the last territories of the Bulgarian Empire. T˘ urnovo fell into Ottoman hands in 1393, and the Bulgarian Patriarchate went defunct the following year. Later, the Bulgarian recension of Slavonic survived (alongside Greek) as a language of the Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ohrid, whose hierarchs had claimed the acephalous status for their ecclesiastical province since 1223. But the prestige of the Bulgarian recension was such that it was used in Serbia, Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Muscovy. In turn, from the standard Bulgarian translation into Church Slavonic, the Gospels were translated into Ruthenian (1517–1525), Walachian (Romanian; 1547–1554), and slightly Ruthenized Church Slavonic (1581). Especially the latter translation became the basis for the first modern Russian (1819) and Serbian (1820) translations of the Gospels.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

277

In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror (reigned 1451–1481) subjected the Ohrid Archbishopric to the Patriarchy of Constantinople, which meant a strong influence of the Greek language. Ohrid archbishops continued to claim the title of Patriarch until 1767, when they were forced to discontinue this practice. It was the de facto end of the Bulgarian Patriarchate, which de jure had not existed. After that year, the use of Church Slavonic was limited to lower clergy and the Slavic monasteries in Mount Athos. The Bulgarian recension also survived in other monasteries across the Balkans (for instance, Rila near Sofia), but Greek hierarchs ordered destruction of Slavonic manuscripts in many of them. In Ottoman Bulgaria, Ottoman (Old Turkish) was employed in administration, and Greek in ecclesiastical administration and even liturgy. In the eyes of the Greek Orthodox hierarchs, the use of any other language than Greek disunited and weakened the vulnerable position of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire. For the Ottomans, all the Orthodox subjects of the sultan formed the Orthodox millet and were known as ‘Romans’ (that is, Greeks). Religion, not the language, was the main basis of political organization and group identification in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 14th century, the Bulgarian recension of Church Slavonic remained in wider use in Walachia and Moldavia, though the influence of Ruthenian radiating from Poland-Lithuania was strong, especially in the latter principality, which was a Polish fief between 1387 and 1456. Bulgarian Church Slavonic was adopted as the official language of the Danubian Principalities and gradually developed into a specific Dacian recension that remained in use until the beginning of the 18th century. Meanwhile, since the end of the 16th century, Cyrillic-based Walachian (Romanian) had been increasingly used in the princely chancelleries, which contained Church Slavonic to ecclesiastical administration. At the beginning of the 18th century, the Phanariot administration replaced both languages with Greek in both principalities. Phanariot officials also supported the replacement of Church Slavonic with Walachian in liturgy, which had been accomplished by the end of the 18th century. It is popularly claimed that the first printed book in Bulgarian was published in 1566 in the Walachian capital of Tîrgovi¸ste, but what it means is that the publication was in the Bulgarian recension of Church Slavonic. In the 16th century, Greek letters were increasingly used for writing in the vernacular. Elements of the Bulgarian vernacular surfaced in a religious book published thanks to the efforts of Bulgarian Catholics in Rome (1651). In the 17th and 18th centuries, most literature created in Bulgaria was in the form of religious books written by Catholic authors, increasingly with the use of Latin letters. The Western European experience of the Reformation convinced them that the use of vernaculars facilitated proselytizing. Catholic missionaries only insisted that the Latin script should replace any others in such vernacular books. The Habsburg reconquest of Ottoman Hungary, accomplished during the last two decades of

278 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the 18th century, convinced not only as many as 200,000 Orthodox Serbs to move to Vienna’s military borderland in the 1690s, but were followed by 20,000 Bulgarian converts to Catholicism, who settled in Banat (today, in Romania), in the 1730s and 1740s. Catholic missionaries’ use of the Latin script for writing in the Slavic vernacular reinforced the idea espoused by the Orthodox clergy that spoken Slavic of everyday life was not worthy of use in church and for writing books. Orthodox popes (priests) saw the Latin alphabet as a ‘devil instrument,’ as much a danger to Orthodoxy symbolized by Cyrillic, as the Arabic script of Ottoman. Like in Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy or Serbia, the literate Orthodox clergy of the Bulgarian Patriarchate called their written language ‘our language’ or ‘Slavic.’ When in the late 18th century and in the first half of the following century, they wished to refer to the vernacular they called it ‘common language,’ ‘simple language,’ or ‘Bulgarian language [written] in a simple manner.’ Despite the short shrift given to the vernacular, a fledgling tradition of vernacular manuscript culture began in the 16th century with Slavic translations of Greek collections of sermons and religious songs. Such manuscripts were created and circulated widely in the Balkans (that is, modern-day Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia) through the 19th century. Two hundred of them survive to this day, mostly deposited in Sofia. A small manuscript, which grew into the foundational code text of Bulgarian nationalism was written by a monk, Paisii (1722–1773), from the Slavic (Serbian) monastery Hilandar on Mount Athos. He traveled across the Balkans and in the Habsburg lands. In the course of his wanderings, he acquainted himself with 16th-century Italian and Latin histories of the Slavic polities, which had thriven in the Balkans prior to the Ottoman conquest. This research inspired him to compose a brief sixty-page-long book, SlavicBulgarian History, completed in 1762. He wrote it in a strongly vernacularized Church Slavonic, reminiscent of the aforementioned Slavic translations of Greek religious books. In this book, Paisii admonished fellow ‘Bulgarians’ (that is, Orthodox Slavic-speakers of the Ohrid Patriarchate) to care about their own ‘Bulgarian language,’ not to be ashamed to call themselves ‘Bulgarians,’ and not to turn to ‘foreign ways,’ such as reading and speaking in Greek. His advice is eerily reminiscent of Herder’s opinions on language, though the latter expounded them only later, in the 1770s and 1780s. However, without the furor, which Herder’s works gained at the turn of the 19th century (thus underwriting the legitimacy of Central Europe’s and the Balkans’ coalescing ethnolinguistic nationalisms), perhaps, Paisii’s manuscript would have been of little more than antiquarian interest today. It was published only in 1885 in Lublin (located then in Russia’s Congress Poland) to show St Petersburg’s continuing Pan-Slavic support for the cause of Bulgarian nationalism, and to celebrate the unification of the Principality of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

279

Bulgaria with the autonomous Ottoman region of Eastern Rumelia into a territorial unit largely coterminous with present-day Bulgaria. The beginning of the Bulgarian language, as we know it today, is associated either with the aforementioned Slavic translations of Greek originals, or Paisii’s history. The latter circulated in manuscript and inspired early Bulgarian nationalism. It also added the term ‘Slaveno-Bulgarian language’ as another name for the vernacular. As in the case of Serbian, the 17th century saw an influx of Church Slavonic publications in the Russian recension, which replaced the moribund Bulgarian recension, hardly known or used by popes (priests), and heavily Hellenized after the abolishment of the Bulgarian Patriarchate of Ohrid (1767). At the beginning of the 19th century, books in the Serbianized version of Russian and in Slaveno-Serbian (published in Russia and Austrian) started arriving, on the territory of the erstwhile Bulgarian Patriarchate, too. The idea of writing in the vernacular became more popular, though the Greek-speaking hierarchy thought it an utter anathema, and successfully imparted this viewpoint onto a section of the Slavophone clergy, including Khristaki Pavlovich (1804–1848). The Constantinople Patriarchate wished to retain Byzantine Greek and Church Slavonic as languages of liturgy in Greek- and Slavic-speaking areas. Sofronii Vrachanski (1739–1813) was the most enthusiastic propagator of Paisii’s history and the author of the first Bulgarian autobiography (1804). Like Paisii, Vrachanski settled for vernacularized Church Slavonic (Slaveno-Bulgarian) (Burke 2004: xi; Dell’Agata 1984: 158–159; Dinekov 1985: 125; Dulichenko 2003: 207; Frucht 2000: 112; Janich and Greule 2002: 29; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 181; Magocsi 2002: 65; Moszynski ´ 2006: 36; Pinto 1980: 37–42; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 297, 463–464, 513–514; Rychlík and Kouba 2003: 326–327; Sugar 1977: 45; Todorova 1992: 12–14). The status of the Bulgarians (or Orthodox Slavic-speakers living on the territory of the former Bulgarian Patriarchate) saw a dramatic improvement in the wake of the 1820s Greek Revolt, which led to the decline of the privileged position of Greek merchants and Phanariot officials in the Ottoman Empire. After 1829, the Ottoman administration and army increasingly turned to Bulgarian merchants for supplies, making them into the elite of the coalescing ethnolinguistic Bulgarian nation. In order to educate necessary personnel in the Bulgarian areas, Greek merchants had previously founded so-called Helleno-Bulgarian schools, which first helped Slavic-speakers acquire Greek, and then provided learners with basic education via this medium of instruction. Orphaned Vasil Aprilov (1789–1847) was taken by his brothers, who were merchants, to Moscow. There, he chanced across Iurii Venelin’s (pseudonym of the Pan-Slavist, Georgii Khutia, 1802–1839) 1829 book, Early and Contemporary Bulgaria (Moscow), which claimed continuity between the inhabitants of both medieval Bulgarian Empires and the Orthodox Slavophone inhabitants of the demoted Bulgarian Patriarchate. As a successful merchant in his own right, he

280 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

founded in 1835 the first secular with Bulgarian as the language of education in the village of Gabrovo. For him, Bulgarian meant the vernacular, and luckily for the students, Peter (Petar) Beron (1795–1871) had already published a vernacular primer (Kronstadt, Transylvania) in 1824, which could draw on the authority of Petar Sapunov’s (1800–1872) Slaveno-Bulgarian translation of the New Testament (1828). Between the 1820s and the1840s, the first books in vernacular Bulgarian and vernacularized Church Slavonic (Slaveno-Bulgarian) were printed in the colonies of Bulgarian merchants and intellectuals in Constantinople, Bucharest, Belgrade, and Budapest. In the 1830s, Russian Grazhdanka, modeled on Antiqua, superseded the ecclesiastical (Church Slavonic) version of Cyrillic, which, like in Russia, continued in religious books earmarked for clergy. In 1840, the British and Foreign Bible Society published Neofit Rilski (1793–1881) and Neofit Bozveli’s (1785–1848) Slaveno-Bulgarian translation of the New Testament in Smyrna (I˙ zmir), much to the dismay of the patriarch of Constantinople, who dubbed it as the ‘heretical and Protestant Bible.’ But the Orthodox Bulgarianspeaking faithful welcomed this translation. In 1844, the first grammar of vernacular Bulgarian came off the press in Bucharest. (Rilski’s 1835 grammar, printed in Church Slavonic Cyrillic, was of Slaveno-Bulgarian.) This Bulgarian New Testament and this grammar became the first bestsellers among the Bulgarian-speakers. The first ever Bulgarian periodical, Liuboslovie (1842–1846), published in the vernacular, rolled off the press in Smyrna, which grew to be the center of the predominantly American Protestant missions to the Bulgarians. This periodical’s title ‘Love of Words’ indicates the clear connection of Bulgarian nationalism to language. However, those who established it were Konstantin Fotinov (1790– 1858) and Elias Riggs (1810–1910). The former had been a staunch supporter of Church Slavonic in the role of the Bulgarian language, while the latter was the most prominent figure among the American Protestant missionaries. In the first half of the 19th century, the three camps championing Church Slavonic, Slaveno-Bulgarian, and the vernacular as the basis of the Bulgarian language, reminded one of Lomonosov’s corresponding ‘three styles’ of Russian. In the latter case, the ‘middle style’ (‘Slaveno-Russian’) won, whereas Church Slavonic (‘high style’) became limited to Orthodox liturgy and the vernacular to realistic dialogs in novels. In Bulgaria, the proponents of vernacular Bulgarian had won by the mid-19th century. Increasingly vernacularized Church Slavonic remained as the language of the Bulgarian Bible, and, after it replaced Greek in this function, Church Slavonic survived in Orthodox liturgy. Later, the discussion was if standard Bulgarian should reflect some features of Church Slavonic construed as ‘classical or Old Bulgarian,’ or exclusively of the vernacular. It was a vital decision as the former is highly inflectional (with cases) while the latter analytical (without cases), which is unique among the Slavic

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

281

languages (with the exception of Macedonian). The trend soon switched in support of entirely vernacular syntax. The first publications in ‘New Bulgarian’ were written in western Bulgarian (Macedonian) dialects, which early Macedonian nationalists saw as the potential basis for a common ‘Bulgarian-Macedonian’ language. But the majority of early Bulgarian nationalists came from eastern Bulgaria, so the eastern dialects were eventually made into standard Bulgarian. Later editions of the 1840 Bulgarian translation of the New Testament were even re-written in accordance with the peculiarities of the East Bulgarian dialects. Had the standard been based on the western dialects and supplied with Church Slavonic’s cases, Bulgarian would have been much closer to Serbo-Croatian than modern Macedonian, making it a viable option to build an All-South Slav language (Serbo-Croato-Bulgarian, Illyrian, Yugoslavian). One wonders if the outcome in the form of Bulgarian, as we know, was an accident of inter-Bulgarian discussion on the national language, or a conscious decision to distance the coalescing standard from Serbo-Croatian. Upon his ascent to the throne, Sultan Abdülmecid (ruled 1839–1861) commenced the tanzimat (reform) of the state, which ensured greater equality among the subjects despite their different religious backgrounds. Bulgarian activists seized this opportunity for doing away with Greek dominance in Orthodox churches located in Slavophone areas. In an 1849 firman (decree), which the sultan issued to allow for opening a Bulgarian church in Constantinople, he used the term ‘Bulgarian millet.’ At that time, there was no such entity and all the Orthodox of the Ottoman Empire were contained within the Roman (Greek) millet. The semi-official term, ‘Bulgarian millet,’ was the sultan’s tacit nod to a more ethnolinguistic definition of the Bulgarians as a nation in line with the ethnolinguistic nature of autonomous Serbia and independent Greece, which had emerged by detaching territory from the Ottoman Empire. Ethnolinguistic nationalism had eroded the empire’s ideological basis steeped in religion since the beginning of the 19th century, so it was only suiting that the empire struck back with the very same weapon. Before the sobriquet ‘Bulgarian’40 was limited to referring to the Bulgarian nation in the last quarter of the 19th century, it meant Orthodox Slavic-speakers, especially in the areas dominated by Greek clergy. By siding with the religious-cum-linguistic demands of these Slavophone Orthodox, the Ottoman administration limited the influence of Hellene (Greek) nationalism, which in line with its ‘Great Idea,’ claimed all the members of the Orthodox (Roman, that is, Greek) millet for a future Greater Hellene nation-state. In 1850, Protestant missionaries achieved a great success, when Constantinople recognized the Protestant millet, which was mainly joined by Armenian converts. On the one hand, it was the sign of the penetration of the Ottoman Empire by Europeans (including Russians) and Americans, who published their own books and newspapers, and even ran their own postal

282 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

service in the empire. On the other hand, the proliferation of millets in the second half of the 19th century, limited the demographic and political power of the traditional Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish millets, which could be used by corresponding fledgling nationalisms. And last but not least, new millets protected converts from the wrath of the Churches, which they had left. Until the turn of the 20th century, the system aptly preserved the power in Ottoman hands by maintaining equilibrium between the empire’s socio-political groups despite various external impositions introduced by the Western powers. In the mid-19th century, many Bulgarian leaders were better at writing in Greek, Ottoman, or Church Slavonic than in Bulgarian, which had not been standardized yet. This was the usual phenomenon when the language of a coalescing ethnolinguistic national movement had not been in official administrative use thus far. Hence, early Czech nationalists wrote and spoke better German than Czech, their Magyar and Slovak counterparts better Latin and German than their respective Magyar and Slovak, early Ukrainian leaders better Polish, Russian, or German than Ukrainian, their Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian counterparts better Polish and German, respectively, than their native languages and so on. Afterward, it was difficult to speak a coalescing national language ‘correctly’ prior to its agreed upon final standardization. Willy nilly, national leaders had to fall back on their local dialects, but often, for the sake of mutual comprehensibility, switched to an established language of wider communications like the participants of the All-Slav Congress in Prague (1848), who debated in German. The penchant for ‘purifying’ Bulgarian of Turkic and Greek linguistic loans set in during the first half of the 19th century. Writers replaced them with Church Slavonic neologisms, but supplied those with Turkic and Greek counterparts in brackets so as to make sure that the reader would know which words these neologisms were intended to replace. In the second half of the 19th century, most neologisms and linguistic loans were borrowed from Russian. It was the function of the growing dependence of the Bulgarian national movement on Russia. St Petersburg used its influence among the Balkans’ Orthodox to further its imperial ambitions in the region. The pro-Russian center of radical Bulgarian nationalism emerged in the Walachian capital of Bucharest, while the proponents of traditional Bulgarian nationalism, who strove for milletlike autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, concentrated in Constantinople. Other Bulgarian centers in Belgrade, Vienna, Budapest, or Odessa (Odesa) were of secondary significance. Bulgarian-language schools, established by merchant colonies and mainly American missionaries, spread elementary and secondary education among Bulgarians in the 1850s and 1860s. But most careers in the Orthodox Church and administration were still reserved for those with a good command of Greek. The Patriarch of Constantinople did not allow Slavophone bishops residing in

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

283

Slavic-speaking areas to write in vernacular Bulgarian, or to publish religious materials in this language. Exasperation with the policy was such that the Bulgarian Church leaders and the faithful expelled the Greek bishops influenced by Bucharest’s 1864 seizure of the land of Greek monasteries in Romania. The Patriarchate, succored by Athens, strove to limit Greek losses. But Sultan Abdulazüiz (reigned 1861–1876) decided to use the conflict in order to weaken the Greek influence, and decreed the creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870. This de facto autocephalous Bulgarian Church comprised present-day Bulgaria and most of historical Macedonia. Much to the dismay of Greeks and Serbs, the Bulgarian national movement equated the exarchate with the territorial extent of their future nation-state. Between 1859 and 1871, Fotinov, Riggs, and Petko R Slaveikov (1827–1895) completed the Bulgarian translation of the Bible, which was published in Constantinople, just a year after the founding of the exarchate. The translation stabilized fledgling standard Bulgarian. In 1875, Serbs began a revolt in Bosnia, intending to partition this province between Montenegro and Serbia. Bulgarian nationalists followed suit and staged their own rebellion a year later. The successful suppression of the Bulgarian rising provided St Petersburg with a pretext to intervene on behalf of ‘fellow Christians.’ In 1877 and 1878, Russia defeated the Ottomans and established the client state of Bulgaria, largely coinciding with the exarchate. London and Vienna protested, and the Bulgarian principality, with its capital in Sofia, was reduced to what today is northern Bulgaria. The south of present-day Bulgaria was made into the autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia with its capital in Plovdiv. The short-lived Greater Bulgaria of 1878 became Bulgarian nationalists’ own ‘Great Idea.’ When a rebellion flared up in Eastern Rumelia in 1885, they managed to annex this province to Bulgaria. After the establishment of Bulgarian control in the principality and Eastern Rumelia, persecution and forced expulsion of Muslims (mainly Turks, but also Slavic-speakers and Circissians) followed, modeled on Russia’s 1774–1878 expulsions of Muslims from the northern shores of the Black Sea and from the Caucasus, which St Petersburg conquered. Then independent Greece and autonomous Serbia followed suit. Of Bulgaria’s 1.5 million Muslims, less than 0.7 million (or 16 percent of the population) remained in 1900. Ethnic cleansing improved the chances of the ethnolinguistic homogenization of the nation-state. The Bulgarian National Library was founded in Sofia in 1879. The Bulgarian Literary Society (established in 1869 in Romania) moved to Sofia in 1911 and was transformed into the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The first ever Bulgarian university opened in Sofia in 1888. The city emerged as the clear political and cultural center of Bulgaria, which facilitated the codification of standard Bulgarian. In the 1870s, a compromise was sealed that Bulgarian should be based on the east Bulgarian vernacular, but with the use of the Bulgarian recension of Church Slavonic as a pool from which to draw in order to coin neologisms. In

284 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

practice, Russian linguistic loans remained more popular. The new standard was codified and finally promulgated for official use in 1899. In the meantime, when in doubt how to write, Russian lexical and syntactical loans were the practical answer. State-approved efforts were also undertaken to ‘purify’ standard Bulgarian from Turkish and Greek words. A five-volume dictionary of the Bulgarian language came off the press between 1895 and 1904. In 1908, Bulgaria declared outright independence from the Ottoman Empire, and the principality was elevated to the rank of tsardom (kingdom, or empire). The defeat suffered in the second Balkan War (1913) ended Bulgaria’s hopes of expansion into Macedonia and Thrace. Two years later, the seat of the exarchate was moved from Constantinople to Sofia. In 1945, the Patriarch of Constantinople recognized the autocephalous status of the Bulgarian Church. In 1953, the exarchate was transformed into the Bulgarian Patriarchate, a move recognized by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1961. By that time, the state’s borders had coincided with those of the Bulgarian Church. After World War II, marked by Bulgaria’s alliance with the Third Reich, Sofia resigned from the dream of a Greater Bulgaria. The etymological orthography that preserved some phonetic and morphological peculiarities of Church Slavonic prevailed until 1945 with the brief interlude of 1921–1923, when a short-lived phonetic spelling was introduced. In 1925, the new standard translation of the Bible, commissioned by the exarchate’s Holy Synod, was published. It is used along with the 1871 translation, which preserves various peculiarities that obtained prior to the 1899 codification. The establishment of communist Bulgaria in 1944 led, a year later, to the replacement of the ‘bourgeois etymological spelling’ with the phonetic orthography that obtains to this day. Two Bulgarian characters not used in Russian were dropped so that the Bulgarian form of Cyrillic is identical with its Russian counterpart, though some letters are pronounced differently. The strong Russian lexical influence continued until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. An authoritative dictionary of the Bulgarian language began to be published in 1977, and by 2004, 11 volumes have been published. It is interesting to note that the Bulgarian translation of the Koran was printed in 1930 for the use of the Pomaks, a Slavophone Muslim ethnic group. After World War II, Bulgaria was mostly spared vast ethnic cleansing and internal displacement, which plagued Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Greece, and to a lesser extent, Romania. Between 1944 and 1945, only 120,000 Bulgarians ‘returned’ from Greece’s Thrace. The 1912–1913 and 1941–1944 campaigns of Bulgarianizing Turkish and Muslim personal names of Bulgaria’s inhabitants (that is, ethnic Turks, Pomaks, and Roma) were repeated in 1971–1973, and 1984–1989. The first two campaigns sent 220,000 refugees to Turkey between 1923 and 1949, who were followed by a wave of 155,000 expellees between 1949 and 1951. Afterward, Sofia practically sealed the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

285

Between 1965 and 1972, a separate campaign of the forced Bulgarianization of personal names was directed at Pomaks (Slavophone Muslims) and Roma. In 1972, Turkish was banished from schools as a subject and it was prohibited to speak in this language even at home. The last Bulgarizing campaign followed the 1981 celebrations of the 1300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state. It was conveniently forgotten that that the Bulgar ‘forefathers’ spoke in Turkic. Sofia slickly renamed them as ‘Proto-Bulgarians.’ The scholars at the service of the communist-national authorities, bent on emphasizing the Bulgarian (Slavic) character of Bulgaria, developed the triunine theory of Bulgarian ethnogenesis. In this perspective, by the 9th century, native Thracians, Slavic masses, and Proto-Bulgarian nomads coalesced into the Bulgarian nation. It was understood that after the ‘five centuries of Turkish yoke’ the ‘purity of the 9th century nation’ should be regained. In the second half of the 1980s, it was prohibited to speak in Turkish in public, and in early 1989, this Bulgarizing frenzy led to the forced expulsion of Bulgaria’s most remaining Turks (including Roma and Pomaks), 310,000 in all, to Turkey. The international outcry, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc brought the Bulgarian communists down, too. Under the impression of the bloodshed spawned by the break-up of neighbor Yugoslavia, expellees were allowed to return to postcommunist Bulgaria, where cultural and political rights of minorities are observed. About one-third of the expellees came back to Bulgaria. The destructive attraction of Bulgarianization was abandoned in favor of an accession to the European Union. It took place, as planned, in 2007, and thus Bulgarian became another one of the Union’s official languages. Actually, it is the EU’s first official language written in Cyrillic (Americans Discover the Bulgarians 2006; Bulgaria Turks 1992; Donev 2003; Eberhardt 1996: 270; Frucht 2000: 95, 103, 108–109, 264; Jelavich and Barbara 1977: 129–144; Magocsi 2002: 115, 191, 217; McCarthy 1997: 130–131, 206, 296–297, 331–341; Pinto 1980: 41–45; Price 1998: 44, 46; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 464; Qarai 2004; Riis 2002: 10–11; Todorova 1992: 17–19, 38–40). Between 1738 and 1741, about 20,000 Slavic-speaking Bulgarian converts to Catholicism, led by French missionaries, left the Ottoman Empire for Habsburgheld Banat in Hungary. At the time, it was part of the military borderland depopulated by the recent reconquest. Because Church Slavonic was much distanced from their vernacular, and written in Cyrillic associated with Orthodoxy, the refugees adopted Latin script-based Croatian for written purposes. In the 19th century, they replaced Croatian with their vernacular as the medium of instruction at their schools. To this end, the first printed book in their language, a catechism, was published in 1851 (Pest). It was printed in a Magyar-style Latin orthography, but with elements of Slovenian spelling. Obviously, ‘Orthodox’ Cyrillic was not an option, at that time Catholics believed that the only appropriate way of writing was in Latin characters. This gave rise to a new written language, whose users began to refer to as ‘Banat Bulgarian.’ A version of

286 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Croatian-style Latin alphabet was developed for this language in an 1866 textbook (Pest), and a grammar of Banat Bulgarian followed 3 years later (Pest). Many Banat Bulgarian periodicals and especially religious books came off the press by the turn of the 20th century. The codification was rounded up with a Magyar-(Banat) Bulgarian dictionary (1896, Szeged). Later, Magyarization extinguished the grassroots support for this language, and after 1918, most of Banat Bulgarian-speakers found themselves in Romania, where the building of an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state of the Orthodox Romanian nation took precedence over the cultivation of other languages and religions. The publishing of Banat Bulgarian books for Catholics revived in the 1930s, and the last periodical in this language published until 1943. In communist Romania, the principle of ethnolinguistic homogeneity triumphed again. Accordingly, the number of Banat Bulgarian-speaking Catholics plummeted from 30,000 in 1930 to 17,500 in Romania (and 5000 in Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina) in 1965, to 7600 registered in the Romanian census of 1992. After the fall of communism, publishing and cultural life in Banat Bulgarian revived during the 1990s. The Banat Bulgarian Bible was published, which to a large extent is a Latin-script transliteration of the Bulgarian Bible. The most important periodical soon switched from publishing exclusively in Banat Bulgarian to trilingualism; articles in Romanian and Cyrillic-based standard Bulgarian appear, as well. The pool of speakers is so small that it is difficult to produce enough texts in Banat Bulgarian in order to codify it. Increasingly, it evolves into an identity symbol. In order to emphasize their loyalty to Romania, Banat Bulgarian-speakers stress their ethnic difference vis-à-vis ‘southern Bulgarians’ of Bulgaria, and refer to their language as ‘Paulician Bulgarian,’ or ‘Paulician,’ and to themselves as ‘Paulicians.’ This glottonym and ethnonym go back to the Paulician sect, which emerged during the 7th century in the Byzantium-controlled Caucasus. They were resettled in the Balkans in the 9th century, and in the 11th century, influenced the rise of the sect of Bogomils, who thrived in Bosnia, and in turn, gave an impulse to the rise of Cathars, who became influential in southern France between the 11th and 13th centuries. It is probable that the French missionaries found it easy to convert the ancestors of the present-day Banat Bulgarians/Paulicians, because the former were descendants of Bogomils and as such, did not wholeheartedly embrace Orthodoxy. In 1995, a history of the Paulicians was published in Paulician and Romanian. It claims that the ancient Paulicians possessed an extensive state in what today is Ukraine. In turn, Bulgarian scholars and politicians maintain that Paulician, Macedonian, and standard Bulgarian are the three written standards of the Bulgarian language. The Macedonians could not disagree more, but the opinion(s) of the few remaining Paulicians cannot be made heard. Strangely, Sofia is usually silent on the subject of the Pomakian language. The Pomaks are Slavophone peasants, who converted to Islam between the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

287

16th and 18th centuries. The etymology of their ethnonym is oblique, but the popular belief is that it comes from the verb pomagam (‘to help’), because the legend casts the Pomaks in the role of ‘Turks’ helpers.’ In reality, many served as pomagache, or auxiliary troops, in the Ottoman army. Bulgarian nationalists like to claim that the origin of the ethnonym ‘Pomak’ is the Bulgarian word maka for ‘torment’ suffered by Pomaks’ ancestors supposedly forced to adopt Islam. (As it is known, most cases of such conversion were voluntary.) But the relative newness of their conversion spawned the Turkic ethnonym Ahreani for Pomaks, derived from ahara-yen for ‘new faithful.’ Another myth widespread among the Bulgarians is that the Pomaks speak the ‘purest Bulgarian,’ though, to this day, their vernacular preserves numerous Turkic and Arabic linguistic loans, which actually make Pomakian into a language quite different from standard Bulgarian. The Pomaks, on a par with Bulgaria’s Turks, were forced to Bulgarianize their Turkish/Muslim personal names in 1912–1913, 1941–1944, 1971–1973, and 1984–1989. In 1989, numerous Pomaks left for Turkey, too. Today, 300,000 Pomaks live in southern Bulgaria, and 40,000 in northeastern Greece. In 1996 and 1997, three grammars of Greek script-based Pomakian were published in Greece. Athens is interested in the codification of a separate Pomakian language, because it would allow for warding off Sofia’s claims that Pomaks constitute a Bulgarian minority in Greece. Officially, Bulgaria defines its Pomaks as Bulgarians, but in practice they remain second-class citizens, shunned by ‘real Bulgarians.’ To progress in life, educated Pomaks, with Bulgarianized names and who even converted to Orthodoxy, prefer to keep their ethnic origin secret, not to endanger their careers. In this situation, Pomaks have no chance of codifying their language in postcommunist Bulgaria, and prefer sending their children to Turkish-language minority schools, thus expressing their displeasure at tacit Bulgarianization, and in order to ensure better educational and employment prospects for their offspring in Turkey (Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 175; Dulichenko 2003: 207–208, 2004: 40–41; Guentcheva 2001; Magocsi 2002: 201; Miklowicz 2002: 49; Price 1998: 45; Todorova 1992: 7). The largest ideological-cum-linguistic strife in which the Bulgarian language participates is that between Skopje and Sofia. The last phase of the second Bulgarian Empire commenced with the moving of its capital to Ohrid in 997, and terminated when this rump realm was reincorporated to Byzantium (1018). Macedonian nationalists claim that this fast-declining Bulgarian Empire was a ‘Macedonian Empire,’ because it centered on Macedonia. Similarly, because Old Church Slavonic was developed on the basis of the Slavic dialect of Thessalonicae (the capital of historical Macedonia), Macedonian linguists prefer to dub this language as ‘Old Macedonian.’ Then they also refer to the 16th century tradition of Slavophone vernacular writings in Greek letters as ‘Macedonian.’ Bulgarian nationalists flatly refute all these claims as usurpation of the past and literacy that ‘truly’ belong to the Bulgarian nation. Both groups of nationalists

288 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

do not wish to accept the fact that common cultural tradition could spawn two different modern cultures. In addition, Sofia does not believe that culturally and dialectally close but politically different national centers can give birth to different standard languages. Hence, Macedonian is still classified in Bulgarian textbooks as a ‘dialect of the Bulgarian language.’ Accordingly, no dictionaries or grammars of Macedonian can be purchased in Bulgaria. The situation is similar with regard to their Moldovan counterparts, which are not available in Romania.

Slovenian In the northernmost extreme of the South Slavic dialectal continuum, the Slovenian language developed. The so-called ‘Alpine Slavs’ settled in this area during the 6th century. In the following century, they established their own polity, Caranthanii (Carinthia), whose name stemmed from its capital of Krusky (Krnsky) Grad (in German, Karnburg, or Karnberg). The best known of the Slavic princes of Carinthia, Cacatius (Karatus, reigned 745–751), was baptized, when held as a hostage at the Bavarian court between 740 and 745. The Germanic Bavarians,41 who established in the 6th century their realm in what is present-day western Austria and Germany’s Land of Bavaria, were permanently subjected to the Frankish Kingdom at the beginning of the 8th century. In turn, the Frankish Kingdom incorporated Slavic Carinthia in 788 and overhauled it into a borderland mark under Bavarian control. In 976, an extensive Carinthian (Windisch) Mark was founded, and its territory was excluded from Bavaria. This mark coincided with present-day Slovenia, Austria’s Länder of Carinthia and Styria, and Italy’s regions of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Veneto (except the city of Venice). It was divided into smaller regions between 1000 and 1122. This relatively shortlived Greater Carinthia prompted some Slovenian nationalists to dream about a Greater Slovenian nation-state, despite the fact that the medieval mark’s inhabitants spoke in Germanic and Romance alongside increasingly less dominant Slavic. Like the ethnonym ‘Slovak, Slovakian,’ the ethnonym ‘Slovene, Slovenian’ is a relatively recent one, coined in the second half of the 18th century, and popularized as the self-ethnonym of the Slovenes in the first half of the 19th century. Both ethnonyms, ‘Slovene’ and ‘Slovak’ were derived from ‘Slav,’ and spread most among their intended users when Pan-Slavism was an influential political idea in Austria’s Slavophone areas between the 1830s and the 1850s. Until the inclusion of most of the Slovenian lands in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1918), the majority of Slovenian-speaking population lived in the Austrian crownlands of Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, Görz (Gorizia)-Gradisca, Triest (Trieste), and Istria. A small group resided in Venice’s adjacent territories, and another in the adjacent areas of the Hungarian komitats of Zala and Vas, immediately south of the town of Szentgotthárd. Slovenian authors refer to the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

289

latter region as ‘Prekmurje,’ or ‘Prekomurje,’ meaning the ‘land beyond the River Mur (Mura). To complicate matters further, the north half of the Slovenianspeaking area was included within the borders of the Salzburg Archdiocese and the southern half in the Aquileia Archdiocese. Both archdioceses’ eastern borders largely coincided with the frontier between the Austrian (Habsburg) lands and Hungary’s province of Croatia. This overlapping of ecclesiastical and political boundaries created a boundary which unambiguously separated Slovenes and Croats who actually spoke the same dialects in the borderland areas. In the 1930s, Slovenian linguists reified this ecclesiastical border as a linguistic one by producing appropriate maps of Slovenian dialects, which were imagined to delimit the ‘correct’ national territory of the Slovenes. The Slovenes and the Croats share the Latin script, but the political-cumecclesiastical border separating them meant that the former tended to use German and Italian orthography, while the latter Magyar and Italian. In addition, to a limited degree, Croats also employed Church Slavonic in Glagolitic until the turn of the 20th century. On the other hand, because there was no single political, administrative, or ecclesiastical unit, which would contain most of Slovenes and could be identified with them as an ethnic group, the Slavicspeakers tended to identify themselves and their speech by association with the region in which they happened to live, for instance, as ‘Carniolan,’ ‘Carinthian,’ or ‘Styrian.’ After the successful spread of the intended national self-ethnonym ‘Slovenian’ among most of the population defined as ‘Slovenian’ in the mid19th century, the self-ethnonym ‘Winds (Winden)’ continued to occur among the Slavic-speakers in southern Carinthia between the towns of Lavamund and Rosegg. (Significantly, after the Great War, in the 1920 Klagenfurt Plebiscite, most of them voted in support of the proposal that their region should remain in Austria.) In addition, local identities of Slavic-speakers, pegged on specific Alpine valleys, persist to this day. At the same time scholars tended to follow the regional sobriquets, or referred to these Slavic-speakers and their speech as ‘Illyrian.’ The problem was that the adjective was also popularly applied to the Slavic-speakers of Croatia, Dalmatia, Slavonia, and Bosnia. In German(ic), the Slavophone ancestors of the today’s Slovenes were identified as Winden, and their language as Windisch. The usage was akin to Germanic Welsche (and its variants, such as Wälisch for ‘Italians’) for Romance-speakers, sometimes for Celtic-speakers (for example, ‘Welsh’), and by extension, for Slavophone shepherds in the northern Carpathians. Unlike in the case of Windisch, the etymology of Welsche is clear, the word is derived from Germanic *walxa for ‘foreigner.’ Windisch is a variation of Winida and perhaps ultimately comes from Celtic *vindo (‘white’) or *wen (‘belonging to the same lineage’). A group of Slovenian-speakers in Hungary declared themselves as ‘Wenden’ until the beginning of the 20th century. Germanic-speakers also applied this ethnonym to the Slavs living between the Oder (Odra) and

290 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Elbe rivers. Because most of these Slavs lost their idiom to German by the 19th century, the usage became limited to the Slavophone Sorbs of Lusatia, but unlike Slovenian (Windisch), Sorbian was referred to as Wendisch. (Sometimes the Slavic Kashubs of Western Pomerania were dubbed Wenden.) English-speakers took over both terms, rendered as ‘Windish’ and ‘Wendish.’ In the 1st and 2nd centuries, Roman sources located the Wen(e)ds in Central Europe. Their ethnic provenance is unknown, but some believe they might be Celts or related to the Indo-European Illyrians. In the 6th century, Jordanes, a notary at the Ostrogoth court in Italy, mistakenly identified the Weneds with the Slavs, which accounts for the Germanic usage of Windisch and Wendisch for Slavic-speakers. Obviously, Slavs themselves never used these appellations as their self-ethnonyms. ‘Russia’ in Finnish is Venäjä, and Venemaa in Estonian. These coinages might arise by copying the Germanic use of Windisch and Wendisch, or, otherwise may have something to do with the small ethnic group of, perhaps Finno-Ugric, Vends (Wenden in German), who survived in northcentral Latvia until the 16th century. Herodotus wrote of the (probably Italic) Venetii, who lived in the area, where Venice was founded. Julius Cesar mentioned a Celtic group Venetii, whom he located in Armorica. Just north of this area, the French region of Vendée emerged. In Antiquity, the name of Lake Constance was Venetus. These names may be a reflection of some relations between Central Europe’s Weneds and their Celtic and Italic neighbors. More often than not, ‘Weneds’ were not of Italic origin, which, in the eyes of the Romans, made this ethnonym into a synonym of ‘foreigner,’ applied to Celts and the non-Germanic ‘barbarians’ of Central Europe. From the ethnolinguistic vantage, the Slovenian-speaking area continued to contract in the north (Carinthia and Styria), losing to German(ic), until it stabilized in the mid-15th century. On the other hand, most Germanic-speaking settlers assimilated with their Slovenian neighbors in the Carniolan countryside. In the compact Slovenian-speaking areas, even towns remained predominantly Slavophone, with the exception of the narrow stratum of the richest patricians who spoke in German(ic). The exception was the coast where towns were Italianophone. Because relatively few Slovenes were members of the nobility, the Slovenian language was not widely used in public life. The situation contrasted with that in the lands of the Czech Crown, where the mixed Bohemian (Czech)-German character of the nobility translated into the official status for both languages until the late 1620s, when the expulsion of much of Protestant nobles led to the containing of Bohemian to the private sphere. Since the 8th century, the Slavophone lands of future Slovenia had been dominated by Germanic-speakers. The border of the Holy Roman Empire separated the Slovenian-speaking territories from Croatia until 1806. Later, between 1809 and 1815, all of these territories, except Styria and Prekmurje, were contained in Napoleon’s Illyrian Provinces. This short-lived polity kindled the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

291

vision of the Illyrian (that is, Yugoslav, or all-South Slav) nation-state. But the mid-19th century decision to base the Serbo-Croatian (Yugoslav) language on the Štokavian dialect of eastern Bosnia removed the ethnolinguistic center of gravity of the Yugoslav national movement by 200 kilometers away from the Slovenian-speaking area. In present-day northeastern Slovenia, the vernacular is close to Kajkavian Croatian, and in the southeastern corner of the country to ´ Cakavian Croatian. Hence, there was a possibility of creating some comprom´ ise Cakavian-Kajkavian language for both Croats and Slovenes. The Štokavian solution nullified this chance. It did not substantially improve the situation for creating a unified Slovenian language either, as the mountainous character of the Slovenian-speaking area brought about the emergence of a plethora of very distinctive dialects, usually classified by linguists in as many as seven separate groups. There was no single significant center of Slovenian-speaking culture, which could prevent this fragmentation. Laibach (Ljubljana), as the capital of the Crownland of Carniola, and the seat of the Carniolan Diocese (founded in 1462), with time, came to fulfill such a role, to a large degree, by default, for it was the sole sizeable town in the center of the compact Slovenian-speaking area. Following Napoleon’s defeat, the Congress of Vienna (1815) reestablished the status quo ante, and it persisted until 1918. The Slovenes continued to live in the Austrian lands, while the Croats mostly in the Kingdom of Hungary. This border that survived a millennium largely unchallenged, separated the Slavophone Catholics and significantly influenced their development into two separate ethnolinguistic nations, despite their shared linguistic and confessional commonality. The first monuments of Slavic literacy created on the territory of future Slovenia were written in Church Slavonic with the use of Glagolitic characters (10th century). The waning of Byzantine influence in the region, the arrival of Magyars who insulated the local Slavic-speakers from Church Slavonic literacy then contained to the southern Balkans and Kievan Rus, and the Great Schism of 1054 prevented the rise of Cyrillic Slavonic literacy in the Carinthian Mark, and limited Glagolitic Slavonic literacy to Dalmatia. Slovenia’s claim to fame is the fact that the first surviving Slavonic text written in Latin characters was created in the lands that, nowadays, constitute Slovenia. This text was composed in the late 9th century, and is preserved in a manuscript from the turn of the 11th century. In the mid-19th century, these monuments of Slavonic literacy inspired the early Slovenian nationalists to rename Old Church Slavonic as ‘Old Slovenian,’ which ‘proved’ that Slovenian was a ‘sister’ of the Greek language in which the Gospels were composed. But this legend is not often invoked nowadays, because, unlike Croatian, Slovenian does not face the arduous task of disentangling itself from the Serbo-Croatian linguistic commonality. The official employment of the Slavic vernacular survived until 1414 in the ceremony of the enthronement of the Dukes of Carinthia, who were usually

292 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Germanic-speaking. In the meantime, as elsewhere in Catholic Central Europe, the paramount language of literacy was Latin. Chancery German joined it in the 13th century. The Reformation gave the necessary impulse for the rise of the written vernacular, from which the codified Slovenian sprang up. The first printed book in this vernacular, published in 1551 in Tübingen, was Primus (Primož) Trubar’s (1508–1586) Protestant Catechism in the vernacular of Laibach (Ljubljana). He referred to the vernacular as ‘Carniolan or Slovenian (meaning “Slavic’’),’ hence Slovenian linguists claim that he was the first to coin the glottonym-cum-ethnonym ‘Slovenian.’ The Catholic Habsburgs initially tolerated the spread of Protestantism in the region, overwhelmed by the sudden popularity of the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire, and facing the continuing expansionism of the Ottomans. In 1584, Slavic (or the first Slovenian) translation of the Bible by the Protestant pastor, Jurij Dalmatin (1547–1589), came off the press in Wittenberg in the vernacular consciously purged of some Germanisms. Eight years later, it was followed by a Latin-German-Italian-Slavic (Slovenian) dictionary, printed in Graz. The second edition was produced in 1608 (Frankfurt am Main), and the third in 1744 (Klagenfurt). The Slavic vernacular was variably referred to as ‘Windisch,’ ‘Illyrian,’ and ‘vernacular Slavic.’ For writing in this Slavic vernacular authors employed the German, Italian, or Magyar versions of the Latin alphabet. In his 1584 Latin grammar of ‘LatinCarniolan,’ published in Wittenberg, Adam Bohoriˇc (1520–1598) developed a specific alphabet that utilized numerous diagraphs. The so-called ‘Bohorˇcica’ became popular among those few who continued to write and publish in the vernacular during the Counter-Reformation. The first limited actions against Protestantism in Carniola, Carinthia, and Styria were taken during the 1580s. In 1598, Protestant ministers and teachers were banished. A year later, all townsmen were ordered to adopt Catholicism, or emigrate. After 1601, Protestantism survived in the Slovenian lands, but mainly in Hungary’s Prekmurje, because religious freedom was granted to Royal (Habsburg) Hungary in 1606. The tradition of vernacular literacy came almost to a standstill after 1628 when, in the course of the Thirty Years’ War, Slovenian Protestant nobles and burghers were forcibly expelled or agreed to convert to Catholicism. This literacy continued in a limited and decentralized manner, in line with the needs of the Counter-Reformation. Jesuits adopted Protestant texts for Catholic use, and usually published them in the dialect of Ljubljana. But before the mid-18th century, four other distinctive dialects came to be used for writing. They were not conceptualized as dialects of a Slovenian language, as at that time, there was no concept of such a language, either. For instance, Dalmatin did not intend his translation of the Bible for ‘Slovenes.’ He followed the tradition of supplying editions of Luther’s German Bible with glossaries of words explained in local dialects or German chancery languages, depending on the place of publication. Dalmatin appended his translation with the list of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

293

words, which differ in Carniolan, Carinthian, Slovenian (Prekmurjan), Croatian, Dalmatian, or Istrian. As a good entrepreneur, he clearly targeted his translation also at what today is Croatia, where the local 1560–1563 translation of the Holy Writ was done in Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Hence, Dalmatin’s rendition in Latin characters appeared as ‘more suitable’ for Slavophone Catholics in Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia. Until the liquidation of their order in 1773, Jesuits were responsible for Slavophone education and book production in the Habsburg lands. Apart from the Czech lands with its well established literacy in chancery Bohemian, which remained a co-official language until the late 1620s, Jesuits treated the Slovenian and Croatian lands along with Upper Hungary (Slovakia) as a single, largely undifferentiated, Slavophone area. Slavophone priests and religious writers delivered sermons and published books all over this territory. The Jesuit, Juraj Habdeli´c’s (1609–1678), dictionary of the Slovenian (Slavic) language published in Graz in 1670, was based on the Kajkavian version of Croatian. In the 18th century, Slovenian Protestants in Prekmurje also published their books in Kajkavian, but written in the Magyar version of the Latin alphabet, not in Bohorˇcica. The written language steeped in Kajkavian or the Ljubljana dialect was intended as the means of mass communication mediated via books. Nobody spoke it, as people stuck to their local dialects, or spoke po domaˇce (in the manner of their hometown). But religious publications for the simple folk had to accommodate the dialect differentiation in order to ensure easy comprehension. Thus, between 1758 and 1762, a Catholic catechism was printed in three different linguistic versions namely, in Styrian, Carinthian, and Carniolan, all of which, however, were in Bohorˇcica. The Jesuit divinity seminaries in Klagenfurt and Ljubljana educated Slavophone priests mostly for these areas that today are identified as inhabited by Slovenian-speakers. After the late 16th century clampdown on Protestantism, the first original book in Slovenian (that is, the Slavic dialect of Ljubljana) was published in 1678 in Graz. The first printshop in Ljubljana opened a century later in 1778. Until the turn of the 19th century, Slavophone, German(ic)speaking, and Ital(ic)ophone inhabitants of the territory of modern-day Slovenia identified with their regions as Carniolans, Carinthians, Istrians, or Styrians. (The same phenomenon persisted among Slavic- and German(ic)-speaking Bohemians and Moravians, before the communities split along the linguistic lines in the first half of the 19th century.) The modern tradition of Slovenian writing emerged with the new vernacular translation of the Bible (1784–1802; the first one done by Catholics, though closely following Dalmatin’s translation), and the publication of a German-Windish dictionary (1789). In the last two decades of the 18th century, especially after the 1784 replacement of Latin with German as the official language in the Habsburg lands, the novel normative belief emerged that language is the ‘appropriate’ criterion of selfand group-identification. In line with this insight, the Carniolan writer, Anton

294 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Tomaž Linhart (1756–1795) switched from German to Slovenian when composing poetry, though he continued to write his scholarly books in German. In his history of Carniola and the South Slavs of the Habsburg lands, he stressed the unity of Slovenes, which should be rebuilt within the borders of the extensive medieval mark of Carniola. In his linguistic views, Linhart fell back on Marko Pohlin’s (1735–1801) Slavophone grammar of Carniolan, in which the latter deplored the preference given to German over Carniolan. The creation of the French protectorate of Illyria, and the novel political program of transforming the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia into a German nation-state, accelerated the polarization of the population along the ethnolinguistic lines. In 1797, Vienna permitted the publication of the first Slovenian newspaper hoping to win Slovenes for the war effort against Napoleonic France. Earlier, the Jesuit linguist, Ožbalt Gutsman (1727–1790) had proposed that despite linguistic differences (which he deemed rather minute), a single dictionary should be compiled for the Slavic-speakers of Carinthia, Carniola, and Styria. The head of the imperial library in Vienna and the censor of Slavophone publications in the Austrian Empire, Bartholomäus (Jernej) Kopitar (1780–1844), carried out this program in his German-language Grammar of the Slavic Language in Carniola, Carinthia and Styria (1808, Ljubljana). In his effort to codify this language, he was also inspired by Herder’s thought on languages as the basis of groupidentification, and also by the examples of Johann Christoph Adelung, Josef Dobrovský, and Samuel Bogumił Linde, who commenced the standardization of German, Czech, and Polish, respectively. Through the influence of his academic works, Kopitar christened Glagolitic- and Cyrillic-based liturgical Slavic with the name ‘Church Slavonic,’ and also identified ‘Slovenian’ Slavic as the direct and ‘purest’ descendant of the former. This contributed to the later Slovenian national myth that Old Church Slavonic was none other but ‘Old Slovenian.’ The adjective ‘Slovenian’ for referring to this vernacular and people speaking it emerged firmly only in the 1820s (the German term Windisch was rejected as it developed into a pejorative denotation for the Slovenes). Earlier, it had been usual to refer to Carniola’s Slavophone population as ‘Carniolans,’ and to the ethnically close Slavic-speakers in Carinthia and Styria as ‘Slovenes’ (Slavs). By identifying Church Slavonic as ‘Old Slovenian,’ Slovenian linguists and nationalists joined the competition for the Cyrillo-Methodian literacy and tradition also contested by the Croats, the Bulgarians, the Macedonians and, to a lesser degree, by the Slovaks. But the Slovenes and the Slovaks have tended to refer to this tradition in a rather rhetorical manner. Their claims for exclusive national ownership of Church Slavonic as ‘Old Slovenian’ or ‘Old Slovak’ are rather rare in comparison to the heated and politicized discussion on this subject that has raged among Bulgarian, Macedonian and Croatian intellectuals to this day. Another feature that the Slovenes share with the Slovaks is the ethnonym. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Slovenian and Slovak intellectuals had not

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

295

clearly distinguished between the ethnonyms of their respective ethnic groups, as at that time the generic name of ‘Slavs’ was popularly applied to refer to most Slavophone peoples. Even today, all the three ethnonyms remain quite close. For instance, in Slovak, the adjectives ‘Slovenian,’ ‘Slovak,’ and ‘Slavic’ are rendered as slovinský, slovenský, and slovanský, respectively; and as slovénski, slovaški, and slovánski in the Slovenian language. In 1774, Slovenian (that is, ‘Slavic’ and ‘Carniolan’) was introduced as an auxiliary medium of instruction in elementary schools in Carniola and Gorizia. The 1784 replacement of official Latin with German limited the influence of Italian (previously equated with Latin) in Gorizia and Triest. Although the French administration initially wanted all the Slavic-speakers of the Illyrian Provinces to use Croatian alongside French, Italian, and German, they allowed in 1811 the official use of Slovenian. This was a formative experience for the Slovenes, because apart from Styria and Prekmurje, all the Slovenian-speaking areas were included in this French protectorate. Vienna permitted the introduction of Slovenian as a subject to secondary schools in Graz (1812), Ljubljana (1817), and Gorizia (1847). An ethnolinguistic Slovenian national movement had coalesced by the 1830s. Its leading figure was France Prešeren (Franz Prescheren, or Presern, 1800–1849), who like Linhart, resigned from German in favor of Slovenian, and with his poetry wrote the Slovenian language into European literature. Prešeren composed the Slovenian epic, Krst pri Savici (1836, Laibach, The Baptism on the Savica Waterfall, 1996, Bilje), on the conversion of the last Slavic Carinthian ruler to Christianity. During the 1830s, the poet and his followers combated the schemes for codifying separate Slavic languages for Carniola, Carinthia, and Styria. Thanks to the group’s efforts, the first books of poetry and fiction in standard Slovenian came off the press in 1836 and 1847, respectively. The 1820s and the 1830s also saw a veritable ‘war of alphabets.’ The two modern proposals aspiring to replace Bohorˇcica, besides Latin characters, also comprised 8 and 12 Cyrillic letters, respectively. It was an anathema to most Catholic Slovenian intellectuals, including Prešeren’s group, who feared it may be the first step to including Slovenian in a bi-scriptural Serbo-Croatian. They rejected the possibility of submerging painstakingly coalesced Slovenian in a larger South Slavic (Illyrian) language, or even an all-Slavic one with numerous literary dialects. Support for such Pan-Slav projects was never strong among the Slovenes, unlike in Slovakia, Serbia, or Croatia. The script strife caused Slovenian intellectuals to settle for a compromise in the form of the Croatian alphabet. It is known as Gajica in Slovenia because the Croatian linguist and author Gaj had developed it. The diagraphs of Bohorˇcica gave way to one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondence as pioneered by Czech Hussite writers in the 15th century. In the course of the 1848 revolutions, Slovenian leaders demanded the founding of a united Duchy of Slovenia (composed of all the Slovenian-speaking territories) within the Austrian Empire, the introduction of Slovenian into

296 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

administration and education, and sided with the Czech opposition to the project of transforming the German Confederation into a German nation-state. The absolutist reaction actually removed Slovenian from secondary schools by 1852. But paradoxically, the apolitical Catholic St Mohorja (Hermagoras) Society, founded in 1851 in Klagenfurt, decisively contributed to the solidification of Slovenian nationalism. Its main purpose was to publish books in Slovenian, and the society excelled in this sphere. Between 1860 and 1918, it produced 16 million copies of Slovenian books for the population, which numbered 1.25 million in 1900. This effort and the unique (in Central Europe) prosperity of the Slovenian lands allowed for the virtual eradication of illiteracy among the Slovenes by the turn of the 20th century. Elsewhere, this feat was repeated in Central Europe, only in Austria proper, Prussia, the Czech lands, and Russia’s Baltic provinces. Like Galicia’s Poles, Slovenian deputies also supported the 1867 transformation of the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary. They were rewarded with the co-official status for Slovenian in proceedings before Carniola’s law courts, and in the deliberations of the Carniolan Landtag (Diet). Under the 1869 compulsory education act, the use of Slovenian as a medium of instruction expanded in elementary schools in Carniola, Styria, Gorizia, and Istria. Istria’s Italian-speakers protested this move. But in Carinthia, the sole Slovenian-German secondary school, founded in 1871, became completely German 3 years later. In 1882, 2 years after Czech had gained the status of co-official language in Bohemia and Moravia, Slovenian was introduced as a co-official language for law court proceedings in the Slovenian-speaking areas in Styria and Carinthia. In 1908, there were four bilingual (German-Slovenian) secondary schools in Carniola, and the sole Slovenian-language secondary school in Görz. Slovenian did not become a co-official language in administration, but it was widely used for official contact and proceedings with Slovenian-speaking subjects. The concentration of Slovenian cultural life in Ljubljana made the Carniolan dialect into the basis of standard Slovenian. Between 1856 and 1859, a new Catholic translation of the Bible into standard Slovenian came off the press. Between 1869 and 1882, the British and Foreign Bible Society published another translation of the New Testament, which was intended for Catholics, but Slovenian Catholics and Protestants shunned it. In 1894–1895, a two-volume Slovenian-German dictionary came off the press. The Czech missionary, Antonín Chraska (1868–1953), translated the Bible for Protestant Slovenes, and it was printed in 1914. During the second half of the 19th century, the Slovenian language was ‘purified’ of German loans (including the Gothic letters used until then) and the standard was distanced from the vernacular by adopting the 16th century language of Protestant writers as the guideline of ‘correctness.’ In this respect, Slovenian emulated the codification course of the Czech language. This produced a considerable gap between the spoken language and the standard, which one has to learn at school as a second language.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

297

After Vienna’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, many Slovenian politicians lost their cherished hope for the transformation of Austria-Hungary into a federation with united Slovenia as one of its states. This opened the trend, which advocated a union with the Croats and Serbs in a South Slav federation. In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Serbo-Croatian replaced Slovenian in the majority of state institutions. However, the former language functioned under the confusing ideological guise of ‘Serbocroatoslovenian,’ introduced by the 1921 Constitution as the official language. Slovenian intellectuals successfully resisted any attempts at creating a common ‘Serbocroatoslovenian language,’ or making Slovenian into a dialect of the ‘Yugoslav language,’ as Serbo-Croatian became popularly known after the 1929 royal coup, when the kingdom’s long-winded name was replaced with that of ‘Yugoslavia.’ These attempts at submerging Slovenian in Serbocroatoslovenian (or Yugoslavian), brought about conscious reaction in the form of ‘purifying’ Slovenian from Serbo-Croatian words and expressions. However, thanks to the legal construct of Serbocroatoslovenian, the administration of the Slovenian lands was conducted actually in Slovenian, and Slovenian deputies spoke Slovenian in the state parliament in Belgrade. But Serbo-Croatian was the exclusive language of command in the Yugoslav army. In 1919, the first-ever Slovenian-language university was founded in Ljubljana. But only in 1938, the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts was established in the city, that too, as a parallel to the Croats’ Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb (1866), and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade (1886). The Slovenian-speaking lands, which remained outside Yugoslavia, included Gorizia-Gradisca, northern Istria, and southwestern Carniola granted to Italy, and southern Carinthia granted to Austria. In Yugoslavia, most of Carniola, southern Styria, and Prekmurje were divided into two administrative units until 1929, when, for the first time in history, Slovenia became a single administrative entity, the Drava Banovina. During World War II, between 1941 and 1945, this banovina was split between the Third Reich and Italy. Accordingly, German and Italian replaced Slovenian as official languages. But the Italian occupation administration provided for the de facto use of Slovenian as a co-official language, and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts was accepted as a member of the Council of the Italian National Academy in 1943. This cultural leniency (on the other hand, the Italians murdered 6000 Slovenes and sent 30,000 to concentration camps) was over in late 1943, when Germany seized control of Italy’s occupation zone of the banovina. As earlier in Germany’s occupation zone, place-names and public life were Germanized and Slovenian-language schools and institutions were liquidated. The sole significant exception was the formation of a Slovenian army for helping the Germans fight the Yugoslav guerillas. This contributed to a serious inter-Slovenian conflict, which claimed 50,000 lives, while 40,000 casualties were due to warfare and occupation repressions.

298 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

After the war, most of interwar Italy’s Slovenian-speaking areas passed to Slovenia, made into a state within the federation of communist Yugoslavia. Appropriately, Slovenian was made into the official language of this Yugoslav Republic of Slovenia, but Serbo-Croatian held sway as the common language of the federation, which meant much less opportunity to speak Slovenian in the Belgrade parliament than in the interwar period. The economic clout of demographically and territorially small Slovenia allowed for maintaining the elevated status of its language. In 1974, the ecumenical Slovenian translation of the Bible, intended for both Catholics and Protestants, was published in Belgrade. It was based on the Catholic translation printed between 1959 and 1961. Between 1970 and 1991, the five-volume authoritative dictionary of the Slovenian language was published. Beginning in 1981, official protests were voiced against the encroachment of Serbo-Croatian on the Slovenian vocabulary and the various official spheres of language use earlier guaranteed for Slovenian. The most pressing question was that of employing Slovenian in the Yugoslav army vis-à-vis Serbo-Croatian. After the 1990 declaration of independence, Slovenian became the sole official language of the Slovenian nation-state. For the first time in history, Slovenian does not share its status of the official language in Slovenia with another language. In 1996, this event was celebrated by the brand new translation of the Bible into the newest version of standard Slovenian, as defined by the aforementioned authoritative dictionary. Slovenian politicians take pride in the Habsburg (Austrian) connection, which, they claim, that radically differs their country from the rest of ‘Balkan Yugoslavia.’ They also point to the fact that per capita Slovenia is the richest of all the postcommunist states, which facilitated its accession to the European Union in 2004. In 2007, Slovenia was also the first postcommunist state to become a member of the Euro zone. The bright picture is marred by 18,000 of the ‘erased.’ Most of them were born in Yugoslavia’s Slovenia, but they had other republican citizenship than Slovenian. After the declaration of independence, they failed to gain Slovenian citizenship, and subsequently, were erased from the register of permanent residents. Today, as stateless persons, they are deprived of any social, economic, and political rights. Obviously, Slovenian is one of the EU’s official languages now, but its main claim to fame is the ‘Giant of Ljubljana,’ that is, the neo-marxian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (born in 1949). He started his international career with his easily comprehensible exegeses of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s (1901–1981) arcane writings, quickly translated into English and French. In 1990, Žižek unsuccessfully ran for Slovenian presidency, which contributed to his status of an international celebrity intellectual. Between 1989 and 2006, 28 of his books were published in English translations. Žižek’s highly popular writings made Slovenian (mediated via English and French translations) into a recognizable language of world philosophy and social sciences, including the alterglobalist discourse (Bajt 2004: 11–14, 19; Bibliˇcne družbe in Slovenci 2006;

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

299

Biblija 2006; Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 217; Darasz 2000: 143, 145–152; Dulichenko 2004: 143; Etymological Dictionary 2001; Hafner 1987: 6–15, 18– 19; Hannan 1996: 69; Hasenmayer et al. 1981: 29; Honzák et al. 2001: 81–82, 310–312; Hösler 2006: 32–36; Jagodzinski ´ 2006; Janich and Greule 2002: 282– 284; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 43–44, 50–51, 210–216, 327–333, 336–337, 343; Lehr-Spławinski ´ 1949: 118; Lencek 1984: 315; Magocsi 2002: 43, 74, 98–99, 159; Megiser 1744; Price 1998: 445; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 48, 80, 465, 547; Slovenia 2005; Stankiewicz 1980: 87–89, 91, 95, 98, 101–102; Toporišiˇc 1993: 144–150; Urbanczyk ´ 2000: 143; Žižek 2006). The 19th century consolidation of the Slovenian language and nation was delayed in Prekmurje and the isolated Alpine valley of the Resia River, located in Hungary and Italy, respectively. Apart from the administrative border, also Protestantism isolated Prekmurje’s Slovenian population from their ethnic kin in Austria. In addition, Prekmurje bordered directly on the Agram (Zagreb) Archdiocese, which spread the Croatian Kajkavian linguistic and cultural influence among Prekmurje’s Slavophone Catholics. The first (overwhelmingly Protestant) manuscripts in Prekmurjan date back to the 17th century. They were composed in the Slavic dialect of Görz (with a touch of the local dialect, close to Kajkavian) and noted in the Magyar version of the Latin alphabet. The first printed book in Prekmurjan, a catechism, came off the press in 1715 in Halle, and was followed by a primer (1725), and the translation of the New Testament (1771, Halle). All were intended for the Protestant readership. The tradition of Catholic literacy in Prekmurjan is connected to the founding of the Steinmanger (Szombathely) Diocese in 1777. In 1780, Father Mikloš Küzmiˇc (1737–1804) published the first Catholic Prekmurjan book (a catechism merged with a prayer book) in Ödenburg (Sopron). Father Jožef Košiˇc (1788–1867), who headed a parish in Senik authored numerous ethnographic, historical and linguistic writings in Prekmurjan. In 1875, the first periodical in Prekmurjan began publication, and at the turn of the 20th century, Protestant and Catholic literacies in Prekmurjan converged. Prekmurje’s Slavic-speakers, like their counterparts in southern Carinthia adopted the German sobriquet ‘Winds’ as their self-ethnonym. The incorporation of most of their region in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes disenchanted them with both this South Slavic nation-state-in-making and the Slovenian national movement, which was overwhelmingly Catholic. The publication of books and periodicals in Prekmurjan intensified during the 1920s, and was crowned with the first-ever dictionary of Prekmurjan (1922). At that time, Prekmurjan-speakers preferred to refer to their language as ‘HungarianWindish,’ stressing their attachment to historical Hungary, partitioned after World War I. During the 1930s, this trend waned, and Prekmurje’s Catholics mostly switched to standard Slovenian. The tradition of Prekmurjan literacy was carried on among the Prekmurjan diaspora in Pennsylvania. After World War II, a few prayer books in Magyar-orthography Prekmurjan were published

300 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

for Protestants in Vendsé, which remained in Hungary. In the 1960s, scholars and antiquarians in Slovenia began to republish the most interesting of Prekmurjan writings. The Slavic-speakers of the valley of the Resia River remained in Italy after World War II, when most of Italy’s Slavophone areas were transferred to Slovenia and Croatia. They never adopted the ethnonym ‘Slovenes’ and refer to themselves as ‘Resians.’ Their glottonym for their idiom is ‘Resian,’ too, or ‘speaking in our way’ ( po nas). The first manuscripts in Resian appeared in the 18th century, and in 1875, the first book, a Catholic catechism, was printed in Warsaw, as a curiosity for Slavicists. At the turn of the 20th century, Resians strove for the introduction of their language to schools, but to no avail. Resian literacy was supported by the Catholic Church, which published in 1927 the first Resian book intended for the Resian-speakers, a catechism. Since then Resian books have been published in Italy and Slovenia, in a variety of orthographies drawing at Italian and Slovenian spelling, or a mixture of both. The current efforts aimed at the standardization of Resian probably will never be finalized, as the Resian-speakers do not number more than 1500, and all of them are bilingual in Italian and Resian. Another factor that probably prevented either the mergence of Resian with standard Slovenian, or the Italianization of the Resians is the fact that their valley is located in the midst of the Friulian-speaking area and squeezed between German(ic)-speaking islets. The ethnonym, Friulian, stems from the name of the ancient city Forum Iulii, today Cividale del Friuli. The Alpine borderland between the Romance- and Germanic-speaking areas, criss-crossed by political, ecclesiastical, and administrative borders reinforced the isolation of the population in their respective valleys and regions. Today, this linguistic borderland is divided among Austria, Germany, Italy, and Liechtenstein. In 1938, the Romance language of Romansh was recognized in Switzerland as co-official with French, German, and Italian. This encouraged Swiss linguists to claim that Romansh along with Friulian and (Dolomitic) Ladin constitute a separate Rhaeto-Romance subgroup of the Romance languages. Italian linguists disagree and believe that the three languages belong to the Lombardian language (or dialect). The knowledge of Tuscanian in the role of standard Italian became widespread in Italy only after World War II, which allowed for the largely uninterrupted continuance of literacies in local, well-established Romance standards, including Friulian. The poetry of Ermes di Colloredo (1622– 1692) became the basis for the emergence of written Friulian. The first grammar was published in 1846, and was followed by a dictionary in 1871. In 1945, the Academy of the Friulian Language was founded, and the famous director and writer, Piere Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) wrote in a Friulian dialect. Since 1957, Friulian organizations have demanded the introduction of Friulian to schools, but so far with no success. In the same year, the Slavic-style diacritic

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

301

letters ([ˇc], [˘ g], [š], and [ž]) were adopted for writing in Friulian so as to make it more different from standard Italian. After autonomy was granted to the Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in 1963, there has been increasing use of this language in the mass media. A 1996 regional law adopted a new unified orthography and provides for the protection and promotion of Friulian, spoken today by 0.7 million persons. Almost all Friulian-speakers are bilingual, and know Italian. Besides striving for the preservation of their language vis-à-vis Italian, Friulian leaders also struggle to limit the use of ‘colonial Venetian’ in their region, that is, Venetan, or the written language of Venice. They believe that Venetan properly belongs within the borders of the region of Veneto (Dulichenko 2003: 178–179, 206, 2004: 143–144; Janich and Greule 2002: 78–80, map 14; Magocsi 2002: 160; Price 1998: 265–266, 391–392; Tornow 2005: 460).

Sorbian This description of the broader sociolinguistic context of Central Europe cannot avoid having a look at languages of those speech communities who have not attained their own nation-states in this region. Nevertheless their political, cultural, and economic influence left a significant imprint on the Central European past, and, in some cases, continues even nowadays. The only Slavic group that secured the internationally recognized status of nation without winning their own nation-state is the Sorbs of Lusatia in Germany. The Jewish diaspora that concentrated in Central Europe prior to the Holocaust spoke vernacular Yiddish and Ladino in their communities apart from cultivating the traditional and religiously motivated literacy in Hebrew and Aramaic. A similar but much less numerous diasporic group were Armenians. Last but not least, the Roma with the only Indic language widely spoken in Europe, remain the most numerous ethnically distinctive diaspora in post-World War II Central Europe. *** The Sorbs live in the historical region of Lusatia, which derives its name from a sub-group of Slavic Sorbs, who settled in this region at the turn of the 7th century, after it was vacated by Germanic Vandals and Langobards. The arrival of Sorbs (ethnically close to the Serbs, who at the same time settled in the Balkans) was part of the broader process of Slavic settlement between the rivers Oder (Odra) and Elbe. The name Lusatia (Losicin, Lonsicin, perhaps derived from Slavic lug for ‘puddle’ or ‘pond’) was recorded for the first time in 932. In the second half of the 9th century, Lusatia formed a borderland region between the East Frankish Kingdom and Greater Moravia. In the following century, it was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire. In the 11th century, Lusatia changed

302 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

hands between the empire, Bohemia, and Poland. During the next two centuries, Upper Lusatia (the southern section of the region centered on Bautzen [Budyšin in Upper Sorbian and Budyšyn in Lower Sorbian]) belonged to Bohemia, and Lower Lusatia (the northern section of this land with its center in Cottbus (Chó´sebuz in Lower Sorbian, and Cho´cebuz in Upper Sorbian]) to Saxony. In the course of the 14th century, Upper Lusatia and Lower Lusatia were incorporated into the Crown of the Czech Lands. In 1462, Brandenburg obtained Cottbus within its vicinity, and during the Thirty Years’ War, entire Lusatia (except the Cottbus area) was granted to Saxony in 1635. At the Congress of Vienna (1815), Catholic Saxony was made to cede all of Lower Lusatia and the northern part of Upper Lusatia to Protestant Prussia. In 1871, entire Lusatia (though administratively still divided between Prussia and Saxony) was included in the German Empire. Between the 10th and 16th century, the formerly Slavophone area between the Oder and the Elbe became overwhelmingly Germanic-speaking. In the mid-18th century, the speech community of the Polabian (literally ‘at the Elbe’) Slavs disappeared in the vicinity of Dannenburg, Lüchow and Wustrow (south of Hamburg), leaving the Sorbs the last Slavic-speaking group in this area. In 1990, 67,000 Sorbian-speakers survived in Lusatia, but not more than 20,000 actively communicated in this language with family and neighbors on everyday basis. All Sorbian-speakers are bilingual, knowing German. Germanic-speakers used to refer to the Sorbs and their language with the adjective Wendisch, similar to that of Windisch, discussed above, as applied to the Slovenes and their language. In Slavic languages, the ethnonyms ‘Lusatians,’ ‘Serbolusatians,’ and ‘Lusatian Serbs’ predominated along Slavicized versions of Wendisch, which is obsolete nowadays. In English sources, ‘Wendish’ remains popular to this day. In Sorbian, the Sorbian self-ethnonym is Serb, almost exactly the same as the Serbian self-ethnonym, which is Srb in Serbian. As explained above in detail, the Serbs and the Sorbs may share their ethnonym, because they had formed a single ethnic group, perhaps prior to the 6th century. The development of the Sorbian national movement convinced German-speakers to favor Sorbisch instead of Wendisch, which many Sorbs found offensive. The change began at the end of the 19th century and was completed only after World War II, though in the legislation of the Land of Brandenburg both terms are still today employed as synonyms. In the German rendering of the Sorbian self-ethnonym, the letter [o] replaced [e] to allow for marking the difference between the Sorbs and the Serbs (Serbisch).42 The change in German usage also influenced English, in which ‘Sorbian’ is now preferred to ‘Wendish.’ This antiquated ethno- and glottonym Wendisch still crops up in German usage, because Protestant Lower Sorbs prefer it to mark thus their difference vis-à-vis predominantly Catholic Upper Sorbs. It is so because, for all practical purposes, the Lower Sorbian language ceased to fulfill this function, given that not more than 7000 persons have a reasonable command of this language.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

303

The division of Lusatia into northern Lower Lusatia and southern Upper Lusatia, reinforced by the confessional cleavage of Protestantism in the former and Catholicism in the latter, led to the rise of the two varieties of the Sorbian language, which some users and linguists also define as two different, though genetically close, languages. This vacillation whether Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian are dialects of Sorbian, or languages in their own right, reflects the same political-cum-linguistic question as in the cases of Bulgarian-Macedonian-Pomakian-Paulician (All-Bulgarian), Aromanian-Istro Romanian-MeglenoRomanian-Romanian-Moldovan (All-Romanian), CzechMoravian-Silesian-Slovak (All-Czech, Czechoslovak), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian/ Macedonian (Serbo-Croatian, Yugoslav, Illyrian), Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian (Serbocroatoslovenian), Belarusian-Russian-Ukrainian (Great Russian, AllRussian), Belarusian-Goralian-Kashubian-Mazurian-Polish-Silesian-Ukrainian (All-Polish), Dutch-Flemish-Lower German-Swiss German-Upper German (German), Dutch-Flemish (Netherlandish), or Calabrian-EmilianRomagnolLigurian-Lombardian-Neapolitan-Piedmontese-Roman-Sicilian-Tuscanian (Italian)-Venetan (All-Italian). Originally, Protestant Lower and Catholic Upper Sorbian languages developed around their respective urban centers of Cottbus and Bautzen. It was the Reformation, which gave an impetus to the rise of Sorbian literacy. This division was deepened by the confessional cleavage as Protestantism dominated in Lower Lusatia and Catholicism in Upper Lusatia. But Protestantism did radiate to Saxony’s Upper Lusatia, which spawned Catholic Upper Sorbian and Protestant Upper Sorbian by the 18th century. Written Lower Sorbian was based on the dialect of Cottbus, while Protestant and Catholic Upper Sorbian at those of Bautzen and Wittichenau (Kulow in Upper Sorbian), respectively. Earlier Sorbian authors had written in their local dialects, but between the 18th century and the late 1940s, continued to use the single Lower Sorbian and two Upper Sorbian written languages. Both Upper Sorbian languages were unified in ideologically atheist East Germany. The subjection of most of Lusatia to Protestant Prussia in 1815 contributed to the spread of Protestantism among Upper Lusatia’s Catholic Sorbs, accelerated by the 1871 founding of the ideologically Protestant German nation-state in the form of the German Empire. At present, merely 15,000 Upper Sorbian-speakers profess Catholicism. The earliest extant (Upper) Sorbian text dates back to 1532. The first book in Lower Sorbian was published in 1574 and in Upper Sorbian in 1597. The first grammar of Sorbian (actually its Upper variety of Bautzen), written in German, was published in 1686 in Bautzen. Interestingly, this grammar and especially Latin-language sources on Sorbian referred to it as the ‘language of the Vandals’ (lingua vandalica) during the 17th century. The Lower Sorbian translation of the New Testament and the Old Testament were published in 1709 and 1796, respectively, and in 1824, under one cover. The Protestant Upper Sorbian

304 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

translation of the Bible came off the press in 1728, and the Catholic Upper Sorbian of the New Testament in 1896. A new Catholic translation of the New Testament in unified Upper Sorbian was published in 1966, and was followed by the two-volume translation of the Old Testament in 1973 and 1976. Earlier, the translators of the Holy Writ drew usually on Luther’s German Bible, and the Czech, Polish, and Slovenian Bibles. However, Catholic translators preferred the canonic Vulgate to Luther’s translation. Protestant Sorbs wrote Lower and Upper Sorbian with the use of German-based orthography, while at the end of the 17th century, Catholics settled for noting Upper Sorbian in Czech diacritical spelling. The latter change drew from the popular (thus, self-fulfilling) belief that Lower Sorbian was close to Polish and Upper Sorbian to Czech. The Sorbian-speaking area of about 8000 sq km is an insular remnant of the North Slavic dialect continuum, hence it developed quite independently of chancery Bohemian or Polish. Mainly Czech, but also Polish and other Slavic linguistic loans in Sorbian were consciously introduced after 1840, to ‘purify’ this language of Germanisms. Today, there are less than 5 percent of German loan words in the lexicon of both standard varieties of Sorbian, though in colloquial speech they add up to half of the vocabulary. By the way of German, numerous English linguistic loans also enter Sorbian nowadays. In the field of Sorbian syntax, the Germanic category of article was successfully suppressed in the second half of the 19th century. Otherwise, alongside Bulgarian and Macedonian, Sorbian would have been another member of the exclusive club of standard Slavic languages, which possesses this feature. The consistent use of Gothic letters for writing and printing united both Protestant and Catholic varieties of Sorbian. The rise of Sorbian nationalism led to the 1841 decision to replace the Gothic script with Antiqua and to introduce the new spelling system based on Czech and Polish orthographies in Catholic publications. However, the change was not complete among Protestant Sorbs until 1937, when publishing and any other public (and ideally, private) use of Sorbian was banned in the Third Reich. Sorbian literature took off in the 1840s. The Catholic Upper Sorbian Ma´cica Serbska (Sorbian Cultural Organization) was founded in 1847, and was followed by its Protestant Lower Sorbian counterpart, the Ma´sica Serbska (Sorbian Cultural Organization) in 1880. The former organization began publishing the first scholarly Sorbian periodical in 1848. Further, Upper Sorbian newspapers and periodicals followed in the 1850s, but only one in Lower Sorbian. After the creation of the German Empire, Sorbian, like other languages non-definable as part of the German language, was banned from schools and public life. Catholic Sorbian clergymen had received education in Prague since 1706. With time, this ecclesiastical link facilitated contacts between Czech and Sorbian nationalists, which bore fruit in the form of a three-volume Lower Sorbian-German dictionary, published in St Petersburg and Prague (1911–1928). A modern extensive Upper Sorbian-German dictionary had been published

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

305

in 1866, and was followed by similar ones in 1920 and 1927. From 1847 to 1937, repeated attempts were undertaken to merge the Catholic and Protestant varieties into a single supra-confessional Upper Sorbian language, but to no avail. The institutional unification of the Sorbian national movement was more successful. In 1912, the Domowina (Homeland) publishing house was founded to cater to both Catholics and Protestants, and to the users of all the three varieties of Sorbian (after World War II, it was re-founded in 1958). Literature in Sorbian was limited to folklore, poetry, and short stories. The first Sorbian novel was printed as late as 1955. Despite Czech support, at the Paris Peace Conference (1919), the Sorbian National Committee did not obtain international recognition for the Sorbs as a national minority, let alone a promise of their own nation-state. The Weimar Republic denied them the status of national minority, because there was no Sorbian nation-state outside Germany. However, Germany’s recognized national minorities cooperated with the Sorbs, which amounted to an indirect recognition that they were a national minority. In turn, these national aspirations of the Sorbs triggered assimilatory repression in the Third Reich, when democracy collapsed in Germany in 1933. Earlier, Czechoslovakia had lent international support to the Sorbs, so, in effect, their nation had gained semi-formal recognition from the Slavophone nation-states and France. In the second half of the 1930s, the German administration gradually restricted the public use of Sorbian, and the language was banned in 1937. In 1945, Prague and Warsaw appealed to Moscow for attaching Lusatia to Czechoslovakia and Poland, respectively. The Kremlin refused, but instituted a ‘nationality policy’ for the Sorbs in communist East Germany in emulation of the Soviet model. Article 11 of the East German Constitution of 1949 provisionally secured this policy, but the actual details of how nationality and language rights of the Sorbs were to be carried out were contained in the so-called Sorbian laws issued by Saxony in 1948 and Brandenburg in 1950. At the constitutional level, the rights were confirmed in a more concrete form in Article 40 of the 1968 Constitution, as the Sorbs were mentioned by their name in this article. Sorbian was reintroduced to elementary and secondary schools in 1945, and numerous institutions were established to support, standardize, and popularize this language. Sorbian-speakers received the right to use their language in state offices and bilingual, Sorbian-German signposts with the names of localities and streets were erected in the Sorbian-speaking areas. Paradoxically, the atheistic policy of the state, combined with the collectivization of the countryside and rapid industrialization, increased the social and spatial mobility of Sorbs, thus hastening their Germanization. The East German authorities, despite their official support for the Sorbs, also wished to Germanize this group, as evidenced by various school regulations, which led to the sudden drop in the number of children learning both varieties of Sorbian from 12,800 in 1962 to 3200 in 1964. By 1989, the number had slowly grown up to 6174.

306 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The definitive academic grammar of Upper Sorbian was published in two volumes (1968, 1976), a feat not yet repeated in the case of Lower Sorbian. An extensive Upper Sorbian-German dictionary and an Upper Sorbian-Russian one came off the press in 1954 and 1974, respectively, and were followed by a twovolume German-Upper Sorbian dictionary (1989–1991). A small German-Lower Sorbian dictionary was published in 1953, and a more extensive one was produced in 1990. In 1999, an extensive Lower Sorbian-German dictionary came off the press. No monolingual dictionary of Sorbian has been compiled yet, and there is a chance for such an achievement only in the case of Upper Sorbian, which enjoys a terminology-oriented core of such a dictionary available on the Internet. After 1945, Sorbian was written exclusively in Antiqua. The 1948–1952 linguistic reforms secured the unification of Upper Sorbian and encouraged the use of this variety at the expense of increasingly neglected Lower Sorbian, which also became Upper Sorbianized much to the dislike of Lower Sorbian-speakers. The standardization of orthography solidified the difference between Upper and Lower Sorbian. The former does not share with the latter the letters, [ó] and [ˇr], whereas [dž], [´r], [´s], and [´z] are specific to Lower Sorbian. In the wake of the re-unification of Germany (1990), the East German constitutional guarantees for the Sorbs were repeated in a more limited scope in the pre-unification treaty between East and West Germany, and in the constitutions of the re-established Länder of Brandenburg and Saxony between which historical Lusatia is split. In present-day Germany, there are four recognized minorities; Danes are classified as a national minority (nationale Minderheit), Sinti and Roma along with the Frisians as ethnic groups (Volksgruppen), and the Sorbs as a people or nation (Volk). Both varieties of Sorbian are used for radio and television broadcasting and there are monolingual Sorbian elementary and secondary schools. Sorbian teachers are educated in the departments of Sorbian at the Universities of Leipzig and Potsdam, catering to Upper and Lower Sorbian, respectively. There remains a degree of Serbian-German bilingualism in the public life of the Sorbian-speaking areas, but hardly any Sorb exercises the legally guaranteed right to use Sorbian in state offices and law courts. On the other hand, many new employers, usually stemming from western Germany, unofficially discourage the use of this language on premises in their enterprises. Perhaps, in a generation or two, Upper Sorbian (like Lower Sorbian before) will also lose its last active speakers. In Ireland, Gaelic is preserved by lavish governmental support, but for all practical and everyday purposes, English is employed. Maybe, in a similar fashion, Sorbs will use their language for symbolical purposes, but German will become the overwhelming means of everyday and official communication for the vast majority of Sorbs (Cyganski ´ and Leszczynski ´ 1997: 107–108, 111, 131, 139; Dulichenko 2004: 282–284, 319–320, 378, 380; Elle 1995; Honzák et al. 2001: 363–364;

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

307

Janich and Greule 2002: 290–294; Kamler 2000: 204–205; Kasper 1987: 16–17; Polanski ´ 1980; Price 1998: 359, 447–449; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 472–473, 549–550; Stankiewicz and Worth 1970: 144–145; Wölke 2005: 294–295; Wyder 2003: 133–139).

Hebrew and Aramaic Prior to the Holocaust, 70 percent of the world’s 11 million Jews43 lived in Central Europe. They were known as Ashkenazim or Ashkenazic Jews. In addition to that, 200,000 Sephardic Jews or Sephardim made their homes in the Balkans. The ethnonyms of both the groups are derived from the ancient Hebrew words Ashkenaz and Sepharad, which, in the Middle Ages, rabbis used to denote the Germanic-speakers of the Holy Roman Empire and the Romance-speakers of Iberia, respectively. Ultimately, Ashkenaz is a personal name of the son of Gomer, son of Japheth, son of Noah. On the other hand, Sepharad is the name of a country mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Obadiah. Medieval rabbis identified Sepharad with Iberia. The discrimination and persecution they suffered (especially in the wake of the Black Death in the mid-14th century) made Ashkenazim leave the empire for Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the 13th and 14th centuries. After 1492, the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain and settled in North Africa, the Apennine Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, England, the Netherlands and Poland-Lithuania. In the 15th and 16th centuries, while Poland-Lithuania expanded eastward and the Ottoman Empire northward, Ashkenazic and Sephardic settlers followed (Magocsi 2002: 107). Both groups preserved ancient Hebrew and Aramaic literacies of Middle Eastern origin in their religious texts. The ethnonym and glottonym ‘Hebrew’ was mediated by Latin Hebraeus and Greek Hebraios from Aramaic ‘ebhrai. This Aramaic form corresponds to Hebrew ‘ibhri for an ‘Israelite,’ literally meaning ‘one from the other side’ in reference to the River Euphrates, which Jews crossed when led into the ‘Babylonian captivity’ in the 6th century BCE. Others maintain that the term originally denoted an immigrant from ‘ebher, or the ‘region on the other side.’ The glottonym ‘Aramaic’ is derived from the name of the biblical land of Aram, mostly corresponding to modern Syria. It may be related to Hebrew and Aramaic rum for ‘to be high,’ hence, originally ‘highland.’ Hebrew and Aramaic are closely related and belong to the group of Semitic languages. Hebrew literacy commenced in the 12th century BCE. The language was written in the specific Hebrew version of the Phoenician alphabet, from right to left. The letters were for denoting consonants only, so the reader had to insert vowels, drawing on his command of the spoken language. In the 6th century BCE, Aramaic, as the international language of the Middle East at that

308 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

time, began to replace Hebrew. The rise of the Hellenic empire made Greek into another important language of the region. Hebrew disappeared as a spoken language of Judea at the end of the 2nd century, and Jews began to use Aramaic and Greek as their languages of everyday communication. But Hebrew remained the ‘Holy Tongue’ (Leshon Qodesh) of the Jews because the Old Testament and the Talmud were written in Hebrew. The increasing dispersion (or diasporá in Greek) of Jews, in the period from the 1st to 4th centuries, entailed linguistic diversification of their communities. In order to maintain links with one another, the groups employed Hebrew for written communication, especially since the 5th century. Later, besides the usual employment of this language for religious commentaries, a growing variety of texts were composed in Hebrew, especially in Western Europe. Beginning in the 7th century, medical treatises appeared, in the 10th century secular poetry, and after the mid-12th century scientific and philosophical works. Pronunciation of Hebrew varied sharply from region to region to the point of incomprehensibility. The main cleavage was that between Ashkenazic and Sephardic speakers of Hebrew. In the 13th century, this situation encouraged the rise of a single Hebrew orthography across Europe, but pronunciation remained as varied as before. In 1488, the Hebrew original of the Old Testament was published for the first time. The complete Bible with the New Testament translated into Hebrew came off the press in 1599. The centuries-long use of Hebrew for commercial purposes declined sharply in the 19th century when the use of the Hebrew script was banned from any legally binding documents (including contracts) in Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, and the Russian Empire. Until early modernity, Hebrew remained the written language of the Jews and their religion, not unlike Latin in the case of Western Christianity, or Church Slavonic and Byzantine Greek among the Orthodox Christians in Europe. The Old Testament and the Talmud were translated from Hebrew into Aramaic in Antiquity. The use of Aramaic for specific religious and community purposes made it into a specifically Jewish tongue. It existed alongside two other Aramaic languages – the official idiom of Babylonia and the tongue of Christians (that is, Syriac) written in different scripts. Early Christians, including Jesus, spoke in Aramaic, which gave rise to Syriac. Jewish Aramaic survived in the diaspora, known as the ‘translation language’ (that is, into which the Old Testament was rendered). As more prestigious than the more broadly used Hebrew, Aramaic was reserved for the most learned in Jewish communities. The central work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, was written in Aramaic, and it remained the preferred language of talmudic commentary. Today, while Hebrew still functions as the language of liturgy and prayer in the synagogue, Aramaic remains the language of marital contracts among orthodox Jews (Etymological Dictionary 2001; Fellman

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

309

1973: 12–13; Majewicz 1989: 40; Price 1998: 12, 225; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 77, 1713). The development of Modern Hebrew removed from ecclesiastical usage began in the mid-19th century, when the first collections of secular poetry were published in Hebrew. This trend was encouraged by emancipation of Jews, which accelerated in the first half of that century, and by proponents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. This movement emerged among the Ashkenazim at the turn of the 19th century, and proposed modernization and assimilation of Jews with the populations in the countries of their residence. Jews were to pursue mainstream secular education in local official languages. But the first half of the 19th century also saw the rise of various ethnolinguistic national movements across Central and Eastern Europe, which gave rise to Hebraists, who believed that Jews were a nation, and as such should develop their own secular culture, using Hebrew as their unifying national language. The first novel in Hebrew was printed in 1853. The first Hebrew weekly started publishing 3 years later in Luzk (Lutsk) in Austria’s Galicia; three more followed, in 1860–1862, in Vilnius and one in Warsaw (1862) in the Russian Empire. Interestingly, during that time a Hebrew translation of the Koran came off the press in Leipzig in 1857. The linguist and national activist Eliezer Perelman (1858–1922) grew up in this newly coalesced tradition of secular literacy in Hebrew. In recognition of the national goals of Zionism, he changed his Germanic surname to the new Hebrew one of ‘Ben Yehuda.’ In 1878, he opined that the only chance for the Jews to survive as a distinctive group and form their own nation, was to establish their Jewish nation-state in the Holy Land, complete with the national language, none other than Hebrew. He arrived there with his family 3 years later. When his first son was born in 1882, Ben Yehuda prohibited his wife to speak to him at all, because she did not know any Hebrew. As an Ashkenazic Jewess, she spoke in Yiddish, the Germanic language of everyday Jewish communication in Central Europe at that time. Ben Yehuda isolated their son from the family’s friends and also other children in order to raise him speaking Hebrew only. This unusual manner of socialization delayed his development of speech until the age of six. But, in this manner, he became the first native speaker of Ivrit, or Modern Hebrew, 1500 years after Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken vernacular. As a consequence, Ben Yehuda’s wife suffered serious depression. In 1889, Ben Yehuda established the Plain Language Society. His efforts and personal example facilitated the creation of a small, though solid, base of Modern Hebrew-speakers by 1900. Three years later, the Hebrew teachers proclaimed Ivrit as the unifying language of all the Yishuv (that is, of the entire Jewish population in Palestine). In 1910, Ben Yehuda published the first volume of his opus magnum, The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew. The publication of all its 17 volumes was completed in 1959. This work collected

310 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

all the extant Hebrew words and built the bridge between Old and Modern Hebrew. In 1948, upon the proclamation of the independence of Israel, construed as a Jewish nation-state, Modern Hebrew was elevated to the rank of the sole official language of this polity. By default, it meant harsh suppression, especially of Yiddish, which, until the Holocaust, had been slated for becoming the national language of the Jewish nation. In 1971, the Ivrit translation of the Koran came off the press in Tel-Aviv, and was followed by that of the Bible 5 years later. Obviously, in synagogues, only the Old Hebrew original of the Pentateuch is used in liturgy. In this respect, Judaism shares with Islam and Orthodox Christianity the unshakable attachment to the original of the Holy Book, construed as written in the unique and only ‘holy language.’ Muslims, of whatever native language, recite the Arabic original of the Koran, Orthodox Greeks the ancient translation of the Old Testament and the Ancient Greek original of the New Testament, and Slavophone Orthodox usually the Church Slavonic translation of the Bible. Catholics followed suit until the turn of the 1970s, when only the Vulgate (Latin Bible) could be employed in liturgy. Ironically, the strict monolingualism of Israel, in line with the Central European concept of homogenously ethnolinguistic nation-state, was breached in the 1990s with the mass arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union. These new immigrants tend to keep to themselves, and speak exclusively in Russian. Their strength is numbers. In 2006, a 0.95 million of them constituted 13.6 percent of Israel’s inhabitants (7 million), but 17.8 percent of the state’s Jewish population (5.33 million). They feel no need or obligation to acquire Hebrew, and even consider Russian ‘more cultured and European’ than Hebrew. Israel being a democratic state, there are no legal instruments to force these new arrivals to abandon their Russian in favor of the official language. Actually, in accordance with Israeli law, one is considered a Jew, not because of a language, but provided one professes Judaism, or at least had one grandparent, who did, and as such was recognized as a Jew. Orthodox Jews are even stricter in their definition of Jewishness, and maintaining that one is a Jew only if his or her mother was a Jewess. In this, Jewish nationalism (Zionism) is similar to Greek nationalism, where being a member of the Greek Orthodox Church is the ultimate test of one’s Greekness, even if in reality one is an agnostic. Owners of the mass media in Israel follow this splendid business opportunity posed by the Russian-speaking community with much acumen. They furnish these Russian-speaking Jews with a plethora of locally produced and imported Russian-language periodicals, books, radio programs, and cable television. Numerous terrestrial television channels broadcasting in Hebrew customarily provide Russian subtitles. In 2001, an Israeli Russian-language television channel entered the market, providing just Hebrew subtitles for the startled Hebrew-speaking mainstream. For all practical purposes, Israel

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

311

became a bilingual, Hebrew- and Russian-speaking nation-state. Obviously, 1.39 million Arabic-speakers are also Israeli citizens, but the ethnolinguistic-cumreligious concept of this nation-state excludes them from any commonality with the Jewish nation. However, Arabic is used on street and road signs, and in public life, especially in the areas adjacent to the territories slated to become the Palestinian nation-state (Fellman 1973: 38, 46; Glinert 1993: 87; Keyser 2001; Latest Population Figures for Israel 2006; Qarai 2004; Waldstein 1916: 15, 19, 27). Interestingly, some claim that the original Yiddish and Slavic linguistic background of Ben Yehuda influenced Modern Hebrew to such an extent that it should be classified as a Slavicized Semitic language or Semitized Slavic one. Ben Yehuda’s contemporary and fellow Jew, Ludwik Zamenhof (1859–1917), was born in the town of Belostok (Białystok) in the Polish-Belarusian ethnic borderland. This necessarily influenced the character of the artificial language Esperanto, which Zamenhof began to codify in 1887 (Price 1998: 19; Wexler 1990).

Yiddish Until the Holocaust, the true national language of the overwhelming majority of the Jews in Central Europe as well as in the Soviet Union and the United States was Yiddish. The name is derived from the German term Jüdisch Deutsch or ‘Jewish German.’ From the former part of this phrase, Jüdish, the English glottonym ‘Yiddish’ was coined in 1875, and, in turn, gave rise to German Jiddisch. Before World War II, three quarters of all the Jews spoke this language, namely 12 million people, out of whom more than 8 million Yiddish-speakers lived in Europe, mostly in the central and eastern sections of the continent (3.3 million in Poland, 3 million in the Soviet Union, 0.8 million in Romania, 0.25 million in Hungary, 180,000 in Lithuania and others in England, France, Germany, Latvia, Belgium, and Switzerland). Yiddish is a Germanic language that developed in the 11th century in the Holy Roman Empire, on the basis of Middle Upper Germanic. The initial main difference between Yiddish and German was that the former was written in Hebrew characters, while the latter in the Latin script. In addition to that, Yiddishspeakers used a plethora of Hebrew and Aramaic words connected to their religion and specific way of life. After the forced migration of the Ashkenazim to Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-14th century, Yiddish acquired numerous Slavic linguistic loans. This also disconnected Yiddish from the area of Germanic dialects, and from its linguistic source in the form of East Middle Germanic. Unlike in Hebrew, vowels are represented by letters in Yiddish. Until the early 19th century, the special Mashkit font distinguished Yiddish publications, whereas square type was used for printing in Hebrew, and the rabbinic cursive (Rashi) for religious texts in Hebrew and Aramaic, and printing in Ladino, as well.

312 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The earliest extant manuscript in Yiddish, written in 1382, was found in Cairo. The first printed Yiddish book (a Hebrew-Yiddish glossary) was published in 1534 in Cracow. Printed Pentateuchs in Yiddish came off the press in 1544 (Augsburg) and 1560 (Cremona). The first two Yiddish competing translations of the Hebrew Old Testament, done under the influence of Luther’s German Bible and the Dutch Staatenvertaling (official, literally ‘state,’ translation), were printed in Amsterdam (1678–1679). In 1686, the first Yiddish newspaper began publishing in this port city as well. In the last three decades of the 18th century, the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment developed in Western Europe. The movement grew around the person of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) who lived in Berlin. He and his circle condemned Yiddish as unworthy ‘jargon’ and urged Jews to adopt the languages of the countries where they lived. To this end, Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch into German for the use of enlightened Jews, but significantly it was published in Hebrew characters (1780–1783). Ironically, the 19th-century maskilem (‘enlighteners’ or modernizers) had to use Yiddish in order to spread their secular message among Central European Jewry.44 The eradication of Yiddish, prescribed by maskilem, was achieved with little effort west of the Austrian Empire and the lands of erstwhile PolandLithuania, because only a handful of Ashkenazic Jews remained in Western Europe. This was the end of West Yiddish as a significant language of Jewish culture. At the same time, when the Haskalah unfolded in Western Europe, the strongly religious and anti-elitist movement of the Hasidim coalesced around their charismatic leader, Baal Shem Tov (actually, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, 1698–1760), in the mid-18th century. Initially, Hasidism radiated from Poland-Lithuania’s Podolia, where his rabbinical court was located in the locality of Mie˛dzybórz (Mezbizh in Yiddish, today Medzhybizh near the city of Khmelnytskyi in Ukraine). The Hasidim’s program was in their name, which is Hebrew for ‘the pious ones.’ This term crops up in the biblical books of Maccabees and in the Talmud, to denote those who distinguish themselves by loyalty to Jewish law and by charitable deeds. Hasidism shielded the Ashkenazic speakers of East Yiddish from the Haskalah, thus preserving the use of Yiddish as the vernacular of their everyday communication. The symbolic date of the birth of secular Yiddish literature is 1864 when the Hebrew-language didactic writer Sholem Yankev (Yakov) Abramovi(t)sh (1836– 1917) adopted the pen name of Mendele Mocher (Moykher) Sforim (literally, Mendele the Bookseller) and began to write exclusively in Yiddish. This development split the Hasidic community. Traditionally, Hebrew was the sole language in which all writing was done, unless some pious texts were to be explained in Yiddish to women, who were not schooled to read and write in Hebrew. In addition, writing was limited mainly to matters religious with a narrow leeway for

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

313

business needs. But using the vernacular for writing ‘good-for-nothing’ fiction was as unthinkable and antithetical to Hasidic ethos as the Haskalah. But modernization, imposed on Jews in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary during the second half of the 19th century, could not be just ignored. For instance, the legal ban on the use of the Hebrew script made the merchants and entrepreneurs to adopt the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet for drawing contracts, and necessarily their written Yiddish became similar to standard German. With time, they also began to use Russian and Polish for business purposes. The gate for the assimilation was open. Popular education, especially in Austria-Hungary, accelerated this process. However, it was soon noticed that assimilation did not secure acceptance for Jews either in Western or Central and Eastern Europe. The rise of political anti-Semitism in the last decades of the 19th century brought about the reaction of Zionism, or Jewish nationalism conceived in ethnolinguistic terms. One of the first dictionaries of Yiddish was a Yiddish-Russian one published in 1876 in Zhitomir (Zhytomyr), and was followed by a Russian-‘New Jewish’ dictionary in 1909, printed in Warsaw. Despite pogroms, acceptance of Yiddish was wider in Russia than in Austria-Hungary. To the Russian ear, Yiddish was a foreign language, unlike to the Austro-Hungarian one, to which it appeared as ‘corrupted German in need of correction.’ In the Austro-Hungarian census of 1880, the nationality of the population was recorded for the first time on the basis of the language they used. In the next four decades, Vienna persistently rejected Jewish petitions that they should be recognized as a separate ‘nationality’ with their own specific language. The census-takers considered Yiddish a ‘kitchen German’ and subsumed Jews into the German nationality. In reply to this policy, in 1908, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nationalists organized a conference in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in the easternmost Austrian Crownland of Bukovina that bordered on Russia, Romania, the Austrian Crownland of Galicia, and the Kingdom of Hungary. At this conference, Yiddish was proclaimed a (not the) national language of the Jews. This did not change Vienna’s policy toward Jews in Austria-Hungary but lent prestige to the earlier despised ‘jargon.’ The new elevated status of Yiddish led to the unceasing strife between the supporters of this language and Hebrew. The destruction of Central and Eastern European Jewry in the Holocaust tipped the scale to the victory of the latter. Meanwhile, during World War I, Yiddish was made into one of the official languages employed in the Land Ober Ost (or Russia’s territory composed of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which found itself under German occupation). The German administration paired it with Belarusian, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian in the official Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch (Dictionary of Seven Languages, 1918, Leipzig), which sanctioned the policy. Although officially only the Latin script was allowed in this territory, an exception was made for Yiddish’s Hebrew script (and Cyrillic publications in Belarusian were tolerated). The multilingual tradition of the Land Ober Ost

314 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

continued in Soviet Belarus, where Yiddish remained a co-official language alongside Belarusian, Russian, and Polish. Its official status began in 1920, and was re-confirmed in 1924. At lower administrative divisions Yiddish functioned also as a co-official language in Soviet Ukraine. The Soviet cities of Kyiv/Kiev and Mensk/Minsk along with Vilnius, Warsaw, and New York became the centers of Yiddish-language secular culture, including theater and film. In 1925, the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO, Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) was founded in Vilnius, and the complete modern Yiddish translation of the Holy Writ came off the press in New York between 1926 and 1936. In 1923, 324 Yiddish book titles were published, over 70 percent in Poland, 13 percent in Germany, 6 percent in the United States, and 6 percent in the Soviet Union. Between 1864 and 1939, about 30,000 Yiddish book titles were published, or, on average, 400 per annum. The increasing isolation of the Soviet Union from the outside world, drove a wedge in communication between Soviet Jews and worldwide Jewry. This bifurcated the progressing standardization of Yiddish into two separate varieties, which some even believe to be two different languages. In line with the atheistic policy, the Soviet authorities prescribed the purging of Soviet Yiddish-in-making from religiously tinted Hebraisms and Aramaicisms (simultaneously, the use of Hebrew, branded as a ‘backward clerical language,’ was banned). In 1923, as part of the officially espoused program of ‘revolutionary modernization,’ the campaign of Latinization commenced. The main targets of this campaign were the Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. The former was branded as ‘backward and Asiatic,’ and the latter, frequently referred to as ‘Russian,’ was loathsome because of its association with ‘Great Russian chauvinism.’ The Hebrew script of Yiddish, due to its ‘Asiaticism,’ was slated for replacement with a version of the Latin alphabet, but the process was stopped, because Jewish nationalists feared that Latin script-based Yiddish would be too similar to German. On the other hand, the Soviet authorities thought that Latinization of Yiddish could result in the Polonization of Soviet Jewry concentrated close to the Polish border. The same consideration prevented the planned Latinization of Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Kremlin believed that any Polish cultural or linguistic influence might weaken the hold of the Soviet ideology in Soviet Belarus and Ukraine, or even precipitate a Polish military attack in this region. The standardizing conference on Soviet Yiddish took place in Kyiv/Kiev in 1934. Russification was rejected as a method of making Yiddish into a full-fledged modern language. New words and terms were to be coined on the basis of Hebrew, German, and Slavic (Belarusian, Polish, and Ukrainian) elements. But in the end, almost all the new coinages and neologisms were loanwords or calques from Russian. In 1929, the handbook of Soviet Yiddish orthography was published, and was followed by a spelling dictionary and pocket Yiddish-Belarusian dictionary in 1932. An extensive Yiddish-Russian dictionary came off the press in 1940. The belief was that a nationality or nation to exist, it has to possess a nation-state.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

315

Following this idea, in 1928, Moscow established the Jewish Autonomous Soviet Region of Birobidzhan in the Far East. Yiddish became the official language of the republic, but few Soviet Jews moved to this outback region on the border with China. Meanwhile, the Russification of Soviet Jewry progressed apace. The proportion of Jews who declared Yiddish as their first language dropped from 72.6 percent in 1926 to 41 percent in 1939. World War II and the Holocaust brought death to the vast majority of Jews in Central Europe and the Soviet Union. Emaciated Soviet Yiddish cultural life continued in the service of Stalinism and the Cold War effort until 1952 when the twenty-four leading Yiddish writers and leaders were executed. A shadow of Yiddish culture was revived at the turn of the 1960s. The proportion of Jews claiming Yiddish as their first tongue continued to plummet to 21.5 percent in 1959, 14.2 percent in 1979, and 11.1 percent in 1989. In line with this statistics, 150,000 Jews spoke predominantly Yiddish, but in reality, not more than a few thousand frequented Yiddish libraries. In 1990, the last Yiddish book was published in the Soviet Union, and it was followed by the demise of the last Yiddish periodical a year later. The last significant achievement of Soviet Yiddish came in 1984 in the form of an extensive Russian-Jewish (Yiddish) dictionary. After the war, the YIVO was moved to New York. The Yiddish cultural life concentrated in this city after the de facto liquidation of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union in the wake of the 1952 purge. But assimilation with the English-speaking majority soon took its toll. Between 1945 and 1984, 1200 Yiddish book titles came off the press in the United States and Canada; 500 in 1945–1954, 370 in 1955–1964, 200 in 1965–1974, and a mere 120 in 1975–1984. The YIVO oversaw the standardization of Yiddish. In 1968, a bilingual Yiddish-English dictionary was published. Seven years earlier, the publication of the authoritative multivolume dictionary of Yiddish commenced but so far only the first four volumes covering the first letter of the alphabet (that is, one-third of the lexicon) have came off the press. The project moved from New York to Jeruslem, where it seems to have petered out. In Israel, Modern Hebrew was promoted at the expense of Yiddish, which Holocaust survivors still spoke. The similarity of this language to German was an important argument to convince them to acquire Hebrew. However, such a speedy shift to Hebrew would not have been possible without Tel Aviv’s heavy-handed policies, which amounted to the de facto censorship of Yiddish theaters and publications. In this manner, Hebrew-speaking Zionists (nationalists) won their ideological battle with Yiddish-speaking internationalists (socialists, communists), which raged unresolved before World War II. In Israel, Yiddish survives as the language of choice and school instruction among the orthodox Hasidic communities (who account for about one-tenth of Israel’s population, or 0.7 million). Such communities carry on also on the United States’ Eastern Coast. With no authoritative dictionary to fall back on, the standard of ‘Western Yiddish’ was decided by the YIVO’s 1961 handbook of

316 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Yiddish orthography and the actual usage as employed in the most important Yiddish newspaper, Forverts (Forward), with its headquarters in New York and its European office in Oxford. In Paris a radio station broadcasts in Yiddish, and in Oxford, a scholarly Yiddish journal is published in the Latin and Hebrew scripts. The last flourishing of the Yiddish language arrived with the spellbinding fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991), which earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. But even his books were published in English translations rather than in the Yiddish. Interestingly, in the Britannica World Language Dictionary (1954, Chicago), English was paired with French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Yiddish. To my knowledge, it is the only significant dictionary that granted the status of ‘world language’ to Swedish and Yiddish. This reflected the significance of both languages among immigrant communities in the mid-20th-century United States, rather than in the sphere of globalwide communication. In this dictionary, Yiddish words were given in the Latin script with the use of English orthography. In the 1950s and the 1960s, this unusual dictionary entered popular use in Northern America, included in the third volume of the deluxe three-volume edition of authoritative Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. Today, there are no exclusively monolingual Yiddish language communities any more. The renowned United States linguist, Joshua Fishman, and his colleagues wish to revive this language in emulation of the example of Ben Yehuda and the orthodox Hasidic communities. In New York, they buy houses along a single street to create (secular) Yiddish language communities. (The very same method is used to create new Gaeltachtaí, or Irish-speaking areas, in Ireland.) In 1995, the Council of Europe passed a resolution calling for the perpetuation of Yiddish language and culture. But there seems to be not much hope for this project because there is no national movement or nation-state that would vigorously support it. Nowadays, Yiddish is a ‘grandmother or great-grandmother tongue,’ because for decades the surviving Yiddish-speakers tended to refuse to pass this language onto their children, preferring that they acquire locally spoken languages. In 1980, the National Yiddish Book Center was founded in Amherst, Massachusetts with the goal of preserving and reviving Yiddish culture across the world. So far, the center’s success has been limited to preserving Yiddish publications. Thanks to a grant from the famous American film director, Steven Spielberg (1946–), since 1998, almost all of the Yiddish publications held at the center have been made available online in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library (Aptroot 1989; Baumgarten et al. 1994: 588; Estraikh 1999: 2–3, 37, 102–103, 106–108, 117–136, 179, 187, 190–191, 195; Fishman 1993: 322; Geller 1994: 26, 61–63, 72; Glinert 1993: 83; Hutterer 1990: 350; Janich and Greule 2002: 114–120; Katz 2004: 323; Martin 2001: 198; National Yiddish Book Center 2007; Price 1998: 497–498; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 474–475, 555–556; Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 2361; Smith 1990: 367; Webster’s 1961).

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

317

Ladino This Romance language has been known as Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, or Judezmo (‘Jewish [language]’) to outsiders, or Haquitía in Morocco (from Arabic haka for ‘to tell’), and Spanyolit in Modern Hebrew, though its speakers preferred to speak about it as Spanyol or Espanyol (Spanish). The name ‘Ladino’ was also employed by the Balkan native speakers of this language, but usually to mean the sacral language of the Jewish Romance translation of the Old Testament. Ladino of this translation differs starkly from the Sephardic Romance vernacular, because it follows the Hebrew original word for word without heeding the flow of the Romance syntax. Nobody spoke this sacral language of Ladino, which made it possible to use it in synagogue on a par with biblical Hebrew, a practice unheard of among the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. The name ‘Ladino’ comes from the Latin word Latinus for ‘Latin,’ an adjective originally relating to the Latin language, Romance-speakers, and Western Christianity. At the threshold of modernity, this adjective became a noun, which came to mean a ‘person, who knows Latin,’ and, in turn, spawned the Spanish term Ladino for a ‘sagacious, cunning, crafty person.’ In the overwhelmingly Orthodox and Muslim Balkans, the knowledge of Latin and other Romance languages was not widespread, unlike in the Catholic and Protestant half of Europe. Hence, this unique linguistic ability gave Ladino-speakers an advantage in commercial relations between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe. Ladino shares the Latin etymology of its name with the Rhaeto-Romance language of Ladin, spoken by 30,000 speakers in the Alpine valleys of the Dolomites in northern Italy. However, ‘Ladin’ is a scholarly coinage introduced only in 1873, similar to the term ‘Rhaeto-Romance,’ developed by linguists at the end of the 19th century. It was the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Castile and Aragon that gave birth to the Sephardic community of Jews. The Spanish example was soon followed by Portugal, Navarre, Provence, Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples. Altogether 0.25 million Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. These expellees were welcomed to the Muslim states of Northern Africa and the Ottoman Empire. In the empire, they found tolerance and administrative autonomy within their Jewish millet (system of non-territorial autonomy). In the course of their travels along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, their Romance vernacular acquired Arabic, Greek, and Turkic loans in addition to those from Hebrew and Aramaic, which had always been present in this Jewish vernacular as in Yiddish. In the Balkans, Slavic linguistic loans entered Ladino, as well. Until the expulsion, the main difference between Castilian as used by Christians and Jews was that that the latter wrote it in Hebrew characters, while the former in the Latin alphabet. The earliest Castilian texts in the Hebrew script date back to the 14th century. Besides Castilian as the dialectal basis of the future standard Spanish, the expellees also spoke Leonese, Aragonese, and Galician. This elevation of

318 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Castilian to the position of the official language of Spain at the turn of the 16th century, also influenced the Sephardim’s perception of their speech. In Sel¯anik (Thessaloníki), which was the most Jewish city of the Ottoman Empire, and later, of Greece, Sephardim constituted the plurality of the inhabitants. In 1913, they numbered 61,000 alongside 46,000 Ottomans (Muslims), and 40,000 Greeks. The Sephardic inhabitants considered those speaking in Castilian as more accomplished. Thus, Castilian dominated in the city, and gradually crowded out Leonese, Aragonese, and Galician. These low-prestige idioms continued to be spoken in the city’s vicinity, and became the butt of ridicule, especially distinctive Galician, which, with time, was identified as ‘Portuguese,’ a badge of a country bumpkin. In 1547, a Ladino translation of the Pentateuch in Hebrew characters was published in Constantinople. Six years later, it was followed by the full translation of the Old Testament, which came off the press in Ferrara. Significantly, this translation was printed in Latin characters of the Gothic type as it was intended both for Jews and Christians. That is why, some scholars consider it to be the first published Spanish translation of the Holy Writ. This undeniably Jewish translation incited further Christian translations of the Holy Scripture into Spanish and Portuguese. After instituting freedom of religion in Amsterdam, this commercial hub, which attracted Sephardic merchants and entrepreneurs also, developed in an important center of Ladino culture. The ready availability of state-of-the-art printshops facilitated this process. Between 1675 and 1690, the first Ladino newspaper, Gazeta de Amsterdam was published in this city, and in 1676 and 1685, two academies of this language were founded there. The Christian philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a son to a Sephardic merchant from Portugal, was born and lived his life in this city. The Ladino background helped him master Latin in which he authored most of his works. However, Constantinople-based Rabbi Abraham ben Issac Assa was destined to become the ‘father of Ladino literature’ thanks to his complete translation of the Bible, which came off the press in Constantinople between 1739 and 1745. It remained the most popular book among Sephardim until the 20th century. By the 1620s, the predominantly Castilian vernacular of the Balkan Sephardim had already differentiated much from the Castilian of the Spanish court. At that time, Ladino was truly born, though the gradually widening difference did not prevent mutual comprehensibility between it and Castilian-based standard Spanish, with the exception of specialized religious usages specific to Judaism. The tradition of printing and writing in Ladino with the use of the Rashi (rabbinic cursive) characters was gradually discontinued at the turn of the 20th century. In 1825, the first Ladino newspaper in the Ottoman Empire began Pub˙ lishing in Smyrna (Izmir), further five followed in Constantinople (1853–1867) and five more in Bulgaria (1867–1911). The first Ladino newspaper in the Latin

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

319

alphabet was published in Romania beginning in 1885, that is, two decades after the final replacement of Cyrillic with the Latin script for writing Romanian. After 1860, French Jewish organizations, with Paris’s support, started organizing schools with French as the medium of instruction for Ladino-speaking Jews in the Ottoman Empire. In 1910, over 30,000 Ladino students attended 116 French-medium schools. Gradual Gallicization of Ladino also entailed the spread of the Latin alphabet for writing and printing in this language. In 1906, Spanish scholars joined the French organizations, but with a different aim, as they set out on a project of collecting the entirety of ‘Judeo-Spanish’ folksongs. Until Epirus and southern Macedonia with its historical capital of Thessaloníki were incorporated to Greece in 1913, few Sephardim had cared to learn Greek. The prestigious language of administration and official communication in the Ottoman Empire was Ottoman (Old Turkish), not Greek reserved for the Orthodox millet. This attitude differentiated Ladino-speakers from the several hundred Greek-speaking Jewish families (known as Romaniotes, literally ‘Romans’), who had established themselves in the Balkans and Asia Minor during the Byzantine times. In Greece, the relaxed Ottoman attitude to public language use was replaced by the radical policy of Hellenization applied to public spaces and Jewish schools. As a result, the Ladino of Greece’s speakers was infused with Greek linguistic loans, which crowded out their former Ottoman counterparts. In Turkey, the older shape of Ladino was retained but the language reform of 1928, which replaced the Arabic script with its Latin counterpart, accelerated the switch from the Hebrew script to the Latin alphabet for writing Ladino. The last Ladino periodical to use Hebrew characters was printed in the United States and did not begin to use the Latin alphabet until 1948. Ironically, the independence of the Jewish nation-state of Israel was proclaimed in that year, and Modern Hebrew written in Hebrew characters was made into the polity’s official language. As in the case of Yiddish, the period of modern literature in Ladino commenced in the mid-19th century under the influence of the Haskalah (introduced in the Balkans by French Jewish organizations) and European nationalisms. In 1853, the first Ladino journal started publishing in Constantinople. Twelve years later, the first novel in Ladino came off the press. In 1898, an extensive Jewish-Spanish-French dictionary was published in Jerusalem. The flowering of Ladino literature continued in the Ottoman Empire until the end of World War I, and increasingly in Latin America, where numerous Sephardim emigrated. The breakup of the empire caused the dispersal of the Ladino speech community among a plethora of nation-states, and the fate of Europe’s Sephardim was sealed by the Holocaust. In 1900, around 193,000 Sephardim lived in the Balkans. The northern boundary of their settlement was eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and southern Walachia. Today, there are no monolingual groups of Ladino-speakers. As in the case of Yiddish, the users of

320 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Ladino are middle-aged or old, and usually strove not to impart the knowledge of this language to their children, preferring that they speak local languages as their own. Nowadays, Ladino-speakers number about 150,000 worldwide. At least two-thirds of them live in Israel, where their language is ostracized (like Yiddish) in favor of official Hebrew. Other communities of Ladino-speakers are in Latin America, Los Angeles, New York, and, increasingly, in Spain. Ladino survives as the marker of Jewish identity and speech in Spanish- and Portugueselanguage literature. Interestingly, a year before the famous Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, this prize had gone to Elias Canetti (1905–1994) in 1981. He was a Sephardic writer born in Bulgaria, who settled in Great Britain and wrote in German. No monolingual dictionary of Ladino has been published so far, and there is no Ladino institution similar to Yiddish’s YIVO, which would attempt to standardize the Ladino language. Actually, very few bilingual dictionaries of Ladino have been produced at all. The two most extensive ones are a Judeo-SpanishFrench dictionary and a Judeo-Spanish-Turkish dictionary, which came off the press in Madrid (1977) and Istanbul (1997), respectively. Interestingly, despite the deep cultural and linguistic connections with Spanish culture, merely a small, brochure-like Ladino-Spanish dictionary was published in the Catalan capital of Barcelona in 1977 (Etymological Dictionary 2001; Geller 1994: 23– 25; Harris 1994: 20–23, 55; Janich and Greule 2002: 144; Magocsi 2002: 109; Mazower 2005: 47, 51–52, 284–285, 376–377; Price 1998: 262–263, 277–278; Romero 1992: 182, 223; Schlösser 2005: 97, 120; Sephiha 1997; Sugar 1977: 278; Tornow 2005: 294–295, 406, 624–625).

Armenian Another important diaspora community of Central Europe is that of Armenians. In 521 BCE, this ethnonym, rendered as Armina in Persian, Armaniya in Elamic, and Urashtu in Babylonian, appeared on the Bistun cliff, near Bakhtaran (today, Kermanshah in Iran), in the inscription of the Persian King Darius I the Great (reigned 521–486 BCE). Also, Herodotus mentioned Armenioi as soldiers serving in the armies of Darius’s son, Xerxes I (reigned 485–465 BCE). From the Latin version of this ethnonym, Armenii, present-day designations of Armenians are derived in European languages. Herodotus suggested that they were Phrygians, who had migrated from the Balkans to Asia Minor. Present-day Armenian scholars, drawing on the Babylonian Urashtu ethnonym for Armenians, claim that the 9th BCE polity of Urartu (centered on Lake Van in eastern Anatolia) was the first Armenian state. They add another argument that in 859 BCE an Assyrian chronicle mentioned an Urartian ruler by the name of Aram. This would make Armenians into a native population of eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. (In Soviet Armenia, when religion was suppressed, Urartian art

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

321

and symbols were made into the expression of Armenian nationalism.) Other theories say that the name of Armenia comes from the Iranian or Greek confusion of the Armenians with the Arameans, a Semitic group whose homeland of Aram (‘highland’ in Hebrew) extended from Canaan to the Euphrates. The self-ethnonym of the Armenians is Hay. They call their state Hayastan and language Hayeren. Recently, a clay tablet from the Second Millennium BCE came to light during excavations in Hattusas (today, Bo˘ gazkale in Turkey), the capital of Hatti, the earliest known Indo-European polity. This tablet recorded the name Hayasa, which could be related to the self-ethnonym of the Armenians. Christian folklore of Armenia created the figure of Hayk, the father of the Armenians. He was to be a grandson of Noah’s son, Japheth. Perhaps, the biblical story of Noah’s ark that after the flood reached terra firma on Ararat, the holy mountain of the Armenians, somewhat substantiated the postulated reality of Hayk. All in all, there is no agreement on the origin or etymology of the terms ‘Armenian’ and ‘Hay.’ The historic-cum-geographic concept of Armenia overlaps with the high tableland of 1000 meters above the sea level, located in the upper valleys of the Euphrates, Tigris, Araks, and Kura (Kuruçay). It is 650 to 800 kilometers long, and of nearly the same width. Lakes Van, Sevan, and Urmia demarcate the core of this region, crowned in the center with the towering mass of biblical mount Ararat (5165 m). This area changed hands between Media, Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Seleucid Empire, before two largely independent Armenian polities emerged in 190 BCE. They merged in 94 BCE, but Rome defeated Armenia in 69 BCE, making it into a buffer state between the Roman Empire and Parthia. At some point between 278 and 313, Armenia was the first state to adopt Christianity as its state religion. However, most Armenian authorities cite this date as 301. Opportunely, this allowed for the merger of the celebrations of the 1700th anniversary of ‘Armenian Christianity’ with the tenth of Armenian independence. In 387, the East Roman Empire and Persia partitioned Armenia. In the 7th century, the Arab armies of Islam seized the country. In 859, Armenia re-emerged as a vassal polity within the Caliphate, and gained independence in 885. In 1045, Byzantium and the Turkic Seljuks partitioned Armenia anew. Many Armenians moved southward to the Mediterranean southeastern corner of Anatolia, where they established the new Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. In 1375, the Muslim Mamelukes seized it and incorporated to their polity with its center in Egypt and Syria. Thereafter, there was no independent Armenian state until the 20th century. All these political upheavals sent waves of Armenian refugees and expellees. First, at the end of the 6th century, within the confines of the Byzantine Empire, many Armenians left (or were forced to leave) the Caucasus and settled in the Balkans, which was the empire’s economic center. In the 9th century, in order to

322 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

secure the borderland against Arabs and to uphold the religious uniformity, the ethnically Armenian sect of Paulicians was persecuted and its members resettled in the Balkans, where they incited the rise of another sect of Bogomils in the 11th century. After the fall of the Caucasian state of the Armenians in the mid-11th century, another trickle of emigrants to Central Europe followed. The same process repeated itself in the mid-13th century after the fall of their Mediterranean state of Cilicia. In the wake of the fall of Constantinople, the struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Persia in the Caucasus played out during the 16th and 17th centuries sending even more refugees to Central Europe. In addition, in 1604, the Persian Shah Abbas the Great (reigned 1587–1629) deported numerous Armenians from what is present-day Nakhichevan (Azerbaijan’s exclave) to his capital at Isfahan, where they established their colony, New Julfa. From there, Armenians spread to India, the East Indies, and Australia. Meanwhile, Armenian merchants involved in Levantine and Mediterranean long-distance trade continued visiting and settling in this region throughout the Second Millennium CE. In 1900, Armenians of Central Europe numbered 249,000, the vast majority of whom (178,000) lived in the European part of the Ottoman Empire. Around 160,000 of the Ottoman Armenians resided at Constantinople making it the largest Armenian city worldwide. In the empire, they were organized in a separate Armenian millet, founded in 1461. It grouped all the members of the monophysite Armenian Apostolic Church, who lived in the empire. But the ethno-religious unity was not absolute, as the Ottoman authorities included in this millet other ethnically non-Armenian monophysites also, namely Chaldeans, Copts, and Georgians. In the wake of the Greek revolt of the 1820s, the Ottoman authorities transferred the control of the empire’s banking to Armenian hands (as they redirected governmental orders for army supplies to Bulgarian merchants). At the same time, Russia completed its seizure of most of Persia’s section of Armenia, following the Russo-Persian Wars of 1796, 1803–1814, and 1826–1828. After the 1878 war with the Ottoman Empire, St Petersburg seized another piece of historical Armenia. The gradual Russian annexation of the Ottoman territories extending along the northern, western, and eastern shores of the Black Sea, entailed wholesale expulsion of Muslims. In the Caucasian borderland, St Petersburg strove to attract Christian (that is, Armenian) settlers from the Ottoman side of the border, and to incite Armenians remaining there to revolt in order to facilitate repeated Russian attacks. Although most of the Ottoman Armenians, concentrated in Constantinople and in Western Anatolia, were the Sultan’s loyal subjects, the events in northeastern Anatolia contributed to the repeated massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, and 1909. The ravages of the Great War combined with the Russian menace, contributed to the horror of the 1915 massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman government. The apparent objective was to deport Armenians to Mesopotamia,

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

323

far away from the theaters of war, where they could come to the succor of Christian attackers. Due to the lack of logistical preparation and the growing enmity of the Ottoman administration and soldiers, Armenian communities were decimated throughout Anatolia, though most Armenians living in the capital remained there unscathed. (However, the question of whether these deportations might not be intended as a means of annihilating the Armenians of eastern Anatolia remains. It appears that at the local level, time and again soldiers were given orders to kill deportees in their charge. Should it become unambiguously established that it was the Ottoman government’s clear intention, the Armenian persistence to call the massacres by the anachronistic term ‘genocide’ would be fully justified.) After 1918, this forced expulsion created a new Armenian diaspora of 0.25 million in what today is Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq. Many others left for Western Europe (mainly France) and Northern America. In Central Europe outside the Ottoman Empire, Armenian communities were scattered in Bulgaria, Romania, Austria’s Galicia, and in the south of the Russian Empire. The emigration of Armenians from their homeland in eastern Anatolia usually took several generations before they reached the western Rus principalities (later, annexed by Poland-Lithuania and the Kingdom of Hungary) beginning in the 12th century. Because they traveled across the lands around the Black Sea, which at that time were mostly Turkic-speaking, they adopted Kipchak Turkic as their vernacular. In the course of their centuries-long residence in Central Europe, smaller groups of Armenians often adopted local languages. Like Jews, most Armenians lost their native language but continued to write their new vernaculars, exclusively in the specific Armenian script. Hence, numerous Arabic, Kipchak, Syriac, Ottoman (Old Turkish), and Tatar texts were written in this alphabet. What united diaspora Armenians was their own specific monophysite Christian Church in which they employed the liturgical Armenian language, known as Grabar, or ‘the written word.’ The religious and ethnic significance of Grabar meant that various bilingual glossaries and dictionaries were compiled in which it was paired with the actual vernacular spoken by Armenians in a given location. St Mesrob Mashtots (355–349) developed an Armenian script in about 406, despite some Greek endeavors to write the Armenian vernacular in Greek characters. The Armenian alphabet with the perfect one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is quite original, though some characters might be derived from Greek and Syriac counterparts. The popular belief (not supported though by a shred of evidence) is that either Mashtots developed equally specific Georgian and Aghvanian alphabets too, or that they were modeled on the basis of the Armenian example. The tradition of Armenian literacy took off in earnest when the initial translation of the Bible was completed between 406 and 431. The revised version deemed as canonic was ready by the mid-5th century. Language change required the introduction of two additional

324 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

letters in the 11th and 12th centuries to maintain the one-to-one phoneme– grapheme correspondence. Since then the Armenian script has not changed. The Catholic Church, which sought a union with the Armenian Church, encouraged the use of Grabar. To this end, in 1695, a Latin-Grabar dictionary was published in Rome. In 1701, Mekhitar of Sebastia45 (today, Sivas in eastern Turkey) (1676–1749) founded an Armenian Catholic congregation in Constantinople. In 1717, it moved to Venice and became known as ‘Mekhitarist.’ A breakaway Mekhitarist group established a new congregation in 1773 in Triest (Trieste), before it moved to Vienna in 1811. Meanwhile, an Armenian Catholic Church was founded in 1742, though most Armenians stuck to their monophysite Apostolic Church. The Mekhitarist congregations in Venice and Vienna were the main centers of Armenian culture and literacy in Western and Central Europe. In the first half of the 19th century, American Protestant missionaries joined the competition for Armenian souls. Their efforts brought success, when the Ottoman authorities recognized the Protestant millet in 1850. The overwhelming majority of its members were Armenian converts. Understandably, the Armenian millet strongly opposed this unexpected development, but eventually was placated to recognize that the Ottoman Empire guarantees freedom of religion for all those who profess a form of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Further efforts of Protestant missionaries to attract Balkan Slavs to the Protestant millet spurred up the rise of Bulgarian nationalism, but failed to convince many Slavs to renounce their Orthodox Christianity. Armenian, like Greek and Albanian, has no cognates. These three idioms are singular representatives of their separate branches of the Indo-European languages at the same taxonomic level as the branches of the Slavic or Germanic languages. It was the German scholar, Heinrich Hübschman (1848–1908), who proposed this classification of Armenian in his seminal 1877 article. The first Armenian book was published in Venice in 1512. A Grabar Bible, based on a Cilician manuscript from 1295, came off the press in Amsterdam in 1666. It was reprinted in Constantinople in 1705. The Mekhtiarists used a manuscript dated 1319, to publish a Catholic version of the Grabar Bible in Venice in 1805. The Mekhtiarist also published the first modern grammar of Grabar in 1779. The first Armenian periodical (not in Grabar, but a local Armenian dialect close to that spoken in Isfahan) was printed in Madras (Chennai) in 1794. Grabar though at that stage starkly different from the vernacular continued to be used for writing. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the tradition of literacy in Middle Armenian flourished in Cilicia. As a later version of Grabar, Middle Armenian was closer to the vernacular, but still hardly intelligible to an uneducated Armenian-speaker. The situation was similar to the case of Greek in Byzantium. Ancient Greek was used in church, and its somewhat later version, Byzantine Greek, for secular purposes. Similarly, classical Grabar persisted in liturgy, and Middle Armenian in Cilician administration and literature.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

325

In the 15th and 16th centuries, only classical Grabar was used as the language of liturgy and ecclesiastical administration in the Armenian millet, but first poems in the vernacular appeared, too. Finally, a vernacular tradition of Armenian writing emerged in the 17th century. This new Armenian was dubbed Ashxarhabar, or ‘secular (civil) language,’ as opposed to ecclesiastical Grabar. In his Latin-language grammar of Armenian published in 1674 in Constantinople, Hovhannes Holov distinguished three Armenians, Classical (Grabar), Vernacular (dialects), and Civil, conceived as a fusion of the other two. This scheme predated Lomonosov’s ‘three styles’ of Russian by an entire century. Modern Russian emerged from the ‘middle style,’ which was a mixture of the vernacular and Church Slavonic. Similarly, Civil Armenian spawned Modern Armenian, which popularly goes by the name of the former (Ashxarhabar) in order to distinguish it from Grabar. Ashxarhabar developed in two variants, the western based on the dialect of Constantinople, and the eastern, which drew on the Ararat dialect of northeastern Anatolia, whose users created a lively cultural center in Tiflis (Tbilisi). (Two other distinctive groups of Armenian dialects were left out from the standardization process, one of Poland-Lithuania and Transylvania, and another of Russia, Persia, and India.) The first grammars of Eastern and Western Armenian came off the press in 1711 and 1727, respectively. This also gave rise to the question if they are varieties of one language, or maybe two separate languages. The degree of mutual comprehensibility is small. First, Western Armenian was infused with Turkic and Greek, and later, French and English linguistic loans. In the case of East Armenian, initially Persian, and afterward, Russian loanwords predominated. Grammatical structures also differ in both varieties. In addition, out of the 38 phonemes mapped by the Armenian alphabet, ten, though denoted by the same letters in Eastern and Western Armenian, differ in pronunciation. Beginning in the 1840s, in the Armenian communities of Venice and Constantinople, the question raged if the Armenian nation should adopt Grabar or Ashxarhabar as its national language. The reply in favor of the latter was facilitated by American Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, who followed Luther’s creed to translate the Holy Writ into the everyday vernacular of the faithful. The translations of the New Testament into Western and Eastern Armenian were published in Paris (1825) and Moscow (1835), respectively. The complete modern translations of the Bible in both varieties followed in 1858 and 1883, respectively. The Western Armenian translation of the Koran was published in the Bulgarian port city of Varna in 1904. St Petersburg supported the development of Eastern Armenian spoken by Russia’s Armenians, but the economic and political clout rested with West Armenian-speakers in western Anatolia, who also obtained much educational and cultural aid from the West. As in the case of Belarusian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Moldavian, and Ukrainian earlier, Armenian was banned as the medium of education and for printing

326 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

books in the Russian Empire. While the ban was lifted only in 1905, Western Armenian literacy unfolded largely unhindered during this period. In 1840, the first periodical in Ashxarhabar (Western Armenian) began publishing in Smyrna. In the same year, the first novel was written in Ashxarhabar (Eastern Armenian), yet it was finally printed only in 1858. In the 1860s, it was clear that Ashxarhabar was slated for becoming the national language of the Armenians. In 1866, a modern grammar of standard Western Armenian came off the press in Vienna, and was followed 8 years later by its Eastern Armenian counterpart, published in Tilfis (Tibilisi), then a Russian city and the shared center of Georgian and Armenian culture. The two extensive dictionaries of Grabar, published in Vienna (1836–1837) and Constantinople (1844–1846), blazed the trail for the lexicography of Ashxarhabar. In Venice, a Grabar-Ashxarhabar dictionary and its Ashxarhabar-Grabar counterpart came off the press in 1843 and 1869, respectively. The tragic events of 1915 dispersed the thriving community of the West Armenian-speakers, which tipped the scales in favor of Eastern Armenian as the national language of the Armenian nation. But the massacres, remembered in Armenian historiography as ‘genocide,’ were made into a cornerstone of Armenian nationalism, as the Holocaust in the case of Jewish nationalism. In 1918, Eastern Armenian was made into the official language of the shortlived independent Armenian Republic (1918–1920). Its successor in the form of Soviet Armenia was located in the northeasternmost periphery of historical Armenia. Russian never overwhelmed Armenian there, as it did in the cases of Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Kazakh in the respective national republics. Actually, the ratio of Soviet Armenians residing in their national republic, who claimed Armenian as their first language grew, from 89.9 percent in 1959 to 99.4 in 1989. In the course of the 1923–1933 Latinization campaign, Armenian along with Georgian, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian were allowed to keep their specific scripts. Uniquely among native languages in the Soviet Union, the Kremlin absolved Armenian alongside Georgian and Yiddish from changing their scripts into the Cyrillic alphabet.46 The specific script placed quite an impenetrable ethno-cultural border between Armenian-speakers and the rest of the Soviet population united through the commonality of Cyrillic employed for writing their various languages. The authoritative four-volume dictionary of Armenian was published in 1944–1945 in Yerevan, and reprinted in 1955– 1956 in Beirut. The 1915 Armenian genocide largely extinguished and dispersed the Western Armenian-speaking community of western Anatolia. The remaining centers of Western Armenian-speakers coalesced in Istanbul and Lebanon. This variety of Ashxarhabar still lacks an authoritative multi-volume dictionary and, in its lieu, the extensive one-volume dictionary that came off the press in Beirut in 1953, must suffice (at least seven more one-volume dictionaries of Western Armenian were published by 2000, but they are less extensive than the 1953 one).

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

327

Since 1991, Eastern Armenian has been the sole official language of independent post-Soviet Armenia, and since the mid-1990s, of the second Armenian state of Nagorno-Karabakh, carved out from the territory of Azerbaijan. Although institutionally and politically separate, in practice, both Armenian polities function as a single state. The international community does not recognize Armenian Karabakh as a state, which, in light of international law, remains part of Azerbaijan. Here, the situation is similar to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The difference is that all Azeris either were expelled or fled from Armenia and Karabakh to Azerbaijan due to mutual ethnic cleansing, and the same measure was meted out to Azerbaijan’s Armenians. As in all post-Soviet Caucasus, Russian remains in everyday use, including governmental offices, also in Armenia and Karabakh. However, fewer people know this language in the countryside and Armenian youth, who gained education after 1991, tend to know better English than Russian. (French is also an important foreign language acquired by Armenians due to their large and influential diaspora in France.) Grabar survives in the liturgy of the Armenian Church, which after the seven decades of Soviet-imposed atheism, is glorified as the ‘national Church’ of all Armenians.47 Beginning in the 1970s, Ashxarhabar (usually Western Armenian) replaced Grabar among the Armenian Catholics. The disastrous 1988 earthquake and the war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh destroyed the Armenian economy in the 1990s. Predictably, a wave of 1 million emigrants left for Russia, Western and Central Europe, and Northern America. Alongside, these emigrants brought their Eastern Armenian. Thanks to Armenian satellite television, the internet, phone calls and regular air connections, they are unlikely to lose their mother tongue anytime soon. This new emigration also helps to rekindle interest in matters Armenian among Central Europe’s old Armenian communities, who lost even the knowledge of Grabar for liturgical purposes. Last but not least, the novel situation contributes to the further decline of Western Armenian and champions Eastern Armenian as the Armenian language (Armenian Versions of the Bible 2004; Erkanian 1985: 12, 16–17, 32, 39, 66, 84–86; Galustian 1981: 83; Khudaverdian et al. 1990: 41–42; Magocsi 2002: 109–110; McCarthy 1997: 334–335; Mojdl 2005: 28–32; Pisowicz 2000: 135–137; Price 1998: 13–18; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 7, 282–283, 350, 462–463, 508–512; Qarai 2004; Redgate 1998; Rogers 2005: 164–165; Smith 1990: 366; Stachowski 2003; Sugar 1977: 49, 277).

Romani After the destruction of the Jewish communities in Europe during World War II, only the Roma remain a significant diaspora on this continent. Like the Jews, they concentrate in Central Europe and the Balkans. But Roma were not pulled into these regions by the opportunities of economy or religious freedom.

328 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Quite the contrary, in the mid-14th century, they were enslaved in Walachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania. The Roma slavery was gradually dismantled by the end of the 18th century in Transylvania, but in the two other regions they were finally freed from bondage only between 1855 and 1864. Many of the estimated 600,000 slaves left for Central and Western Europe looking for a living, after being removed from the estates of their former masters. The Roma are a people who, probably, stem from northwestern India. At the beginning of the 11th century, maybe in the course of the military hostilities between Islamic and Hindu armies, they left westward across Persia, the Caucasus, and Anatolia to Europe. Their slow-paced trek is mainly deduced from the foreign linguistic loans present in Romani. It acquired numerous linguistic loans from Persian, Kurdish, Armenian, Georgian, Turkish, Greek, Romanian, Magyar, and Slavic. The absence of any Arabic loan words in this language allows for inferring that the Roma’s involvement on the part of antiIslamic forces continued, or they simply avoided lands inhabited by Arabs. In the 19th century, the authorities in British India classified several groups as ‘Gypsies’ on the basis of their nomadic or itinerant way of life. These groups were not linguistically or historically related with the Roma. But this classification spurred attempts to identify some specific group living in present-day India as ‘Roma, who stayed in their motherland.’ In the 1970s and 1980s, when India was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, Delhi was partial to this idea, because it could heighten the status of India as an ‘ancient civilization’ of worldwide influence. At its 1978 congress in Geneva, the International Roma Union declared that India was the ‘mother country’ of the Roma. In return, some organizational and other aid flowed to Roma organizations from New Delhi. To emphasize the link between India and the Roma, a Romani-Punjabi-English dictionary was published in Patiala, Punjab in 1981, and also some Romani texts in the Devanagari script (employed for writing in India’s national language of Hindi) came off the press. However, it seems more probable that Roma and their language emerged outside historical India, when the ethnically variegated (Indo-European and non-Indo-European) ethnic groups, though united in their Hinduism, had already left the subcontinent. Roma arrived in the Balkans in the mid-13th century, perhaps in the wake of the Mongol-Seljuk and Byzantine-Ottoman struggle, which unfolded in Asia Minor. During the 14th century, Roma spread to Central Europe, and in the following century, to the western part of this continent. But, to this day, most of them reside in Central and Eastern Europe. In the 16th century, they reached Scandinavia, and later, Muscovy. Between 1582 and 1724, numerous Roma were deported from Spain, Portugal, France, and Great Britain to the states’ colonies in the Americas. In the second half of the 18th century, itinerant Roma were forced to become peasants (thus serfs) in the Kingdom of Hungary. In 1761 and 1767, a ban was introduced on speaking Romani at the penalty of 25 lashes.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

329

Hungary’s Roma were transformed into ‘new Magyars,’ indistinguishable from other peasants. At that time in Spain, one could also have his or her tongue cut out for talking in Romani. All these instances of discrimination combined with the institution of Roma slavery in Walachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania led to the emergence of anti-Gypsism, similar in its intolerant nature to antiSemitism. But unlike Jews, most Roma converted to Christianity (except some in the Ottoman Empire, who chose Islam to improve their lot), so the generalized prejudice was directed against their itinerant way of life, language, and specific customs, which prevented their assimilation. The intensity of anti-Roma prejudice shows clearly in European ethnonyms used to refer to them. For instance, from English ‘Gypsy’ the verb ‘to gyp’ (meaning ‘to cheat, lie’) was coined (first recorded in 1889), and from Polish Cygan the verb cygani´c (meaning ‘to cheat, lie,’ as well) was derived in the second half of the 18th century. Ethnonyms in other European languages also spawned a similar plethora of negative usages and meanings. To this day, the tendency remains to deny the status of a separate ethnic group, nationality, or nation to the Roma by writing their ethnonym with the initial lowercase letter, ‘gypsy’ or cygan. In the same way, a denial of the ethnic separateness of Jews was often expressed in Central European languages. ‘Rom’ is Tsikan in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, Cikán in Czech, Zigeuner in Dutch and German, Tsigane in French, Zingaro or Zigano in Italian, Cigány in Magyar, Cygan in Polish, Cigano in Portuguese, Tsygan in Russian, Cigán in Slovak, Çingene in Turkish, or Tsyhan in Ukrainian. Some believe that this ethnonym stems from Kurdish asingar for ‘blackmith,’ or Byzantine Greek Athínganoi, which was the name of a heretic sect, and by extension became a synonym of ‘heretic,’ ‘foreigner,’ or ‘stranger.’ English ‘Gypsy,’ Spanish Gitano, or French Gitan are derived from the name of ‘Egypt.’ Until early modernity, it was popularly believed that Roma were emigrants from Egypt. Perhaps, it is a reflection of the fact that for a considerable period of time they resided in the Asian section of the Byzantine Empire. In the past, Roma called themselves by various names derived from regions where they resided, their occupations, and other local self-ethnonyms. Today, most Roma organizations and activists prefer ‘Roma’ as their group’s self-ethnonym, and strive to replace with it such previously popular ethnonyms as ‘Gypsy’ or Cygan, which they consider to be pejorative. ‘Rom’ is Romani for ‘man,’ ‘husband.’ For the first time this ethnonym was recorded in English in 1841. Other Pan-Roman self-ethnonyms have similar meaning. For instance, Sinti preferred by Roma in the Germanspeaking states stems from Sinto for ‘man.’ French Roma refer to themselves as Manouche (‘human being,’ ‘man’), and Roma in Spain, Wales, and Finland as Kalé (from Kalo for ‘man’). Interestingly, despite these persisting differences in the use of their self-ethnonyms, almost all the groups call their language ‘Romani.’

330 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The first records in Romani, exclusively written by non-Roma, date back to a 1542 publication. Longer texts appeared only in the 19th century. The oldest text written in Romani by a Roma came off the press in 1755, but Roma themselves started writing in their language at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1915, an essay written in Romani by the Romani author, Aleksandr Germano (1893–1954), was printed in Russia. Much earlier, a scholarly reflection on the Romani language commenced. In 1782, Johann Rüdiger proposed that this language is closely related with Hindustani (present-day Hindi and Urdu). His well-documented thesis allowed for pursuing this line of linguistic and historical research, which ascertained the link of Roma and their language with India. The first dictionary and grammar of Romani came off the press in 1844–1845 in Halle. In 1900, a grammar of the ‘Russian Gypsy dialect’ was published in St Petersburg, and was followed by numerous other works on Russia’s Roma. The fledgling Roma elite and their organizations emerged during the interwar period. The creation of a multitude of ethnolinguistic nation-states in Central Europe marginalized Roma as ‘Others,’ who, like Jews, could be discriminated against with impunity, because they had no state of their own. This discrimination applied to Roma (as well as to other minorities) was meant to make them leave a given state or to assimilate with this state’s nation. The nationstates of Central Europe were designed to be ethnolinguistically homogenous. When Roma managed to establish their minority schools or periodicals, usually local languages were employed in them, though sometimes elements of bilingualism were introduced, too. Interestingly, the first ever Romani periodical published in the 1920s in Edirne, Turkey, was printed in the Arabic script, as Turkish began to be written in Latin characters in 1928. Having achieved little success in battling against discrimination, many a Roma activist came to a conclusion that, like Jewish Zionists, they should strive for establishing their own nation-state, a Romanestan. In 1934, Poland’s Roma petitioned the League of Nations for a grant of land in South West Africa (Namibia). Later, they toyed with the possibility of founding a Roma nation-state in India or Uganda. In 1936, they requested Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) for some land in Abyssinia, but to no avail. At the same time, Stalin’s idea was that each inhabitant of the Soviet Union must belong to a specific nation before nationalism could be crushed and a communist classless nation of the Soviet people forged. To this end, a Roma nation had to be formed as well. Roma were forced to settle, which resulted in the formation of one Roma national village soviet, and 23 Roma national collective farms. Between 1925 and 1938, about 300 books were published in Romani, all of them in Cyrillic, because the Romani publication industry developed at the beginning of the 1930s, which saw the beginning of the end of the Latinization campaign in the Soviet Union. In 1931, a new monumental grammar of the ‘Gypsy language’ came off the press, and a small

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

331

Gypsy-Russian dictionary followed 7 years later. In 1931, the national Roma theater opened in Moscow, but its productions were mainly in Russian. Roma intellectuals complained that Roma were denationalized in the Soviet Union, because merely 64.2 percent Roma claimed Romani as their first language in the 1926 census. Several schools with Romani as a language of instruction were founded in the early 1930s, but all were closed down in 1937. To this day, the Roma remain largely traditionalistic and the majority of them are illiterate. The huge dialectal diversification of their language48 and imperfect command of the local language of a polity where they happened to reside caused the authorities to treat them as ‘vagabonds’ or ‘lumpenproletariat.’ In the age of nation-states, the Roma were repeatedly denied the status of a distinctive ‘nationality’ or ‘national minority,’ especially in the Soviet bloc prior to the fall of communism in 1989. Instead, opportunistic steps were taken to assimilate them into one nation or another though, simultaneously, they were stigmatized as ‘Gypsies,’ or, recently, as ‘Blacks.’ This process of marginalization and downgrading of the Roma culminated during World War II, when Nazi Germany made them a target of the Endlösung (‘final solution’) along with the Jews. About 0.2 to 0.5 million Roma perished during the Holocaust.49 After 1945, in the Soviet bloc countries Roma were ‘productivized.’ It meant the destruction of their traditional semi-nomadic life of itinerant craftsmen and traders, and settling them in substandard, ghetto-like communities usually isolated from the non-Roma population. In 1958, the communist authorities of Czechoslovakia ascertained that it would be ‘reactionary’ to create a literary Romani language. It was forbidden to print anything in Romani in Bulgaria through the 1980s. The situation of Roma was slightly better in Yugoslavia. In 1971, they were recognized as an ethnic group, which allowed for forging an elite of Roma politicians, activists, and intellectuals. The mass media heeded their request to use ‘Rom’ instead of pejorative Tsikan. In 1978, a biography of the Yugoslav communist leader, Josip Broz Tito, was printed in Romani in Skopje, and 2 years later, was followed by the first ever grammar of Romani in Romani, though it was a bilingual publication, and the parallel text was in Macedonian. Illiteracy was a blessing in disguise, as it allowed the Roma to preserve their vernacular despite persecution and discrimination. In the case of Central Europe’s Jews and Armenians, it was a specific religion and Church, respectively, which shielded them from assimilation. This was enough, even if a Jew could not speak in Hebrew, Ladino, or Yiddish, and an Armenian did not acquire a command of Armenian. In the case of the Roma, it was Romani that has functioned as an ethnic boundary separating them from the outside world. The assimilatory pressure of the nation-state proved unsuccessful when directed at an illiterate community. Social engineering, as conducted in communist dictatorships, relied on full literacy. A Rom could be sedantarized by force, his traditional way of living destroyed, but his language let him remain a Rom nevertheless.

332 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

This social potency of language and the example of Central Europe’s model of ethnolinguistic nation-states convinced the coalescing Roma national movement to embrace Romani as its ideological basis. Today, half of the world’s 8 to 12 million Roma population speak Romani. At least two-thirds of them live in the Balkans and Central Europe. In the region, the retention of Romani as the first language remains high, at the level of around 90 percent. The exception is these countries, where anti-Romani and anti-Roma measures were consistently enforced from the 19th century until the fall of communism in 1989. It is estimated that only half of Roma in the Czech Republic and Hungary speak Romani, and the level is only slightly higher at 60 percent in Slovakia. After World War II, the Roma national movement had no chance to be rekindled in the areas where most Roma lived, because from the legal viewpoint they did not constitute an ethnic or national minority in the Soviet bloc. The impetus came from the West with a significant involvement of non-Roma. The first World Gypsy Congress took place in London in 1971, thanks to the support lent by the World Council of Churches and the Indian government. This congress adopted the term ‘Roma’ as the self-ethnonym, and also the Romani flag and anthem. In the event’s wake, the International Roma Union was founded, and the national movement of the Roma was re-commenced in earnest. The first success came in 1981 when Yugoslavia recognized the Roma as a distinctive ‘nationality’ following an Indian suggestion, as Delhi had treated them as a ‘national minority’ since 1976. However, only the two Yugoslav republics of Bosnia and Montenegro decided to implement this change on their territories. Elsewhere in communist Yugoslavia, Roma remained an ethnic minority. In 1973, the first radio station started broadcasting in Romani in the Macedonian town of Tetovo, Yugoslavia. Two years later, the first Romani-language periodical began publishing in Hungary. But the Roma national movement remained an elitist affair until the fall of communism in 1989. The fourth World Roma Congress held at Serock near Warsaw in 1990, among other things, set the course for the standardization of Romani (to be based on the Vlax dialect, seen as most mutually intelligible with other Romani dialects, and spoken by 2.5 million persons) and the publication of a multi-volume encyclopedia in this language. Since then on, various Roma NGOs have taken over the program of Roma nationalism. Some are Pan-European, but most limit their activities to specific localities, regions, and home states. Their overreaching goal is to create conditions, which would allow Roma to participate more fully in the mainstream of social, political, and economic life. The postcommunist transition deeply stratified societies, and Roma, who did not fit because of their language and way of life, lost in the competition and became even more marginalized than they used to be during the communist period. Their worsening position evoked a stream of legislation and programs from the Council of Europe to improve the

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

333

standing of Europe’s Roma. Anti-Gypsyism is rampant and additionally limits the already slim chances of employment and social advancement for Roma. A limited success came in the growing recognition that not only Jews, but also Roma were singled out as an ethnically defined group to be liquidated in the national-socialist Holocaust (Greek for ‘all burnt,’ meaning ‘sacrifice’). This event, known to the Roma as ‘Porajmos’50 (Romani for ‘devouring’), is bound to become the founding basis of Roma national history, as the Shoah (Hebrew for ‘catastrophic upheaval’) in the case of Jewish nationalism. It is sad to reflect that all of Central Europe’s three most significant diasporas of Armenians, Jews, and Roma suffered a genocide in the 20th century. It is the most telling sign how antithetical diaspora peoples and minorities are to the project of building ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-states. Most Romani publications are either bilingual or in the language of the country of residence. Minority Roma schools rarely offer anything more than Romani as a subject. Romani enjoys a semi-official status only in Macedonia. In 1993, it became a medium of instruction in Macedonia’s Roma schools. In addition, Romani is almost the sole language of politics in Skopje’s nearly exclusively Roma municipality of Shuto Orizari with the population of 20,000. But the weakness of international appeals and of the Roma national movement in general translates into the lack of any practical progress in the codification of a single Roma language. At present, there are at least 11 standardization projects steeped in local Roma dialects, and conducted for the sake of Roma publishing, broadcasting, and education in Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Sweden. These projects often draw on the orthographies of local languages, but, in general, favor the Latin script, with the exception of Russia where the tradition of Romani literacy in Cyrillic continues. However, in the Latin script-based orthographies, the tendency is to use Czech-style diacritical letters, such as [ˇc], [š], or [ž]. Because of the diasporic character, the Romani literacy develops most vibrantly via email correspondence. The discrepancies between various standards orthographies, and the general difficulty of using diacritic characters, leads to the gradual Anglicization of Roma spelling with, for example, [ch], [sh], and [zh] in the place of [ˇc], [š], and [ž]. It seems that the Romani-speaking community connected via the Internet, thanks to their sheer number, may act as the regulating agency of this language in the absence of any formal one to which all the Roma leaders would subscribe. Romani-speaking users of the Internet tend to use the most widespread and mutually intelligible syntactical forms and words. The coalescing of German as a standard language unfolded in a similar manner in the wake of Luther’s German Bible, though via the medium of print. Portions of the Bible (mainly the New Testament) have been published in different Romani varieties since 1837. The entire New Testament in Kalderash and

334 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Balkan Romani came off the press in 1990 and 1995, respectively. In 2004, the Lovari translation of the Bible was published in Hungary. In 1990, the revival of Russian Romani was announced by the publication of a Gypsy-Russian and Russian-Gypsy dictionary (Moscow), which mostly records Kalderash vocabulary. The so far most extensive Romani-German-English dictionary (Wiesbaden, 1994) contains Romani vocabulary drawn from all the dialects spoken in the territory of erstwhile Yugoslavia. There are a plethora of small, usually monodialectal dictionaries that pair Romani with Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Latvian, Macedonian, Magyar, Norwegian, Punjabi, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. No monolingual, let alone authoritative, dictionary of Romani has been compiled so far. The pluricentric character of Romani has prevented such a feat, but the ‘bottom-up’ resource of Romlex seems to be approaching this ideal in agreement with the variegated needs of Romani-speakers. This online multidialectal dictionary was made available to the public in 2005. It covers 25 varieties of Romani and 15 target languages. Romlex offers a pool of dialect-to-dialect and Romani-to-target language dictionaries, which can be printed on demand. Perhaps, a Romani encyclopedia is possible only if it is developed in a similar manner. The start-up Romani version of the online Wikipedia encyclopedia51 is a good beginning, because the 1990 World Roma Congress’s official pronouncement that Romani should be standardized on the basis of the Vlax dialect, and a multivolume encyclopedia in this standard ought to follow, has failed to bear any fruit so far. Significantly, some standard works on the European languages still do not cover Romani as, for instance, the authoritative reference, Sprachkulturen in Europa. Eine internationales Handbuch (Languages in Europe: An international handbook). This extremely detailed and wide-ranging work, published in 2002, includes even Saami of northern Scandinavia as well as the tiny and not codified Slavic language of Polesian. One wonders if this omission of Romani is just an accident or rather an expression of ingrained anti-Gypsyism. A similar complaint can be leveled against (otherwise excellent) The Everyman Companion to East European Literature (2003), which records the few and far apart literary publications in Upper and Lower Sorbian, but fails to mention literary works in Romani, which seem to be of wider influence. Poems of the Polish Romani writer, Papusza (actually, Bronisława Wajs, 1910–1987) were published in Polish translation during the 1950s. In the latter half of the 20th century, they were translated into English and other languages, and earned her the sobriquet of ‘Mother of Romani literature.’ In 1998, the PEN American Center sponsored the publication of The Roads of the Roma: A PEN anthology of Gypsy writers; a half of the texts in this anthology were originally written in Romani (Bakker and Kyuchkov 2000: 14–15, 17, 40–41, 57–61, 81, 83, 90, 98–100, 119–120, 128, 132; Bankowski ´ 2000: II 207; Courthiade 1998; Crowe 1996: 16, 47, 87, 120– 121, 129, 173, 176–179, 226–227; Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 57; Ficowski

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

335

1985: 423; Fraser 1995: 263; Hancock et al. 1998: 11–19; Hancock 2002: 17–25, 139; Kenrick and Puxon 1995: 150; Martin 2001: 44; Marushiakova and Popov 2005: 435, 437–440, 2006; Matras 2005; Mirga and Mróz 1994: 50–51, 86; Mróz 1971: 254; Pleasant Fiction 1998: 8; Price 1998: 379; Rejzek 2001: 105; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 724, 1608; Timeline of Romani (Gypsy) History 2004; World’s First Gypsy Bible 2003).

Esperanto The past of the constructed (artificial) language of Esperanto closely mirrors the exigencies of Central and Eastern European history in the 19th and 20th centuries. The language grew out from the typically multilingual landscape of the region, which led many locally-based intellectuals to the fallacious belief that the multitude of mutually incomprehensible languages bore responsibility for the majority of conflicts between individuals and human groups. This idea harked back to the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, which claims that the Humankind lived peacefully thanks to the sharing of a single, Adamic language. Thus, the cause of antagonism was mentally shifted from individuals and their actions to the inanimate phenomenon of language, making it possible to propose a new universal language, in the bosom of which all people could regain the peaceful bliss of Edenic existence. This messianic streak agreed well with the regionally generated movements, which strove for the ‘reawakening of nations’ and promised the proletariat a socialist (or communist) paradise on earth. The dramatic social and economic change, much faster in Central and Eastern Europe than in the western section of the continent (where it was spread over several centuries), bred an acute sense of anomy, easily explained on the ground of the shared Abrahamic tradition of Christianity, Islamic, and Judaism with the trope of the last days immediately preceding the end of the world and the return of the golden age from before the Fall of Man. In the era of dreaming up ethnolinguistically defined nations and aspiring to win for them suitable nation-states, Europe’s Jews found themselves left without a country, which they could claim as their own. Anti-Semitism on the rise across the continent at the turn of the 20th century deepened their feeling of being edged out from the Europe of nation-states. Attempts at emulating the ethnolinguistic sort of nationalism, favored in Central and Eastern Europe, did not serve well the cause of nascent Jewish nationalism (Zionism) due to the lack of a single language, which all Jews would recognize as theirs. The use of the Hebrew of the Pentateuch, shared by all Jews, was limited to religious celebrations and theological works. Naturally, neither Yiddish- nor Ladino-speakers wished to learn a completely new Jewish language. Even if such a decision had been taken, there was no Jewish central authority or nation-state to enforce it. In the context of advancement afforded to Jews by emancipation, it seemed that the solution to

336 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Jewish question was assimilation with a nation on the territory of which one resided, while one’s Jewishness would be limited to one’s optional participation in religious observances held in synagogues Gentiles, however, forgetful of the aims of emancipation, continued to single out even assimilated Jews as a collective scapegoat, presumably responsible for all social, political, and economic ills of the age. Gradually, the path to genuine assimilation was closed. The proponents of Zionism, who soon settled on the project of recreating a Jewish polity in Palestine as a Jewish nation-state, also sided with the project of reintroducing Hebrew as the national language of the postulated Jewish nation. In 1878, Eliezer Perelman (later, Ben Yehuda) embarked on the project almost single-handedly, and actually created Ivrit, or Modern Hebrew, from scratch. His namesake, and peer, born just a year later, Eliezer Samenhof (1859–1917) devised a similar scheme. Samenhof experienced multilingualism obstructing communication in the Russian town of Belastok (now Bialystok in Poland), where he was born, and where Belarusian-, German-, Polish-, Russian- and Yiddish-speakers brushed sides. Soon enough, Samenhof came across various instances of antiSemitism and pogroms in Warsaw, where his family had moved, and in Moscow, where he pursued his medical studies. At the university he adopted a gentile name, Ludovik (Ludovic), and his surname phonetically transcribed into Russian, yielded Zamenhof in the Latin script. When his brother, Leon, became a doctor and began signing as ‘Dr L Zamenhof,’ Ludovik added to his name the Russified version of his given name, Leizer (Lazarus), which resulted in ‘Dr L L Zamenhof.’ In the same year of 1878, when Perelman steeled himself to carrying out the task of constructing Ivrit and spreading its knowledge among Palestine’s Jews, Zamenhof completed the first version of his lingwe uniwersala (‘universal language’), because he came to a conclusion that his favorite Latin could not serve the intended purpose. Eventually, thanks to the administrative support of his father (who was a censor of Hebrew and Yiddish books) and to the financial help of his father-in-law, Zamenhof presented his linguistic project in the textbook, Lingvo internacia (International Language, 1878, Warsaw), tailored for Russianspeakers. It is often referred to as Unua Libro, or ‘the first [Esperanto] book.’ Polish, French, German, English, Hebrew, and Yiddish editions of this textbook followed in quick succession. Zamenhof signed these textbooks as Dr Esperanto (‘one who hopes’), which gave rise to the modern name of this language. Esperanto is an Indo-European language, whose vocabulary derives mainly from Romance roots, supplemented by others from English, German, Greek, and Slavic. (Perhaps, Zamenhof’s insistence on the Romance basis for Esperanto was intended to attract Sephardim to this project, which, if successful, would produce a single common language for Ladino- and Yiddish-speaking Jews.) What started as an ‘insignificant folly,’ in the words of Zamenhof’s father, quickly gained an unexpected momentum. In 1888, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

337

wrote in support of Esperanto, and a year later, the members of the Nuremberg club of another constructed language, Volapük (its name was derived from the altered English words ‘world’ and ‘speak’),52 decided that Esperanto was a better choice, and transformed their gathering into the first club of Esperantists. The year 1889 was an annus mirabilis for Esperanto. The first Esperanto periodical began to be published in Germany and another followed immediately in its footsteps in Bulgaria. Zamenhof also printed the address book of 1000 people who had mastered Esperanto. In 1891, 33 Esperanto textbooks appeared in 12 languages. Two years later, Zamenhof’s Universala Vortaro (Universal Dictionary [of Esperanto], Warsaw) came off the press. Together with the 1887 Unua Libro, it constitutes the Fundamento de Esperanto (Foundation of Esperanto). In 1895, Tolstoy’s new enthusiastic article on Esperanto caused St Petersburg to forbid the printing of Esperanto publications in Russia and their importation from abroad. This decision reflected the broader policy of Russification, which by banning or sidelining languages other than Russian, was to lead to the transformation of the empire into an ethnolinguistically homogenous Russian nation-state. The sudden popularity of Esperanto as a hopeful international language could not, thus, be tolerated. The limitations, as in the case of Russia’s other languages, were scrapped after 1905, but Russification returned to the empire already at the turn of the next decade. On the wave of international enthusiasm for Esperanto, in 1906, Zamenhof published a Russian-language brochure with his project of a universal religion, Homaranismo (Esperanto for ‘Humanitarianism’), but it never gained a wide following. Single-handedly, he translated the Old Testament into Esperanto. The British and Foreign Bible Society commissioned an Esperanto translation of the New Testament, which came off the press in 1910. The entire Esperanto Bible was published in 1926 in London. In 1905, the first World Congress of Esperanto was held in France. It attracted almost 700 participants (the proceedings were exclusively in Esperanto) and led to the founding of the Universal Esperanto-Asocio (UEA, World Esperanto Association) 3 years later. The first congress also founded the Lingva Komitato (Language Committee), which was transformed into the Akademio de Esperanto (Academy of Esperanto) in 1948, that is, the regulating body of Esperanto. In recognition of his achievements, members of the British and French parliaments nominated Zamenhof for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907 and 1910, respectively. Prior to World War I, Esperanto was taught in Chinese, Bulgarian, and Greek schools, while the followers of the Bahá’í Faith accepted the language as their lingua franca in Asia. Since 1905, a group of French Esperantists had hoped to reform Esperanto, mainly by infusing it with more Romance elements. When this proved impossible, their leader, Louis Couturat (1868–1914) founded the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language. Surprisingly, in 1907, many French Esperantists threw their weight behind Couturat’s supposedly anonymous project of

338 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Ido (abbreviated from Idiomo Di Omni, or ‘language for all’), which the Delegation had selected. About one-fifth of Esperantists followed this new language, which they saw as an improved Esperanto, but Ido’s popularity declined sharply after the Great War. About 40 other constructed languages (many derived from Esperanto) were proposed by the middle of the 20th century, which was an acute case of oversupply. The Delegation, transformed into an International Auxiliary Language Association in 1924, eventually abandoned Ido in favor of predominantly Romance-based Interlingua (‘International Language’) in 1954. None of these proposals seriously rivaled Esperanto as the primary choice for those wishing to acquire a neutral international language. In the wake of World War I, many saw Esperanto as a significant instrument for fostering international understanding, and thus conducive for preserving peace. In 1920, under Comintern’s auspices, the Bulgarian, Greek, and Yugoslav communist parties established their Balkan Communist Federation, which supported the use of Esperanto in the Balkans. In 1921, the French anarchosyndycalist, Eugène Lanti (pseudonym of Eugène Adam, 1879–1947) founded a famous leftist Esperantist organization, the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT, World Non-National Association) with its seat in Paris. To this day, SAT has employed Esperanto to unify the workers’ movement and to overcome national cleavages within its fold. In 1920, it was proposed to adopt Esperanto as a working language of the League of Nations alongside French, English, and Spanish. Paris’s staunch opposition prevented an implementation of this popular proposal. The French government covertly supported Ido and banned Esperanto from French schools in 1922 to lessen the influence of Esperantists. Perhaps, in this manner, France hoped to preserve the self-proclaimed position of French as the ‘real international language,’ especially in the context of the emergence of English as the first global language. But in 1924, the League of Nations managed to issue a recommendation for its member-states to adopt Esperanto as an auxiliary language. At the time, the Brazilian Ministry of Education employed Esperanto for its international correspondence, and Soviet Russia supported the teaching and learning of Esperanto as an instrument of spreading communist revolution to Western Europe. Stalin, who had learned Esperanto during his several terms of imprisonment in Azerbaijan and exile in Siberia (1909–1917), approved the establishment of the Soviet Esperanto Union (1921), which soon aligned with SAT. Thousands of Soviet Esperantists successfully engaged in correspondence with mainly German workers to win them for the communist cause. In the mid-1920s, a group of Soviet Zionists established an Esperantospeaking collective farm in the Crimea; an experiment, which lasted for a decade. Furthermore, in 1924, the Japanese syncretic Shinto-Buddhist religious movement of Oomoto adopted Esperanto as its language alongside Zamenhof, believed to be an aspect of a single Master God. To this day, the movement’s 45,000 members are required to study Esperanto, and at least, 1000 of them are

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

339

fluent in the language. In the 1920s, the Secretary of the Esperanto Association of Britain, Montagu Christine Butler (1884–1970), was the first to raise Esperantospeaking children. Unlike Perelman, who isolated his son from everybody else but himself, to make him into the first native speaker of Modern Hebrew, Butler allowed her children for interaction with English-speaking peers. The international rise of Esperanto was over in the mid-1930s. First, the crowning of the movement came with the publication of La Enciklopedio de Esperanto (Encyclopedia of Esperanto) in 1933–1934 in Budapest. In 1935, the first authoritative and full grammar of Esperanto came off the press in the Hungarian capital. Hitler vilified Esperanto as a ‘language of Jews and communists,’ and subsequently it was banned in Germany along with Esperantist organizations in 1936. After the end of korenizatsiia at the beginning of the 1930s, the tendency was to present Russian as the lingua franca of the Soviet Union and global communism. Esperanto being a viable alternative could not be tolerated, so it was expediently branded a ‘bourgeoisie language of spies and traitors.’ Personal ties between Soviet citizens and their counterparts abroad became a suspicious liability in the eyes of the increasingly isolationist Soviet regime. The Soviet Esperanto movement was abolished in 1937, and the following year, its leaders and official members were summarily executed or exiled to Siberia. These repressions targeted about 30,000 people. The year 1938, when Russian was introduced to all the schools in the Soviet Union as an obligatory subject, also marked the final end of the remnants of korenizatsiia. Japan, Portugal, and Spain adopted a similar approach to Esperantist. During World War II, the Esperantist movement was liquidated on the territories occupied by the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. After 1945, the role of English as the first global language became apparent, leaving no international space for such a neutral language as Esperanto.53 In the Soviet bloc, Russian mirrored the cultural, economic, and political dominance of English in the West. The UEA and SAT resumed their activities in Rotterdam and Paris, respectively, but international recognition of the movement was late in coming, unlike after 1918. In 1954, the UEA gained a consultative relation with Unesco, and as late as 1985, the latter organization decided to encourage the UN members to add Esperanto to school curricula. The top priority of those times was the Cold War, in the waging of which neutral Esperanto was of no help. In 1952, the UEA and SAT appealed to Stalin to allow for a revival of the Esperantist movement, but to no avail. For the first time after the war, Western and Eastern Esperantists were permitted to meet in Warsaw in 1955, that is, 2 years after Stalin’s death. National Esperanto associations were re-established in Vietnam (1956), China, Czechoslovakia (1957), Poland (1959), Hungary (1960), and East Germany (1961), among others. Much later, Esperantists were allowed to resurface in Romania (1978), but they were an anathema to the country’s national communist regime because of their association with the vilified Magyar minority. Hence, Esperantist clubs and groupings were banned in 1982, and after

340 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

1986, it was illegal to teach Esperanto in Romania. Esperantists in the Soviet Union had to wait for the re-establishment of their organization until 1979. In 1987, Esperanto’s centennial was celebrated at a world congress in Warsaw. For the time being, the codification of Esperanto was completed with SAT’s publication of an extensive one-volume dictionary of this language in 1970 in Paris. Numerous books and periodicals have been published in Esperanto after World War II (including the translation of the Koran in 1969 in Copenhagen) as well, but there is no hope that this language may rival the position of English in global communication, as it did in the context of English and French after 1918. But the Esperantist movement survives. In 1992, International PEN accepted an Esperanto section, 9 years later, the Esperanto Wikipedia (Vikipedia) was launched (mainly on the basis of the 1933–1934 Enciklopedio de Esperanto), and in 2005, an internet-based television channel began to broadcast from Brazil. Since the beginning of the 21st century, about 200 book titles are published in Esperanto per annum. It is commonly accepted that 100,000 to 2 million people worldwide have a sound command of Esperanto, but native speakers are not more numerous than several hundred to 1000. Most Esperanto-speakers reside in Central and Eastern Europe, and in East Asia (Banac 1984; 324; Breton 2003: 21; Lins 1988; Price 1998: 19–20; Qarai 2004; Smith 1998: 76–79, 154–155). ∗

∗

∗

This overview of Central European languages and literacies is not and cannot be complete. New languages and nations were and are still emerging. This is especially true of Slavic languages and nations at the peripheries of established nation-states. Such languages, among others, include Kashubian spoken on both sides of the pre-1939 German-Polish border at the Baltic littoral; Polesian used in the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderland close to the frontier with Poland; (Carpatho-)Rusyn at the confluence of the Polish, Slovak and Ukrainian borders; and also Lachian and Silesian in the region of historic Upper Silesia, where Czechoslovak, German, and Polish borders met prior to 1938. The breakup of Yugoslavia created numerous new languages (Bosnian, Croatian, perhaps Montenegrin, and Serbian) as well, alongside the brand new nations of the Bosnians and the Montenegrins. Nations (ethnic groups) and languages are not forever either. The Ruthenian people and their Ruthenian language vanished in the 18th century, though the tradition of both is claimed by the Belarusians, the Russians and the Ukrainians. The Serbo-Croatian (Yugoslav) nation of interwar Yugoslavia split into the numerous nations of communist federal Yugoslavia after 1945. The fate of the Serbocroatoslovenian (Yugoslav) language was similar. During World War II, it spawned Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian. In 1944, Macedonian was added to this repertory, while Croatian and Serbian were fashioned into

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

341

Serbo-Croatian (Croato-Serbian). In the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian emerged from this language. Similarly, the commonality of the Czechoslovak nation and its Czechoslovak language unraveled after the destruction of interwar Czechoslovakia in 1938–1939. In their places the Czechs and the Slovaks coalesced with their respective national languages. The issue of the aforementioned languages of Kashubian, Lachian, Polesian, (Carpatho-)Rusyn, and Silesian and their corresponding national movements are intimately connected with the process of nation-building and linguistic homogenization in Central Europe, which unfolded in the 20th century. Therefore, I decided to deal with them in the further chapters, which constitute the main focus of this study.

Script variants, alphabets, and politics In Chapter 2, I wrote about the intimate connection that developed and persisted between various alphabets and religions in Europe and the Middle East. The pattern of these scriptural-cum-confessional divides emerged in the second half of the first millennium CE and was complete at the beginning of the second millennium. Let me reiterate. The Jews wrote in Hebrew characters, the Latin alphabet dominated among Western Christians, the Orthodox world stood fast by Cyrillic and the Greek alphabet (the use of other ‘Orthodox scripts’ was localized or ethnically specific), while Muslims committed words to paper in Arabic letters. Even stark differences among languages did not matter; Islamic writers used the Arabic alphabet for recording messages in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman (Old Turkish), or Slavic for that matter. The same was true of the Latin script that, beginning in the late Middle Ages, was employed to write such diverse languages as French, English, German, Czech, or Magyar, among others. The use of Cyrillic was limited to Church Slavonic and Ruthenian. But since the 18th century, the quick succession of newly standardized East and South Slavic languages have been recorded in this script, for instance, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, or Bulgarian. The use of the Greek script remained largely confined to the ancient and modern Greek language, though some Slavic and Turkic texts were written in Greek characters until the 20th century. On the other hand, what united all the scripts employed in Central Europe was their uniformly alphabetic (phonemic) character. No other systems of writing (moraic, syllabic, morphemic, or mixed) has ever been employed in the region. Only the Hebrew script for writing Hebrew and Aramaic is a bit faulty in this respect as an abjad, or consonantry, which does not allow for marking vowels. However, Hebrew script vowel characters were developed for writing Ladino and Yiddish. At the onset of modern times, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation split the world of Western Christianity into the inimical camps of Catholicism

342 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and Protestantism. At the beginning of the 18th century, the process of separating the sphere of secular power from the Church commenced in Muscovy. In the course of the next two centuries, this momentous change spread to other Orthodox polities. The tradition of caesaropapism held longest in the Ottoman Empire, where religious differences translated into socio-political divisions survived until the proclamation of the Turkish Republic (1923) and the subsequent dissolution of the caliphate in 1924. As in earlier times, these political and religious changes mentioned above, found their reflection in scriptural policies. When printing developed in Western Europe in the mid-15th century, the font of the first publications closely imitated the lettering of handwritten manuscripts. In a nutshell, during the 1st century the Greek scriptural practices gave rise to the Roman inscriptions in capital letters of the Latin alphabet. When the codex form of the book developed in the 2nd century, the uncial (rounded) form of the Latin script was developed as more suitable for writing on parchment. This majuscular (uppercase) form of writing came into popular use during the following century and remained the favorite of scribes for half a millennium. In 5th century, the more cursive half-uncial appeared that allowed for employing lowercase letters. But this hand remained less popular than uncial until the Carolingian minuscule emerged at the end of the 8th century. The Carolingian minuscule introduced small, or lowercase, letters for writing sentences that started with capital letters and ended with periods. This made possible the division of text into sentences and paragraphs. Later, the minuscule became laterally condensed. The strokes became heavier, and it was transformed into the Gothic minuscule script. The Gothic hand (also known as ‘Black Letter’ or the ‘Old English script’ in England) originated in northern Europe and became popular throughout the continent, where the Latin script was used, in the 10th to the 15th century. The Gothic script was an angular and compact letterform. Its three basic forms were known as Textura, Rotunda, and Bastarda. In the early 15th century, the humanistic minuscule was devised in Florence. It combined the uppercase letters of Roman inscriptions and the Carolingian minuscule. Cosimo (1386–1464), the founder of the power of the Medici family in Florence and Tuscany, chose this script for copying the Latin texts, which he commissioned. The hand became known as littera antica or Antiqua (antique script) because, purportedly, it harked back to the style of writing as employed in classical Rome. Antiqua came to be employed in the papal chancery in Rome, and beginning in 1465, this type was used for printing Latin-language literature, first in Italy, and shortly afterward, elsewhere in Europe. For the time being, the Gothic script ruled supreme as the Latin-language Bible of Gutenberg (1454–1455, Mainz) was published in Textura, and other printshops followed suit. Around 1481, the Schwabacher (literally, the ‘Script of Swabia’), another kind of the Gothic type, came in use with the eye-catching

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

343

superscript ‘e ’ for rendering umlauts in German. Today, the double dots fulfill this function, placed above a letter, as in German [ä], [ö], and [ü]. The name of this hand comes from the region of Swabia (Schwaben), as publications in it originated there, especially in the city of Mainz, the initial font of the Gutenberg galaxy. The German-language Bible of Martin Luther (1483–1564) was published in Schwabacher (1534). Protestantism spread the use of this font in the north of the Holy Roman Empire, and the tradition of Schwabacher publications persisted in Bavaria until the 19th century. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (reigned 1486–1519), spoke German, Latin, French, Italian, English, and Czech. As a man of his times and connoisseur of paintings, architecture and music, he disapproved of the humanistic miniscule (Antiqua) as a thing of the past. He went for the then modern Schwabacher, and in 1510, commissioned Leonard Wagner, a monk from Augsburg, to prepare a set of various scripts based on this font. In 1513, the emperor selected the one he considered the most beautiful, most probably, on the advice of the artist, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). It became known as Fraktur (literally ‘broken letters’) due to its notably pointed and heavy-bodied letters. With the use of this script the emperor wished to print some 150 books that would glorify the Habsburgs and especially himself. He died too early to carry out this project, but Dürer, with the support of Archduke Ferdinand (future emperor reigning in 1558–1564), popularized Fraktur in the 1520s. Although Maximilian foresaw this font for Latin books, eventually, it came to be used for printing in German. The tradition developed to print Latin books in Antiqua (Hartmann 1998: 339; Kapr 1993: 13–36; Morison 1972: passim and 306–308). Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), born in Rome, was a scholar and humanist. Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) chose him to translate the works of Herodotus and Thucydides into Latin. Valla undertook this labor for the sake of reintroducing classical Latin in place of medieval Latin, which he considered ‘clumsy.’ His criticism of contemporary usages also extended to Schwabacher, Textura, and Bastarda that he disparagingly termed as ‘Gothic.’ He threw his support behind the humanistic miniscule (Antiqua) as true to the tradition of classical Latin. The successive popes supported the use of this hand in their chancery, though they realized its ‘neo-pagan’ origin that, ideologically, did not suit the papal administration. During the pontificate of Pope Sixtus V (1585–1590), Antiqua was overhauled to dissociate it from the pre-Christian Roman Empire. In the meantime, the use of this font for printing Latin books spread throughout Europe, while French- and Italian-language were also published in this ‘Roman (papal) type’ of the Latin alphabet. The spread of the Reformation limited the political and cultural influence of the papacy to Catholic states. This meant that the Luther Bible set the standard of font use in Protestant areas. During the second half of the 16th century, the establishment of the network of elementary schools in the homogenously

344 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Lutheran north of the Holy Roman Empire made the Gothic script into the standard one in this area. In the Calvinist cantons of Switzerland and in the Calvinist Netherlands, the inhabitants strove to emphasize their difference vis-à-vis the Lutherans as well as to gain independence from the Catholic emperor. Because the Lutherans and the emperor employed the Gothic letters, the Swiss and Dutch Calvinists chose the Roman type (Antiqua). Similarly Calvinist Scotland settled for Antiqua, as Gothic letters persisted in England (Kapr 1993: 53; Morison 1972: 309–314). In the course of the 16th century, books in languages other than Latin were printed in the Gothic script across the Holy Roman Empire and on the territories of the Teutonic Order along the southeastern littoral of the Baltic from West Prussia (Danzig [Gdansk])to ´ contemporary Estonia. These languages included German, Czech, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Sorbian, and Pruthenian. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the switch from the Gothic type to Antiqua for publications in Magyar and Croatian took place in the mid-16th century. The proximity of Venetia and Rome in the times of the CounterReformation caused the change of the Gothic to Antiqua font in Slovenianlanguage books already during the second half of the 16th century. The successful re-Catholicization of the Slovenes only reaffirmed this change. Interestingly, the re-Catholicization of Bohemia after 1620 was not reflected in the script, though a few Czech-language books had been printed in Antiqua as early as the mid-1530s. Gothic letters continued to persist in Czech-language books and this influence spread to the Slavic-speakers of Upper Hungary (future Slovaks) (Berˇciˇc 1968: 36, 46; Jakó 1976: ill 46; Kapr 1993: 53; Kopecký 1978: ill 22, 24; Paška 1968: 13; Rous 1979: 10; Soltész 1973: ill 19, 21, 25; Trautmann 1910). In Poland-Lithuania, the change from the Gothic script to Antiqua in Polishlanguage publications took place at the end of the 16th century, despite the significant spread of Protestantism in this state during that time and in the following century. North of this polity, the Gothic script was established in Lutheran Prussia, Livonia, and Scandinavia, including far-flung Iceland. The ideological example of the Luther Bible was irresistible. Similarly, the King James Bible (1611), as published in the Roman font (Antiqua), caused the switch from the Gothic script to Antiqua in England. However, the simplified version of Black Letter survived in English-language juridical literature until the 19th century. Also in that century, antiquarians brought out some editions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1342–1400) works in Gothic letters. Apart from the use of Antiqua in Presbyterian Scotland, Catholic Ireland was presented with another scriptural complication in the sphere of English domination. The half-uncial of the medieval Irish manuscripts served as the model for the printing press that was set up in 1571 at the order of Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603) so as to publish a catechism and other religious books in the Irish language (Gaelic). The decision was taken to hinder the penetration of Ireland by Calvinist Gaelic books from

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

345

Scotland, which were printed in Antiqua. All Irish publications were produced in the Irish (Gaelic) script’ until 1735, when Antiqua started to make inroads into the Irish-language publishing market. The rise of the Irish national movement during the 1890s gave a new lease of life to this tradition of printing in the specific Irish script that persisted in independent Ireland until the period immediately after World War II, until it was finally abolished in the name of progress in 1965 (Eðvardðsson 1994: 34; Holloway 2004; Järv 1983: 164; Klemensiewicz 1976: ill 39, 47; Lynam 1924: 2–3, 35–36; Staunton 2005:88). Generally speaking, in the production of publications in vernaculars, the Gothic script, however, persisted in the Holy Roman Empire and the Lutheran polities through the 18th century, while Antiqua ruled supreme elsewhere in the Catholic and Calvinist areas of Europe. The slow transition to Antiqua commenced due to the rise of German nationalism at the beginning of the 19th century. From that time, the cultural commonality of the Lutheran world unraveled giving way to the politicization of ethnic and linguistic divisions. Ergo, the Gothic font gradually ceased to be perceived as the symbol of the Lutheran cultural-cum-religious heritage, and evolved into the ideologically charged ‘German script.’ Sweden reacted first, already in the mid-18th century, in line with the 1743 decision of the Swedish Academy of Sciences to publish its proceedings in Antiqua. The renewal of the Slovenian- and Croatian-language printing, which took off again at the end of the 18th century, continued the 16th-century tradition of book production in Antiqua. This allowed for emphasizing their difference vis-à-vis the German-speakers. In the last three decades of the 18th century, a handful of Icelandic books were printed in Antiqua, but the Gothic script continued to dominate in Icelandic books as local printers were not able to purchase enough Antiqua fonts due to economic difficulties. Only when the Althing (Icelandic Parliament) was restored in 1845, the decision to publish its proceedings in Antiqua caused the decisive abandonment of the Gothic script in Iceland. It also marked the difference between the Icelanders and the Danes who stuck to the Gothic script. The 1848–1851 war of Denmark against Prussia and the Austrian Empire over the principalities of Schleswig (Slesvig) and Holstein (Holsten) flared up the Danish national feeling vis-à-vis the Germans. Beginning in 1850, the first Danish-language books were printed in Antiqua. The Gothic alphabet ceased to be taught at Danish schools in 1875, but the increasingly narrowing trickle of books printed in this script continued appearing until the 1930s. A similar process took place in Norway. Norwegian schools stopped teaching the Gothic alphabet in 1860, and in book production the switch to Antiqua took place in the period 1890–1920. In the Grand Duchy of Finland (in 1809 seized by the Russian Empire from Sweden), the Gothic script persisted in Finnishlanguage publications until the beginning of the 20th century, though Antiqua made its appearance already in the 1840s. The Gothic type allowed emphasizing

346 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the difference of Finland in relation to Sweden, the former country’s erstwhile suzerain (Benedikz 1969: 41, 51; Berˇciˇc 1968: 55–106; Eðvardðsson 1994: 42, 48; Finnish Historical Newspapers Library 2004; Skrift 2004; Järv 1983: 253; Om gotisk håndskrift i Norge 2004; Pedersen 1959: 26–27, 185). St Petersburg wished to homogenize the empire, preferably by Russifying the population, or at least, by making the vast majority of the inhabitants adopt Orthodox Christianity as their faith. The hope was that this would allow for transforming the polity into a Russian Orthodox nation-state, deemed as the indispensable first step to Western-style modernization. To this end, during the last four decades of the 19th century, a succession of bans were clamped on the printing and importation of books and periodicals in Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, and Ukrainian. In the case of a few religious and ethnographic books that were permitted in these languages, the Russian kind of Cyrillic was imposed. It meant the wholesale replacement of the Latin alphabet when it came to publishing works in Belarusian, Latvian, and Lithuanian; the suppression of the Ukrainian version of Cyrillic; and in the case of Moldavian, the prevention of a switch from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet in emulation of the Romanian example. Initially, this policy of Russification and Cyrillicization was applied only to these lands that were believed to have constituted part of Kievan Rus, whose territory and heritage St Petersburg claimed for the Russian Empire, arguing that this medieval polity was the direct predecessor of Russian statehood and Russian Orthodox culture. Hence, neither were the local languages abolished nor was Cyrillic imposed on them in the provinces that in the past belonged to Denmark, Sweden, and the Teutonic Order, or constituted the non-Rus section of Poland-Lithuania. These languages were divided into two groups. German, Polish, and Swedish, which had been established languages of administration and literatures in other states, continued in this role in the territories seized by Russia from these polities. The emerging new languages of Estonian, Finnish, and Latvian were tolerated, though attempts at banning or Cyrllicizing them were taken at the close of the 19th century. Latvian (meaning Latgallian in Polish orthography) was effectively banned by the requirement to publish Latvian books in Cyrllic, but such measures were never successfully applied to German-orthoraphy Latvian Estonian or Finnish. Publications in German, Polish, and Swedish continued to be printed largely unhindered, though Russian finally replaced Polish in the function of the language of administration in the mid-1860s and German in the mid-1880s. The Grand Duchy of Finland was the empire’s sole region, where local languages (Finnish and Swedish) retained their function of co-official languages alongside Russian, despite the 1900 ban on Finnish and Swedish. After 1905, practically all restrictions were abolished on publishing in local languages, the Latin script, and in non-Russian versions of Cyrillic in the Russian Empire.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

347

The Gothic font persisted in Estonian- and Latvian-language books and periodicals until the end of World War I (and even in the interwar period), though Antiqua began to be used for publications in these languages already in the 1880s. The prevalence of Gothic letters with the concomitant rise of Antiqua reflected the use of both scripts in Germany. And the cultural link between Germany and Russia’s Baltic provinces was quite strong due to the direct border with East Prussia and to the fact that German, not Russian, functioned as the official language in these provinces until the mid-1880s. The final (though gradual) switch from the Gothic font to Antiqua took place only after 1918 in independent Estonia and Latvia in order to dissociate these two nation-states from the erstwhile Lutheran-cum-German cultural commonality. But the use of Gothic font survived until World War II, especially in Lutheran prayer books published for the Estonian- and Latvian-speaking faithful (Aus Lauluraamat 1926; Krastinš ¸ et al. 1942: 13–15; Robert 1988: 124, 129, 130–134; Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918). A similar Lutheran confessional commonality kept the Lithuanians, living in Lithuania Minor and elsewhere in East Prussia, from using Antiqua that was the sole script for printing Lithuanian-language books in Russia’s Lithuania Major until St Petersburg’s ban on Lithuanian books other than those published in a prescribed form of the Cyrillic. Catholic Lithuanians despised this imposition, because they unambiguously associated Cyrillic with Orthodoxy, and smuggled Lithuanian books in Antiqua from East Prussia. Obviously, the Russian authorities ideally hoped to entice Lithuanians into the Orthodox fold through this use of Cyrillic, or at least, to make their acquisition of Russian swifter. Another argument for banning Antiqua from Lithuanian and Belarusian books was the fear that this ‘Polish alphabet’ in combination with the continued cultural and political dominance of the Polish language in the empire’s western borderlands could lead to the further Polonization of numerous Lithuanian- and Belarusian-speakers, instead of Russification, as striven for by the authorities. Similarly, Prussia’s overwhelmingly Lutheran Lithuanians disliked Antiqua seen as the symbol of Catholicism, which dominated among Lithuanians in the Russian Empire. Not surprisingly then the Gothic script predominated in the Lithuanian prints published in Germany until the end of World War I, though Lithuanian books and periodicals had begun to be printed there in Antiqua already in the 1880s. This change was connected to the fact that following the ban on Lithuanian books in the Latin alphabet in Russia’s Lithuania Major, they were published in Germany for smuggling to Russia. Because Lithuanian-speakers in the latter country could not read the Gothic script or associated it with Lutheranism, prints earmarked for distribution among them had to be published in Antiqua. After 1918, in independent Lithuania, Antiqua was employed for printing, while the Gothic script continued to be used for an increasingly smaller number of

348 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Lithuanian-language publications in Germany until 1941, when Berlin officially prohibited any further use of this script (Kaunas 1996: 330–333, 589, 631). A similar persistence of the Gothic script was observed among other linguistic minorities in the German Empire. Sorbian books appeared in this font until the mid-19th century, and much longer among Lower Sorbian-speaking Protestants. Although the Polish-speakers of the Province of Posen (Poznan) ´ continued the established Polish tradition of using Antiqua, just across the provincial border in the Province of Silesia, Slavic (Polish)-speaking Protestants had their books published in the Gothic script. The very same script remained in use until 1919, among the Catholic Slavophone Morawecs in the small region around the town Hultschin (Hluˇcín) in the southeast of Silesia on the border with AustriaHungary (today, in the Czech Republic). The Protestant group of Slavophone Mazurs and Lithuanian-speakers from East Prussia also wrote and published their books in Gothic letters. This font survived among the Slavophone Kashubs until the mid-19th century, and later, among a small group of Kashubs, who professed Lutheranism. Although in the interwar period, there was a tendency to employ Antiqua in Kashubian- and Mazurian-language publications, especially in those printshops, which identified the two languages as dialects of Polish, or (as in the Kashubian case) catered to Catholics, the Gothic script persisted until the 1941 ban, especially among the overwhelmingly Lutheran Mazurs (Breza 2001: 11–50; Dulichenko 2003: 254–255; Komissarova 2002; Petr 1986: 32; Pla´cek 2000; Sakson 1990: 23–63). Across the border, in the non-Hungarian section of the Austrian Empire, the Czechs stopped using the Gothic script in favor of Antiqua during the 1830s to emphasize their ethnic and cultural difference vis-à-vis the Germans and the German-speaking Austrians. Josef Jungmann’s authoritative five-volume CzechGerman dictionary of the Czech language (1835–1839) was printed in Antiqua, though with the exception of German words that were given in the Gothic type. At that time, this was a popular convention that foreign-language words, sentences, and texts appeared in Antiqua when a book was published in a language that typically employed the Gothic script for printing, and vice versa, books in languages that utilized Antiqua preserved the Gothic type of quotations from languages (especially German) that stuck to the latter script. However, this tradition in the Antiqua-based languages began to disappear in the second half of the 19th century, though it did not completely vanish until the 1930s (Niemiecko-polski 1862; Rank 1920; Rous 1979: ill 99, 80). The administrative border between the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the Austrian Empire, institutional differences, and different history delayed the spread of the Czech example to the Slovaks. However beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, the latter had accepted the Czech language for written purposes, complete with its Gothic type. The switch to Antiqua took place gradually at the turn of the 1850s, but some Protestant periodicals in standard Slovak

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

349

were published in Gothic letters until the end of the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, stronger cultural and ideological links developed between Czech nationalists and the nascent Slovak national movement, hence the first Slovak-language publications had been printed in Antiqua as early as the 1830s. Following the Czech model of using Antiqua was not advantageous for Slovak nationalism. This script allowed the Czechs to differentiate themselves from the Germans or the German-speaking Austrians, but from the typographical vantage, Antiqua made the Slovaks closer to the Magyars who had employed it since the 16th century. On the other hand, German being the dominant language of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, the speakers of languages written and printed in Antiqua had to learn the Gothic script in order to be able to acquire the German language. To this end, for instance, Czech-language primers included some texts written in Gothic characters (Druhá 1860; Kováˇc and Vongrej 1963: ill 21, 22, 25, 26, 37, 41, 43, 100; Paška 1968: 13–15). For the longest time, the Gothic script remained attached to publications in the German language wherever they happened to be produced in Central and Eastern Europe. But, beginning in the mid-18th century, a movement against the use of this type began to swell. Those German-speaking intellectuals, who aspired to transplant elements of the French Enlightenment to the Germanophone lands, considered the Gothic type as the symbol of backwardness and wished to replace this script with Antiqua, associated with progress and modernity. In 1749, the first collection of German-language poetry was published in Antiqua, and since then this script was slowly but gradually more frequently used for publications in German. The rise of the mass German national movement at the beginning of the 19th century made the Gothic type into the ‘German national script,’ which translated into its continuing, though declining, popularity in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and other German-speaking areas across Central and Eastern Europe. In 1861, in Prussia, 78 percent of Germanlanguage books were published in Gothic letters whereas in Germany, this percentage sank to 59 percent in 1891, and 57 percent in 1928. And in 1928, about 60 percent of Germany’s periodicals were published in the Gothic type. In line with the German prescriptive approach to language use, not only spelling and pronunciation were under the pressure of various ‘reformers,’ but beginning in 1881, also a heated discussion commenced whether the Gothic script should be replaced with Antiqua or not. In 1885, an organization supporting Antiqua was founded, and 5 years later, the proponents of the Gothic type established their own association. Between 1908 and 1911, the question of the ‘German script’ was discussed several times in the Reichsrat (German Parliament). The wide-ranging political and cultural discussion continued after World War I. In 1916, a book came off the press that accused the Gothic type of being a ‘Jewish script,’ and as such antithetical to Germanness. Ironically, another organization founded in support of this type, the Gesellschaft für Deutsche

350 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Schrift (Society for the German Script, 1918), unambiguously hailed it as the ‘German script.’ The conflict was finally settled in 1941 when the authorities of the Third Reich prohibited the use of ‘Swabian Jewish letters’ (Schwabacher Judenlettern), and the aforementioned society was abolished. From that moment, all publications produced in wartime Germany were to be printed exclusively in the ‘normal script’ (Normal-Schrift), that is, Antiqua. At schools, children stopped learning the Gothic script, too. After 1945, the occupation administrations in Germany and Austria upheld this change, though some books were allowed to be published in the Gothic type until the late 1940s, probably in ideological defiance of the 1941 ban unambiguously associated with national socialism. To this day, the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache und Schrift (Society for the German Language and Script) brings out publications in Gothic letters. Ironically, the image of the Gothic type as the ‘Nazi or Hitlerian script’ persists to this day in the popular mind of Central Europe. When the Allies agreed to move Poland’s western border 300 kilometers westward, the ensuing policy of de-Germanization applied to this new Poland’s formerly German territories, did not discriminate between Mazurian, Kashubian, and German books, even if Mazurian and Kashubian were officially considered Polish dialects. As long as a book was in Gothic letters it was classified as ‘German’ and slated for pulping. The same fate met Gothic-script books in Polish, published until the 1880s for Lower Silesia’s Slavophone Protestants (Hartmann 1998: 28–33, 405; Kapr 1993: 78–82; Weisgerber 1948). A similar scriptural discord, as observed between the Gothic script and Antiqua, also took place in the Orthodox world of Eastern and Southeastern Europe where Cyrillic was employed for writing. Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725) who overhauled Muscovy into the Russian Empire in 1721, wished to modernize his state by emulating Western Europe. His efforts touched upon every sphere of public life, including the script. He decided to replace the traditional type of Cyrillic used for writing and printing in the Church Slavonic language, with a new one modeled on the Antiqua of Latin-language books. This change was intended to limit the influence of the Orthodox Church on the essentially non-ecclesiastical spheres of public life. The ideological role which this novel Cyrillic script was to play was clearly spelled out in its name, grazhdanskii shrift (grazhdanka, in short), or the ‘civil script.’ On the symbolical plane, Grazhdanka marked the, Western in its inspiration, separation of Church and State, though the Russian tsar remained the figurehead of the Russian tradition of ideologized caesaropapism until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Apart from Antiqua, another source of Grazhdanka was the hand of the Muscovy chancellery. First, trial publications in the planned new script were printed between 1699 and 1707 in Amsterdam thanks to the personal involvement of Peter the Great, who (incognito) sojourned in the Netherlands during the years 1697–1700. The first book printed in Grazhdanka in Russia came off the press in Moscow in 1708.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

351

The introduction of Grazhdanka also entailed the replacement of the use of letters in the function of numerals with the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which had been popularly employed in Western and Central Europe since the 15th century. This system of numerals (borrowed in the 11th century from the Arabs of the Iberian Peninsula) replaced the Roman numerals (based on the numerical values of some letters of the Latin alphabet) in the 13th century, among merchants and scholars in the north of the Apennine Peninsula, and also in the south of France and the Holy Roman Empire. In 1710, not unlike the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in the case of the Gothic type, Peter the Great commissioned a repertory of several versions of Grazhdanka. He selected those letters he liked most and made this document into a decree that ordered all books on commerce and technology published in ‘Great, Little and White Russia’ to be printed in this script. The new script left the narrow circle of the secular literate elite in 1748, when the first school textbook was published in Grazhdanka. Peter the Great did not know the name of Grazhdanka, as it is a later development. He referred to this script as ruske litery (‘Ruthenian letters’). Drawing on the tradition of the Ruthenian literacy as developed in Poland-Lithuania, Peter the Great also ordered non-ecclesiastical books to be published in the ruski iazyk (Ruthenian language). This allowed for distancing secular literacy from the Church Slavonic language of the Orthodox Church, and to steep this secular literacy in the vernacular filtered through Muscovy’s chancery (Ruthenianized) version of Church Slavonic. Thanks to such a development, the stage was prepared for the codification of the Russian language in the second half of the 18th century (Shitsgal 1947: 8, 24–25, 1959: 5–6, 92, 259, 265, 1974: 31–32). At the turn of the 19th century, the Russian Empire, thanks to its military and economic ascendancy, became the model of development, which other Slavophone Orthodox peoples and polities strove to emulate. Only through the gradual detachment of the Church from the secular sphere of life, was it possible for vernacular (that is, ‘civic’) languages to replace Church Slavonic among these peoples and polities. It was a prolonged process. Initially, transitional language forms, which were hybrids of Church Slavonic and vernaculars, emerged; for instance, ‘Slaveno-Russian,’ formed in the first half of the 18th century from Muscovy’s chancery Church Slavonic and Poland-Lithuania’s vernacular written language of Ruthenian. On the other hand, ‘Slaveno-Serbian,’ which developed at the turn of the 19th century, contained elements of Church Slavonic, the vernacular, and increasingly, of standard Russian. From SlavenoRussian, standard Russian emerged in the second half of the 18th century, and Slaveno-Serbian spawned Serbian in the first half of the 19th century, but before this language completed to emerge, it was unified with Croatian into the bi-scriptural (Cyrillic and Latin-alphabet) Serbo-Croatian language. On the other hand, ‘Slaveno-Bulgarian,’ which included, apart from Church Slavonic and

352 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

vernacular elements, many Greek lexical and syntactical loans, emerged at the beginning of the 19th century. Vernacular-based Bulgarian (heavily influenced by Russian linguistic loans) replaced it in the function of standard language by the mid-19th century. The earliest Cyrillic-based Orthodox language that achieved the feat of replacing prestigious Church Slavonic in secular administration, however, did not follow this pattern. It was the Romance language of Walachian (Romanian). Due to its pronounced difference vis-à-vis Church Slavonic, this language clearly stood out from the Church Slavonic linguistic and cultural commonality, despite being written and printed in the Church Slavonic type of Cyrillic. Walachian-language books had already been published in the 16th century. At the same time, Cyrillic-based Walachian (Romanian) became the chancery language of Walachia and Moldavia. It even replaced Church Slavonic as the language of administration and liturgy of the Orthodox Church at the end of the 17th century in Transylvania, and at the end of the following century in Walachia and Moldavia. In the first half of the 19th century, the main question faced by Romanian nationalists was not whether to develop a Romanian version of Grazhdanka in order to replace Church Slavonic Cyrillic, but how to achieve a switch to the Latin alphabet. This alphabet was perceived as the script of progress that was ‘true’ to the ‘Latin/Roman character’ of the Romanian nation, because the nationalists claimed that both their nation and this script stemmed directly from ancient Rome. In Transylvania, the very first Walachian-language books in the Latin alphabet came off the press during the 1560s, but the tradition of continuous Latin script-based literacy in Walachian (Romanian) commenced in this province in the 1780s. But the change from Cyrillic to the Latin script was a protracted process that lasted from the 1820s to 1860 in Walachia and 1863 in Moldavia. Meanwhile, there emerged various types of transitional alphabets, which mixed Latin and Cyrillic letters. In these mixed alphabets, the Latin fonts were always of the Antiqua type, and the Cyrillic ones closely followed the model of Grazhdanka. Because the movement to replace Cyrillic with the Latin script for writing in Romanian commenced in Transylvania under the ideological pressure of Latin script-based literacy in the Kingdom of Hungary, the change was swifter in this region, especially among Walachian (Romanian)-speaking Greek Catholics. The switch either to Grazhdanka or the Latin alphabet was much slower in Bessarabia, or the eastern half of Moldavia incorporated in the Russian Empire in 1812. Church Slavonic Cyrillic for writing in Moldavian (Moldovan) predominated there until the turn of the 20th century. The change in script from Grazhdanka to the Latin alphabet actually did not take place until 1989, when Soviet Moldavia (now known as Moldova) commenced its way to independence, which arrived with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Latin script had also been used for writing and publishing in Moldavian, then officially

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

353

known as ‘Romanian,’ in the interwar period when Bessarabia was included in Romania. The backwardness of Bessarabia combined with the 1827 imposition of Russian as the sole language of administration kept Walachian (Moldavian) to few ecclesiastical uses in this vastly illiterate society where only 4 percent of Walachian-speaking women and 18 percent of Walachian-speaking men could read at the end of the 19th century. The ban on the use of Walachian in education (1842) was followed by the re-introduction of Church Slavonic in Orthodox liturgy and ecclesiastical administration. The Russian administrators called the Romance vernacular of Bessarabia the ‘Walachian-Moldavian language.’ Soon, the Romancephone population spoke of it as the ‘Moldavian language’ and saw it as different from Romanian, which had been written and printed in Latin letters since the early 1860s. After 1905, the printing of Moldavian-language publications was allowed, and in 1913, the Russian Orthodox Church permitted the use of Moldavian in churches. These few publications that were printed in Moldavian prior to 1918 were of religious character and mostly in the Church Slavonic type of Cyrillic. Grazhdanka entered secular publications in Moldavian after 1905. This persistence of Church Slavonic Cyrillic allowed the Moldavians (today, known as Moldovans) to keep their ethno-cultural distinctiveness, not only in relation to the Romanians but also the Russians, who used Grazhdanka. Nowadays, Moldavian, known as ‘Moldovan,’ is written in Latin characters in independent Moldova, but the use of Grazhdanka for writing and publishing in this language continues in separatist Transnistria (Clark 1927: chs 9, 10; Osadchenko 1983: ill 3; Tomescu 1968: ill 28, 79, 85, 88; Vîrtosu 1968: 221–250). In the 18th century, Slaveno-Serbian books were published outside the Montenegrin or Serbian ethnic territory, in Venice, Vienna, Buda, and St Petersburg. Apparently, the first Slaveno-Serbian book that was printed in Grazhdanka was the Montenegrin Vladika Vasilije’s (reigned 1750–1766) The History of Montenegro that was published in St Petersburg in 1754. In Vienna, Grazhdanka was used for Serbian publications for the first time in 1786. But the tradition of publishing at least all the religious Cyrillic books in the Church Slavonic type continued in Vienna and Buda until the mid-19th century. Out of the 13 books that came off the press in Cattaro (Kotor) during 1798–1802, all were in Italian but two. Out of the two Slavophone ones, one was published in Church Slavonic Cyrillic (1799), whereas the other was in the Latin alphabet. The new chapter in Serbian-language printing commenced in 1832 and 1833 when the Serbian Prince Miloš (reigned 1815–1839) and the Montenegrin Vladika Petar II (reigned 1830–1851), respectively, established state presses using the Cyrillic printing presses complete with Grazhdanka and Church Slavonic fonts purchased from Russia. The first primer of the Serbian language, published in Montenegro in 1836, was in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. Two years later, another primer followed it, this time in Grazhdanka. Both Cyrillic scripts were taught at school, but due to the gradual development of printed culture in the

354 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

second half of the 19th century, Church Slavonic Cyrillic became increasingly insignificant as limited to ecclesiastical uses only. Like in Russia, this script was employed for the production of liturgical books. In the Balkans, the growing obscurity of Church Slavonic Cyrillic in printing coincided with the decline of the tradition of handwritten books. In the mid-19th century, printing clearly took over even in the Slavophone areas of the Balkans remaining under the Ottoman control (Arnautovi´c 1912: 25–28; Ivic and Pesikan 2004; Martinovi´c 1994: 136–138, 141, 144, 152; U Beˇcu 2004). The change from Church Slavonic Cyrillic to Grazhdanka was slower in Slavophone books published in the Ottoman Empire. It was so because most of the books were religious and it was the printshops of the Orthodox Church that produced them. Neither Church Slavonic nor Slavic vernaculars served any state administrative purposes; hence, writing in these languages was limited to the ecclesiastical sphere. However, the influence from Central Europe and the West was strong enough that it necessitated the introduction of HinduArabic numerals already in the 1810s. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Bulgarian national movement introduced the knowledge of Grazhdanka among Bulgarian-speakers, thanks to its connections with Russia and the example of the Serbian-language production in this type. The first Bulgarian-language books in Grazhdanka came off the press in the 1840s. The first Bulgarian-language newspapers, which made an appearance in the same decade, were published in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. These Bulgarian-language periodicals in Church Slavonic Cyrillic survived until the end of the 1850s, but Bulgarian newspapers began to be printed in Grazhdanka as early as 1848, and started taking over their Church Slavonic Cyrillic counterparts in the 1850s. The change from Church Slavonic Cyrillic to Grazhdanka reflected the switch from Church Slavonic and Slaveno-Bulgarian to the vernacular as the basis of standard Bulgarian. The 1850s and 1860s were the period of the final transition from the Church Slavonic to Grazhdanka script. Initially, the printshops publishing Bulgarian-language books outside the Ottoman Empire (in Moscow, Belgrade, and Bucharest) led this change, but the influence soon spread ˙ to printshops in Constantinople, Smyrna (Izmir), and Sel¯anik (Thessaloníki). The popular and widespread use of Grazhdanka became possible in the core Bulgarian-speaking territories after Bulgaria gained autonomy in 1878. Later, Bulgarian (alongside Ottoman) became an official language of this autonomous polity and the volume of publications produced in Grazhdanka-style standard Bulgarian increased rapidly. As in the case of Serbia and Montenegro, the amount of Bulgarian secular publications in Grazhdanka soon outnumbered religious books and periodicals in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. This change was delayed in historical Macedonia, which remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1913. In this region, Ottoman (Old Turkish) was the official language, and Greek predominated in Orthodox churches and the Orthodox

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

355

Church-controlled educational system that served the pastoral and educational needs of Slavophone Orthodox Christians. In addition, Macedonian nationalism was a latecomer, which managed to spawn a vibrant national movement as late as in the 1940s, but only when lavishly aided by Yugoslav communists, who, in this manner, wanted to obliterate Bulgarian influence in Yugoslavia’s section of historical Macedonia. Hence, Bulgarian and Macedonian nationalists nowadays lay claim to the same part of the pre-20th-century Slavophone printing output that originated in the center of the Balkans, namely on the territory of historical Macedonia, at present within the borders of Bulgaria, Greece, and Macedonia (Atanasov 1959: 149, 153, 198, 207; Ionchev and Ioncheva 1982: 115, 146; Polenakovik 1989: 288; Stoianov 1957: 12–13, 58– 59, 80–81, 202–204, 306–307, 313–315, 328–329, 336–337, 352–353, 388–389, 433–436). As in the Balkans, Church Slavonic Cyrillic persisted among the Slavophone population of Ruthenians (Ukrainians, Rusyns) in eastern Upper Hungary (that is, today in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia) and eastern Galicia (western Ukraine). They were members of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, unlike the ethnically similar Little Russian (Ukrainian) population who lived across the border in the Russian Empire. Following the partition of Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century, those Little Russians who had been members of the Uniate Church were pressed by the Russian administration to embrace the Orthodox faith during the first decades of the 19th century. In this way, the Uniate-Orthodox divide overlapped with the new political border between the Habsburg lands and the Russian Empire. In addition, while secular publications had already began to be printed in Grazhdanka in the Russian section of future Ukraine during the 1780s, Church Slavonic Cyrillic persisted in secular publications in the Ruthenian-speaking areas of the Habsburg lands until the 1860s. This type of Cyrillic became limited to religious books in the Church Slavonic language, but religious books and periodicals in the vernacular (today, identified as Rusyn) continued to be published in this script well into the interwar period, first in eastern Upper Hungary, and after 1918, in Czechoslovakia’s Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Today, reprints of these Church Slavonic Cyrillic publications are still produced for the Rusyn faithful and supporters of the Rusyn national movement. The influence of the changes in the political ownership of Galicia was not limited to Cyrillic, but also bore its imprint on the use of the Latin alphabet. Vienna annexed Galicia in the wake of the first partition of Poland-Lithuania (1772). Among others, it meant the introduction of German as the medium of culture, and beginning at the end of the 18th century, as the language of administration, too. This change entailed the decline in the use of Antiqua connected to the Polish language, and its partial replacement with the Gothic script in which German-language publications were then printed.

356 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Until the mid-19th century, Orthodox religious books were printed in Church Slavonic Cyrillic all over the Russian Empire, despite the dominance of Grazhdanka in secular publications. The short experiment in publishing religious texts with the use of Grazhdanka during the 1820s was soon abandoned due to the backlash from the Orthodox hierarchy. Grazhdanka began to enter the sphere of religious publications after the first Russian translation of the Bible approved by the Orthodox Church (1856) was printed in this script. From that time, more religious prints earmarked for the faithful were produced in Grazhdanka, though books for the perusal of the Orthodox clergy continued to be published in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. The argument was that in Russia and other Slavophone Orthodox areas, the Orthodox liturgical books were (and still mostly are) in the Church Slavonic language. The eventual phasing out of the Church Slavonic script took place after the Bolshevik Revolution, when religion and various Churches were suppressed in the Soviet Union. Following this revolution, between 1917 and 1918, the Russian version of Grazhdanka was also ‘modernized,’ meaning that letters employed mainly for Greek sounds used in religious texts and vocabulary were abolished, thus reaffirming the Slavic and secular character of the ‘revolutionary Russian language.’ Interestingly, between 1707– 1710, Peter the Great did not allow inclusion of these letters in Grazhdanka in order to emphasize the difference between his ‘civil script’ and the Orthodox Church’s Church Slavonic Cyrillic. But under the Church’s subsequent pressure, the letters were reintroduced to Grazhdanka between 1735 and 1738. In the 18th century, this Church, as the guardian of the purity of Orthodoxy, became the basis of the imperial ideology, and increasingly more secular academic works (printed in Grazhdanka-based Russian) were devoted to the past of the Orthodox Church. This necessitated the use of the ‘Church letters,’ which Peter the Great had despised. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Church Slavonic Cyrillic survived in religious books produced for Orthodox Christians in these eastern sections of Poland and Czechoslovakia that Moscow would annex during World War II. In the wartime Soviet Union, a small revival of Orthodoxy and literacy in Church Slavonic Cyrillic was allowed in order to reawaken the formerly denigrated Orthodox-based Russian national feeling. Stalin agreed to this unprecedented move, because from the ideological viewpoint, Russian nationalism was more effective in mobilizing the ‘masses’ for the sake of war effort than communism, popularly associated with genocidal-scale purges and arbitrary application of law. After 1945, the use of Church Slavonic Cyrillic in Russia was limited to a few approved liturgical and prayer books in Church Slavonic. This script suffered a similar fate across the Soviet bloc, in the areas where Slavophone Orthodox communities resided. It is worth noting, though, that scholars writing in the Grazhdanka-based Slavic languages were allowed to quote from Church Slavonic Cyrillic publications with the use of this antiquated script.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

357

This tradition continues to this day (Deditskii 1859; Dulichenko 2003: 335–336, 362–363, 386–387; Magocsi 1979: 9, 11; Mojdl 2005: 43–44; Pedaniuk et al. 1965: 49; Tichý 1938: 154–159; Zapasko and Isaievych 1981: 10, 61, 71, 1983: 118–119). The practical abolishment of Latin script-based White Ruthenian (Belarusian construed as a dialect of Polish) in the 1830s, and White Russian (Belarusian) and Little Russian (Ukrainian) in the 1860s on the territory of the Russian Empire had several implications. In the case of White Russia (Belarus), it meant the gradual replacement of Polish with Russian as the language of administration and education, and entailed the switch from the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic, which was not fully completed until the early 1920s in Soviet Belarus. Alongside mainstream Cyrillic, the use of Latin alphabet persisted for writing and publishing in Belarusian in interwar Poland’s share of Belarus, while the employment of Cyrillic was discouraged in entire Belarus under German occupation during World War II. In Russia’s Ukraine the ban on the Little Russian (Ukrainian) language did not cause any change in the alphabet. However, a few ethnographic and literary texts that were allowed to be published in Little Russian had to be printed in the Russian version of Grazhdanka. Church Slavonic Cyrillic employed for Ruthenian (Ukrainian)-language publications in Austria’s Galicia was not allowed for Little Russian in the Russian Empire, so the first Ukrainian nationalists developed their own specific type of Grazhdanka in the 1840s in order to draw a line between Russian and their language. Due to the 1860s ban on Little Russian and its specific kind of Grazhdanka, these nationalists could develop a wider use of Little Russian Grazhdanka in print only after the 1905 liberalization. It is worth noting that from the 1830s to the 1850s, there was an ongoing discussion in Galicia whether Ruthenian (Ukrainian) should be written and printed in Church Slavonic Cyrillic or in the Polish version of the Latin alphabet. The discussion was settled in 1859, when the Ruthenian-speaking intellectuals and Greek Catholic clergy successfully rejected the official imposition of the ‘Polish alphabet.’ The subsequent dissociation of both Ruthenian and Little Russian from the Latin script was so decisive that, unlike in the Belarusian case, this alphabet was not reintroduced for writing in Ukrainian in interwar Poland, and the German occupation authorities did not attempt imposing it on this language during World War II. For Belarusian nationalists, who became active quite late, at the turn of the 20th century, the question was not so much their own kind of Grazhdanka, but whether to write and publish Belarusian books in the Latin alphabet associated with White Ruthenian since the 18th century, or in Cyrillic, which was the telling mark of White Russian, seen as a branch of the Great Russian (Russian) language. Both scripts were used side by side (often literally, in a single periodical) in the wake of the 1905 liberalization in the Russian Empire. The German administration of the Land Ober Ost banned Cyrillic and allowed exclusively the

358 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Latin alphabet for writing and printing in the White Ruthenian (Belarusian) language (though publications in this language produced in Cyrillic were tolerated). After World War I, in Soviet Byelorussia, a specific kind of Cyrillic became official for writing the Belarusian language, while the dual Latin-Cyrillic scriptural tradition (with the predominance of the latter alphabet) persisted in interwar Poland’s section of Belarus until the outbreak of World War II. During the war, the German occupation authorities discouraged Cyrillic and favored the use of the Latin script for writing and publishing in White Ruthenian (Belarusian), but in reality more Belarusian books were printed then in Cyrillic than in Latin letters. When all of Belarus and Ukraine became a permanent part of the Soviet Union in 1945, the Soviet versions of Belarusian and Ukrainian Cyrillic became the only allowed scripts for writing and printing in the respective languages. (In Western Europe and Northern America, Belarusian and Ukrainian emigrants continued to write and publish in other non-Soviet versions of Belarusian and Ukrainian Cyrillic, and also in the Latin script in the case of Belarusian.) In addition, the new postwar western border of the Soviet Union almost perfectly overlapped with the westernmost extent of the official use of Cyrillic in Central Europe, with the minor exception of Soviet Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, where the Latin alphabet was retained for writing and publishing in Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian (Magocsi 1978a: 5–7; Pedaniuk et al. 1965: 49; Shevchenko 1886; Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918; Ulianov 2004; Vakar 1956: 68–73, 90–91, 130). The political significance of script was such that the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia prohibited Cyrillic upon the outbreak of World War I, when the Dual Monarchy found itself at loggerheads with Russia. The same measure was extended to Serbian publications in the south of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Latinization campaign, carried out in the Soviet Union during the years 1922–1932, saw the Latin alphabet as the ‘pinnacle of civilizedness and cultural development’ to which Cyrillic was inferior, and the Arabic alphabet even more so. The discussion on the civilizational merits spilled to Turkey where the Arabic script was replaced with the Latin one in 1928, and to Bulgaria where Latinization seemed an option worth following at the beginning of the 1930s. The end of Latinization in the Soviet Union reestablished the dominance of Cyrillic for writing all languages native to the Soviet territory, with the exception of Armenian, Georgian, and Yiddish. Neither was Cyrillicization extended to major minority languages written in other scripts than Cyrillic outside the Soviet Union, for instance, Latin script-based German or Polish. After the breakup of this polity, Cyrillic remains the script of Ukrainian and Belarusian, though not of Moldovan (formerly, Moldavian), as the Latin alphabet replaced it in independent Moldova (except separatist Transnistria). Similarly, the split of Yugoslavia apportioned the Latin alphabet to Croatia and Slovenia, and Cyrillic to Serbia and Macedonia, with Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo being the transitory zone

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

359

between both alphabets. However, despite the fact that the Latin alphabet is not deemed a national script in Serbia (unlike in Montenegro), numerous publications are printed in Latin letters in this country. It is a legacy of Yugoslavia’s biscriptural tradition of Serbo-Croatian literacy. On the other hand, publishers in Slovenia and Croatia have not reciprocated in kind, and practically no Cyrillic prints are published in both states. The use of the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic is also strictly regionalized in Bosnia. Besides the federal government and the international administration publishing in both scripts, Cyrillic is the sole script of the Serbian Republic (unlike in Serbia), whereas the Latin alphabet is of the Bosnian-Croatian federation. (Both the republic and the federation constitute federal Bosnia.) In the international protectorate of Kosovo (independent since 2008), the situation is similar with Albanians sticking to the Latin alphabet, and Serbs to Cyrillic. The difference is that these Albanians add up to the vast majority of the province’s population, which, in practical terms, makes Cyrillic a minority script. The end of communism also meant a small-scale revival of Church Slavonic Cyrillic. It survived even in the Soviet Union when some liturgical books in the Church Slavonic language were published in this script. The pressure for the use of Grazhdanka and Russian in these books was so strong, however, that liturgical books in the Church Slavonic language but printed in Grazhdanka were officially registered as ‘in the Russian language.’ This led to the curious phenomenon of equalizing Grazhdanka with the Russian language and Church Slavonic Cyrillic with the Church Slavonic language, irrespective of the actual language in which a publication was printed. This development paralleled the 19th-century identification of the Gothic type with the German language, and Antiqua with other Western and Central European Latin script-based languages, whose users strove to dissociate their respective national cultures and projects from any German influence. Obviously, in both cases of such blatant ideologization of script, the actual language of a text recorded in a print with the employment of a given script practically did not matter. The Gothic type entailed Germanness, Grazhdanka Russianness, and Church Slavonic Cyrillic Orthodox Christianity and liturgy in Church Slavonic. After the fall of communism, the authorities do not attempt suppressing Orthodox Churches in the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav nation-states any more, or even actively support them. It only depends on the Churches and the faithful themselves how many liturgical and religious books are published in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. Even in the communist times, a university student tended to have a few lessons in how to read this Cyrillic to enable him or her to peruse old books useful for research in Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, or Ukrainian history, culture, and literature. Nowadays, the use of Church Slavonic Cyrillic has modestly broadened when the Orthodox Churches in the Slavophone Orthodox nation-states aspire to teach young children this

360 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

‘holy script’ of Orthodox Christianity along with some elements of the Church Slavonic language (Dobrijevi´c 1997; Ionchev and Ioncheva 1982: 146; Kravetskii and Pletneva 2001: 227–228, 247; Martin 2001: 203; Mitrofanova 2004; Šipka 1999). In order to complete this picture on the political uses of script in Central Europe and in its immediate vicinity, it is necessary to have a glance at the Greek alphabet. When the first printed Greek-language books were produced at the end of the 15th century, they preserved the lettering of Byzantine manuscripts. This type of the Greek alphabet, used for publications, remained largely unchanged to this day. In some cases, the Greek printing font became similar to the thick and ornamented letters of Church Slavonic Cyrillic (originally copied from some Greek-language Byzantine manuscripts), while in some other cases, the font looked similar to the regular strokes of Antiqua due to the influence of Latin and Italian publications produced in the Apennine Peninsula. The Antiqua-like type of the Greek script dominated in Greek-language books published in the West, and the former in publications produced in the Ottoman Empire. Because Greek was the main language of liturgy and administration in the Orthodox millet in the Ottoman Empire, the Antiqua-like slim letters of the Greek alphabet caused some printshops to copy this example in Church Slavonic-language publications produced in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. This might also be one of the influences, which convinced Peter the Great to introduce Antiqua-like Grazhdanka for secular use in Russia. In independent Greece, the Antiqua-like version of the Greek alphabet won hands down, due to the unwanted association of the thick-lettered type of this script with the ‘half a millennium of Turkish yoke, suffered by Greeks in the Ottoman Empire.’ In the mid-18th century, in Greek-language publications, the Hindu-Arabic numerals replaced Greek letters in this role, probably, in emulation of the Russian example, though the Western influence should not be underscored either. However, years tended to be given on the title pages of Greek-language books side by side in Greek letters and the Hindu-Arabic numerals until the 1820s. These numerals superseded Greek letters in this role much faster when it came to noting years and numbers in the body of text. The first issue of the Governmental Gazette of the Kingdom of Greece was published in 1833. The gazette was bilingual with two columns of text on the page, one in Greek and the other in German. The German text was in Antiqua bowing to the influence of this type of the Latin script, which emanated from the Apennine Peninsula and France. Obviously, the gazette’s Greek text was composed in the Antiqua-like version of the Greek font, associated with the times of classical Greece and Alexander the Great’s Hellenistic empire. Similarly, when the Austro-Hungarian administration was established in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, all the governmental publications in German did not employ the Gothic type either. Outside Central Europe proper, the German language was exported in the garb of Antiqua.

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

361

Although there were cases that Albanian, Gagauz, Slavic (Macedonian, Pomakian), and Turkish were noted in Greek letters, the Greek alphabet is unique in this respect that it has not come to serve permanently any other language than Greek. On the contrary, the script of the Latin language is now employed for writing all the languages of Western and Central Europe, while Cyrillic (that is, Grazhdanka formed on the basis of Church Slavonic Cyrillic) for the graphic representation of all the Slavic languages of the Orthodox nationstates in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. What is more, Greek alongside Latin and Church Slavonic were the most significant written languages of Europe from the Middle Ages to early modernity. All the three, including Greek, eventually fell out from administrative and public use since Demotic Greek is as different from Byzantine Greek as Italian from Latin. But Latin gave rise to the Romance languages of Catalan, French, Galician, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, and Spanish, just to enumerate the most significant ones. Likewise, Church Slavonic was the foundation from which, among others, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian sprang up. In the case of Greek, its Atticizing (classicizing) Byzantine version spawned just Demotic Greek, at present, construed as the standard Greek language. Ironically, when the territory of the Greek nation-state was ethnically and linguistically homogenized, and, despite some serious setbacks, its area grew in leaps and bounds from the 1830s to the second half of the 1940s, at the same time, the territorial extent of the use of the Greek language outside this polity shrank. The independence of Greece was preceded by the 1820s abolishment of Greek as the administrative language of Walachia and Moldavia. The Ottoman administration, mistrustful of Greeks, chose to support, at the cost of the Greek language, more written Slavic in ecclesiastical administration and the life of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire’s Slavophone areas. This tendency slowly extended to education as well. An unintended result was an encouragement for the founding of autonomous Bulgaria in 1878, which convinced Ottoman administrators to allow more Greek back into public use in order to stem the rise of Slavic separatisms. The Greek-Turkish war at the end of World War I (known as the ‘Disaster’ to the Greeks, and the ‘Turkish War of Independence’ in Turkey) culminated in the 1923 population exchange that did away with the Greek-language life and communities in western Anatolia. The last attempt at creating a Greater Greece by unifying Cyprus with the Greek nation-state triggered the division of this island in 1974. Hence, the Greek language vanished from the north of this island. One could argue that the same phenomenon of ‘shrinking’ pertained to Turkish in the context of the northern, western, and eastern shores of the Black Sea, and of the Balkans and Greece. True. But Ottoman (Old Turkish) gave rise to contemporary Turkish alongside (though not everyone agrees with this view) Gagauz and Azeri. In addition, the examples of both Ottoman and modern

362 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Turkish shaped all the other significant Turkic languages in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. So far, northern Azeri,54 Gagauz, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek followed the Turkish example and switched from Cyrillic to the Latin script after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 2002, the Russian authorities prevented a similar switch to the Latin alphabet for writing in Tatar in autonomous Tatarstan. A modest reversal in the shrinking of the geographical area outside Greece, where Greek is used, took place with the accession of Greece to the European Community in 1981. Now Greek is one of the European Union’s official languages. But in the 1990s, practically all Pontic Greeks left their homeland of Crimea (nowadays, in Ukraine) for Greece (Polenakovik 1989: 288; Staikos and Sklavenit 2000: 15–18, 23, 25, 46, 57, 66, 85). The socio-political story of Greek reminds that of Central Europe’s languages and cultures. The pre-modern and early modern tradition of using numerous different alphabets and scripts side be side within a single polity gave way to cultural and scriptural homogeneity that underlies and emphasizes the striven-for ethnolinguistic homogeneity of the nation-states in this region. For all practical purposes, Church Slavonic Cyrillic and the Gothic script eventually fell out of use during the first half of the 20th century. Simultaneously, upon the establishment of the ethnolinguistic nation-states (or national republics) in the Balkans, and Central and Eastern Europe, the use of Grazhdanka (today, the sole standard type of Cyrillic) was limited to the borders of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and communist Yugoslavia. Elsewhere in Europe (excluding the diasporic literacies of Jews and Armenians in the Hebrew and Armenian scripts, respectively) one wrote in the Antiqua type of the Latin alphabet, with the exception of Germany and Austria, where the Gothic script survived until 1941. As the Soviet Union expanded westward in the course of World War II, the area where Cyrillic was the sole official script moved in the same direction as well, with the notable exception of the Soviet Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where Antiqua continued to be used for writing and publishing in these republics’ national languages. This Cyrillic-Latin alphabetical borderline remained unchanged after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but for Moldova where the Latin alphabet supplanted Cyrillic in writing the Moldovan language. However, because Russian remains a significant language of business, politics, and social life in the post-Soviet states (especially if a sizeable Russian-speaking minority exists in such a polity), Cyrillic continues to exert its cultural influence there. The importance of the Russian language in present-day Europe is underscored by the fact that it is the only non-EU official language in which the Euronews channel broadcasts. The final changes in the border between Cyrillic and the Latin alphabet took place in the 1990s, during the post-Yugoslav Wars. Cyrillic was allocated to Serbia and Macedonia, while the Latin alphabet to Slovenia and Croatia. The sole region where both scripts still coexist in a legally enshrined manner consists of

The Broader Linguistic Context of Central Europe

363

Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. One only wonders if this notable exception is bound to last, especially when the logic of building ethnolinguistically differentiated nations and nation-states still holds in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia split into the Czech and Slovak nation-states in 1993, and the proliferation of the post-Yugoslav nation-states continues. In 2006, Montenegro and Serbia parted ways, fashioned into separate nation-states, and the tangible possibility that Kosovo may follow suit soon was realized two years later. Looking eastward, after the Latin alphabet replaced Cyrillic in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan may also emulate this example, especially if the polity gathers enough oil wealth to be able to afford to reaffirm its ethnolinguistic separateness vis-à-vis its own sizeable Russian-speaking minority and Russia itself.55 Interestingly, Turkey is a lone post of the Latin alphabet almost surrounded by nation-states with official languages that are written in other scripts. In Turkey’s Balkan neighbors, Cyrillic dominates in Bulgaria and the Greek script in Greece. Across the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey faces Cyprus, where Greek is the official language except in the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In Turkey’s Middle Eastern neighbors of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the official languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Armenia and Georgia are Turkey’s Caucasian neighbors, where the specific Armenian and Georgian scripts are employed, respectively. Across the Black Sea, Turkey faces Russia and Ukraine with Cyrillic as their official script. The sole exceptions, where the Latin alphabet is official, are Romania, separated from Turkey by the Black Sea, and Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhichevan, separated from its parent polity’s main body of territory by Armenia.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Central European Politics and Languages in the Long 19th Century

The advent of nationalism The political shape of Central Europe in the 19th century resulted from a series of momentous events. First, Poland-Lithuania completely disappeared in 1795, apportioned to Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Second, the impact of the Napoleonic Wars defined the political and social relations in Central Europe until World War I. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 and the Viennaled German Confederation replaced it in 1815. The ideals of nationalism sown by French bureaucracy and armies began to germinate. Third, a semblance of the pre-Napoleonic order, which the Congress of Vienna reintroduced in 1815, was challenged in 1848 when various ethnolinguistically defined national movements tabled their political demands and, sometimes, struggled for their sake with military means. The Holy Alliance of Catholic Austria, Protestant Prussia, and Orthodox Russia successfully suppressed the rise of this novel force of nationalism, but not for long. In the Seven Weeks’ War (1866), Prussia defeated the Austrian Empire, which secured for Berlin hegemony among the Germanophone states and brought an end to the German Confederation. Prussia consolidated its victory by adding to its German Customs Union the North German Confederation (1867). Since 1834, the former organization had steadily spread the growing might of the Prussian economy in the German Confederation, apart from Austria. The North German Confederation finally clothed Prussia and the other members of the German Customs Union in political garb. These events paved the way for the establishment of the German Empire (1871) as a ‘Little German nation-state,’ named so because numerous German-speaking territories remained outside it. The German Empire was the first nation-state of Central Europe. From the beginning of the 19th century until 1871, nationalism was a faith of political underdogs. Later, it was they who gained the upper hand in Central European politics. The question whether the nation-state was an appropriate form of political organization for Central Europe ceased to be asked. Leaders of the proliferating national movements just waited for the opportune moment to put their postulated nation-states on the political map. The war of 1914, which

366 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

commenced as the usual sparring among the great powers, soon turned into the Great War, which destroyed the old order. With the support of Western Europe, nationalists frantically worked to replace this old order with a new national one. Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the scholar turned United States President (1913–1921), ennobled the national principle as paramount for organizing the political shape of Central Europe and, later, the entire world. After 1918, all of the Central European polities were nation-states, with the tiny exception of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk). ´ They aggressively set out on the policies of making their populations homogenous in accordance with the ideals of the ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism. Language appeared an obvious instrument to this end. Throughout the 19th century, the national movements had successfully used it to define and delimit their postulated nations vis-à-vis others. What is more, after its unsuccessful struggle against the Catholic Church in the mid-1880s, Berlin had resigned from the course of political and social nullification of the Catholic Church’s universalistic influence in the German Empire, and focused on making language politics into the sole ideological basis of national consolidation.

4 The Polish Case: From Natio to Nation

Should we reflect upon our [Polish] language, if we compare it with dead and living languages alike, we will see why it is most beautiful, advantageous and the best of all the other known languages that were sadly created in barbaric times and, for that matter, in an unseemly manner. First, the [Polish] language is clear and easy to understand, second, it is plentiful [in words], third, it is exact in expression of various shades of meaning, fourth, it allows the speaker great freedom of eloquence, fifth, Polish’s melody is outstanding due to the abundance of its sound system, sixth, the language’s pronunciation harmony flows from the freedom of expression and numerous agreements of government among parts of the sentence, then last but not least, Polish enjoys the most perfect correspondence between its writing system and pronunciation. (Deszkiewicz 1843: 4) There were always two circles of Poles. The former and bigger contained all people speaking Polish, but not conscious of any [national] historical tradition. The other circle, which gradually broadened its scope, contained these Poles, who consciously realized that they were Poles. (Tazbir 1997: 19) The reader may ask why I chose to deal first with the Poles and their language politics. In Chapter 2, I focused first on Czech out from the four Central European languages to which this book is devoted. I took as a guideline the fact that the initial documents written in Czech predate those jotted down in Hungarian (Magyar), Polish, or Slovak. Here, however, I decided that continuity of literary tradition and the use of an idiom as an official language allows me to concentrate on Polish first. With this approach I do not wish to rank these four languages along some imaginary scale of importance or quality; not at all. Simply, I stress the use of a language in public and political sphere as decisive 367

368 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

for the rise of nationalism and the implementation of national policies – the very subject matter of this work. Consequently, a section devoted to Hungarian comes second, while those on Czech and Slovak follow. The Magyar language was elevated to the status of an official language already in the 1840s and the Magyar nation obtained its ersatz nation-state in Austria-Hungary in 1867. The Czech language had to wait for similar recognition in Bohemia and Moravia until the 1880s, and Czechoslovakia, as the nation-state of the officially announced Czechoslovaks (or the Czechs and the Slovaks), was founded in 1918. Only in this state did Slovak develop as a language of administration and politics.

The Polish language and nationalism in partitioned Poland-Lithuania The last Polish-Lithuanian King, Stanisław August Poniatowski (ruled 1764– 1795) and other like-minded modernizers, strove to reform the commonwealth in order to prevent its looming disappearance from the political map of Europe. In 1791, under the influence of the French Revolution, they forced through the Seym (estate parliament) the 3 May Constitution, named after the day when it was promulgated. It combined the traditional divine legitimization of the monarch’s rule with the will of the Polish nation, and vested the latter with the decisive role. Significantly, the erstwhile nationes of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were made into the common Polish nation (naród) from the legal point of view. De facto, though not explicitly, the separateness of Lithuania was abolished because the dual commonwealth was now construed as the unitary Kingdom of Poland. Despite the novel terminology, however, the proclaimed Polish nation was not much different from the traditional Polish and Lithuanian nationes. The latter were composed exclusively of the noblemen of the kingdom and grand duchy. The new nation, as prescribed by the Constitution, also encompassed the male members of the nobility only. The document opened the path to nobility for propertied burghers, but did not include them in the nation. The Constitution actually diminished the number of members in this new nation vis-à-vis the erstwhile nationes; it deprived the noblemen who were not property-owners of political rights (as distinct from civil rights). Peasants, who formed the vast majority of the population, remained serfs. The former civic concept of natio was also limited in other spheres that were to become instrumental for the rise of ethnic nationalisms in the 19th century. The Constitution provided that Catholicism was the state religion and prohibited abandoning it for any other faith. Although the document did not say anything about language, the fact that it was done in Polish indicated the final replacement of Latin as the traditional language of politics and administration at

The Polish Case

369

the state level. In 1790, Father Hugo Kołła˛taj (1750–1812) proposed that Polish should fully replace Latin as the official language of the grand duchy; and he saw this language as the visible proof of the unity of the Polish nation. In line with the practice of the Jacobins, who abolished the public use of languages other than French in 1794,1 he proposed making Polish the sole language of politics and administration in the kingdom. This spelled the end of Latin as the foremost language of the Polish-Lithuanian natio, not shared with any part of the populus, but by which this nobility underlined its social and cultural commonality with the noblemen of Western Christianity. Kołła˛taj’s views were not surprising, as they stemmed from his experience as a member of the Commission for National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, KEN), one of the first European ministries of national education. It was established in 1773 on the basis of the Jesuit educational system (that is, in the same year that the pope abolished the Order of Jesus). This abolition had been preceded by the banning of Jesuits from Portugal (1759) and the dismantling of their educational system in France (1762). During the 1760s, French educational reformers, who appealed for éducation nationale (national education) for the youth, directed most of their efforts at replacing Latin with French as the medium of education. In emulation of the French pedagogical trends, KEN hoped to ‘create the [Polish] nation through popular education;’ and Kołła˛taj, as a co-founder of this one of earliest state systems of popular education in Europe,2 influenced the decision to supplant Latin with Polish as the language of instruction. This was only practical, because 80 to 90 percent of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility spoke Polish,3 while considerably fewer had a reasonable command of Latin. But Latin lingered as a significant sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility well into the 19th century. That is not surprising, as in 1772, 1 year before disbanding the Jesuit educational system, 200,000 young noblemen received education exclusively via Latin as the medium of teaching in the order’s 56 colleges and 2 university-level academies (in Lwów [Lviv] and Wilno [Vilnius]). Ironically, the gradual disappearance of Latin as the nobility’s socioloect during the first half of the 19th century did not mean that it was fully replaced by Polish. The ascendance of French as a language of ‘cultured discourse in civilized Europe’ had begun in the 18th century. Central European rulers, courts, and aristocrats tended to acquire it along with Latin, or instead of Latin. Genetic closeness between the two languages facilitated the process. Not surprisingly, King Stanisław August Poniatowski preferred to converse and govern through this language, though his contemporaries noted favorably that he often talked to noblemen in Polish. In the 19th century, descendants of the PolishLithuanian aristocracy tended to acquire French as their first language, whereas aspiring noblemen turned gentry, and the emerging intelligentsia, diligently learned this language to improve their social position and chances of gainful

370 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

career. In the context of the growing politicization of language, French also allowed a Polish socialite to communicate with his Russophone and Germanspeaking equals without the need to converse either in Russian or German, which would risk incurring the accusation that one was a ‘traitor to the Polish national cause.’ On the other end of the social spectrum, French marked the clear-cut class border between Polonophone gentry and peasantry.4 In the late 19th-century rhetoric of Polish ethnic nationalism, both groups were to constitute a single nation. The 19th-century monopoly of French as the distinctive sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility and the aspiring intelligentsia (gradually spawned by the former group) was not a foregone conclusion at the turn of the 19th century. For example, the first Polish-Lithuanian scientific journal, Warschauer Bibliothek (Warsaw’s Library, 1753–1795), was published in German. That was due first to the multiethnic character of the commonwealth, in which German-speaking Protestants and Jews were most active in developing Polish-language publishing during the 18th century and at the beginning of the next century. Their personal contacts with publishing and printing houses in the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia allowed for the ‘transfer of know-how’ to Poland-Lithuania. The example of commercial success achieved by publishers who produced Polish-language publications in Saxony and Prussia’s Silesia motivated new firms to repeat their success in Poland-Lithuania. The paragon of them all was Michał (Michael) Gröll (1722–1798), who served as the royal court’s printer and published the 3 May Constitution. Second, in neighboring Russia, until the beginning of the 19th century, modernization and centralization were conducted initially through Latin, and later through German and French, the preferred languages of Western European specialists employed by St Petersburg. Third, in the 18th century, the stereotype of ‘civilized languages’ emerged, and held fast throughout the 19th century. Within that framework, French was seen as the language of polite conversation, suitable for women and socialites, while German was accorded the role of language most suitable for philosophical and metaphysical pursuits. Although the KEN educational system was designed to eventually cater to the educational needs of all the inhabitants, at least at the elementary level, Kołła˛taj was not troubled by the fact that more than 60 percent of the commonwealth’s population did not speak Polish (and the Polonophone nobility constituted one quarter of all the Polish-speakers). First, despite modernizing changes, the Polish nation was still equated with the nobility. Second, these modernizers, who agreed to encompass the entire population of Poland-Lithuania in the confines of the concept of the Polish nation in line with the French Jacobin model, required that all the members of this nation learn Polish (construed as ‘their’ national language). Kołła˛taj’s closest KEN collaborator, Father Franciszek Salezy Jezierski (1740–1791), expressed this attitude most clearly in his 1791 definition of nation as ‘an assembly of people sharing a single language and customs,

The Polish Case

371

governed by one and the same law for all the citizens.’ Subsequently, KEN produced curricula and textbooks in Polish, many of which remained in use until the mid-19th century, along with Onufry Kopczynski’s ´ (1735–1817) Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego (The Grammar of the Polish Language, 1785, Warsaw), originally published in three parts (1778, 1781, and 1783, Warsaw), and earmarked as respective textbooks for the first, second, and third grades of the elementary school. This first full-fledged grammar of Polish written in Polish was entitled in the initial textbook edition as Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego i je˛zyka łacinskiego ´ dla szkół narodowych (The Grammar of the Polish language and the Latin Language for National Schools [that is, for the schools of the KEN educational system]). As indicated by its title, Kopczynski’s ´ popular and practical grammar closely emulated the conceptual scheme of the generic Jesuit grammar of Latin, set by Father Emmanuel Alvarez (1526–1582), with his De institutione grammatical libri tres (The Three Books of Grammatical Principles, Lisbon, 1572) (Beauvois 1996: 239; Bienkowska ´ and Chamerska 1990: 15, 17; Ciesielski et al. 1992: 11; Jodłowski 1979: 166; Johnson 1950: 16, 21–22, 25, 36, 40–41; Judge 2000: 74; Klimowicz 1980: 108; Kloch 1995: 46; Konstytucja 2004; Mikołajczak 1998: 187, 190, 240–243; Siatkowska 1992: 252, 254; Stankiewicz 1984: 40–42; Tazbir 2001: 304, 318; Walicki 1989: 67–68, 72–74, 2000: 248). The 3 May Constitution was abolished in 1793, when Prussia and Russia concluded the second partition of Poland-Lithuania. Two years later, the state disappeared altogether in the course of the third and final partition, in which Austria too participated. There was then no time for the Polish and Lithuanian nationes to be trimmed of nobles without property, and transform into a noble and civic Polish nation, as postulated by the Constitution. What remained were the memory of the vanished Polish-Lithuanian statehood, increasingly presented as exclusively ‘Polish,’ and the Polish language. Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko (1746–1817) fought against the British in the American Revolution and headed the 1794 uprising of the Polish-Lithuanian army against the partitioning powers. He attracted peasants to participate in this uprising by his declarations limiting serfdom duties and suspending them altogether for peasants who joined his forces. But Ko´sciuszko was an opportunist in this matter. He turned a blind eye to noblemen, who often seized back their serfs-turnedsoldiers. Furthermore, despite his support for political freedom, Ko´sciuszko opined in 1798, 3 years after the final disappearance of Poland-Lithuania, that the Uniate and Orthodox Ruthenians should learn Polish and begin to use this language in their holy masses, still said in Church Slavonic. Ko´sciuszko perhaps knew that most of the Uniate and Orthodox clergy educated and active in Poland-Lithuania already knew Polish, but he hoped for the spread of the command of this language among their parishioners. Most influential in spreading the idea of this novel linguistic nationalism was Kopczynski. ´ His grammar was the first textbook of the Polish language, which long remained in wide

372 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

use throughout the territories of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania (Stomma 2006: 48; Tazbir 2001: 304). Kopczynski ´ dedicated his grammar to his ‘Beloved Nation’ (Kochany Naród). He noted that ‘the fate of the [Polish state] may be dissolution and it could mean the disappearance of the [Polish] language too.’ Then he speaks about the ancient Greeks and Romans, emphasizing that not their states but their languages and literary works ensured immortality for those two peoples. Kopczynski ´ concludes that the Poles should follow the same path by making their language pure of foreign influences and using it in the cultured way explained in his grammar. He adds that it is the ‘Language’ (Je˛zyk) that will ensure the ‘immortality of the name of Poland’ (1817: 5–8). Kopczynski ´ and other Polish thinkers drew on Herderian thought, and maintained that the Polish language was the ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ of the Polish nation. The aristocrat, scholar, journalist, statesman, and general, Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1755–1821), who saw the end of Poland-Lithuania and the Duchy of Warsaw, perceived the Polish language as a ‘living organism’ that could function in lieu of the vanished polity. He also spelled out the goal of the codification of Polish, which was to make it into a ‘civilized language’ in emulation of the French model. Perhaps Potocki was aware of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin’s (1766–1826) Russian-language fiction published in the 1790s. With his literary works, Karamzin introduced to Russian the so-called ‘new style’ in which he emulated French models of syntactical correctness and word formation. This allowed for the firm distancing of Russian from heavily Church Slavonicized Russian that, until the beginning of the 19th century, functioned as the official and most respected form of the Russian language. During the 1820s and 1830s, the popularity of Karamzin’s ‘new style’ sidelined Church Slavonicized Russian and the possibility of steeping Russian in the vernacular of Moscow or St Petersburg, and thus, the modern Russian language emerged as we know it to this day. This ‘new beginning’ of the language is conventionally associated with the poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837). Potocki maintained that the most appropriate measure of the ‘civilizedness’ of a language was the ‘logicality of its syntax.’ Not surprisingly, French syntax appeared to him as the apex of logicality, to which Polish should aspire in order to be distanced finally from ‘emotional’ (hence, ‘less civilized’) languages such as Church Slavonic or not-yet-fully-secularized Russian, whose civilizedness was tainted by its direct association with religion. Potocki’s analysis of civlizedness and logicality of languages was given a twist by his views on the development of languages. Classical Greek appeared to him as the most perfect language. In this view, Latin was the product of the decomposition and destruction of Greek, and French emerged from the ‘vulgarization’ of Latin. This dimmed the perceived perfection of French, but there was no ‘living’ Latin or classical Greek to outshine it. Still, the ‘degree of vulgarization’ was even larger in Italian and

The Polish Case

373

other European languages, which allowed him to rank them as ‘less civilized’ than French. This ongoing discourse on the role of language in nation, state, history, and education pitted Kopczynski ´ against Jan S´ niadecki (1756–1830), a scientist and future rector of the Imperial University of Wilno (Vilnius). (Jan’s brother, Je˛drzej S´ niadecki (1768–1838), created Polish chemical vocabulary in the first decade of the 19th century.) Kopczynski ´ wanted to codify contemporary Polish, as used in speech and writing by politicians, scholars, and writers. Jan ´ Sniadecki disagreed, following the thinking on language then prevalent in Europe that associated perfection with the past, reminiscent of the myth of a Golden Age. He proposed that 16th-century Polish be made into standard Polish and argued that Polish was in its most perfect and pristine state when Poland-Lithuania was then at the apex of its political power. It did not matter to S´ niadecki that 16th-century Polish varied from late 18th-century Polish; he trusted that the codifiers of language were great scholars and writers, so if they consistently stuck to 16th-century Polish, this would finally produce a desired standard of the Polish language. Kopczynski ´ and his followers won this competition with S´ niadecki about the future shape of standard Polish, but the model of grounding a modern standard language in some literary tradition dating to several centuries earlier was followed by the codifiers of the Czech language. They derived modern Czech from the 16th-century usage of the Czech Brethren, which Josef Dobrovský and his followers identified as the pinnacle of the Czech language, and identified the period as the ‘Golden Age’ of Czech history. The geographical center of Poland-Lithuania was located in the lands coterminous with present-day Belarus and western Ukraine. The partitions gradually shifted this center westward to the region of Warsaw. The establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807), followed by Russia’s Kingdom of Poland ´ (1815), reaffirmed this tendency. Sniadecki found this antithetical to the historical tradition of Poland-Lithuania. The political change also made the process of codification of Polish more readily dependent on dialects and usages prevailing in ‘ethnic Poland,’ especially those spoken and employed between Warsaw and ´ Cracow. Sniadecki decried this development and poked fun at Polish usages employed in Warsaw publications, because they varied from those current in Polish as spoken and written in the lands stretching along the line Vilnius – Minsk/Mensk – Lwów (Lviv). The difference was caused by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population in this vast region were Ruthenianspeaking Uniates and Orthodox Christians. Their Cyrillic-based Ruthenian had functioned as one of the official languages of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until the end of the 17th century. Obviously, the nobility spoke and wrote in Polish, but their Polish was colored with various Ruthenian expressions and phonetic features. S´ niadecki saw this Ruthenized Polish as closer to his ideal

374 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of 16th-century Polish and more characteristic of the Polish-Lithuanian tradition than the Polish of Warsaw (Issatschenko 1980: 137; Kloch 1995: 24–25, 38, 46–54). The intensification of political life in Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century produced a lot of specialized Polish vocabulary. The process was most visible in the coining of Polish synonyms for Latinate words, for instance, posiedzenie for sesja (session), przedstawienie for prezentacja (presentation), przedmiot for objekt (object), or pomnik for monument (monument). Jacek Przybylski (1756–1819) was the foremost representative of linguistic purism and proposed more neologisms, je˛zyko´slednia for gramatyka (grammar), wywodnia for morfologia (morphology), wy´spiewnia for prozodia (prosody), or rozczertnia for interpunkcja (punctuation). They never caught on. First, there was no need for them, as established terms conveying the same meanings already existed. (The situation was different in the cases of the Czech and Magyar languages; the corresponding movements of linguistic purism filled in terminological lacunae in these languages.) Second, the high status and distinctiveness of Polish vis-àvis neighboring languages was of longstanding nature, hence there was no need to emphasize its uniqueness with puristic methods (unlike in the case of Czech, culturally bounded with German, and heavily Latinized and Germanized Magyar). Kopczynski ´ treaded the middle ground between purists and those who shunned Polish altogether and subscribed to the view of Łukasz Górnicki (1527–1603), who had maintained that ‘Greek is the most beautiful language, and Latin a close second.’ In the first half of the 19th century, a similar position was taken by those who opposed replacing Latin with Magyar as the official language of Hungary. Throughout the 19th century, numerous descendants of Polish-Lithuanian aristocracy and intellectuals of this social origin continued to avoid using Polish, and spoke in French (Klimowicz 1980: 34; Siatkowska 1992: 261). At the beginning of the 19th century, the use of Polish in public and administration was quite checkered across the lands of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania. In 1778–1781, Kołła˛taj reformed the University of Cracow. He replaced Latin with Polish as the medium of education at the Faculty of Philosophy, which produced teachers. The change enabled KEN to issue the 1783 decision that made Polish the only language of instruction in the parish schools. Teaching of, and in, Latin was allowed to a limited degree only in later grades. These reforms, however, did not apply to the lands Poland-Lithuania lost to Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the first partition of 1772. In the territories of the Kingdom of Poland seized then by the three partitioning powers, Latin persisted as the language of administration and instruction, while Polish largely functioned in these capacities in the lands detached from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In addition, Polish remained the language of public discourse in all these areas.

The Polish Case

375

The final abolishment of Poland-Lithuania in the two successive partitions of 1793 and 1795 led to the gradual dismantling of the Polish-language educational system that KEN had built. The centralizing and modernizing reforms of Maria Theresa and her successor Joseph II, carried out in the Habsburg-controlled lands of Central Europe, entailed the replacement of Latin with German as the language of administration and education. This policy was applied to Galicia, which Vienna had seized from Poland-Lithuania in 1772. To meet these needs, the University of Lemberg (Lviv) was established in 1784, with Latin mostly, but also German, as the media of instruction. In 1805, after the third partition, German replaced Polish as the language of instruction at the University of Cracow. The partitions made Prussia into a de facto bilingual German-Polish state; Polish-speakers constituted 40 percent of the population. The former PolishLithuanian capital of Warsaw was cast in the role of the administrative center of the Province of New East Prussia. Polish was tolerated in the schools and in administrative contacts with the nobility, although this did not prevent the Germanization of KEN’s network of Polish-language schools. In 1775, of the originally 24 Polish-language secondary schools, only 8 survived. Berlin organized two modern secondary schools in Posen (Poznan) ´ (1804) and Warsaw (1805) but they provided education exclusively in German. Samuel Bogumił Linde, the future author of the first multivolume dictionary of the Polish language, headed the latter school. The overall goal was to produce enough teachers to make the entire educational system Germanophone. At the end of the 18th century, the administration remained bilingual in the areas east of the Vistula River, but German became the sole medium in the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian lands west of the river, that is, in Wielkopolska and West Pomerania. The position of Polish was different in Russia’s section of former PolandLithuania. It was the language of the nobility who constituted a minority among the Ruthenian- and Lithuanian-speaking populus. Tsaritsa Catherine the Great (Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, ruled 1762–1796) was born in Prussia’s Germanophone city of Stettin (today Szczecin in Poland). Although she mastered Russian, her court was German- and French-speaking. Her absolutist and centralizing reforms were different from those conducted in Austria and Prussia. She was interested more in stabilizing and fortifying her empire than in educating the multilingual populus in any given language. To this end, she closed numerous KEN schools as sources from which seditious (French) revolutionary ideas had spread. This resulted obviously in the limiting of Polish-language education. In 1798, her son and successor, Paul I (reigned 1796–1801), banned the importation of any foreign books, including Polish ones from the Prussian and Austrian zones of partition. The University of Vilnius (Vilna in Russian) was also closed down. In 1803, the tsaritsa’s grandson Alexander I (reigned 1801–1825) revived it as the ‘Imperial University of Vilnius.’ Initially, the language of instruction remained Latin,

376 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

but because many professors came from Western Europe some courses were delivered in French or English. Although Polish dominated in the university’s social life, it was made the medium of instruction only in 1816. Beginning in 1803, the university became the center of the school district (uchebnyi okrug) that comprised all the Polish-Lithuanian lands seized by Russia, and in addition, the Gubernia of Kiev (Kyiv). In the south of this school district, the famous lyceum (secondary school) was founded in Krzemieniec (Kremianets’ in Ukrainian, Kremenets in Russian) in 1805 with Polish as the language of instruction. It functioned almost as another university, and its excellence in scholarship earned the town the nickname of ‘Volhynian Athens.’ Unlike his grandmother, Alexander I appreciated things Polish and surrounded himself with Polish aristocrats, including Prince Adam Czartoryski (1770–1861), whom he made Minister of Foreign Affairs. In the early 19th century, the University of Vilnius was the largest in the Russian Empire, and far more subjects of the tsar could read Polish than Russian. Perhaps as many subjects were literate in Russian as in German, which was the language of administration and education in Russia’s Baltic gubernias that enjoyed their own German-language university in Dorpat (Tartu). (Obviously, the vast majority of the population remained illiterate.) At that time, the status of Polish and German as long-established languages of politics and culture still exceeded Russian, which was newly standardized only in the second half of the 18th century. French and German took precedence over Russian in the imperial court and provincial administration, and Polish in general education.5 The tsar allowed for the revival and development of KEN’s Polish-language educational system, with the University of Vilnius at its center. Hence, not only legal, but also the cultural distinctiveness of these Polish-Lithuanian lands was maintained in the Russian Empire. The only significant concession to integration was the introduction of the old-style Julian calendar in these lands in 1800 (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 70–71, 264–265, 348; Davies 1982: II 114, 232; Johnson 1950: 63, 287; Klemensiewicz 1976: 501, 508–511; Magocsi 1996: 335; Snyder 2003: 25–27; Wandycz 1974: 33–34, 68). The political situation changed dramatically when Napoleon’s armies defeated the troops of Austria, Prussia, and Russia in a succession of battles during the years 1805–1807. They accepted French dominance in Central Europe and had no choice but to agree to the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807). It was established on the basis of an agreement between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I and comprised the territories Prussia had annexed in the course of the second and third partitions of Poland-Lithuania. Another conflict between Vienna and Paris in 1809 led to the next Austrian defeat, thanks to which the duchy was enlarged with the territories the Habsburgs had seized during the third partition. By then, apart from Warsaw itself, the duchy also contained the first Polish-Lithuanian capital of Cracow and

The Polish Case

377

Poznan, ´ the capital of Wielkopolska. The duchy’s territory of 155,500 sq km was inhabited by Polish-speakers (79 percent), Jews (6 percent), Germanspeakers (6 percent), Lithuanian-speakers (5 percent), and Ruthenian-speakers (3 percent). The duchy was a de facto French protectorate placed under the hereditary rule of Friedrich Augustus (reigned 1807–1813), King of Saxony (ruled 1763–1827). Paris devised such a dynastical arrangement, because Saxony was a French ally. As the duchy was not contiguous with Saxony, Napoleon granted Dresden the use of a military road across Prussia’s province of Silesia. The Duchy of Warsaw was crucial for the Napoleonic war effort. It provided 180,000 to 200,000 recruits to the duchy’s conscript army. As a result, Polish soldiers fought French battles from Haiti to Moscow. At the time of Napoleon’s fatal invasion of Russia and its disastrous aftermath in 1812 and 1813, the duchy turned into one large military camp. In the last 2 years of its existence, the Duchy of Warsaw functioned under Russia’s provisional regime. Friedrich Augustus knew Polish. His great-grandfather, Elector of Saxony Friedrich Augustus the Strong (ruled 1694–1733), had been the King of PolandLithuania (as August II) during 1697–1704 and 1709–1733, while his grandfather, Elector of Saxony Friedrich Augustus II, reigned in Poland-Lithuania (as August III) between 1733 and 1763. As the Duke of Warsaw, Friedrich Augustus made sure the government deliberations were conducted in Polish, not in French, though the latter language was preferred by numerous PolishLithuanian aristocrats. The educational system was re-Polonized and developed in line with KEN’s guidelines, which provided for schools even in small towns and villages. In 1809, the system was supplemented with the University of Cracow, where Polish replaced German and Latin as the language of instruction. The connection between the Polish language and nascent Polish nationalism was visible in the mission of the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk (TPN, Society of Friends of Sciences), founded at Warsaw (then in Prussian hands) in 1800. The society strove to ‘preserve the national language’ and ‘to protect it from disappearance.’ It gathered Polish aristocratic thinkers and intellectuals, who saw the Polish language and culture as instrumental for preserving the ethos of former Polish-Lithuania while awaiting an appropriate moment for recreating it. Napoleon’s victories over Prussia and Austria, followed by the subsequent establishment and enlargement of the Duchy of Warsaw, seemed the first steps in this direction. The person who happened to marry the ideologically charged concept of the Polish language with the message of Polish nationalism was Samuel Bogumił Linde (1771–1847). In 1803, he accepted the Prussian civil service position as principal of the bilingual Polish-German secondary school in Warsaw that finally opened 2 years later. Linde was born to a German-speaking Lutheran family (of Swedish origin) in Torun ´ (Thorn) a year before the first partition of Poland-Lithuania (1772),

378 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

which placed his hometown next to the new border with Prussia. In 1789, he left for Saxony, where he continued his education at the University of Leipzig. The influence of the milieu of Polish-Lithuanian nobles and thinkers living in this city caused Linde to start research on the Polish language. In the city’s public library, he met Johann Christoph Adelung (1832–1806), who had compiled (and published in 1774–1786) the first modern dictionary of German (in three volumes) that commenced the standardization of the language. Linde noticed that there was no similar dictionary for Polish. The sole modern work that described the vocabulary of this language was Michał (Michael) Abraham Trotz’s (Troc’s) (1703–1769) four-volume Nouveau dictionnaire françois, allemand et polonois / Nowy dykcjonariusz to jest mownik polsko-francusko-niemiecki / Vollständiges deutsches und polnisches Wörterbuch (The New Dictionary, consisting of the French-German-Polish part, the Polish-French-German part, and the German-Polish part) published in Leipzig between 1744 and 1772. Its three parts went separately through numerous revised and enlarged editions until 1832. Significantly, Trotz’s dictionary was preceded by a trilingual (Polish, German, and French) introduction, with an overview of the abbreviations and conventions employed in the work. As he explicitly wrote in the introduction, Trotz hoped to replace Grzegorz Knapski’s (Gregorius Cnapius, Knapiusz, 1561–1639) outdated Thesaurus polonolatinograecus (1621–1632, Cracow) and to improve on it by providing a large number of scientific and technical terms in order to raise the level of Polish to that of French and German. Since the early 1790s, Linde had translated Polish literature and documents into German. In the course of the 1794 insurrection against Russian dominance in rump Poland-Lithuania, Linde carried out research for his future dictionary of the Polish language. At that time, he met Kopczynski, ´ whose grammar Linde referred to as Grammatyka Narodowa (National Grammar). In the second half of the 1790s, Linde lived in Vienna, where he befriended Count Józef Ossolinski ´ (1748–1826). The count made Linde his librarian. Linde also met Josef Dobrovský and other scholars who researched Slavic languages. At that time, the idea of compiling his monumental Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language) took its final shape. What is more, he decided to explain Polish words not only by means of German translations but also through counterparts drawn from other Slavic languages. Scholars, who Linde had acquainted in the Holy German Empire, helped to secure for him the position of the principal of the German-language secondary school, which the Prussian partition authorities opened in Warsaw in 1805. He continuously held the position until 1835. (The school’s language of instruction became Polish after 1807, when Napoleon founded the Duchy of Warsaw.) This secure source of income in the extremely volatile times allowed Linde to devote his full attention to his linguistic pursuits. Thanks to Ossolinski, ´ Linde obtained a considerable financial grant for this project from Adam Czartoryski. Apart from Polish-Lithuanian aristocrats

The Polish Case

379

who aided Linde, Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III (ruled 1797–1840) and Tsar Alexander also supported his project. Both monarchs were interested in the further codification of Polish, which was a significant language of administration, politics, and education in their realms, considerably enlarged after the partitions of Poland-Lithuania. In the context of the political instability bred by the Napoleonic Wars, Berlin and Prussia knew that concessions to the PolishLithuanian nobility were necessary in order to secure their friendly attitude. The survival of Prussia was at stake, and the tsar hoped to retain the lands seized from Poland-Lithuania. The first volume of Linde’s dictionary came off the press in Warsaw in 1807 and was followed by five more, the last of which was published in 1814. The publication of this dictionary, which codified the modern Polish language, symbolically coincided with the period of the short existence of the Duchy of Warsaw. However, there remained numerous mistakes in this hastily carried out lexicographic work. Some authorities remark that Linde’s dictionary would not have been possible without Jerzy (Georg) Samule Bandtk(i)e’s (1768–1835) Słownik dokładny je˛zyka polskiego i niemieckiego / Vollständiges polnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch (The Exact Dictionary of the Polish and German Languages, 1806, Breslau [Wrocław]), from which Linde borrowed much material without acknowledgement. This 2000-page-long one-volume Polish-German dictionary recorded over 1000 Polish words more than Linde’s dictionary. Bandtkie was born in Lublin, but finished secondary school in the Prussian city of Breslau, which at that time functioned as an emporium for Poland-Lithuania equal to Gdansk ´ (Danzig). Similarly, to Linde and many other scholars from Poland-Lithuania, he continued his education at universities in the Holy Roman Empire, in Halle and Jena. When the partitions of Poland-Lithuania made Prussia into a bilingual, German-Polish kingdom, Bandtkie’s linguistic expertise in Polish was much needed by Prussian administration and schools. In 1798, he returned to Breslau, and 5 years later, published his Nowy elementarz polski (The New Polish Primer, Breslau). The publication of Bandtkie’s Słownik dokładny je˛zyka polskiego i niemieckiego / Vollständiges polnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch was followed by his Polnische Grammatik fuer Deutsche (The Polish Grammar for Germans, 1808, Breslau). After Napoleon founded the Duchy of Warsaw, most Polish-speaking areas were excluded from Prussia; hence, in 1811, Bandtkie moved to the University of Cracow, where he worked as a professor and the librarian of the university’s library (Bankowski ´ 2000: I XIV; Czaplinski ´ and Ładogórski 1993: 20; Klemensiewicz 1976: 512–513; Klimowicz 1980: 37; Linde 1854–1860: I 15–19, dedications; Ogrodzinski ´ 1946: I 183; Przyłubski 1955: 32, 80–82; Stankiewicz 1984: 51–52, 54; Wandycz 1974: 43, 48, 61). Thus a Catholic priest (Kopczynski), ´ a Lutheran who studied to become a pastor and spoke better German than Polish (Linde), and a career scholar in the service of Prussia, the Duchy of Warsaw and the Free City of Cracow (Bandtkie)

380 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

created the foundations of standard Polish.6 This quite atypical trio reflects the multiconfessional and multilingual make-up of the Polish-Lithuanian natio. The make-up clashes with the current paradigm of Polish ethnic nationalism (which emerged at the turn of the 20th century) that equates Polishness with the Polish language and Catholicism. In 1816, General Józef Zaja˛czek (1752–1826), the Viceroy of Russia’s (Congress) Kingdom of Poland, had two medals minted to celebrate Kopczynski’s ´ and Linde’s achievements in the standardization of the Polish language. This event at least partially contributed to the legitimization of the polity in the eyes of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. It pained them that due to the decisions of the Congress of Vienna (1815), the kingdom was much smaller than the Duchy of Warsaw, deprived of Cracow and Poznan ´ along with entire Wielkopolska. But they and burghers (whose status was equated with that of the noblemen already in the Duchy of Warsaw) could draw consolation from the fact that the Constitution granted to the kingdom by the tsar was much more progressive than its predecessor, the 3 May Constitution, or even the contemporary French Constitution. In a 30-million-strong France, only 80,000 citizens had the right to vote, while the same privilege was enjoyed by 100,000 citizens in the much smaller kingdom. At the Congress of Vienna the partition powers granted ‘the Poles’ a modicum of rights stemming from the legislation of Poland-Lithuania. Clearly, the term ‘Poles’ meant the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, irrespective of actual language or ethnicity. Wielkopolska, renamed as the Grand Duchy of Posen, was excluded from the Duchy of Warsaw and reincorporated into Prussia. The grand duchy’s territory of 30,000 sq km was inhabited by Polish-speakers (54 percent), Germanspeakers (40 percent), and Yiddish-speakers or Jews (6 percent). The remaining lands of the Duchy of Warsaw, roughly speaking the Prussian and Austrian share in the final partition of Poland-Lithuania, were organized as the Kingdom of Poland (popularly known as the ‘Congress Kingdom’) within the borders of the Russian Empire. With a Constitution published in Polish and French, this was a constitutional monarchy united in real union with the absolutist Russian Empire. Tsar Alexander I promised wide-ranging legal and cultural autonomy to the Polish nationalité, under which term he meant the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. The tsar adopted the title of King of Poland. The kingdom’s territory of 128,500 sq km was populated by Polish-speakers (75 percent), Jews (10 percent), German-speakers (7.5 percent), Lithuanian-speakers (5 percent), and Ruthenianspeakers (2.5 percent). Indecisive on Cracow, the partition powers made it into ‘a free, independent, strictly neutral city with its district’ that popularly became known as the Republic of Cracow. Austria, Prussia, and Russia jointly controlled this republic, whose territory amounted to 1164 sq km. The TPN, with its seat at Warsaw, survived all the political upheavals. When St Petersburg got the upper hand in Warsaw, the TPN did not fail to stress the similarity of Polish with the ‘language used in the Russian Empire,’ which put

The Polish Case

381

the TPN in good stead with the empire’s authorities. This claim of closeness between Polish and Russian was not as absurd as it may seem nowadays; in 1813, Linde even proposed creating a common alphabet for writing all the Slavic languages which would combine Latin and Cyrillic letters. Linde, as a rarely remembered precursor of Pan-Slavism, hoped that it would be the first step toward creating a common standard language for all the Slavs. Tsar Alexander I, known for his fondness of things Polish, allowed the retention of the Polish-language educational system in the Kingdom of Poland. The subsequent development of elementary schools gradually ensured an education for the daughters of noblemen and richer burghers. The tsar also acted as the official protector of the University of Cracow, and soon recognized the need for a local university that would produce teachers for the educational system. In 1818 (a year before founding a university in the empire’s capital of St Petersburg), the Royal University of Warsaw was founded, with Polish as the medium of instruction. After the University of Vilnius, it was the second Polish-language university of the empire. At that time, in Russia, there were three Russian-medium universities in Moscow, Kazan, and Kharkov (Kharkiv), which educated considerably less students than the two Polish-language universities. The TPN published a new edition of Kopczynski’s ´ grammar and two altogether new grammars of the Polish language. In 1827, the TPN formed the Deputacja Ortograficzna (Orthography Commission) headed by the Rector of the University of Warsaw. It was a second attempt, as a first commission of the same name had been founded in 1814 but had not begun its deliberations due to the political upheavals at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1830, this new commission published the 500-page tome, Rozprawy i wnioski o ortografii polskiej (Theses and Conclusions on Polish Orthography, Warsaw). In line with the French prescriptive tradition, the work proposed changes in Polish spelling. The outbreak of the November Uprising then intervened, and no consultations were held, but the volume showed the direction in which Polish orthography would develop throughout most of the 19th century. This was a partial answer to the TPN’s appeals for a Polish academy of sciences that would ensure ‘purity and perfection of our national language,’ like the Académie Française established in 1634. Significantly, the 1830s saw the end of discussions about what shape the Polish language should take. Between the 1790s and 1830s, Polish emerged as the standardized language we know today, with its related and mutually dependent formal written variety and colloquial spoken variety. Subsequently, poets, writers, administrators, journalists, and schoolteachers spread the knowledge of standard Polish among the growing number of users (including populus), gradually transcending the outmoded bounds of the Polish-Lithuanian natio. The Polish questione della lingua (language question)7 was over well before standardization of modern Czech, Magyar, and Slovak started in earnest.

382 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The official status of the Polish language in the Congress Kingdom was also reflected in the part of partitioned Poland-Lithuania incorporated directly into the Russian Empire. The Polish-language educational system, with the University of Vilnius at its helm, persisted there. The Polish language remained in administration also. The dominance of Polish culture in this ethnically non-Polish and largely (with the exception of Lithuania proper) nonCatholic environment continued. Not surprisingly then, the still uncodified White Ruthenian (Belarusian) language was classified as a dialect of Polish, chiefly because it was written in the Latin script (which, in Russian eyes, was the ‘Polish alphabet’). In 1820–1823, students at the University of Vilnius, among them the most famous Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), established two secret Polish patriotic organizations. The authorities of the absolutist state were appalled when the organizations were discovered. The subsequent trial was followed by the gradual suppression of Polish-language education. Students found guilty were incarcerated and exiled into the Russian interior. In 1829, Mickiewicz was permitted to leave Russia, and he spent the rest of his life in Western Europe (mainly France). Symptomatically, he never set foot in either Warsaw or Cracow. These events led to the authorities’ replacing Kopczynski’s ´ ‘national grammar’ with Maxymilian Jakubowicz’s (1785–1853) Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego do uzytku ˙ szkół przeznaczona (Grammar of the Polish Language for Schools, 1823– 1827, Vilnius) in the Polish-Lithuanian territories directly incorporated into Russia before 1795. Jakubowicz’s grammar, unlike Kopczynski’s, ´ did not contain references to the Polish nation. Shortly, schools and offices in Russia’s Kingdom of Poland were furnished with Antoni Jakubowicz’s (1789–1842) two-volume authoritative Slovar rossiisko-polskii, sochinennyi po slovariam Akademii Rossiiskoi / Słownik rossyysko-polski ułozony ˙ podług słowników Akademii rossyyskiej (RussianPolish Dictionary, Compiled in Accordance with the Russian Academy’s Dictionaries [of Russian], 1825–1828, Warsaw). However, due to the replacement of Polish with Russian as the official language in the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania after 1831, such a dictionary was more urgently needed there. Stanisław Müller’s (1786–1847) three-volume authoritative Polsko-rossiiskii slovar / Słownik polsko-rossyyski (Polish-Russian Dictionary, 1828–1830, Vilnius) specifically targeted the western gubernias. Müller compiled it in accordance with Linde’s dictionary of Polish and the first two editions of the Russian Academy’s authoritative dictionary of the Russian language (1789–1794 and 1806–1822, St Petersburg). Müller’s dictionary was reprinted in 1841 and 1854. In the Grand Duchy of Posen, the Prussian monarch issued an act that guaranteed the parallel use of Polish and German in education and administration. But in practice, bilingual elementary education led to largely monolingual secondary schools, with German as the language of instruction. The Prussian educational authorities sent talented Polonophone youth to universities in

The Polish Case

383

Berlin or Breslau in clear defiance of the decisions reached at the Congress of Vienna, which provided that Polish-speaking students from all the sections of partitioned Poland-Lithuania should be allowed to study at the University of Cracow. The situation was even more difficult for the Polish language in Galicia, where the above-mentioned KEN reforms were never introduced. Only in the first two grades of elementary schools was Polish used as a medium of education. In the higher grades, German was the sole language of instruction. In secondary schools, apart from German, Latin continued to dominate with the addition of classical Greek. In the course of the Napoleonic Wars, Vienna closed down the University of Lemberg in 1805, so as to stop the spread of revolutionary ideas. This university was reestablished in 1817, with Latin as the sole medium of instruction. German replaced this language 7 years later. The territory of Austria’s Crownland of Galicia was 82,000 sq km. This crownland housed 58.5 percent Polish-speakers, 40.2 percent Ruthenian-speakers, and 1.1 percent German-speakers. The number of Ruthenian-speakers correlates well with that of Greek Catholics, who constituted 42.1 percent. (Already in 1774, Maria Theresa forbade the use of the term ‘Uniate,’ which was perceived as pejorative by those to which it referred.) Those who professed Catholicism usually spoke Polish and numbered 46.5 percent. German-speakers were mostly Protestants (0.5 percent) and actually Yiddish-speaking Jews, whose language was officially classified as ‘corrupt German.’ These Yiddish-speakers together with their Polish-speaking counterparts amounted to 10.9 percent of Galicia’s population. Polish-speaking Catholics concentrated in the western half of the crownland, whereas Ruthenian-speaking Greek Catholics and Jews in the eastern half. In a Ruthenian peasant’s eyes, he spoke in a ‘peasant language,’ Polishspeakers conversed in a ‘language of lords,’ and Jews in ‘Jewish.’ In 1843, drawing from the Polish-Lithuanian usage of Ru´s (Rus, Ruthenia) and the adjective ruski (Ruthenian) derived from the name, Greek Catholic Bishop Mykhailo Levyts’kyi (Michał Lewicki) (in office 1816–1858) of the Przemy´sl Eparchy, proposed to the Austrian authorities the introduction of the official names the Ruthenische Nation (Ruthenian nation) and Ruthenische Sprache (Ruthenian language) for referring to Galicia’s Greek Catholics and their idiom. Vienna approved the proposal and Levyts’kyi popularized the Polish-language counterparts of these terms, Rusini (Ruthenians) and rusinski ´ (Ruthenian). In 1848, the first Chair of Ruthenian Language and Literature was inaugurated at the University of Lemberg. Importantly for the cause of Polish-Lithuanian noble nationalism, in 1817, Austrian Emperor Francis I (ruled 1792–1835) agreed to the founding of the Ossolineum, or Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolinskich ´ (National Library and Publishing House of the Family Ossolinski) ´ in Lemberg, the provincial capital of Galicia. Linde’s benefactor, Józef Ossolinski, ´ could found the Ossolineum due to his unwavering loyalty to the emperor, which secured for him the viceroyalty

384 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Galicia. But it was thanks to Father Franciszek Siarczynski ´ (1758–1829), the first Director of the Ossolineum, that Vienna agreed to the contentious adjective ‘National’ in the full name of Ossolineum. After the TPN in Warsaw, the Ossolineum was the second consciously national scholarly organization that aspired to preserve and improve the Polish language as the only remaining ‘fatherland’ of the Polish-Lithuanian natio. The free use of Polish in all spheres of public life continued in the tiny Free City of Cracow. It was the language of administration, politics, the educational system, and, significantly, of the University of Cracow. As mentioned above, the Congress of Vienna earmarked Poland-Lithuania’s first institution of higher education (founded in 1364) for the role of the Polish university par excellence, which would cater to the educational needs of all the aspiring youth of the Polish-Lithuanian natio. This situation of the Polish language, established in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, remained largely unchanged until the anti-Russian November Uprising of 1830–1831. It erupted in the Congress Kingdom of Poland and in the northern section of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania; that is, in its Catholic and Lithuanian-speaking part. Warfare also spread to the Free City of Cracow. On 25 January 1831, the Seym of Congress Poland deposed Nicholas I (ruled 1825–1855). Inevitably, the imperial army crushed the sparse forces of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. Most of the insurrectionists still shied away from accepting peasantry into commonality with the natio so that it could transform itself into a nation. Peasants, who constituted the vast majority of the population, remained neutral in this ‘war of lords,’ or even provided valuable information to the tsar’s forces. Alexander I’s brother and successor, Nicholas I, was disenchanted with the behavior of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. In 1825, they had sworn loyalty to him as the next King of Congress Poland, and now they rebelled. Unlike his brother, who had pardoned the nobility for their anti-Russian activities during the Napoleonic wars, Nicholas I decided on a sterner course against the rebels (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 59, 72; Anichenka 1969: 13; Berezowski 1934: 91–92; Czaplinski ´ and Ładogórski 1993: 21; Fras 1999: 12, 41, 97; Gajda 2001: 29; Holzer 2004: 477; Jodłowski 1979: 43–45; Johnson 1950: 287; Kizwalter 1999: 203; Klemensiewicz 1976: ill 67, 513–517, 653; Kopczynski ´ 1817: 271–272; Lewaszkiewicz 1980; Magocsi 1980: 9, 1996: 389–390; Mayenowa 1984: 309; Przyłubski 1955: 81; Rogall 1993: 68, 70; Snyder 2003: 29; Stankiewicz 1984: 43, 55, 133, 137–138; Stomma 2006: 133–134; Wandycz 1974: 72; Wapinski ´ 1994: 107). The tsar’s policies were two-fold. Those applied to the Kingdom of Poland were to assure St Petersburg’s full control over it. The goal was different in the Polish-Lithuanian territories incorporated directly into Russia. These ‘gubernias incorporated [to Russia] from Poland,’ now renamed the ‘western gubernias,’ or ‘Western Russia,’8 were to be thoroughly integrated with the rest of the empire in

The Polish Case

385

line with the official imperial ideology of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, which aimed at turning Russia into a homogenous and centralized polity capable of competing with the Western European powers.9 Nicholas I readily espoused this ideology, as proposed in 1833 by Sergei Semionovich Uvarov (1786–1855), the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Minister of Public Education. In line with this new official line, the tsar granted an amnesty (with some exceptions) to the insurrectionists from the kingdom, but none to those from the western gubernias. Between 1831 and 1832, Russian replaced Polish in all the state offices in the western gubernias. Non-Russians were discharged from the civil service. The Imperial University of Vilnius was closed down in 1832, which meant that education in the region was available solely through the medium of Russian. The assets of this university, and the Krzemieniec secondary school (which was abolished, as well), were transferred to Kyiv as the basis for the founding of St Vladimir University in 1834. Paradoxically, that university then served as the center of Polish in Russia, because two-thirds of its students were Polish-speakers; and they constituted half of the students even in the 1860s. Polish was retained as a subject in the secondary schools of the western gubernias until 1839, and only at the beginning of the 1840s, did bilingual Russian-Polish governmental gazettes disappear. In secondary schools, the history of PolandLithuania was replaced with the history of Russia in 1839. The following year, the old Lithuanian Statute, which had regulated the administration and law of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania since the 16th century, was abolished. Russian law replaced it. It was a wave of change, considering that as early as 1811, the tsar had seriously contemplated turning Russia’s partition zone of the Polish-Lithuanian lands into an autonomous Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In this context, St Petersburg perceived the Uniate Church in particular, as a source of instability and potential rebellion; and increasingly incongruous with the official imperial ideology steeped in Orthodoxy. Around 80 percent of the population in the western gubernias professed Uniate Catholicism. In 1827, the staunchly pro-Russian and anti-Catholic Uniate Bishop of Lithuania, Iosyf Semashko (Józef Siemaszko) (in office 1832–1839), began to draw up plans for the abolition of the Uniate Church through its absorption by the Orthodox Church. The faithful supported his policy, because the bishop presented it as a limiting of the despised Roman Catholic influence, which gradually replaced Church Slavonic with Latin and Polish in the Uniate Church. His plan was implemented in 1839, when the Uniate clergy and faithful were ordered to join the Russian Orthodox Church. This distanced the converted population from Polish language and culture, increasingly perceived as inherently anti-Russian. In the Russian Empire, the remnant of the Uniate Church, in the form of the Kholm (Chelm) Eparchy of Volhynia, survived until 1875 because it was located in Congress Poland. By 1905, when a decree of religious toleration was finally enacted, no more than 150,000 to 200,000 Uniates were left to practice their

386 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

faith openly. They survived due to secret pastoral service provided by Uniate clergy, who found safe haven in Galicia’s Greek Catholic monasteries. In the Orthodox eparchies organized in the western gubernias, Russian was used in sermons and the Church Slavonic liturgy was rendered with Russian pronunciation. Because compulsory elementary education was never in practice introduced in the Russian Empire, the state promoted Russian in this manner as the language to which one was expected to aspire. This coaxed the multidialectal vernacular of the Slavophone non-Polish-speakers toward Russian and away from Polish. St Petersburg also decided to cut down on the number of Polish-Lithuanian nobles. The new regulations of 1836 required them to provide the administration with proof of their nobility. Impoverished noblemen who were unable to fulfill this demand were officially stripped of any pretence of nobility, and 54,000 of them were sent to the Caucasus, Siberia, or beyond the Volga. Out of their usual social milieu, they had no choice but to accept Russian as the language of everyday discourse. In the sphere of culture and education, all these measures meant the replacement of Polish with Russian as the official language in the western gubernias. Understandably, the number of secondary and elementary schools plummeted because there were not enough Russian teachers who could replace their Polish counterparts. In the 1840s, Russian replaced Polish as a medium of instruction even in the most obscure schools. By 1854, Polish had also been banned in private schools. In Congress Poland, similar processes of reducing autonomy unfolded, but at a slower rate, hindered by the internationally approved status of this kingdom. However, Pope Gregory XVI (1831–1846) condemned the November Uprising in his 1832 encyclical, Cum Primum (On Civil Disobedience), and urged loyalty to the emperor. This document legitimized the tsar’s anti-seditious decisions. The kingdom’s Constitution was abolished and replaced by a mere Organic Statute, which seriously downgraded the polity’s autonomy. The kingdom’s Seym and separate army were liquidated, and the administration directly subjugated to St Petersburg. The constitutional monarchy was replaced by absolutist rule characteristic of the Russian Empire. The traditional ten voivodeships (administrative regions) into which the kingdom was divided were transformed into Standard Russian gubernias, and their number reduced to five. The title of the Primate of Poland was abolished in the Prussian section of Poland-Lithuania already in 1795; and the tsar also forbade it after the November Uprising. The last vestige of the Polish-Lithuanian crown thus disappeared, for the primate acted as an interrex during periods of interregnum. The University of Warsaw and the TPN were abolished in 1831. The library holdings and art collections of the TPN and other private and public libraries and museums were confiscated and taken to St Petersburg. As was in the case of students from the western gubernias, higher education for prospective students

The Polish Case

387

from Congress Poland was available only at the Russian-language Universities of St Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkov or at the German-language University of Dorpat. (Russian replaced German as the language of instruction at this university in 1889.) In 1839, the educational system of the Kingdom of Poland was placed under the control of the center, that is, the Russian Ministry of Education. The following year, a new act on elementary education recommended, where possible, to teach reading and writing in Russian. Another recommendation provided for the use of German in Protestant elementary schools and of Hebrew in Jewish ones. The 1840s marked the beginning of the process of slow modernization in the course of which Polish-Lithuanian Jews began to leave the Polonophone cultural circle for the Russian-speaking one. In 1847, the Russian criminal code replaced a section of the kingdom’s laws. In the next two decades, all these policies brought about the supplanting of Polish with Russian as the official language in administration. A relaxation of St Petersburg’s approach to things Polish took place after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1854–1856) and in the context of growing social unrest in the empire. In the western gubernias, Polish was reintroduced as a school subject in secondary schools in 1856 but in 1860, when asked by nobility to reestablish the University of Vilnius, reintroduce religious tolerance, and reintroduce Polish as the language of administration and education, the tsar replied that ‘this land is Lithuania, not Poland.’ Alexander II (reigned 1855–1881) meant that some measure of autonomy was reserved only for Congress Poland, but not for the western gubernias that made a homogenous part of the empire after the November Uprising. The Kingdom of Poland became the industrial center of the Russian Empire so that the wishes and influence of Polish and Polish-speaking industrialists could not be disregarded too easily. But this was tempered by the inflow German and Jewish settlers, workers, and entrepreneurs to the industrial centers of Warsaw or Lodz (Łód´z). At least at the beginning, they showed no obvious interest in the cause of Polish language and culture. In 1862, a new act on education for Congress Poland was implemented. It largely emulated laws that had governed the educational system in the Duchy of Warsaw. Polish was reintroduced as the language of instruction and the teaching personnel were to be Poles only. The crowning of this liberal trend was the reestablishment of the University of Warsaw as the Main School of Warsaw (Szkoła Główna Warszawska) in 1862, with Polish as the medium of instruction. The Main School became the center of the renewed Polish-language educational system. The renewed attraction of Polish language and culture was so strong that some Jewish intelligentsia wished Jewish youth to be connected with Polish rather than with Russian, or with a Jewish culture steeped in Hebrew and jüdisch Deutsch (‘Jewish-German,’ or Yiddish). Under such pressure, rabbis agreed to use Polish in Jewish schools (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 59, 63, 77,

388 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

79–81, 84, 86–87; Davies 1982: II 86–87; Hrycak 2000: 49; Johnson 1950: 96; Ma˛czak et al. 1996: 194; Magocsi 1996: 375; Snyder 2003: 120; Szybieka 2002: 72–73; Topolska 2003: 202). Russia’s western gubernias were comprised of the lands, which St Petersburg had seized in the three partitions of Poland-Lithuania (463,200 sq km). Prior to the November Uprising, Polish-Lithuanian nobles toyed with the idea of turning the gubernias into an autonomous Grand Duchy of Lithuania, similar in status to Congress Poland, or even dreamed about merging them with this kingdom into a renewed Poland-Lithuania under Russian tutelage. Alexander I was not adverse to these projects but chose not to carry them out. His brother Nicholas I was not a Polonophile and his distrust of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility was confirmed by the anti-Russian insurrection of 1830–1831. This was the end of dreams about reconstituting Poland-Lithuania with the help of Russia. Before they were forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity in 1839, Slavophone Uniates constituted the majority of the population in this vast region. From them, the present-day nations of Belarusians and Ukrainians emerged. In the Southwestern Land (in Ukrainian histories known as ‘Dnieper Ukraine’), Catholic Poles, or rather the Polonophone nobility, accounted for less than 2 percent of the population. Their number amounted to 10 percent in the Northwestern Land, including Polonophone peasants. Jews constituted more than 10 percent of the population in both lands. In the north of the Northwestern Land, that is, in present-day Lithuania, Lithuanian-speaking Catholics added up to almost 80 percent of the population. By the end of the 19th century, the ethnodemographic changes were quite extensive in the Southwestern Land due to the inflow of settlers to the neighboring Southern Land (Odessa [Odesa] region), or ‘New Russia.’ Many of them settled in the Southwestern Land too. As a result, the numbers of Little Russians (Ukrainians), Jews, and Poles sank to 71.5, 8.5, and 1.7 percent, respectively, whereas Russians constituted 12.4 percent and Germans 2.1 percent of the population (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 230, 238; Czaplinski ´ and Ładogórski 1993: 18; Eberhardt 1997: 94; Magocsi 2002: 108; Wapinski ´ 1994: map between pp. 224–225). The November Uprising also influenced ‘Polish policies’ in the Prussian and Austrian partition zones of former Poland-Lithuania. The danger of sedition on the part of the nominally loyal Polish-Lithuanian nobility became all too clear. In Prussia’s partition zone, German replaced Polish in the traditionally bilingual administration in 1832. Ten years later, German was introduced as a compulsory subject of elementary education. Any changes in educational policy were of much more profound consequence in Prussia than in the Russian Empire, because compulsory elementary education had been introduced in this state in the 18th century, and quite effectively enforced after 1825. Compulsory elementary education combined with Prussia’s astounding economic success led to the virtual disappearance of the phenomenon of illiteracy by the 1870s. Hence,

The Polish Case

389

the intensity of inculcating with German language and culture through education, administration, and printed matter was much more successful in Prussia than St Petersburg’s efforts with respect to spreading knowledge of the Russian language. In the absence of compulsory popular education, the Russian administration had to rely on the Orthodox Church, which was not fully geared to the propagation of the Russian language. Prussia’s Germanizing course abated after the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. These events shook the established order in Central Europe, which entailed more concessions for non-state languages and their users in Prussia. The state was also weakened, because Vienna defeated Berlin in its bid for hegemony in the German Confederation. In 1857, the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk (Society of Friends of Sciences) was established in Posen in emulation of the TPN of Warsaw, disbanded in 1831. For the time being, the TPN of Posen functioned as a second center of Polish culture and language along the Ossolineum in Lemberg (Lviv). The failure of the November Uprising was painful. In the mid-1840s, the leaders of the Polish-Lithuanian natio came to the conclusion that it would be possible to defeat the partition powers only with participation of the Polishspeaking peasantry. The Western European concept of the nation as a majority or even all the population of a country, a concept increasingly divorced from formal social status (such as nobility or tax-paying bourgeoisie), started taking root. The transition from the Polish-Lithuanian natio to Polish ethnic nation commenced. The abolition of serfdom became an inalienable part of any Polish national program at that time. Serfdom was largely a thing of the past in Prussia and the Austrian Empire (phased out gradually in the first half of the 19th century), but not in Russia where the majority of Polish-speakers (that is, potential members of the Polish ethnic nation) resided. Polish national revolutionaries in Prussia and Galicia decided to start an uprising in 1846. They happened to be out of synch with the rest of revolutionary Europe, because 2 years later a series of (mainly national) revolutions swept the continent. Had they waited, the Polish insurrectionists would have stood a better chance of victory. The Prussian authorities prevented the planned all-Polish uprising and imprisoned the organizers. It broke out only in Cracow and in the vicinity of Tarnów in western Galicia. Austrian forces suppressed the insurrection in Cracow. The Free City of Cracow was disbanded and its territory incorporated into the Austrian Crownland of Galicia. Cracow, the first Polish-Lithuanian capital and a regional center, was relegated to the position of a provincial backwater. In Tarnów, the local peasantry killed the noble insurrectionists because the latter rebelled against the divinely sanctioned rule of the Emperor Ferdinand I (reigned 1835–1848). Apparently, the concept of the ‘Polish nation’ was still just a plan; peasants did not identify with the goals of the noble natio. They trusted that the emperor rather than their direct lords might free them from the lingering legal remnants of the oppressive bondage of serfdom.

390 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Polish-language administration and educational system of the erstwhile Free City of Cracow was Germanized. The same measure was applied to the University of Cracow. In the period 1846–1862, there was no institution of higher learning with Polish as a medium of instruction. A slight relaxation of this policy took place after the 1848–1849 uprisings that swept the Austrian Empire and seriously destabilized this polity. Finally, the abolition of serfdom, which had commenced at the turn of the 19th century, was completed in Austria as well as in neighboring Prussia. The rise of German nationalism incited other Central European ethnic nationalisms and offered the model of action. The national idea began to gain the upper hand over the dynastic-cum-absolutist order. The only exception to this rule was Russia, where serfdom disappeared only in the 1860s (in 1861 in the western gubernias, and in 1864 in Congress Poland) and nationalism did not become the dominant ideology of statehood legitimization until the introduction of the official policy of Russification in the 1880s. After 1848, Polish gradually replaced German in western Galicia’s elementary schools, as did Church Slavonic (in Ruthenian pronunciation) in those of eastern Galicia. At that time, the idea of Landessprache (regional language) emerged in the Austrian Empire, meaning that, for pragmatic reasons, local languages should be used to improve the quality of governance. Landessprachen stood in opposition to German that was conceptualized as the Staatsprache (state language) of the Austrian Empire. When Austria-Hungary was founded in 1867, a three-tier language system emerged in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, with the Staatsprache, Landessprachen of the crownlands, and landesüblichen Sprachen (or local languages) recognized for limited administrative and educational use in a given crownland. The Ruthenian language of the Greek Catholics (Uniates) underwent an evolution similar to that of the languages used among other Orthodox and Slavophone peoples. Although prestigious and well-established, Church Slavonic was increasingly difficult to understand. It lacked a firm connection to the everyday speech and did not allow one to speak about numerous solutions and devices brought about by modernization. As a result, elements of the vernacular and of standard Russian entered the local recension of Church Slavonic (not unlike in Slaveno-Serbian). The outcome was the Slaveno-Ruthenian language, similar to, though dialectically and in various official usages different from, the 17th-century chancellery Ruthenian of Poland-Lithuania. In the 1830s and 1840s, some publications (including a short-lived newspaper) were brought out in Slaveno-Ruthenian with the use of Latin characters. Most Ruthenian intellectuals and clergy disagreed with this trend. In the late 1850s, they brought about the change from the Church Slavonic Cyrillic script (kyrylytsia), perceived as backward, to the Russian Cyrillic (grazhdanka), closer in cut to the Antiqua version of the Latin alphabet. This must have been seen as an indication of

The Polish Case

391

increasing Russian influence among Ruthenians, because in 1859, the Galician governor imposed the Czech-type Latin alphabet on Slaveno-Ruthenian. The outcry of Ruthenians was immediate, and the decision had to be revoked. In the early 1880s, the Ruthenian writer and journalist, Volodymyr Barvins’kyi (Włodzimierz Barwinski, ´ 1850–1883), worked out the phonetic orthography of Galicia’s Ruthenian vernacular at the request of the Galician authorities. In 1893, Vienna recognized this Ruthenian vernacular as official. Hence, Ruthenian (very close to modern-day Ukrainian), recognized as a distinctive language, replaced Slaveno-Ruthenian in education and administration. This change did not affect, however, the steadfast use of Church Slavonic in its Ruthenian recension for all written purposes in the backward GalicianUpper Hungarian borderland extending on both sides of the Carpathians from Krynica to Ungvár (Uzhhorod) and Rahó (Rakhovo). This also meant retaining the Church Slavonic Cyrillic in preference to the Russian-style Cyrillic (Grazhdanka). In Hungary’s section of this region, proposals to supplant Cyrillic with the Magyar-type Latin alphabet were voiced in 1894. Finally, the most popular Ruthenian newspaper began to appear in Latin characters in 1916, but this change was short-lived; the alphabet was not used for printing Ruthenian publications after 1918. The Greek Catholic and Orthodox inhabitants of the region (consistently identified since the 1980s as [Carpatho-]Rusyns) stuck to Church Slavonic and their local idiom, prior to the standardization of the Rusyn language in the 1990s. In 1861, Polish and Slaveno-Ruthenian replaced German in Galicia’s village schools, and in the two first grades of town schools. The 1860s were a period of liberalization in the Austrian Empire. The change was hastened by the crushing 1866 defeat in the war with Prussia. Not only did Vienna have to resign from domination in the Germanophone world (and cede Venetia to Italy), this defeat also clearly showed the economic and military weakness of the empire. In order to preserve it, the Habsburgs gave in to those national demands they could not suppress. The 1867 Ausgleich (compromise) gave the Magyars their own semiindependent nation-state and transformed the monarchy into a dual AustriaHungary. In order to offset the Czech national claims to their own nation-state, composed of the historical lands of the Czech Crown (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia), Vienna decided to grant the Galician Poles more cultural autonomy. It was a safer solution, as the latter had largely resigned from military solutions to their national predicament. Although radicals might still wait for a suitable moment to recreate Poland-Lithuania in the form of a Polish nation-state, but with most of the Polish-Lithuanian lands under the tight control of Russia and Prussia, Vienna rightly predicted that this time might not be quick in coming. Stability of the empire was worth such a gamble. In 1867, Polish and Slaveno-Ruthenian replaced German altogether as the media of instruction in elementary and secondary schools. Two years later,

392 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

both the former languages were introduced to administration, Polish in western Galicia and Ruthenian in eastern Galicia. As a result, Polish functioned as the Landessprache of Galicia and Slaveno-Ruthenian as the most important landesübliche Sprache of this crownland. German remained the official language of the military, the train system, the postal services, and of contacts with the central government. In 1870, Polish supplanted German as the language of instruction at the University of Cracow and the same process was repeated at the University of Lemberg (renamed the University of Lwów) during the years 1871– 1874. In 1877, the Polytechnic of Lwów was opened, which ensured the coining and development of technical vocabulary in Polish. In addition, the Akademia Umie˛jetno´sci (AU, Academy of Sciences) was founded in 1872 in Cracow, on the lines of the Towarzystwo Naukowe Krakowskie (Scientific Society of Cracow) that had been active at the University of Cracow since 1815. The AU took over the role of Warsaw’s defunct TPN as a veritable Polish academy of sciences, and in 1879–1901 conducted the standardization of Polish technical, scientific, and administrative vocabulary. This was possible thanks to the fact that the Ossolineum had prepared a second, updated edition of Linde’s dictionary of the Polish language edited by August Bielowski (1806–1876), and published in Lemberg between 1854 and 1860. Significantly, this new, six-volume edition enforced the reformed orthography proposed in 1830 by the TPN of Warsaw. Knowledge of this standard Polish spread thanks also to compulsory popular education. This was introduced in the Habsburg lands at the end of the 18th century, and was never so successfully enforced as in Prussia, but it did provide for a much higher level of literacy than in Russia (Bankowski ´ 2000: I XIV; Dulichenko and Magocsi 2005; Fras 1999: 203, 208; Hrycak 2000: 96; Janich and Greule 2002: 207; Klemensiewicz 1976: 517–523, 654–655; Król 1977; Magocsi 1996: 400, 439, 444, 2004: 85–114; Ogonowski 2000: 19; Wandycz 1974: 122–135; ˙ Zbikowski 1997: 90–91; Zielinski ´ 1977). Apart from Galician autonomy, the two other events that decisively shaped the character of emerging Polish ethnic nationalism were the January Uprising (1863–1864) and the establishment of the German Empire as a Kleindeutsch (Little German)10 nation-state (1871). The defeat of this latest anti-Russian insurrection amply emphasized how old-fashioned and inefficient was the persisting idea of a Polish-Lithuanian noble natio when faced with the might of Russia’s imperial army. On the other hand, the partial success of German ethnic nationalism showed the proponents of Polish nationalism that this was the way they had to take in order to stand a chance of building a Polish nation-state. It was a foregone conclusion that the Polish-speaking peasantry should be included in the socially encompassing Polish nation. The question was not ‘if’ but ‘how to achieve this.’ Tsar Alexander II, who had refused to be crowned King of Poland after his father’s death, fulminated against Polish ingratitude so expressly shown in the

The Polish Case

393

January Uprising. In 1864, the Kingdom of Poland was dissolved and its territory divided into regular gubernias became an indistinguishable part of the Russian Empire. Three years later, the very name ‘Kingdom of Poland’ was abolished and replaced by the ‘Vistula Land’ (Privislinskii Krai), though no formal law to this end was ever adopted. (Afterward, the denotation Kingdom of Poland sometimes re-surfaced as a geographical or traditional name for the Vistula Land even in Russian-language publications.) After the death of the viceroy in 1874, this position was discontinued. The autonomy of this area was gradually scrapped in all spheres of public life and it was directly incorporated into the Russian Empire, with the governor-general of Warsaw at its administrative helm. Martial law, which lasted in Congress Poland and the western gubernias until 1872, facilitated the implementation of these ad hoc measures. The economic power of the Polish nobility was shattered when 1600 of its estates were confiscated in Congress Poland and a further 1800 in the Northwestern Land. Immediately after the suppression of the January Uprising, Russian was introduced to the administration of the Vistula Land, and finally replaced Polish in 1868. (Polish remained as the language of the governmental gazette of the Vistula Land until 1871.) Gradually, this measure was extended to municipal and village administration. As of 1867, the ecclesiastical administrations of various Christian Churches and Jewish religious communities, responsible for issuance of certificates of births, marriages, and deaths, were required to produce these documents exclusively in Russian. The only concession was that Catholic priests could add Polish translations to such certificates. In 1865, Uvarov’s initiative of replacing the Latin alphabet with Cyrillic for writing and printing in Polish was taken up. By 1869, five Cyrillic-based Polish-language school textbooks had been published, including a primer and grammar of Polish. Afterward, this planned Cyrillicization of the Polish language was abandoned. In 1869, 7 years after its establishment, Russian supplanted Polish as the medium of education in the Main School of Warsaw as well as in all secondary schools. In 1876, Polish was banned from courts of law and in 1885, from elementary schools too. Only religious instruction for Catholics could be taught in Polish, with the exception of the Vistula Land’s easternmost gubernias, mainly inhabited by Ruthenian- and Lithuanian-speakers. These Russifying measures did not extend to the Polish-language press and book publishing, which was beneficial for the continued development of Polish language and culture. Paradoxically, St Petersburg’s failure to introduce compulsory elementary education also played into the hands of Polish nationalists; otherwise, Polonophone peasants, molded by school to read in Cyrillic, would have shunned Polishlanguage publications in Latin characters in adult life. Thus, illiteracy preserved the peasantry for the Polish nation, until effective compulsory elementary education was eventually extended to them in the Polish nation-state after 1918.

394 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The repercussions of the January Uprising also included prohibitive legislation against other languages in the western gubernias, such as Lithuanian and Little Russian (Ukrainian). Due to the shared past of Poland-Lithuania, speakers of these languages were closely connected to Polish culture and language, and Lithuanian- and Little Russian-speaking elites tended to know Polish as their preferred second language. St Petersburg perceived this situation as ‘Polish intrigue’ that contradicted the official imperial ideology. The western gubernias, seen as traditional Rus lands, were presented as having ‘rightfully returned’ to the Rus fold of Russia. In 1839, their Slavophone population of the Uniate faith was ‘rightfully returned’ to Orthodox Christianity, and in the 1860s, it was high time that the equally ‘rightful’ domination of Russian would be reasserted in this region in line with the imperial-cum-national myth of historical continuity between Rus and the Russian Empire. ‘The return of Russian as the language of Rus’ in the western gubernias required banning the ‘anti-Rus’ Latin alphabet, Polish language, and all muzhitskoe narechia (peasant idioms) tainted by their historical and cultural connection with Poland-Lithuania and the Polish language. After the suppression of the January Uprising, it became popular to refer to the western gubernias as ‘Western Russia,’ and to the inhabitants of this region as ‘Western Russians.’ This ‘proved’ the immemorially (iskonny) Russian character of these lands. In 1863, the minister of the interior, Count Petr Valuev (1814–1890), issued a circular (popularly known as ‘decree’) to the office of censorship, which prohibited the use of Little Russian (with exception of ‘belles-lettres’), famously claiming that this language ‘did not, does not, and cannot exist.’ It could be only a southwestern dialect of the Great Russian language. (Until the mid19th century, many Russian scholars had considered Little Russian to be a Russian corrupted by Polonization or a Polish dialect altogether.11 ) Even the 1862 translation of the New Testament into Little Russian, deemed dangerous and harmful, was banned by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. The 1876 Ems decree (Alexander II issued it while at the spa in Germany) extended this prohibition to all Little Russian publications and forbade their importation from abroad, especially from Galicia. In 1881, the new tsar, Alexander III (reigned 1881–1894), allowed publication of dictionaries and musical lyrics in Little Russian, if they used Russian orthography. However, the ban was extended to any permanent theaters or troupes performing in the ‘Little Russian dialect.’ Ukrainian cultural (let alone national) activism was invariably perceived as a Polish plot to divide and undermine the empire. The same fate met the White Ruthenian (białoruski in Polish, that is, presentday Belarusian) language even earlier; namely, after the November Uprising. St Petersburg perceived it as a dialect of Polish (mainly due to the fact that it was written and printed with the use of the Polish version of the Latin alphabet) and thus as a ‘Polish intrigue’ to inculcate the Slavophone Uniates with Polish

The Polish Case

395

culture. Accordingly, a ban on performances ‘in the language of the common people’ (White Ruthenian) had been instituted in 1838. In the same year, and in 1852, Polish-language publications featuring texts in this ‘simple language’ (White Ruthenian) were confiscated. In 1859, the printing of ‘Ruthenian books’ (that is, Slavophone publications in the Latin script) was prohibited in the western gubernias, which precluded publishing in White Ruthenian and Little Russian with the use of this script. This prohibition was directed mostly against White Ruthenian, as most Little Russian publications employed Cyrillic. The Polish leaders of the November Uprising supported the publication of the first White Ruthenian-language newspaper. The periodical’s anti-Russian character convinced St Petersburg that ‘White Ruthenian’ was another ‘Polish intrigue’ like ‘Little Russian.’ As in the case of Little Russian, some change in the status of White Ruthenian occurred in the 1880s when Russian scholars began referring to this language as a ‘White Russian’ (belorusskii), or a ‘Northwestern dialect of (Great) Russian.’ These designations safely distanced it from any commonality with Polish language and culture, which allowed for production of some publications in White Russian as long as they used Russian orthography. In the case of Lithuanian, throughout the 19th century two names were used to refer to this language, ‘Lithuanian’ and ‘Samogitian.’ Samogitia, as the northernmost region of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, retained its separate administrative character and continued as a separate Catholic diocese after the partitions of the Commonwealth. Hence, Samogitian referred to the speech of the northern Lithuanian-speakers and ‘Lithuanian’ to the speech of their southern counterparts. Another complication arose due to some Belarusian intellectuals who, like Lithuanian nationalists, aspired to the heritage of the grand duchy, and referred to themselves and their Slavophone speech as ‘Lithuanian.’ St Petersburg could not hope to abolish the Catholic Church by decree, as it had done in the case of the Uniate Church in 1839. The continuing political and economic clout of the Polonophone nobility also prevented such a step. Because most of Lithuanian-speaking peasants were Catholics, it was out of question that they could be made into Russians (though official attempts to convert them to Orthodoxy were continually undertaken). Their religion served as an additional marker of their ethnic difference. But at that time, St Petersburg’s main aim was de-Polonization of the western gubernias, not wholesale Russification. In the Baltic gubernias (Ostseeprovinzen in Russia’s official German-language terminology) of Estland, Livonia, and Courland, German served as the sole language of official documents until 1867, of administration until 1885, of municipal self-government until 1889, and of courts of law until 1892. Education was offered in German, Estonian, and Latvian until 1887, when Russian was introduced as the language of instruction in the two final grades of elementary school. Two years later, Russian supplanted German at the University of Dorpat. In 1887, articles in the Russian-language press suggested replacing

396 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Gothic type of the Latin alphabet with Cyrillic for writing and printing in German, but the Baltic Germans staunchly opposed this proposal, which was not implemented. Likewise, the imposition of Cyrillic on Latvian-language publications was less effective than on Lithuanian, and the Cyrllicization of Estonian was never seriously attempted. German alongside Estonian and Latvian survived in the first 3 years of elementary school in the increasingly Russified educational system. The Russification of schools in the Baltic gubernias had a much larger impact than elsewhere in the empire, because for all practical purposes elementary education was truly popular there, and illiteracy disappeared in the second half of the 19th century. But unlike in the western gubernias and the Vistula Land, private schools with languages of education different than Russian were not prohibited in the Baltic gubernias, which brought about the burgeoning of such schools there with German as the medium of instruction. The position of German, Estonian, and Latvian was partly reasserted after 1905. Significantly, the gubernia diets of nobles (zemstva) and peasant communal administrations retained their native languages. In 1841, a semblance of this relatively lenient Baltic policy was extended, in the field of elementary education, to Lithuanian-speakers in the Samogitia Diocese (largely coterminous with the Gubernia of Kovno [Kaunas]), which bordered the Gubernia of Courland. Russian remained the official language, but numerous elementary schools with Samogitian (Lithuanian) as the medium of instruction were opened. As a result, half of the predominantly peasant Lithuanian-speakers gained literacy in this area, in stark contrast to White Russian and Little Russian peasants out of whom 90 to 96 percent remained illiterate until 1917.12 Overzealous civil servants tended to extend the 1859 prohibition on publishing ‘Ruthenian books’ to Lithuanian books printed in the Latin script. Any leniency ended after the January Uprising. Even non-Polishspeaking Catholics were persecuted to convince them to convert to Orthodox Christianity. In 1864, Lithuanian- and Samogitian-language primers and textbooks were ordered to be printed exclusively in Cyrillic characters. Later in the same year, publication of any Samogitian and Lithuanian books in the Latin script, or their importation from abroad, was prohibited. Alexander II approved this measure in 1866. In 1869, infighting in the administration of the Gubernia of Vilna (Vilnius) led to permission for one publishing house to produce and sell Samogitian and Lithuanian books, after censors had eliminated those considered to be dangerous. This situation lasted until 1881, but in the meantime a multitude of Lithuanian-language publications in the Gothic type of the Latin alphabet had been imported from Lithuania Minor, Prussia. An 1872 circular prohibited the use of Gothic-type Lithuanian books, but the illegal importation (also of Lithuanian publications printed in Antiqua) continued in defiance of this ban. In the last three decades of the 19th century, only about 50 Lithuanian books in Cyrillic characters were published in Russia.

The Polish Case

397

Until the January Uprising, language was not a decisive instrument that divided groups of people in Russia’s section of Poland-Lithuania. What counted was social status, whether one was of the nobility and intelligentsia, enjoying personal freedom, or a serf with limited freedom. This uprising was the last one in which, despite language differences, members of the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian natio fought together to create a noble-dominated Polish nation-state, conceived as a recreation of Poland-Lithuania. The subsequent politicization of language, in emulation of the Prussian/German and Austro-Hungarian models, established the paradigm for the development of Central European nationalisms. St Petersburg also realized the potency of this instrument. For instance, in the Gubernia of Vilnius, Lithuanian replaced Polish as a secondary medium of education in 1863–1872. Polish then returned to local schools as a subject. This decision only partially stopped the influence of Polish culture on local public life. Contrary to what was expected, however, Russian did not fill the vacuum, and this curb on Polish cultural vibrancy provided the necessary space for the rise of Lithuanian ethnic nationalism. (Similarly, the suppression of German in the Baltic gubernias, paved the way for the coalescence of Estonian and Latvian nationalisms.) The rise of industry and capitalism in the Vistula Land gave the Polish intelligentsia and national activists new economic instruments with which to counter Russification and to attract German-speaking settlers and Yiddishspeaking Jews to the fold of Polish language and culture. The Vistula Land was the most urbanized and industrialized region in the Russian Empire with 33 percent of its population living in towns and cities. In 1914, 400,000 workers were employed in the industrial sector. This enormous economic and social potential allowed for a revival of Polish language and culture. In 1881, the Kasa Miankowskiego (Miankowski Foundation) was established in Warsaw. It supported the compilation and publication of Jan Karłowicz’s (1836–1903) Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language, Warsaw). This replaced Linde’s outdated dictionary (as Jacob Grimm [1785–1863] and Wilhelm Grimm’s [1786–1859] Deutsches Wörterbuch [German Dictionary, 1854–1960, Lepizig] supplanted Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart [Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of the High German Dialect, 1793–1801, Leipzig]). Karłowicz, together with Adam Antoni Krynski ´ (1864–1932), Józef Przyborowski, Władysław Nied´zwiedzki, and Kazimierz Król, compiled the first straightforward monolingual and authoritative multivolume dictionary of Polish, without the previously used prop of translations into German, Russian, or other Slavic languages. They emulated the Grimms’ work, but did not wish to compete with them in comprehensiveness. Six volumes appeared in 1900–1915, and two further ones followed in 1919 and 1927. Karłowicz dedicated the first volume of his dictionary to the University of Cracow on the 500th anniversary of its second (and permanent)

398 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

founding. This emphasized the national significance of this work and stressed the cultural link between the two historical capitals of Poland-Lithuania, Cracow and Warsaw. The publication of Karłowicz’s groundbreaking dictionary coincided with the establishment of the Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie (TNW, Scientific Society of Warsaw) in 1907, which aspired to renew the work of the defunct TPN (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 83–84, 88, 90, 96, 98; Czaplinski ´ and Ładogórski 1993: 25–26; Davies 1982: II 100, 364; Janicki 2006; Kiaupa et al. 2002: 106, 115–116; Klemensiewicz 1976: 518–519, 657; Magocsi 1996: 369–373; McMillin 1980: 110–111; Ogonowski 2000: 14–15; Piwtorak 2006: 13–14; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 473; Snyder 2003: 33–34, 120–123; Szybieka 2002: 90, 103, 117; Thaden 1981: 28, 71, 157, 310; Uspenskii 2004: 1–2; Vakar 1956: 81; Waldenberg 1992: 129–130, 137–138; Wandycz 1974: 195). This renewal of organized Polish academic life as the framework for the development of the Polish national movement was possible thanks to the liberalization in the Russian Empire. Tsar Nicholas II (ruled 1894–1917) had no choice. Absolutism was no option after the humiliating defeat of Russia at the hands of Japan in the war of 1904–1905. This event contributed to the outbreak of the 1905 revolution. Social and ethnic violence, and pogroms of Jews, destabilized the empire. The tsar reluctantly agreed to the creation of Russia’s first legislative body, the Duma. The empire set out on the road to constitutional monarchy. The relaxation of absolutism meant partial resignation from the policy of Russification. Between 1904 and 1906, in Russia’s partition zone of former Poland-Lithuania, the authorities allowed teaching and printing in ‘local languages and dialects.’ Russian civil servants usually perceived Polish and Lithuanian/Samogitian as languages and variously named Ukrainian/Little Russian and White Russian (Belarusian) as dialects of the Great Russian language. These provisions also allowed for use of the Latin alphabet for writing and publishing in White Russian and Lithuanian/Samogitian. The import of Lithuanian books in Gothic fonts from East Prussia and of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) books from Galicia was permitted. St Petersburg had never banned Polish from books and periodicals brought out in the empire or importation of Polish-language publications from abroad. Thus, what mattered most for Polish activists and nationalists was broadening the public sphere where this language could be used. But there were no special concessions issued for Polish. In the Vistula Land and the western gubernias, Russian remained official language and the exclusive medium of education. In state schools, religious instruction and Polish could be taught in Polish, but the same privilege was enjoyed by Lithuanian/Samogitian-, White Russian-, and Little Russian-speakers. Speakers of all these languages could also establish private schools with their respective languages as the media of instruction, but diplomas issued to school-leavers were not of the same value as those gained from state schools. Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nationalists perceived this liberalization as an unprecedented chance for their respective

The Polish Case

399

national movements, while Polish leaders still considered all these concessions as nothing in comparison to the status Polish language and culture had enjoyed before the January Uprising, and especially prior to the November Uprising. Indeed, the proliferation of language legislation solidified the status of Russian as state language, which, for instance, imposed on the Catholic Church the requirement to use Russian in its administration, except in these cases where canon law demanded Latin. As a result, Polish was banned from the administration of the Catholic Church, where it had been traditionally used since the times of Poland-Lithuania. The four decades that followed the January Uprising were marked by the ascendancy of ethnic nationalism as the primary ideology of power and statehood legitimization in the Vistula Land and western Russia. The reorganization of the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary accorded with this principle; and the establishment of the German Empire as a German nationstate rationalized this trend in the eyes of intelligentsia and decision-makers. The Polish-Lithuanian natio became obsolete. It proved unable to reestablish Poland-Lithuania in the form of a nation-state, thanks to which this natio might have reinvented itself as a civic nation. The attraction of ethnic nationalism became irresistible, supported by the meteoric success of the German Empire in the spheres of the economy and the military. The Prussian statistician Richard Böckh (1824–1907) proposed to use language as the measure of nationality in censuses. After some trial use of this category in regional censuses beginning in the 1820s, Berlin included the question about language in the all-Prussian census of 1861. Nine years later, at the Sixth International Congress of Statistics held at St Petersburg, it was decided to measure the national composition of populations by asking a question about one’s language in censuses. For the first time, this question was included in the Austro-Hungarian census of 1880 and the Russian one of 1897. Soon, it proved that censuses, rather than measuring the demographic size of nations, created nations. National activists and leaders employed the resultant numerical data as an instrument for obtaining recognition for their postulated nations and bargaining political concessions. In 1895, the Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe (PSL, Polish People’s [Peasant] Party) was established in Rzeszów, western Galicia. Two years later, Polish nationalists organized the Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne (SN-D, National-Democratic Party), which rejected loyalty to the partition powers. The PSL implemented the postulate of including Polish-speaking peasants in the then emerging ethnic Polish nation, while the SN-D stood on the ground of creating an independent Polish nation-state that would coincide with the contiguous territory where the Polish language was spoken. In practice, this meant territories with Polish-speaking majorities and areas where Polish-speakers were in minority but constituted the upper social class of gentry, entrepreneurs, and civil servants. The SN-D hoped that this upper

400 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

class would ensure the eventual assimilation of the non-Polish-speaking masses into the fold of the ethnic Polish nation. In 1813, the poet and German nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) famously proposed in his poem ‘Des Teutschen Vaterland’ (The German’s Fatherland) that the German nation-state extends as far as ‘the German tongue rings.’ This became the working definition of the German nation-state. Polish and other Central European nationalists quickly took over this program of ethnolinguistic nationalism. As early as 1848, the Cracow newspaper Jutrzenka (Morning Star) referred to Arndt and paraphrased his words: ‘wherever one can hear the Polish language, there is the Polish Fatherland.’ The SN-D’s program of Polish independence and ethnolinguistic independence proved attractive to the PSL. In 1903, this party adopted the adjective ‘Polish’ in its name (earlier it had been SL, or the People’s Party) and since that time supported the idea of creating an independent Polish nation-state. This date symbolically marks the end of the political program of the PolishLithuanian noble natio and the emergence of the Polish ethnic nation with full participation granted to the peasantry. Soon, male peasants could test their political strength when, in 1896, Vienna introduced universal male suffrage and in 1907, scrapped electoral curiae (which privileged the richest stratum of male voters) in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. This possibility had been given to peasants even earlier in the Province of Posen. Although Prussia retained its restricted, property-based suffrage until the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1918, as of the founding of the German Empire in 1871, each male had the equal vote in that new polity. But the idea of the full inclusion of the peasant in the Polish nation was fulfilled for the first time in economically backward and more rural Galicia, not in Wielkopolska or the Vistula Land. A politicized Polish peasant movement emerged in the former region, perhaps thanks to Galician autonomy, which fostered cooperation on the basis of ethnic nationalism, among all the social strata of Polish-speakers. Facing Berlin’s Germanizing course, the priority of Wielkopolska’s Polonophone elites was to retain some official status for the Polish language in this province of the German Empire. Hence, forging the Wielkopolska Polish-speakers into a homogenous part of a Polish nation remained of secondary importance. The coalescence of the political and social concept of the Polish ethnic nation necessarily brought a reaction on the part of those inhabitants of the territories of former Poland-Lithuania who did not speak Polish, or whose everyday speech could not be defined as Polish. They constituted the majority of the population in the eastern half of this defunct polity; that is, in Russia’s western gubernias. Ethnic Poles accounted for hardly more than 15 percent of the inhabitants there, with the exception of the region around the Vilnius. But even in the Vilnius region they were less than half of the populace. Around 1900, Ukrainian nationalists accepted the idea of creating an independent Ukraine within what they called ‘ethnographic borders.’ In this task,

The Polish Case

401

the Ukrainian national movement could fall back on the findings and works produced by the Naukove tovarystvo imeny Shevchenka (Shevchenko Scientific Society), established at Lwów in 1873, a year after the founding of the AU. The process of the coalescence of Ukrainian nationalism was quicker in Galicia, as this ideology could freely unfold in Russia only after 1905. The 1890 PolishRuthenian compromise in Galicia (comparable to the 1905 Ausgleich between Germans and Czechs/Moravians in Moravia) was crucial in this respect. In 1894, Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1836–1934) arrived from Russia and took over the newly established Chair of World History, with Particular Emphasis on the History of Eastern Europe at the University of Lwów. After the Chair of Ruthenian Language and Literature at the same university, it was the second university chair with Ruthenian (Ukrainian) as the language of instruction in Galicia.13 Between 1898 and 1913, Hrushevs’kyi published the first eight volumes of his eleven-volume Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy (1898–1937, Lwów and Kyiv, History of Ukraine-Rus, 1997–, Edmonton), and with this monumental work (modeled on Palacký’s The History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia) introduced the ethnonym ‘Ukrainian’ for denoting the postulated nation that would be comprised of Ruthenian- and Little Russian-speakers. In his choice of this ethnonym, Hrushevs’kyi drew on the writings of Volodymyr Barvins’kyi (Barvinsky, 1850–1883), who had standardized Ruthenian orthography in the early 1880s. Galicia’s Ukrainian-speakers remained underprivileged vis-à-vis Polish-speakers in the field of education, but only slightly with regard to elementary schooling. By 1914, Ruthenian (Ukrainian) was employed as the medium of instruction in 45.6 percent of all elementary schools. The disproportion was much larger in the case of secondary schools; only 12 (4 percent) of them were Ruthenianophone. But the situation was still much better in Galicia than in Russia’s Southwestern Land, where there were no state schools with Little Russian (Ukrainian) as the language of education; or in Upper Hungary, where between 2 and 10 percent of Ruthenian (Rusyn/Ukrainian) schoolchildren attended Ruthenian-language elementary schools. Lithuanian ethnic nationalism emerged decisively during the 1880s and 1890s, thanks to the activities of Lithuanian intelligentsia in East Prussia (Lithuania Minor). But as in the case of the Ukrainians, Lithuanian nationalists could freely operate among the major concentration of Lithuanian-speaking peasants in Russia only in the wake of the 1905 revolution. A similar idea of building a nation on an ethnolinguistic basis began budding among the Belarusian intelligentsia only after 1905. The Belarusian national movement took definitive shape only during World War I. Interestingly, White Russian (Belarusian)-language publications were usually published in two parallel versions, one in the Latin script and the other in Cyrillic. After 1905, when Russian orthography could be safely disregarded, Belarusian Cyrillic drew on the Ukrainian model, the so-called Kulishivka, developed in the mid-19th century by Panteleimon Kulish (1819–1897), an early writer and

402 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

translator into Little Russian. This orthography was widely popularized by Kulish’s translation of the New Testament which was published in Vienna in 1871 and smuggled into Russia. Obviously, Little Russian writers in Russia also began to use Kulishivka again. The reintroduction of the Latin script for writing and publishing in Lithuanian and White Russian brought an ideologically significant change, too. Prior to the 1860s ban on the Latin alphabet and on the use of Lithuanian/Samogitian and White Russian, publications in both languages had employed the Polish-type Latin script. In the 1890s, Lithuanian-language publications switched to the Czech-type Latin alphabet, which, for instance, employs graphemes [ˇc] and [ž] for representing the phonemes /ch/ and /zh/, in preference to the Polish digraph [cz] and grapheme [z]. ˙ In 1905, the Belarusian version of the Latin script followed and 3 years later, codifiers of Latvian adopted similar orthographic conventions to separate the graphic representation of their language from Polish and German orthographies, previously employed for writing in Latvian. Interestingly, the specific Polish diacritic ogonek (literally ‘small tail’) as in the Polish letters [a˛] and [e˛] was retained in Latvian and Lithuanian but for modifying different letters, namely [k‚], [l‚ ], [n‚], and [u˛]. Although [a˛] and [e˛] exist in Lithuanian, they denote different phonemes than in Polish. A precursor of the adoption of the Czech-style Latin alphabet for writing in White Russian and other newly codified national languages was the Galician Governor, Agenor Gołuchowski (1812–1875). In 1859, he had first attempted to impose the Latin script on the Ruthenian language, but to not unduly antagonize Ruthenians, he had then decided on the Czech-style Latin script, instead of Polish orthography already used in some Ruthenian publications during the 1830s and 1840s. In the eyes of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian nationalists, Polish language and culture posed a danger to their national languages and cultures similar to Russian. The use of Czech-style diacritical letters clearly marked the difference of Lithuanian and Belarusian vis-à-vis Polish. It was also a safe method, because Czech nationalists did not have any historical tradition or possibility to extend their cultural domination to the former lands of Poland-Lithuania. It is also necessary to mention that the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the ideological conflict in Jewish communities of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania between the Haskalah (which prescribed assimilation), religious traditionalism (best represented by Hassidism), and Jewish nationalism (Zionism), which propagated the revival of Hebrew and Jewish settlement of Palestine. In the Vistula Land and Galicia, assimilation led either to Polish language and culture, or, due to the Yiddish-speaking character of East European Jewry, to German language and culture. In the western gubernias, the attraction of Russian language and culture proved increasingly stronger than their Polish counterparts. In 1896, the Hungarian Jew, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), published his seminal Der Judenstaat (Vienna and Leipzig,

The Polish Case

403

A Jewish State, 1896, London), and the next year he organized the first World Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. The ideological conflict among the different trends in Jewish politics continued into the interwar period. The rise of Zionism was a reaction to the limits of assimilation. One’s Jewish origin or Judaism tended to be singled out by the authorities as a liability, even if in language, culture, and manners one was indistinguishable from Frenchmen or Germans; as amply indicated by the Dreyfus affair (1894), which Herzl reported from Paris for the Viennese press. While Polish ethnic nationalism developed vis-à-vis the rise of German nationalism and St Petersburg’s imperial policy of Russification, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationalisms unfolded in reaction also to Polish nationalism. Having rejected the civic commonality of the Polish-Lithuanian tradition, ethnic conflicts were in the making. These were symbolized by the multiethnic cities of Vilnius and Lwów. Polish nationalists claimed both these cities for a future independent Poland as historical centers of Poland-Lithuania, and inhabited mainly by Polish-speakers; despite the fact that the surrounding areas of the Northwestern Land as well as eastern Galicia were overwhelmingly non-Polish-speaking. To complicate matters further, both Lithuanian and Belarusian nationalists claimed Vilnius as the capital of their would-be nation-states, arguing that it was the historical capital of ‘their’ Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Lithuanian intellectuals appropriated the historical tradition of this grand duchy for the Lithuanians, while Belarusian leaders pointed to the fact that this polity was overwhelmingly Slavophone and Orthodox (or Uniate) throughout its history. The most neglected party in this national quarrel were the Jews, who constituted 40 percent of Vilnius’s population and over half of the inhabitants in Gomel (Homel), Minsk/Mensk, Pinsk, and Vitebsk (Vitsebsk). The logic of ethnic nationalism did not allow for the creation of a Jewish nation-state anywhere in Central or Eastern Europe, so the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ (meaning Vilnius) was slated for extinction in the coming age of ethnic cleansing (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 355–356; Böckh 1863; Fishman 1973: 51; Fras 1999: 205, 208; Herzl 1997; Loza 1999: 2–3, 20; Magocsi 1980: 10–11; Ogonowski 2000: 14; Porter 2000; Snyder 2003: 34–36, 46, 53– 56, 130–131; Stauter-Halsted 2001; Szybieka 2002: 175–177; Vakar 1956: 90–91; Wapinski ´ 1994: 125, map between pp. 224–225; Zaprudnik 1998: 28–31). Prior to the outbreak of the Great War, Polish was the official language of Galicia. Its status improved a bit in the Vistula Land in comparison to the period between 1864 and 1905, when Polish had been completely suppressed, even in schools. The situation looked different in Prussia’s Wielkopolska, or the Province of Posen. After the replacement of the bilingual German-Polish usage in administration with the monolingual German one in 1832, German was introduced a decade later as a compulsory subject in all the elementary schools. After the 1848 revolution, the position of Polish was strengthened again. It returned to offices

404 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and remained an unchallenged medium of education in elementary schools in the Polonophone areas, and even in the lower grades of secondary school. Limitations on the use of Polish in schools were introduced once again after the January Uprising. The Germanizing pressure coalesced into an official policy after the establishment of the German Empire. Berlin hoped to homogenize this new nation-state around the two guiding paradigms of Protestantism and the German language. The influence of the Catholic Church was too strong, however, and after the mid-1880s the German imperial government resigned itself to linguistic Germanization only. In 1872, German became the sole language of instruction in secondary schools and the same process was applied to elementary schools in 1874. Only religious instruction and hymn singing could be taught in Polish, but solely in the lower grades of elementary school, until the moment when students mastered German. In 1876, German was made the sole official language of administration, which meant removal of ancillary Polish from state and municipal offices. In the same year, Polish was removed from courts of law. This Prussian legislation on language, which emphasized the unitary and ethnically German character of the German Empire, was not specifically directed against Polish-speaker but against all non-German-speakers in this polity, including Lithuanian-, Danish-, French-, and Sorbian-speakers. The empire was to be made into an ethnically homogenous German nation-state. Even non-German-speaking citizens were perceived as members of the German nation, which entailed stepping up efforts to make them acquire this language. The Polish language taught as a foreign language was banned from elementary schools in 1887, and between 1890 and 1894 from secondary schools. During his term in office (1890–1894) as Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi (1831–1899) introduced some concessions for Wielkopolska Poles without revoking any language legislation already in force. The change was motivated by Berlin’s need for a majority to pass some crucial army and navy bills (in preparation for a potential conflict in Russia, especially due to German support for Vienna’s expansion in the Balkans, which clashed with St Petersburg’s interests). Polish was reintroduced as an ancillary language of administration in the province of Posen, and Polish could be taught as a foreign language in Wielkopolska’s elementary schools. All these concessions were revoked in 1894. Two years later, a new civil code extended and solidified the unique status of German as state language. For instance, last wills had to be done exclusively in German. In 1900, it was prohibited to provide religious instructions at elementary schools in any other language but German. Eight years later, all organizations and associations had to use German at their meetings unless there was a non-Germanophone minority of more than 60 percent in the county. Ironically, standard Polish was codified in close conjunction with the German language. (Likewise, Polish as a model to be emulated served a similar role

The Polish Case

405

vis-à-vis coalescing Russian until the mid-19th century.) In most bilingual dictionaries published in the 19th century, Polish was paired with German. In Galicia, Polish developed as a language of modern administration. Already in 1862, the Niemiecko-polski słownik wyrazów prawniczych i administracyjnych (German-Polish Dictionary of Legal and Administrative Vocabulary) came off the press in Cracow, where Karol (father) and Karol (son) Stadtmüller’s extensive Technisches Wörterbuch / Słownik techniczny (German-Polish Technical Dictionary) was also published in 1913. Various collocations, phrases, and even word order characteristic of German bureaucratese and scientific language were directly translated into Polish, and are an inalienable part of the Polish language to this day. The reaction of purists against this trend was less successful than their lambasting of French loanwords. Similarly, the use of administrative Russian also left its imprint on standard Polish, but to a lesser extent as the official register of Polish developed in autonomous Galicia. Between 1900 and 1911, the six volumes of Jan Karłowicz’s Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of the Polish Dialects) appeared in Cracow with collaboration of Hieronim Łopacinski ´ (1860–1906), Wacław Taczanowski, and Jan Ło´s. Symbolically, the AU published this work at the same time as Karłowicz’s dictionary of the Polish language was published in Warsaw. Predictably, he dedicated the first volume of the dictionary of the Polish dialects to the University of Cracow on the 500th anniversary of its founding (as he had done with the first volume of his other lexicographic work). Like statistics that formed rather than measured nations, Karłowicz’s dictionary of the Polish dialects not only described the Polish dialects but also decided which dialects were to be classified as ‘Polish.’ By extension, in agreement with the paradigm of ethnolinguistic nationalism, this lexicographic work constituted an argument for claiming various territories as ‘rightfully belonging’ to the postulated Polish nation-state. Such arguments became legion, especially at the peace conference that concluded World War I. Leaders of all the newly founded nation-states aspired to the largest territories possible, and linguists did not deny them help. The model which Karłowicz followed was that of German linguistics. Because language was of fundamental significance for German nationalism, dialectology as a separate field of philology emerged first in the Germanophone states. One of the earliest dialectal dictionaries of German dialect was published in 1868. Others followed in quick succession. In 1878, 7 years after the founding of the German Empire, the first handwritten part of the Deutscher Sprachatlas (Dialectal Atlas of the German Language) was prepared. The entire work was published between 1926 and 1952 in Marburg am Lahn. The whole host of regional dialectal dictionaries used this atlas as the basic grid. After World War II, the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line passed to Poland and the Soviet Union, and were ethnically cleansed of German-speaking population. But this

406 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

grid allowed for the publication of extensive dialectal dictionaries of these areas, for instance, the three-volume Schlesisches Wörterbuch (Dictionary of the Silesian Dialect, 1962–1965). In this manner, through this atlas and these dialectal dictionaries, claim was laid to the ‘proper extent’ of the German nation-state. Obviously, Karłowicz did not have the means, or the support of any Polish nation-state, to emulate this extensive and multifaceted coverage of German dialects; and he could not rival the Grimms’ dictionary, either. But his two works offered a sufficiently detailed description of the standard and dialects of the Polish language to serve as a yardstick for ‘measuring’ how extensive the territory of the postulated Polish nation-state should be. In view of the German model, the Entente saw this description of the territory where Polish was spoken as ‘scientific’ enough to legitimize Polish claims to an ethnically defined Polish nation-state at the peace conference that ended World War I. Actually, the only volumes of the planned multivolume Encyklopedya Polska (Polish Encyclopedia, 1915, Cracow) to appear were those devoted to the Polish language.14 The title of this encyclopedia’s subsection was symptomatic of the ideological rolling of language and territory into a single unit, Je˛zyk polski i jego historya z uwzgle˛dnieniem innych je˛zyków na ziemiach polskich (The Polish Language and Its History in the Context of the Other Languages Used in the Polish Lands). In the second section of this volume, Kazimierz Nitsch (1874–1858) described the ‘territory of the Polish language,’ which he equated with the ‘ethnographic area of Poland’; that is, the ‘appropriate extent’ of the would-be Polish nation-state. This was a summary of the theses and findings he had presented in his 1911 Mowa ludu polskiego (Idiom of the Polish People, Cracow). (Czaplinski ´ et al. 1990: 579; Encyklopedya polska 1915: II 245; Germanistische Linguistik 1978; Klemensiewicz 1976: 520, 630; Martin 1939: VII–VIII; Mitzka 1962–1965; Ogonowski 2000: 16–18; Skobel 1872).

Encyclopedias and politics Compilation and publication of universal encyclopedias was another sphere in which the language-based national competition was played out. The first modern extensive encyclopedias alphabetically arranged were brought out in the United Kingdom (Ephraim Chambers’s [1680–1740] Cyclopaedia [1728, London]) and in France (the famous Encylopédie [1751–1765, Paris], which on one hand emulated its British predecessor, while on the other transcended it). Although Johann Theodor Jablonski’s (1654–1731) Allgemeines Lexicon (Lexicon of All Sciences, Leipzig) was published in 1721 and followed by Johann Heinrich Zedler’s massive 64-volume Grosses volständiges Universal-Lexicon (Great Comprehensive Universal Lexicon, 1732–1750, Halle), the tradition of encyclopedia production in German commenced in earnest with the publication of Friedrich

The Polish Case

407

Arnold Brockhaus’s (1772–1823) Konversations-Lexikon (Conversation Lexicon, 1796–1811, Leipzig). Brockhaus’s encyclopedia and its next editions soon set the standard for this kind of lexicographic works in the German-speaking states. Soon Joseph Meyer (1796–1856) joined the competition with his Der große Conversations-Lexikon (Great Conversation Lexicon, 1853–1857, Hildburghausen). Catholics answered these two encyclopedias (perceived as ‘Protestant’) with Benjamin Herder’s (1818–1888) Conversations-Lexikon (1853–1857, Freiburg). Unlike the British or French encyclopedias that provided the reader with a mixture of succinct and monographic articles, the Germanophone model of ‘conversation lexicon’ was a comprehensive compilation of brief articles gathered in about 20 to 30 volumes of around 800 pages each. This German-language tradition of lexicography was to prevail in Central Europe. It struck root even earlier in the Russian Empire, due to the large colony of German-speaking scholars and administrators. The first real Russian encyclopedia, A Starchevski’s Spravochnii entsiklopedicheskii slovar (1847–1855, St Petersburg), copied the Brockhaus model. Hence a new element was added to the competition between nations and languages: the universal encyclopedia. Each ‘civilized nation’ was expected to produce one to be taken seriously by its neighbors and the European powers. The Polish entered the fray as the first in Central Europe. Significantly, in Congress Poland lexicography was not caught up in confessional controversies (as in the case of Germanophone publishing houses), and thus, it was the Jewish publisher, Samuel Orgelbrand (1810–1868), who published the 28 volumes of Encyklopedyja powszechna (Universal Encyclopedia) in Warsaw between 1859 and 1868. This example of confluence of Polish and Jewish intellectual life on the plane of the Polish language was indicative of the strength of the Haskalah assimilation movement among Jews of the Vistula Land. The encyclopedia was reissued in 1872–1876 and in 1883–1884 in 12 volumes of 450 pages each. An updated edition of 16 volumes appeared in 1892–1912. Unlike the German-language conversation lexicons, this Polish encyclopedia did not include either maps or illustrations. Its volumes were roughly half the size of the 800-page volumes sported by a conversations lexicon. Saturnin Sikorski (1862–1922) decided to ameliorate these deficiencies of Orgelbrand’s work and in 1890–1914 published in Warsaw Wielka encyklopedyja powszechna ilustrowana (Great Universal Encyclopedia with Illustrations). It closely emulated the model of the conversation lexicon though it was issued in much slimmer volumes that numbered 55. Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War I prematurely terminated this work at the letter P. None of the Polish- and Hungarian-language encyclopedias equaled the Czech-language Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (Otto Scientific Dictionary). It was designed as the Národní encyklopedie ˇceská (National Czech Encyclopedia). Although the title had to be altered due to political considerations, Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný did become and still remains the unsurpassed national encyclopedia of the Czechs.

408 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Jan Otto (1841–1916) not only copied the model of the conversation lexicon, but also improved on it. The 28 volumes of this quaintly named ‘scientific dictionary,’ which were published in Prague between 1888 and 1909, counted 1000 pages and more apiece. The supplements to this original dictionary appeared beginning in 1930, titled Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby (Otto Scientific Dictionary of the New Era). Before the national socialist authorities of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia stopped this project in 1943, 6 volumes (in 12 parts) out of the planned 8 had been published. In the Russian Empire two more updated and customized editions of the Brockhaus conversation lexicon were published in St Petersburg in 1890–1907 and 1911–1916. Actually, the latter was not completed due to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Granat Bibliographical Institute (modeled on the Brockhaus publishing house) brought out the first completely original Russian encyclopedia, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar (Encyclopedic Dictionary) in Moscow. Its publication commenced in 1910 and was completed in 1948. Curiously, 29 volumes appeared before the Bolshevik Revolution, and 29 more afterwards.

The rise of the Polish nation-state The situation in Central Europe changed dramatically in the course of World War I. In 1915, the Central Powers defeated the Russian troops, which retreated westward, leaving behind the Vistula Land (former Congress Kingdom of Poland), the Northwestern Land (former Grand Duchy of Lithuania) and western Volhynia (a fragment of the Southwestern Land, or, in other words, of the prepartition Kingdom of Poland’s lands directly incorporated into Russia). Vienna occupied the southern section of the Vistula Land and western Volhynia. Berlin controlled the northern half of the Vistula Land together with Warsaw (organized as the Warsaw General-Governorship), as well as the Northwestern Land and the Gubernia of Courland, which were turned into the Land Ober Ost. The southern section of the Vistula Land was granted to Vienna and turned into the Lublin General-Governorship. Western Volhynia with the southernmost sliver of the Gubernia of Grodno (Hrodna) was made into Vienna’s Rear Administrative Area (benachbarten Gebiet) corresponding in status to Germany’s Land Ober Ost. The occupation authorities allowed the Polish-language publishers and Polishspeaking administrators from Germany’s Province of Posen and from AustriaHungary’s Galicia to take over the grassroots administration and education in the Vistula Land. In 1915, Polish replaced Russian as the language of instruction at the University of Warsaw. Russian actually was banned from administration, courts of law, and education in both General-Governorships. German as official language, and Polish as ancillary, replaced it. On 5 May 1916, Polish was

The Polish Case

409

made the sole official language of the municipal administration in Warsaw. On 18 August, Polish became the sole language of municipal self-government in the Lublin General-Governorship. On 5 November, the German and AustroHungarian emperors proclaimed the creation of the Kingdom of Poland, whose territory was to be composed of areas wrested away from Russia. On 1 January 1917, Tsar Nicholas II (ruled 1894–1917) announced as a war aim, the restoration of a free and united Poland in union with Russia. The Central Powers were not ready to act on their proclamation, which anyway would leave out of this kingdom the Polish-speaking lands included in Germany and Austria-Hungary. On the other hand, the militarily defeated tsar was not in position to fulfill his promise. Moreover, in March 1917 the Russian Revolution shattered his empire. After the proclamation of the Kingdom of Poland, power was gradually handed over to the Polish provisional authorities. This meant that Polish changed places with German, the former became the official language in the two general-governorships and the latter ancillary. On 12 September 1917, Polish became the sole official language of the educational administration in the Kingdom of Poland. Polish-language schools were most numerous, but German-language schools introduced in 1915 for Germans and Jews continued to function. In addition, Ruthenian (Ukrainian)-language education developed in the eastern section of the Lublin General-Governorship, and this language was also allowed as ancillary to administration. Meanwhile, the German administration of the Land Ober Ost not only banned Russian and discouraged the use of Cyrillic (for instance, for writing and printing in White Russian [Belarusian]), and reintroduced Polish in education and local administration, but also, for the first time in history, accorded low-key official use to such upstart languages as Latvian, Lithuanian, ‘White Ruthenian’ (Weißruthenisch, as White Russian was renamed in line with the traditional Polish name of this language, or białoruski), and Yiddish. The administration aspired to make these ‘peasant idioms’ into ‘modern’ languages with all the phrases and terminology necessary for statecraft. Similarly, in the Rear Administrative Area, the Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities allowed not only for the reintroduction of Polish in schools and administration but also for the introduction of Ruthenian (Ukrainian), which, for the first time, attained some official status in the lands of the Russian Empire. The German administration of the Land Ober Ost was surprised at their ‘discovery’ of the ‘new nationality’ of Belarusians, who clearly were not Russians, as German officials had initially thought. There was a lot of bureaucratic agonizing over which to call the Belarusians and their language. The ethnonym ‘White Russian’ (Weiß Russisch) was too close to that of ‘Russian,’ so the administration settled for ‘White Ruthenian’ (Weißruthenisch), drawing on the well-established Austro-Hungarian term ‘Ruthenian’ (Ruthenisch), employed to denote the Ukrainians and their language. Obviously, both the terms were derived from the Polish-Lithuanian term ruski (Ruthenian)

410 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

that denoted the Slavophone Uniate and Orthodox population of PolandLithuania as well as their Cyrillic-based language, one of the official languages of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until 1697. But there was some confusion in the application of the term ‘White Ruthenians,’ because the Ober Ost authorities extended its use to refer to Slavophone Uniates in the Kholm area of the Lublin General-Governorship, though Vienna saw this population as Ruthenian. The only concession to Russian was the permission to publish a single German-Russian newspaper in Pinsk in the Rear Administrative Area, where there was no official policy to discourage the use of Cyrillic among Ruthenians. This newspaper was also distributed in the Land Ober Ost. Obviously, some civil servants had to know Russian to refer to documents, which for over a century had appeared in Russian. Most importantly, along the reestablished network of Polish-language schools, parallel networks of Latvian-, Lithuanian, White Ruthenian-, and Yiddish-language schools were founded for the first time in history in the Land Ober Ost. In the Rear Administrative Area, reestablishment of the system of Polish-language schools was accompanied by the founding of an unprecedented network of Ruthenian-language schools organized by Ruthenian activists and organizations from Galicia. This followed the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation administrations’ principle of allowing education in all the Muttersprachen (mother tongues). This approach differed much from the policy of linguistic homogenization applied by St Petersburg before the Great War, or for that matter, by Berlin in the German Empire since the early 1870s. As a result, national movements connected to all the ‘mother tongues’ rapidly developed. The administration of the Land Ober Ost was especially interested in encouraging White Ruthenian nationalism as a counterbalance to Russian and Polish influence. The success was almost immediate: in December 1915, White Ruthenian nationalists delivered a declaration in White Ruthenian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Yiddish appealing for a Confederation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that would be comprised of the White Ruthenian and Lithuanian nation-states. During the war, Vilnius developed into the center of White Ruthenian culture and politics, which pitted the White Ruthenians against the Lithuanians in their desire to make the city the capital of their future nation-states. Polish nationalists disagreed and continued to see Vilnius as an important Polish city. The territory of the Land Ober Ost was 109,000 sq km. Its population included Lithuanians (34.4 percent), White Ruthenians (20.8 percent), Jews (13.5 percent), Poles (11.8 percent), Latvians (10.5 percent), Russians (6.2 percent), and Germans (2.5 percent). The territory of the Rear Administrative Area varied according to the vagaries of the front, but usually amounted to around 30,000 sq km. Ruthenians constituted the majority of this area’s population, but Jews and Poles also amounted to 5 percent each (Das Land Ober Ost 1917: 142, 362, 376, 432–433, 452; Hrycak 2000: 121; Klemensiewicz 1976:

The Polish Case

411

519; Liulevicius 2000: 121; Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001: 191–192; Ogonowski 2000: 21–23; Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch 1918; Szybieka 2002: 186–190). After November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution threw Russia into disarray. The military successes of the Central Powers only exacerbated the acute economic crisis, and could not stop the rise of revolutionary and national movements. Following the offensive in February and March 1918, the frontline was pushed far to the east, and extended from Narva (that is, east of the Dnieper) to the Sea of Azov. In the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (3 March 1918), Soviet Russia (consumed by internecine civil war) concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers and ceded the territories recently overrun by German and Austro-Hungarian armies to Berlin and Vienna. The overextended German and Austro-Hungarian troops could hardly control this vast area. In the resulting power vacuum, Lithuania and Estonia declared independence (already in February). In March, the Belarusian People’s (National) Republic followed suit, and claimed Minsk/Mensk and Vilnius/Vilna as its two urban centers; this led to conflict with the Lithuanians over the latter city. All three new nation-states paid allegiance to the German Empire and sought German protection. A People’s (National) Ukrainian Republic (with its capital at Kyiv [Kiev in Russian]) had proclaimed independence in January 1918, and was transformed into a straightforward Ukrainian nation-state, known as the Hetmanate, in late April 1918. Thus, for the first time in history, Belarusian (a name of the language, which Belarusian nationalists prefer to Russian ‘White Russian,’ or Polish and German ‘White Ruthenian’), Estonian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian were elevated to the status of state languages. The war of attrition, however, bankrupted Austria-Hungary and this coupled with the rise of separatist national movements and the growing influence of socialist revolutionaries led to the fragmentation of the Dual Monarchy in the early autumn of 1918. Likewise, the German Empire found itself on the brink of collapse. Under the pressure of United States President Woodrow Wilson, the Allies accepted national self-determination as the principle according to which the political map of Central Europe was to be reorganized. In October and November 1918, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Hungary, and Latvia emerged as independent nation-states along with Poland. In November 1918, the breakup of Austria-Hungary also spawned the Western Ukrainian National Republic with its capital in Lviv (Lwów in Polish), which was immediately challenged by Polish troops, because Warsaw considered eastern Galicia as ‘rightfully’ belonging to the Polish nation-state. The German occupying troops buttressed the independence of Belarus and Dnieper Ukraine until December 1918, when they retreated to Germany. At the beginning of January 1919, the Red Army overran Belarus. Western Ukraine, fighting with Poland, and Dnieper Ukraine, attacked by Bolsheviks and Whites (that is, counter-revolutionary forces loyal to the tsar), announced their union the same month. Poland seized Western

412 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Ukraine by June 1919, and the Bolsheviks Dnieper Ukraine by August 1920. Meanwhile, the Polish-Soviet War erupted in February 1919 and raged in the Belarusian and Ukrainian lands. In May 1920, Polish troops allied with antiSoviet Ukrainian forces and seized Kyiv, but in August itself, the Red Army endangered Warsaw. Unexpectedly, Polish soldiers scored an amazing victory and the Bolshevik troops were repelled. In October, an armistice was signed. In March 1921, Warsaw and Moscow partitioned Belarus and Ukraine in the Treaty of Riga. By November 1921, the Red Army had extinguished any Ukrainian forces that opposed Moscow. Soviet Ukraine was established with its capital in Kharkov (Kharkiv in Ukrainian), safely far away from the front. (The capital was moved to Kyiv in 1934.) In the wake of the Polish victory in 1920, General Lucjan ˙ Zeligowski (1865–1947) followed Polish leader Józef Piłsudski’s (1867–1935) suggestion and seized the Vilnius region, turning it into the nominally independent Republic of Central Lithuania (Litwa S´ rodkowa). In 1922, it was incorporated into Poland; and the following year, the Allies recognized this decision. The Lithuanians never accepted this outcome. Thus, Vilnius (then known as Polish Wilno) did not become the capital either of Lithuania or Belarus; independent Lithuania had to content itself with Kaunas (Kowno in Polish) and Soviet Belarus with Mensk/Minsk (Minsk ´ in Polish). The Polish nation-state established in November 1918 was an uneasy compromise between the ethnic and historical-cum-civic visions of Poland. Roman Dmowski (1864–1939), the SN-D leader, wanted an ‘ethnographic Poland’ in the shape of a centralist and ethnically homogenous nation-state. His political adversary, Józef Piłsudski, was the commander of the Polish Legion and of Polish military forces. He hoped for the recreation of multiethnic PolandLithuania in the form of a federal Poland or a Polish-Lithuanian confederation. According to this vague concept, Poland would be linked by political union to Lithuania, Belarus would receive autonomous status within Polish borders, and an independent Ukraine would form a lose confederation with Poland. Clearly, Piłsudski anticipated a unique role of primus inter pares for Poland. Soviet Russia, defeated by Poland, offered Warsaw entire Belarus and most of Ukraine up to Kyiv. In the Treaty of Riga, designed by Dmowski and his proponents in opposition to Piłsudski’s vision, they limited Poland’s intake of Belarusian and Ukrainian lands, to territories deemed as Polonizeable. As a result, Poland was established as a centralist state with no federal concessions, traded for patchy autonomous and regional provisions for the national minorities who accounted for more than one-third of the total population. This was a complete reversal of the situation in the last days of Poland-Lithuania, whose population had been composed of 60 percent non-Polish-speakers. Taking into consideration the statistics that was often massaged to deliver higher numbers of Poles, in 1931, Poland’s population was comprised of 20.7 million Poles (65 percent), 5.1 million Ukrainians (16 per cent), 3.1 million Jews (10 percent),

The Polish Case

413

1.97 million Belarusians (6 percent) and 0.8 million Germans (2 percent). The most dramatic slump was in the number of Germans and German-speakers. In 1910, in the Vistula Land and in the German territories that would be incorporated into Poland after 1918, they numbered 1.8 million. In 1915, the Russian authorities deported 150,000 Germans from the Vistula Land, but most Germans and German-speakers left interwar Poland either because they did not want to live in a state which they thought ‘inferior’ to Germany, or because Warsaw’s Polonizing policies coaxed them to. The new nation-state’s territory was 388,000 sq km in 1922, a little more than half that of Poland-Lithuania prior to the first partition (1772) (which had amounted to 733,500 sq km). Between 1918 and 1921, Warsaw fought border wars with all of Poland’s neighbors (except Romania15 ), namely with Czechoslovakia, Germany, Lithuania, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine, either attacking or being attacked. The new Polish nation-state was composed of the entire Austrian partition zone of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania (Galicia), most of the Prussian partition zone (Wielkopolska and the western half of West Prussia), Congress Poland (the Vistula Land), and the western sliver of the Russian partition zone (the western gubernias). In 1919, the Allies made Danzig (Gdansk) ´ and its vicinity into the Free City of Danzig, with some decisional prerogatives reserved for Poland. In the Treaty of Riga, following the concept of an ethnically homogenous Poland, Dmowski’s supporters brought about Warsaw’s resignation from Dnieper Ukraine and eastern Belarus (that is, the core of the Russian partition zone of Poland-Lithuania). In exchange, and largely against Piłsudski’s will, Poland acquired territories that had never formed part of Poland-Lithuania, but which Dmowski saw as ‘ethnically Polish.’ The most significant of them was the easternmost sliver of Upper Silesia, which contained the second largest (after the Ruhr) industrial basin in continental Europe. The Allies granted this land to Poland in 1922. Two years earlier, in 1920, the Treaty of Versailles transferred several little pieces of territory from Germany’s Lower Silesia to Poland. In the same year, Poland also gained several territorial islets from Upper Hungary (Slovakia) and the easternmost sliver of Austrian Silesia. Czechoslovakia contested these territorial gains of Poland. Polish historians and demographers estimated that there were 7 million ethnic Poles (that is, Polish-speakers) at the end of the 18th century, 10 million in 1870, and 17 to 20 million at the beginning of the 20th century. The rapid surge in the number of Poles during the last three decades of the 19th century is explained by steep natural growth and voluntary Polonization of Jewish and German intelligentsia and bourgeoisie in the Vistula Land, and of their Jewish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) counterparts in Galicia. In the Western gubernias, assimilation usually led to Russiandom; or to Germandom in the Province of Posen. Before Poland came into being as a nation-state in 1918, some scholars

414 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

note that not more than one-third of those defined as Polish-speakers (mostly speakers of dialects construed as ‘Polish,’ with no command of standard Polish16 ) consciously declared themselves as ‘Poles’ and ‘members of the Polish nation.’ It was only interwar Poland that molded them into the ethnic Polish nation; despite the fears of some late 19th-century Polish nationalists, who predicted that the partition borders might lead to the creation of three different and separate Polands and Polish nations. The process of building a single Polish nation united in its own nation-state welded mainly from the three partition zones, proved thorny. In the interwar period, Dmowski berated Polish-speakers who did not express eagerly enough their Polishness as ‘half-Poles’ (pół-Polacy). In his opinion, only one-third of the ‘nominal Poles’ were ‘true Poles’ (prawdziwi Polacy). After 1918, speaking Polish turned out not enough to qualify as a Pole. It was the common Polish culture, developed through the medium of the Polish language, which facilitated the forging and subsequent maintenance of the unity of the Polish noble natio and, beginning in the late 19th century, of the ethnic Polish nation. Most publishers of Polish-language books produced them for the market in all three partition zones. In the first half of the 19th century, the center of Polish-language book production was located in the Saxon city of Leipzig, due to the long-standing political ties between Poland-Lithuania and Saxony, which lasted from the end of the 17th century to the personal union between Saxony and the Duchy of Warsaw at the beginning of the 19th century. Most significantly, Leipzig publishers made available the works of Polish émigré writers, smuggled into Austria, Prussia, and Russia. In the second half of the 19th century, numerous Polish-language publishing houses were established in Galicia and Congress Poland. Usually, they maintained branches in Cracow and Warsaw, and bookstores in Posen, Vilnius, and Lwów. The number of Polishlanguage book titles published per annum grew from 1079 to 2730 between 1865 and 1903. Similarly, the book production per capita also grew in the case of Ruthenian (Ukrainian)-language books published in Galicia and in the case of Lithuanian-language books produced in Prussia (Lithuania Minor). However, a mere 160 White Russian (Belarusian)-language books were published between 1906 and 1915. Despite the successes of Russification prior to 1905, Polish remained an important language of education and book publishing in the Russian Empire, second only to Russian itself. In Congress Poland, the number of Polish-language bookstores grew from around 60 in the 1850s to 300 in 1900, and almost 500 in 1905. Initially, two-thirds of them were located in Warsaw, but by 1905 this proportion sank to one-third, which meant that 89 (80 percent) of the Vistula Land’s cities enjoyed their own Polish-language bookstores. Punitive exiles to Siberia in the wake of the anti-Russian uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864, entrepreneurship, and employment in the Russian civil service sent tens of thousands of Polish-speakers across the Russian Empire. In 1905, they were served by

The Polish Case

415

40 Polish-language bookstores (frequently doubling as printing offices), mostly located in St Petersburg, Odessa (Odesa), Moscow, Minsk/Mensk, Irkutsk, or Vladivostok. Their number increased to 75 by 1913. At the same time, the number of Polish-language bookstores located in Austria-Hungary and the German Empire (but outside the partition zones of Galicia and the Province of Posen), as well as in France, amounted to less than 30. This meant that the point of gravity of Polish-language publishing, located in Saxony in the first half of the 19th century, moved decisively to Galicia and Congress Poland in the 1860s; before spreading to the Russian interior, especially after 1905. Interestingly, the eastward extension of Polish-language bookstores and printing offices across Russia significantly contributed to the spread of the ‘Western’ technology of printing in the empire. The pronounced backwardness of the polity in this field was indicated by the fact that, until its demise, the Russian Empire remained dependent on foreign countries (especially Germany) for printing machines, supplies, and paper. When it came to language and national culture, Polish was made into the Holy Grail of Polish nationalism. Polish activists tried to emulate the models of the Western European nation-states. Polish-language theater developed dynamically from the 1870s to the beginning of the Great War in Galicia and the Vistula Land. In the latter region, only in theaters and Catholic churches was it legal to use Polish in public. Polish-language writers, journalists, philologists, and teachers aspired to serve the national cause by spreading the knowledge of Polish and by guarding the ‘purity’ of this language in line with the slightly diverging usages of the AU and Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) wrote the bestselling Trylogia (The Trilogy, 1884–1888, Warsaw) on the volatile history of Poland-Lithuania in the 17th century in order to spread interest in the Polish national cause. Predictably, Polish nobles were cast as heroes, whereas Cossacks, Swedes, and Muscovites were perfidious villains. The novel was simultaneously published in hundreds of thousands of copies in Warsaw and Cracow. Sienkiewicz was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his Quo Vadis (1896, Warsaw), portraying persecutions of Christians in Nero’s Rome. This made Sienkiewicz into the internationally renowned champion of Polish nationalism. The users par excellence of language are scholars. Many of them who were Polish-speaking gave up on Latin at the beginning of the 19th century, and tried not to succumb to the monopoly of German and Russian during that century. Characteristically, most of them wrote in French, but many switched between this language and Polish. The 19th-century paradigm of ethnic nationalism cast them in the role of intelligentsia burdened with the task of spearheading the postulated nation to independence. At that time, there was no clear-cut division between scholars and national activists. The Polish intelligentsia-cum-national movement absorbed the cultural values and preferences of the Polish-Lithuanian

416 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

natio, because it stemmed mainly from the group. But contrary to the selfenclosed estate of nobility, the intelligentsia was an open class which people of all social backgrounds could join if they gained secondary or university education and identified with the goals of Polish nationalism, most fully expressed in the highly politicized role of the Polish language and literature in it. Actually, to be a Polish writer, one had to turn out engaged literature in order not to be accused of being ‘soft’ on the partition powers, or, worse, a ‘renegade’ and ‘traitor to the national cause.’ Polish-language writers dared to breach this unspoken rule only in interwar Poland, when a poet going out on a walk could at last see a bird singing in a tree, and not see a formulaic allegory of the ‘rebirth of Poland.’ Meanwhile, the Polish intelligentsia forged its unity at All-Polish congresses. Between 1887 and 1914, Polish lawyers and economists met at five congresses, Polish historians at three congresses, and Polish medical doctors at eleven congresses. Philologists were a special group of scholars, because they were burdened (or burdened themselves) with the near-demiurgic role of normative shapers and caretakers of the Polish language. According to Polish nationalists when there was no Polish nation-state, the Polish nation lived in its language, and through this language was made and preserved. Editors and readers of the popular linguistic-cum-patriotic periodical Je˛zyk Polski (The Polish Language), established in 1913 in Cracow, sided with Dmowski’s vision of an ‘ethnically clean’ Poland. The aforementioned scholar Nitsch published his seminal article, ‘Granice panstwa ´ a granice je˛zyka polskiego’ (The Borders of the State and the Borders of the Polish Language) in Je˛zyk Polski (1920, 1921). He emphasized the Polish nation-state’s purportedly ‘most holy’ need to assure the perfect overlapping of the linguistic and political borders, and decried the fact that some Polish-speakers were left beyond the frontiers of this just established Poland. Implicitly, he appealed to Polish irredentism in these areas. Of course, he was not to worry about non-Polish-speakers in Poland, and their right to self-determination and irredentism. Warsaw required their full loyalty to the Polish state (Bienkowska ´ and Chamerska 1990: 23, 28; Blanke 1993: 132; Ciesielski et al. 1992: 15–16; Czaplinski ´ and Ładogórski 1993: 18; Dmowski 1902, 1938: 106–107; Hrycak 2000: 142; Janich and Greule 2002: 207; Je˛drzejewicz 1982: 93–94; Ma˛czak et al. 1996: 184–192; Nitsch 1920, 1921; Remnek 1991: 54; Rogall 1993: 132; Szybieka 2002: 176; Tomaszewski 1985: 35, 1985a: 50).

Polish or Lekhitic? The establishment of the Polish nation-state in 1918 reaffirmed the status of Polish as a significant official and national language of Central Europe. The spotty record of the use of Polish as an official language during the 19th century

The Polish Case

417

showed up in scholarly terminology. At the end of the 18th century, this language was still known as ‘Polish’; as of the 1830s, the new name of ‘Lekhitic’ or ‘Lechitic’ (Lechisch or Lechitisch in German, Lekhique in French, or leský in Czech) emerged for denoting it. Apparently, it was the Russian linguist, Petr Ivanovich Preis (Prejs, 1810–1846), who developed this term, having derived it from the Ruthenian liakh for ‘Pole.’ He employed it in his research on Prussia’s Slavic groups of Kashubs and Sorbs in order to emphasize the similarity of these groups’ languages with the Polish language, and the conspicuous difference of these languages vis-à-vis Russian. In the second half of the 19th century, German linguists popularized this term. The ‘Lekhitic’ or ‘Lekhito-Polish’ language was perceived as composed of the following regional dialects: Polish, Silesian, Pomeranian, Kashubian, Sorbian, and Polabian. Another classification made Polish and Kashubian the sole dialects of the Lekhitic language. In the Pan-Slav scheme, Lekhitic (not Polish) was sometimes enumerated as one of the main dialects of the Slavic language. This lack of surety how Polish should be classified was comparable to the even greater confusion in regard to the Czech language. Scholars and administrators were not sure if its name should be Bohemian or Czech, or whether it was a dialect of some Czecho-Slovak language or a language in its own right. In the latter case, the dilemma remained whether this Bohemian-Czech was spoken only in Bohemia or throughout all the lands of the Czech Crown, and even in Upper Hungary and Lusatia. In the case of Czech, this discussion commenced at the end of the 18th century, but continued well into the period between the two World Wars, when Czechoslovak was the official and national language of Czechoslovakia. But following the period of terminological confusion in the first half of the 19th century, Polish regained its position as a well-established language after it was elevated to the status of official language in Austria-Hungary’s Crownland of Galicia in 1869 (Dobrowsky 1936: 72; Kreplin 2001: 38; Šafaˇrjk 1837: 483; Schleicher 1850: 212–213, 1852: 270–271; Stankiewicz and Worth 1970: 38). The origin of the term ‘Lekhitic’ arguably goes back to the Slavic ethnic group of Le˛dzianie (Le˛dzice), who lived northeast of Cracow. The Polanians (Polanie) of Wielkopolska subdued the Le˛dzians in the first half of the 10th century. The former group passed on their ethnonym as the name for Poland (Polska) itself, while the latter group largely disappeared. The names of the Polanians and Poland are derived from the Slavic word pole (field). The ethnonym ‘Le˛dzianie’ was derived from the Slavic word le˛do (uncultivated, or fallow field). Perhaps this reflected the difference in economy between the Polanians who were agriculturalists and the Le˛dzians who excelled in hunting and gathering. However, the Le˛dzians (or the memory of them) survived long enough to be recorded as Liakh, the Church Slavonic name for Pole used in Rus. Beginning in the 11th century, in Rus Orthodox Christianity the devil appeared as a Liakh, which doubtlessly

418 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

reflected the tension between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Until the mid-14th century, the vague borderland separating both denominations coincided with the political border between Poland and the Rus lands. Liakh, as the ethnonym for a Pole, was well established in these areas, where the first pieces of information about Poland were mediated by Rus sources or authors. Although Liakh disappeared from standard Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian, the ethnonym survives in these three languages as a pejorative name for a Pole, or as a synonym for ‘enemy.’ Moreover, ‘a Pole’ is denoted as lenkás in Lithuanian, lengyel in Magyar, leah in some Romanian dialects, and ljahi in Albanian; and Lekhistan means ‘Poland’ in Osmanlıca (Ottoman Turkish) and Persian. Beginning in the 13th century, the Latinized form Lechita also entered Polish usage, as a poetic self-ethnonym for the Poles themselves. After the founding of PolandLithuania in the late 14th century, Ruthenian influence on the Polish language was strong and remained such through the 17th century. Numerous Ruthenian loans entered Polish, and some have been considered especially suitable for poetic expression to this day. The sobriquet ‘Lechita’ was introduced by Cracow Bishop Wincenty Kadłubek (1150–1223) in his Latin-language chronicle of Polish history. Narrating the origins of Poland, he recorded (or invented) the fable of the three brothers, Czech /chekh/, Lech /lekh/, and Rus. After bidding farewell to their father, they traveled, parted ways, and eventually established their separate realms, identified respectively as the Czech Kingdom of Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, and Rus. In the age of nationalism, Polish school textbooks featured numerous retellings of this story, and portrayed the brothers as ‘fathers’ of the Czech, Polish, and Russian nations (Hannan 1996: 60–66; Havránek 1940: 105; Nehring 1879: 467; Rospond 1984: 180; Trzcionowski et al. 2003: 24–25).

Orthography and politics In the 7th century BCE, Greek settlers brought the skill of writing to the Apennine Peninsula. The Etruscans adopted a modified version of the Greek alphabet for writing their language. The Romans, who conquered the Etruscan lands in the first half of the 3rd century BCE, took over the Etruscan script and molded it into what we recognize today as the Latin alphabet. Unlike Etruscan, Latin writing was always left-to-right (like Greek writing). The Latin alphabet had the task of mapping out the sound system of the Latin language. Despite some inconsistencies, it served this purpose well, for the Latin alphabet’s 22 characters corresponded easily with the 26 phonemes of classical Latin. The most glaring examples of mismatch between Latin graphemes and sounds were provided by the ambiguous use of [c], [k], [q], [i], and [v]. [c] could be read as /k/ or /g/, and [q] as /ts/ and /k/. Although [k] invariably represented the phoneme /k/, in writing the sound was most often represented by [c] or [q]. The sound value

The Polish Case

419

conveyed by [c] also changed in combination with the graphemes representing vowels, namely, [e], [i], [æ], and [œ]. [i] stood for /i/, /y/, and /j/, whereas [v] for /v/ and /u/. The letters [k], [x], and [y], and the digraphs [ch] and [ph] were borrowed from Greek, which enjoyed the high status of ‘language of philosophy and social distinction’ in ancient Rome. [x], representing the two phonemes bounded together /ks/, could be replaced by [cs] or [ks], but the Greek loan took hold (like [ph] standing for /f/ that could be easily supplanted with [f]). [ch] represented the palatal phoneme /x/ (as in Scottish ‘loch’), and in Central Europe this diagraph stands for this phoneme to this day in Czech, German, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. But in French [ch] denotes the phoneme /sh/, in Italian /k/ and /sh/, and in Spanish and English /ch/. The spelling of Latin was complicated in the Middle Ages, by the addition of four new graphemes [j], [u], [w], and [y]. But afterward, the convention of using 26 letters for writing in Latin stabilized. These 26 graphemes also constitute the basic inventory of the Latin script. Latin was used for administrative, political, ecclesiastical, economic, and literary purposes in the Western Roman Empire until its extinction in the 5th century; in the Byzantine Empire until the 8th century, when Byzantine Greek supplanted Latin; and in the Western Christian world until the 16th to 19th century, when local languages (so-called ‘vernaculars’) elevated to the status of written languages finally replaced Latin. The shift from Latin to Byzantine Greek was swift, because it fell back at the established Greek alphabet and usage, which predated those of Latin. The Greek language also remained in semi- or sub-official use throughout the eastern half of the Roman Empire and among the elites in the western section of this empire. The change from Latin to vernaculars presented early scribes with two serious dilemmas. First, whether to employ Latin characters to write in vernaculars. In the Byzantine Empire, each language deemed dignified enough to translate the Bible into, was endowed with its own specific writing system (for instance, Syriac, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, or Church Slavonic). In Western Christianity, non-Latin scripts (Runes, Ogham characters) were seen as a throwback to pagan times, and thus slated for extinction. Celtic scribes used the Latin alphabet from the 5th century on, and their Germanic and Scandinavian counterparts from the 8th and 9th century, respectively. Another dilemma was whether a scribe should be more faithful to the alphabet of the prestigious Latin language or to the sound system of a local language, which he aspired to note with the use of Latin characters. Initially, the original script without any additions won this ‘beauty competition.’ Early users of the emerging Romance languages did not see them as radically different from Latin, and for quite some time (until 10th–12th century) considered these ‘vulgar language(s)’ (as they were then known) to be part of Latin. Therefore, contemporary researchers label the language forms intermediate between Latin and full-fledged Romance languages ‘vulgar Latin.’ It was Dante who at the beginning of the 13th

420 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

century legitimized the use of vulgar languages with his poetic oeuvre in the Florentine dialect (future Italian) and theoretical treatise De vulgari eloquentia. This paved the way for the development of vernaculars to the status of official languages that began to eclipse Latin itself already in the 16th century, as happened in the case of French. In their pronunciation, Spanish and Italian remained relatively close to Latin, so there was no need to add new letters and diacritics to represent new phonemes that did not exist in Latin. The superfluous letters or their combinations were employed to this end, for instance, [j] for denoting /x/ and [z] for /th/ in Spanish, and [sc] for /sh/ and [z] for /ts/ in Italian. The shortcomings of this system became quickly apparent in the case of French, which of all the Romance languages differs most from Latin, due to the substantial admixture of Germanic syntactical, vocabulary, and phonetic loans. First, superfluous letters and combinations of graphemes were employed to represent novel sounds, such as [on] and [om] for /nasal a/, or [z] for /z/, and [j] and [g] for /zh/. After the 14th century, French pronunciation changed dramatically, but the orthographic conventions remained largely the same. The introduction of diacritical letters such as [à], [á], [è], [é], [ê], [ç], or [ô] was to alleviate the situation, but contributed instead to the growing mismatch between graphemes and phonemes, for instance, the sound /s/ may be represented by [s], [c], [ç], and [ss], whereas the phoneme /o/ by [ot], [ô], [eau], and [au]. Hence French pronunciation is no longer mapped out at the level of phonemes, but only at the level of morphemes. That is to say, only simple words (morphemes) represented by clusters of letters correspond to their oral counterparts, consisting of strings of phonemes. The situation is analogous in English, but unlike French, this language employs solely the original 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, without the prop of diacritics. In this respect, English orthography is closer to its Italian and Spanish counterparts. However, the attempt to reflect over 40 English phonemes led to an ever widening mismatch between graphemes and phonemes. In English /sh/ can be written as [c], [ch], [s], [sc], [sch], [sh], [ss], and [t], and /i/ as [ae], [ay], [e], [ea], [ee], [ei], [eo], [ey], [i], [ie], [o], [oe], and [oi]. The use of the diacritics employed for writing French spread to Spanish and Italian ([è], [é], [ñ]), but there are fewer in these languages. In Old English (AngloSaxon) and the Scandinavian languages, few runes were preserved to denote specifically Germanic phonemes not associated with any Latin letters. They were branded ‘pagan’ and soon disappeared from use; and nowadays they remain only in Icelandic [ð], [ þ]. Western European influences, first, brought about superfluous Latin letters, diagraphs, and even multigraphs to convey specifically Germanic sounds of the German language, for instance, [z] for /ts/ (shared with Italian), [ch] for /x/, [sch] for /sh/, and [tsch] for /ch/. The system, as in the case of other vernacular languages, produced considerable mismatch between graphemes and phonemes, for example, /i/ is represented by [i] and [ie], and /sh/

The Polish Case

421

by [ch], [g], [j], [s], and [sch]. The uniquely German diacritic ‘umlaut’ (literally, ‘to change the sound’) developed from the superscript [e ] written above [a], [o] and [u] to indicate ‘rounded’ bilabial pronunciation as distinct from ‘open’ pronunciation of /a/, /o/, and /u/. In the northern (that is, Protestant) Germanspeaking polities the superscript [e ] gave way to the diaeresis (two superscript dots) in the 16th century, but persisted well into the 19th century in Catholic Bavaria. Today, exclusively, the diaeresis denotes umlaut in German, [ä], [ö], and [ü]. Already in the times of the Reformation, this convention also became popular in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. But with the development of the Dutch and Scandinavian languages as different from German, the umlaut disappeared from these languages (with the exception of [ä] and [ö] in Swedish). Doubled vowel diagraphs [aa], [ee], and [oo] were introduced instead (with the exception of Swedish). In 1869, [å] was introduced to Swedish orthography to make it more different from its German counterpart. The same intention dictated the introduction of [ø] in Danish. Because German and Swedish were the dominant languages in Finland and present-day Estonia, Finnish and Estonian orthographies have featured doubled vowel diagraphs prominently since the second half of the 19th century, including doubled umlaut vowel diagraphs, [öö]. Moreover, the specific diacritic letter [õ] was added to written Estonian (Ker 1987: 9–25; Lendle 1935: 45, 116, 140–141, 162–166; Porák 1979: 13; Rogers 2005: 170–174; Wolff 2003). In Central Europe, the dominance of Latin and its script came together with Christianizing missions that arrived mainly from the west of this continent. The subsequent placing of Central Europe in the sphere of Latinate Western Christianity also opened this region to the post-13th-century discourse on the dignity and use of vernacular languages. At first, Czech was found to be ‘dignified’ enough for wider use in writing, beginning in the 14th and 15th centuries. This was so because the tradition of Church Slavonic literacy in the Glagolitic script survived (or was periodically revived for political reasons) in Bohemia from the time of the 9th-century Cyrillo-Methodian Christianizing mission in Greater Moravia. Initially (that is in the late 13th century), as in Latin, in the Romance languages, and English only Latin letters and diagraphs were employed to map out almost 40 Czech phonemes, [cz] for /ts/, [chz] and [cs] for /ch/, [s] for /zh/, [∫∫] ([ss]) for /sh/, [r∫], [rs] and [rz] for /rhoticized (trilled) zh/. Confusingly, [c] stood for /k/, [g] for /j/, [u] and [w] for /v/, [l] for /l/ and /w/, [e] for /e/ and /palatalized e/, [u] for /u/, /iu/ and /v/. Probably, [e] (representing /palatalized e/) and [u] (representing /iu/) reflected two Glagolitic ligatures of similar phonetic values, written today as [e] and [ю] in Russian Cyrillic. In the 14th century, the writing of fricatives and affricates became more orderly and the range of spelling variation narrowed; hence, [c] stood for /ts/, [cz] for /ch/, [s] for /s/, [ss] for /sh/, [z] for /z/, [zz] for /zh/, and [rz] for /rhoticized zh/. [e] representing /palatalized e/ was replaced by [ie], and [j] was introduced

422 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

for /i:/ so as to distinguish it from /i/ conveyed by [i]. The latter change was confusing because /j/ continued to be represented by [j] and [g]. In the following century, in his De orthographia bohemica (1406), Jan Hus proposed that each Czech phoneme should be represented by a single letter. The biggest obstacle was posed by the question as to how to write affricates and how to distinguish between regular consonants and their palatalized counterparts. He proposed to do this with the new diacritic in the form of a superscript dot placed above a letter or next to its top part, for instance, [c] ˙ for /ch/, [e] ˙ for /palatalized e/, or [z] ˙ for /zh/. Hus retained the diagraph /ch/ for /x/, [g] for /j/ and /g/, [x] for /ks/, and [u] and [w] for the same phoneme /v/. Hussites, who readily embraced Hus’s spelling reform, replaced the superscript dot with the circumflex turned upside down, still known in English by its Czech name ‘háˇcek’ (literally, ‘small hook’), for instance, [ˇc] for /ch/, [ˇe] for /palatalized e/, [n] ˇ for /palatalized n/, [ˇr] for /rhoticized zh/, [š] for /sh/, and [ž] for /zh/. The superscript dot gave way to the superscript coma in [d’] and [t’] for /palatalized d/ and /palatalized t/ but ˇ and [T ˇ ] retained the háˇcek. The superscript the letters’ capital counterparts, [D] comma replaced the superscript dot in [l’] and its capital counterpart [L’] for /palatalized l/, but this did not allow to distinguish between this sound and /w/ also noted as [l’]; the solution was the slash, which produced [ł] for denoting /w/. In the 16th century the Czech Brethren replaced [j] with [í] for denoting /i:/. The acute allowed for distinguishing between long vowels and their short counterparts, [á] – [a], [é] – [e], [í] – [o], [ó] – [o], [ú] – [u], and [ý] – [y] (before Hus long vowels had been denoted by doubled letters, [aa], [ee], [ii] and so on). The inconsistency was that at the end of words /u:/ was not conveyed by [ú] but by [u˚]. This Czech orthography was adopted mainly in Bohemia, the stronghold of the Czech Brethren, as opposed to predominantly Catholic Moravia where diagraphs and numerous elements of the pre-Hus writing system survived. In the future, this led to naming written Czech of Bohemia ‘Bohemian’ and of Moravia ‘Moravian.’ In 966, the ruler of the Polanian state (future Poland), Mieszko I (reigned 960–992), accepted Christianity from Bohemia. Latin and Czech influences followed. During the 13th century, first words and sentences noted in Polanian (Polish) employed only single Latin letters and diagraphs, which caused ambiguity, because then the Polanian (Polish) sound system consisted of over 40 phonemes, for example, [s] denoted /s/, /palatal s/, /sh/, /z/, /palatal z/ and /zh/, [ch] taken from French stood for /ch/, and Italian [sc] mediated via Magyar also denoted the same sound. Czech influence showed in the use of [∫∫] for /sh/. Loans from the Greek alphabet also came to the succor, [ϕ] conveyed /nasal o/ and [ø] (that is, a variation of [ϕ]) /nasal e/. The Czech influence was even clearer in the 14th and 15th centuries when Czech attained the status of an international language among Slavophone Catholic nobility. Polish nobles considered it second only to Latin. As a result [cz] was employed to convey /ts/,

The Polish Case

423

/palatal ts/ and /ch/, [ssz] /palatal s/, and [rs] and [rsz] /rhoticized zh/. The German influence also showed up in the use of the trigraph [sch] for /sh/, /zh/, and /s/. Jan Parkoszowic knew Hus’s work on Czech orthography but did not want to follow it because he perceived Hus as a ‘heretic.’ Around 1440, among other less influential changes, he proposed [ÿ] for denoting /j/, [l’] for /l/, and [l] for /w/. In 1513, Stanisław Zaborowski in his Orthographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi polonicum idioma quam utilissimus (Orthography, or on the Manner of Correct Writing and Reading, with the Most Useful Polish Expressions, 1513) proposed to adopt Hus’s superscript dot above [c], [s], and [z] to denote the affricates /ch/, /sh/, and /zh/. To this day, his [z] ˙ for /zh/ survives in Polish spelling. Zaborowski’s proposal of placing two superscript dots (diaeresis) above letters to mark palatalization did not catch on. But his recommendation for a subscript dot below [a] for /nasal e/ and a subscript comma below [a] for nasal /o/ led to the 16th-century emergence of [e˛] and [a˛], which still denote the two nasal vowels in Polish. The most renowned Polish Renaissance writer, Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584), marked palatal /ts/, /n/, /s/, and /z/ with the superscript comma placed above the letters, which spawned [´c], [n], ´ [´s], and [´z], still part of Polish orthography. Jan Sandecki-Malecki (1490–1567) and Łukasz Górnicki (1527–1603) recognized the continuing significance and attraction of the Czech language. The former, a Protestant, looked to the spelling of the Czech Brethren due to confessional affinity. Sandecki-Malecki advocated wholesale adoption of Czech graphemes for writing in Polish. The Catholic Górnicki traded the háˇcek for the circumflex to be placed above letters, for instance [ˆc] for /ch/ as opposed to Czech [ˇc]. None of these ideas found support among printers who contributed to the uniformity of Polish spelling that acquired its final shape by the end of the 16th century. It was a compromise between Hus’s system of single diacritical letters and pre-Hus system of diagraphs for denoting phonemes. The Polish diagraphs introduced then and remaining to this day include [cz] for /ch/, sz for /sh/, [dz] for /dz/, [dz] ˙ for /dzh/, and [d´z] for /palatal dz/. A similar compromise was struck in the case of Magyar orthography that began to develop between the mid-15th and mid-16th centuries when a substantial number of handwritten and printed Magyar texts appeared, initially due to Hussite-inspired translations of fragments of the Bible. The letters of the Latin alphabet did not suffice as the Magyar sound system is comprised of 40 phonemes. French influence showed in the initial acceptance of [ch] for conveying /ch/, before the Italian example of using [cs] for /ch/ led to the adoption of [cs] for denoting /ch/ in Magyar. By analogy, the correspondence between [c] denoting the fricative [ts] and [cs] standing for the affricate /ch/, led to the similar pairing of [z] for the fricative /z/ and [zs] for the affricate /zh/. German influence showed in the adoption of [s] for conveying /sh/, as well as [ö] and [ü] for the phonemes shared with the German language. In the late 1520s, first

424 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Magyar books were published in Cracow, when Poland-Lithuania and Hungary shared the same dynasty, which increased the Polish influence in Hungary. The Polish grapheme [sz] was used to denote /s/ (as opposed to [s] conveying /sh/), [dz] stood for /dz/, and [dzs] for /dzh/ corresponded to the Polish diagraph [dz]. ˙ Hussite usage showed up in the marking of the length of the vowel with the superscript comma placed above the letter. The Magyar pairs of letters conveying short and long vowels include [a]–[á], [e]–[é], [i]–[í], [o]–[ó], [ö]–[˝ o], and [ü]–[˝ u]. The French usage of [y] for /i/ was replaced by [i], but [y] survives in the diagraph [gy] for /di/ derived from Italian where [g] often stands for /dzh/. [y] also shows in [ny] and [ty] for palatalized /n/ and /t/. This usage corresponds to Czech pre-Hus and Polish manner of denoting palatalization through adding [i] to a consonant, for instance, [ci] and [si] for palatalized [ts] and [s]. The aforementioned conventions of Magyar spelling stabilized in the 17th century and survive to this day (Balázs 2000: 32, 113–114; Jodłowski 1979: 16–28; Karlík et al. 2002: 166–168; Kiss and Nagy 1999: 57–63; Orło´s 1993: 24–25; Porák 1979: 13–17; Siatkowska 1992: 104–105, 110–111, 118, 136–138). The system of Polish orthography remained largely unchanged in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the end of the 18th century, Onufry Kopczynski’s ´ grammar reintroduced the rarely used graphemes [á], [é], and [ó], but not all users accepted this novelty, because the letters did not correspond to any clear-cut phonemes. The ferment of the political and educational reforms in the final three decades of the existence of Poland-Lithuania prompted several individuals to submit their proposals how Polish orthography should be reformed. One of these projects was put forward in 1814 by Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826), a renowned geologist and organizer of the educational system in the Duchy of Warsaw and Congress Poland. The discussion heated up when Józef Mrozinski ´ (1784–1838), in his treatises published in 1822 and 1824, introduced to Polish thought on language the clear distinction between the phoneme and the letter. He proposed that actual pronunciation should be the guideline of any spelling reform, while Kopczynski ´ respected the already established system of Polish orthography and did not wish to saddle it with too many changes. The ´ two opposed camps clashed also over the letter [j]: Jan Sniadecki, standing fast by Kopczynski’s ´ grammar, called [j] ‘the evil spirit of grammatical confusion.’ In 1830, Rozprawy i wnioski o ortografii polskiej struck a balance between the two camps. Following pronunciation, [j] replaced [i] before vowels (for instance, iabłko > jabłko), and [y] at the end of words and before consonants (for instance, bayka > bajka, kray > kraj). In turn, Kopczynski’s ´ favorite [á] was scrapped. Obviously, these were the TPN’s recommendations, and were not adopted by all users and publishers. In his publishing company between 1826 and 1839, Franciszek Salezy Dmochowski (1801–1871) published writings of the most significant Polish authors with the use of the spelling employed in Linde’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego, and in line with the TPN’s recommendations.

The Polish Case

425

This set the prevailing norm of Polish spelling for most of the 19th century. The uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864, as well as Russification and Germanization, turned the attention of Polish intellectuals from orthography to politics in order to preserve a modicum of official status for the Polish language in all three partition zones. Meanwhile, the leveling of phonetic difference became apparent for [ó] and [u] both denoting /u/, [rz] and [z] ˙ both denoting /zh/, and [ch] and [h] both denoting /x/. But all these pairs of graphemes, although used for conveying the same phonemes, remain part and parcel of Polish spelling. Although these historical (etymological) elements in Polish orthography distance it from pronunciation, they allow for reflecting in writing significant differences in meaning; for example, moze ˙ (meaning ‘may’) and morze (meaning ‘sea’) sound the same in speech /mozheh/. But spelling conventions may also influence actual pronunciation when the written form of a language attains high prestige. For instance, when Czech was revived as a written language at the turn of the 19th century, speakers of vernacular Czech did not distinguish between short and long vowels (for example, /i/ – /i:/). This was seen as one of the telling signs of how much Czech had ‘deteriorated’ since the ‘golden age’ of Czech-language writing in the 15th and 16th centuries. With the rise of Czech nationalism, the stigma of speaking in ‘rotten Czech’ became of such social importance (especially in Bohemia) that speakers acquired the long-gone distinction reflected in standard Czech by grapheme pairs [á]–[a], [é]–[e], [í]–[o], [ó]–[o], [ú]–[u], and [ý]–[y]. Until the 1840s, Linde’s basically historical dictionary of Polish (which aspired to collect all Polish words attested in manuscripts and publications between the 16th and 18th centuries), and the relative steeping of this language in older usages distanced from spoken Polish, became the guideline for the standardization of Czech. The then-accompanying wave of Polonophilia among Czech intellectuals was comparable to that of Czechophilia among Polish nobles of the 16th century. As Sandecki-Malecki had advised that Polish be made more ‘elegant’ through the infusion of Czech lexical, syntactic, and phonetic loans three centuries earlier, Václav Hanka (1791–1861) translated Polish poetry into a heavily Polonized Czech in the 1830s. Another example is ´ offered by Jan Svatopluk Presl (1791–1849) who, drawing on Je˛drzej Sniadecki’s scholarly work, developed Czech chemical terminology between 1825 and 1835. On the other hand, the sound /w/ denoted by [ł] remained only in some Moravian dialects. But initially, the Czech national movement concentrated in Bohemia where this phoneme had disappeared. The letter [ł] had never featured prominently in Czech Brethren publications (as opposed to Polish-language prints), hence it was scrapped from modern Czech orthography in the first half of the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, the letter [w] was replaced with [v] for conveying the sound /v/. In Polish, [v] is retained for a few foreign

426 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

expressions, while [w] continues to denote /v/. These changes made Czech less similar to Polish. In Bohemia during the 1840s, [j] was firmly introduced to convey /j/ only, and the function of [g] (which previously had stood for this sound) was limited exclusively to denoting /g/. Often, Pavel Josef Šafaˇrík is credited with having successfully advocated this change (Jodłowski 1979: 17, 25–26, 41–42; Kloch 1995: 56, 64–69; Orło´s 1993: 41–45, 54). The aftermath of the failed November and January Uprisings was not opportune for any initiatives toward the further standardization of the Polish language. Yet, the increasing fear was that Polish orthography might develop in different ways in the three partition zones of Poland-Lithuania unless a single standard was accepted by all the leading centers of Polish politics and culture. Because the popular belief was that without its own state the Polish nation ‘lived in and through its language,’ such orthographic disunity would be a disaster for the Polish national movement; it might even produce at least three variants of the Polish language. Were these variants accepted as languages in their own right, it would mean the rise of three related but different Polish nations. Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, preventing such a possibility became a pressing need for the emerging Polish-speaking intelligentsia that no longer equated the Polish nation with the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. This new intelligentsia, often of impoverished noble, urban, or even peasant origin, had a hard time finding gainful employment in the partition administrations, and in the partition educational systems in which the role of Polish was minimal (until the introduction of Polish as the official language in the Crownland of Galicia in 1869). A hike in literacy without a single and shared Polish orthography and usage increased the possibility of Polish splitting into three different languages; but the purchase of the six volumes of Linde’s expensive dictionary remained beyond the intelligentsia’s meager financial means. In order to alleviate this predicament Erazm Rykaczewski’s (1803–1873) modestly priced two-volume pocketsize Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego podług Lindego i innych nowszych z´ ródeł (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, Compiled in Accordance with Linde’s [Dictionary] and Other Newer Lexicographic Works) of 1155 pages was published in Berlin in 1866. It partly drew from the similar but more extensive and more expensive two-volume Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language) of 1700 quarto pages, published in 1861 in Vilnius. This was the last significant flowering of Polish language culture in the western gubernias, before the January Uprising triggered staunch Russification of the region. Maurycy Orgelbrand (1826–1904) (brother of Samuel, the publisher of the first Polish-language encyclopedia, Encyklopedyja powszechna) organized the compilation of the dictionary. Interestingly, this so-called Słownik wilenski ´ (Vilnius Dictionary) recorded numerous words specific to the Vilnius region. This was quite an argument for those Polish leaders and scholars who were arguing that the Polish language in the three partition

The Polish Case

427

zones might diverge into three altogether different ‘Polishes,’ which might mean the end of the single Polish language. After the January Uprising, producing another edition of this Vilnius Dictionary in the Russian Empire became impossible. The run of 2000 copies of Rykaczewski’s Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego sold out in 6 years, which prompted the publisher to produce the second printing of this work in 1873. The third edition was brought out in 1905 in Chicago for the sake of the Polish-speaking immigrants in the United States. Until 1918, it had been the most popular dictionary of the Polish language. Having acknowledged the primacy of Linde’s dictionary for the standardization of the Polish language, the compilers of Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego (Vilnius Dictionary) and Rykaczewski in his Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego podług Lindego set out to record only those words which were actually in use in the mid-19th century, including their inflectional endings and examples of usage. Their ultimate goal was utility and making sure that each person writing in Polish would see one of the two dictionaries as the regular reference. It was an easy feat, as only the richest Polish-speakers could afford to purchase Linde’s multi-volume dictionary. The compilers of Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego and the author of Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego podług Lindego also hoped that their respective dictionaries would contribute to the further codification and unification of Polish orthography. The unforeseen bonus of the Vilnius Dictionary was that its copies significantly contributed to the preserving of the Polish language in Russia’s western gubernias after the January Uprising. The first step toward further codification of Polish was taken by the editors of the Vistula Land’s influential literary-cum-scholarly monthly Biblioteka Warszawska (Warsaw Library, 1841–1914). In 1881, they organized a conference of scholars, teachers, and editors in Warsaw to deliberate on the most contentious issues of Polish orthography. The conference obliged Adam Antoni Krynski ´ (future co-author of Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego) to prepare a summary of the discussion, O pisowni polskiej (On Polish Spelling, 1882, Warsaw), which was then presented to the AU. Although time and again requested to take up the role of guardian of the prescriptive norm of the Polish language, the AU declined this distinction. In reply to Krynski’s ´ document, the AU presented its own resolution on the Polish orthographic norm in 1885. It mainly reaffirmed the spelling rules employed in the AU’s publications, but emphasized that these were just temporary, and internal AU recommendations, but by no means, a final norm to be followed by everybody who wrote in Polish. This was not enough for Galicia’s Rada Szkolna (School Council). Polish was the official language of this crownland, and the council had to be able to decide which spellings and usages were correct and which were unacceptable in order to produce efficient civil servants, if nothing else. They had to write Polish

428 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

following a single orthographic standard. In 1887, the AU answered the School Council, stating that the orthographic conventions used in the AU’s publications could not yet be seen as binding for school use, because disagreements had arisen with regard to the AU’s 1885 spelling norms. Meanwhile, the practical question of ‘correct’ orthography became so urgent that, in 1888, Galicia’s Minister of Religion and Education advised that the School Council adopt the AU’s orthography anyway. The School Council convened a commission for working out the rules of Polish spelling. Almost all but two members came from Galicia. Krynski ´ and Karłowicz were invited from Warsaw, and no one represented the Province of Posen (or any other region from the Prussian zone of partition) in this body. In 1890, Karłowicz published his treatise on the spelling of the phoneme /j/, Niezałatwiona Kwestia, Kwestya, Kwestyja, Kwestja ortograficzna (The Unresolved Orthographic Question, Warsaw). Placing the word ‘question’ in four different spellings in the title, he appealed for a truce with the letter [j], so much abhorred by Kopczynski ´ and Jan S´ niadecki. In 1891, the commission presented its Projekt ortografii polskiej w podre˛cznikach szkolnych (A Proposal of Polish Orthography to be Employed in School Textbooks) to the School Council and the latter, in turn, passed it for corrections and final adoption to the AU. The AU published the authoritative version of this document the following year to the outcry of Karłowicz, Krynski, ´ the internationally renowned linguist of Polish origin Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929), and the German scholar of Polish philology and history (who wrote mainly in Polish) Alexander (Aleksander) Brückner (1856–1939). In 1896, they published their protest in the annual Prace Filologiczne (Philological Review, Warsaw), edited by Karłowicz and Krynski. ´ The AU’s 1891 orthography finally did away with Kopczynski’s ´ [é] wanted by neither Galician or Warsaw linguists; but on the other hand, it contributed to the further divergence between Polish orthography as employed in the crownland and the Vistula Land. Krynski ´ presented the rules of his so-called ‘Warsaw orthography’ in his Gramatyka je˛zyka polskiego (Grammar of the Polish language, 1897, Warsaw). The main difference between AU (Cracow) and Warsaw orthographies was in the spelling of such words as gienerał – generał (general), gieografja – geografja (geography), or kielner – kelner (waiter). The former forms, which strike the contemporary Polish-speaker as somehow ‘Russified,’ were used in the Vistula Land, and the latter ones (almost identical with the present-day Polish orthography) in Galicia. The norm of Warsaw orthography was popularized by Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. No multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Polish language was published in Galicia, but the actual use of Polish as the official language of this crownland successfully propagated the AU’s spelling. The deepening split between Cracow and Warsaw orthographies coaxed the AU to form a section on orthography in the framework of the 1906 meeting

The Polish Case

429

of historians and philologists which convened in Cracow. Baudouin de Courtenay chaired this section, and it accepted Warsaw orthography with some minor changes. The AU itself disregarded this decision however. In 1916, when the Central Powers established the Kingdom of Poland, its Provisional Council of State began to develop a system of Polish-language education. The council appealed to the AU to propose some unified form of Polish orthography to prevent any serious divergence between Polish orthographies used in Galicia and the kingdom. The AU’s Komisja Je˛zykowa (Language Commission) agreed to prepare a proposal that would be presented for comment and final acceptance to scholars and scientific societies from all three partition zones of PolandLithuania. The discussion never took place, however, because the Provisional Council of State adopted the AU’s Zasady (Principles of Polish Orthography) early in 1917. The University of Warsaw accepted Zasady, but they were opposed by the TPN of Posen and various cultural and professional associations from the Galician cities of Cracow and Lwów. In light of this widespread disagreement, the AU suspended its Zasady in May 1917. The AU obliged the Department of Philology at the University of Warsaw to rework the proposal in collaboration with Polish scientific societies from the three partition zones. This resulted in Główne zasady pisowni (The Main Principles of [Polish] Orthography, January 1918) with additional explanations and usage hints provided by the Department of Philology and the AU’s Language Commission. The document was adopted as binding in June 1918, shortly before the independent Polish nation-state emerged in November 1918. Quite symbolically, the orthographic norm of the Polish language was unified, just as modern Poland was founded, which clearly indicates how deeply the question of language was ideologized. A year earlier (in 1917), Brückner had published his monograph, tellingly titled Walka o je˛zyk (The Struggle to Preserve the [Polish] Language, Lwów), which, in a nationalist manner, equated the waning and waxing of the Polish nation with the changes in the status of the Polish language in the three partition zones of Poland-Lithuania. It was also a contribution to the discussion of correctness and foreign influences in Polish language and orthography. Interestingly, despite the renewed interest in ridding Polish of ‘foreign influences,’ no purist movement arose. Karłowicz’s Podre˛cznik czystej polszczyzny dla Litwinów i Petersburszczan (Handbook of the Pure Polish Language for [Poles] Living in Lithuania and St Petersburg, c. 1902) remained unpublished, and Aleksander Łe˛towski’s Błe˛dy nasze. Rzecz o czysto´sci je˛zyka polskiego na Litwie (Our Errors: A treatise on the purity of the Polish Language in Lithuania, 1915, Vilnius) never gained any popularity, the author hoped for. The butt of both authors’ criticism was mainly Russian linguistic loans, and also dialectal words and grammatical constructions in the case of Łe˛towski. But despite half a century of Russification, Polish-speakers in Russia’s western gubernias felt quite secure in their Polishdom, shielded by their high social status of nobles, gentry, and

430 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

intelligentsia. In the areas, where Polish-speakers were in minority, they usually constituted the elite. Hence, it comes as no surprise that they saw their regional variants of Polish as equal to those of Warsaw or Cracow, and did not fear that sticking to these variants might splinter Polish into separate languages. Only nationally minded linguists disagreed. Polish nationalists, who had invested Polish with so much meaning in the course of the 19th century (when no all-Polish polity existed), were afraid that any lack of unity in the field of Polish language might harm the task of building a single centralized Polish nation-state. In these circumstances, there was not much time for discussion of the new spelling rules. The need to concentrate all political, ideological, and military forces on the founding of independent Poland was of utmost and immediate importance; orthographic squabbles were put aside. The temporary nature of the 1918 agreement became apparent in the 1920s, when continuing orthographic inconsistencies became apparent and disagreements flared up yet again, leading to further spelling reforms in 1932 and 1936 (Beauvois 2005: 499–508, 694–708; Cienkowski 1983: 347; Jodłowski 1979: 46–54, 158, 167; Nowy Słownik je˛zyka Polskiego 1873: vol 1 I–VI; Spires 2003; Zdanowicz et al. 1861).

5 The Hungarian Case: From Natio to the Ersatz Nation-State

Italian is pleasant, French beautiful, German earnest; but all these qualities are so united in Magyar that it is difficult to say wherein its superiority consists. János Ribinyi (1722–1788) Oratio de cultura linguae hungaricae (The Treatise on the Culture of the Magyar Language, 1751, Ödenburg [Sopron]) (In Fishman 1973: 65)

Estates politics The Kingdom of Hungary had been part of the Habsburg realms since 1526 when the Sultan Süleyman I the Magnificent (ruled 1520–1566) defeated the Hungarian armies at Mohács. The King of Hungary and Bohemia, Louis II (ruled 1516–1526), died in the battle. Due to the dynastic agreement between the Jagiellonians and the Habsburgs, the latter were to take over Hungary and the Czech lands should the former fail to produce male heirs. In the other case, the Jagiellonians could hope for the imperial throne in Vienna. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire seized most of Hungary proper, including Buda (1541), the seat of Hungarian Kings. Foreseeing this outcome, the Habsburgs had already moved the capital of their part, known as Royal Hungary, to Preßburg (Bratislava)1 in 1536. Between 1526 and 1570, the native Zápolya (Szapolyai) dynasty contested the Habsburg rule. The Zápolyas had held the governorship of Transylvania since 1511, and made this region into their stronghold. While the Habsburgs championed Catholicism according to the logic of the CounterReformation, Transylvania became a haven for Hungarian Protestants. In 1568, the Transylvanian Diet of Torda (Turda) decreed religious freedom for Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Unitarians. As serfs, the Romancephone Walachians, who professed Orthodox Christianity, were excluded from this arrangement. 431

432 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Such freedoms could be negotiated among and conferred only on the nobility – the Hungarian natio. These provisions of religious freedom were not extended to Jews and Muslims living in Transylvania, either. A segment of Transylvania’s Orthodox population improved its legal status only when their hierarchy joined the Catholic fold at the end of the 18th century. This was an emulation of the Uniate Union of Ungwar (Ungvár in Magyar, and today Uzhhorod in Ukraine) in eastern Upper Hungary, which had been finalized in 1646. When the House of the Zápolyas died out, their protector, the Ottoman sultan, downgraded the status of their Báthory successors to that of Transylvanian princes in 1571. The Hungarian political and cultural life was concentrated in Habsburg-held Royal Hungary. In 1542, the Hungarian diet moved to Preßburg, which had been made into the coronation town of the Hungarian Kings in 1536. In the wake of the Habsburgs’ reconquest of Hungary, Buda was recaptured in 1686. Between 1686 and 1687, the Hungarian Diet abolished the institution of royal elections and recognized the Habsburgs as the hereditary monarchs of the Kingdom of Hungary. Many a Hungarian nobleman disagreed. In 1703, the Transylvanian Prince, Ferenc II Rákóczi (1676–1735), led the nearly successful uprising of the Hungarian natio against ‘Germans,’ meaning the Habsburgs. The following year the Hungarian nobles of Transylvania elected him King of Hungary. The 1707 diet of Ónod dethroned the Habsburgs and proclaimed the independence of the Kingdom of Hungary. The fighting continued until 1711, when, in the peace of Szatmár (Satu-Mare), Emperor Joseph I guaranteed the traditional rights of the Hungarian natio, and the status quo was reestablished. Ironically, Ferenc II Rákóczi found safe haven in the Ottoman Empire, where he died. Meanwhile, in 1716, Banat was regained from the Ottomans and the reconquest of Hungary was complete. In 1723, Vienna allowed the transfer of the Lieutenancy General (Consilium Locumtenentiale, or the administrative government of the Kingdom of Hungary) from Preßburg to Pest (Ofen in German). At that time, it was a German-speaking commercial center. Across the Danube, Buda remained an imperial garrison town, where only Germanophone Catholics were allowed to settle at the beginning of the 18th century. In 1777, the university was moved from Tyrnau (Nagyszombat in Magyar, today Trnava in Slovakia) to Buda. Six years later, Emperor Joseph II finally transferred the Hungarian capital and the Curia (court) from Preßburg to Buda and the Lieutenancy General from Pest to Buda. Simultaneously, the university moved from Buda to Pest, but Preßburg remained the coronation town for Hungarian kings until 18302 and the seat of the Hungarian diet for even 18 years longer. Similarly, Vienna did not reincorporate Croatia-Slavonia and Transylvania into the kingdom as its historical parts, and continued to administer these two provinces directly. After 1711, the Hungarian lands became an integral part of the Habsburgs’ hereditary lands. The Magyar natio agreed with this development and confirmed

The Hungarian Case

433

it through the 1723 promulgation of the Pragmatic Sanction. They agreed to recognize the female Habsburgs’ right to the Hungarian throne. The Theresian and Josephine centralizing reforms provoked renewed opposition on the part of the Magyar noblemen. They especially disliked Joseph II’s edict of 1784, making German the official language of the Habsburg realms. In Hungary, this measure replaced long-established Latin in this function and allowed not more than 3 years for implementing this change. The traditional order of Central Europe having been endangered by the ideas of the French Revolution, Leopold II had to repeal most of the reforms under the pressure of the 1790–1791 Diet of Preßburg. Not only did he reinstate Latin (or lingua patriae [the fatherland’s language]) as the official language in Hungary, but also reaffirmed the privileges (usually referred to as ‘Constitution’) of the Hungarian nobility, which, in turn, reintroduced a degree of administrative separateness for the Kingdom of Hungary within the broader framework of the Habsburg realms. This de facto compromise declaration of autonomy for Hungary prevented the noblemen from staging an uprising, which could have been seized by a minority of nobles who hoped to gain full independence for their country. Under the influence of the French Revolution, the ineffectual Martinovics conspiracy of 1794–1795 proposed to overhaul the kingdom into a republic consisting of autonomous (and partly ethnically-based) territorial units. The absolutist reaction against the narrow circle of insignificant supporters of this idea unified the Habsburgs and the Magyar nobility in their opposition to any change and to novel political solutions emanating out from revolutionary France. This blunted the emergence of the ethnic dimension of Hungarian nationalism, and promoted the universal values of dynasty, religion, and Latin as the foundations of lasting and traditional order. This alliance between Vienna and the Magyar natio survived even the 1809 incursion of the French troops into Hungary. At the beginning of the 18th century, the rebel leader Ferenc II Rákóczi looked for help in France, but even at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Hungarian noblemen were not tempted to emulate their Polish-Lithuanian counterparts, to whom Napoleon granted the Duchy of Warsaw in the shape of a French protectorate. The Magyar natio had too much to lose. The twoand-a-half-century-long partition of their kingdom among the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and semi-independent Transylvania had come to an end less than 100 years earlier. In addition, the Habsburgs recognized the administrative and legal separateness of Hungary vis-à-vis other Habsburg lands (Kann 1960: 141; 0 1997: 13–14; Molnár 2001: 140–141, 157). The narrow circles of noblemen and educated burghers who supported Josephine reforms and the enlightenment project, which was spread throughout Europe by the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, did not include more than 15,000 to 20,000 individuals. They constituted only 0.3 percent of the kingdom’s total population, but it was they who first translated

434 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

French tracts into Latin (for consumption by nobles), and, as of the beginning of the 19th century, increasingly into Magyar. Obviously, the Lutheran Germanspeaking burghers of Hungarian towns used German translations produced in the Holy Roman Empire. These burghers dominated Hungary’s economic life through the towns because they constituted the majority of the urban population. Politics was reserved for Hungarian nobility, especially for the Catholic aristocracy and noblemen from western and northern Hungary, which had remained in the Habsburgs’ hands when the Ottoman Empire had taken control of the rest of this kingdom. Transylvania’s Calvinist nobility had less say in politics, because Vienna did not trust them and their region was not permanently reincorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary until 1867. Obviously, Hungary’s Magyaro-, Slavo-, and Romancephone peasantry achieved a modicum of political significance only after the scrapping of serfdom in the first half of the 19th century, and due to the gradual liberalization of political life in AustriaHungary during the second half of this century (Barany 1971: 336, 351; Benda 1980: 435–436; Sugar 1958; Szelényi 2003).

Language enters politics Maria Theresa considered schooling part of politics, which the state should control in pursuing the centralizing reforms that were to change the Habsburg realms into a Gesamtstaat – a unitary state. Unlike in Poland-Lithuania, where Polish had increasingly become the language of politics and education since the 17th century, it was Latin that continued to play this role in Hungary. In 1773, the Jesuit order was dissolved. In Poland-Lithuania, during the very same year, KEN (Commission of National Education) took over the Jesuit educational system and replaced Latin with Polish as the medium of instruction. In Hungary, the Ratio educations (system of education) edict was announced 4 years later in 1777. On the basis of the schools left by Jesuits, Vienna attempted to ensure popular education for all children aged 7 to 13, as well as schools and teachers for communes deprived of such facilities. They constituted half of all the Hungarian communes. These ambitious goals were never met but the remaining educational system, complete with the university (moved from Tyrnau [Trnava] to Buda in 1777), proved to be the most impressive result of the absolutist Enlightenment in Hungary. It would probably have been of more significance than the rise of Magyar-language literature and the aristocratic reform movement drawing its ideas from France, had the educational system not been partially dismantled during the years of political reaction after 1794 and in the course of the Napoleonic Wars. The achievements of the Hungarian educational reform were as short-lived in real (if not ideological) terms as those of its Polish-Lithuanian counterpart. After the third partition of Poland-Lithuania, KEN’s educational system survived,

The Hungarian Case

435

though progressively limited, in the Duchy of Warsaw and its successor, the Congress Kingdom of Poland. In contrast to Poland-Lithuania, Latin remained the medium of education in the Hungarian school system, as it had been during the times when Jesuits had controlled this system. Additionally, schools were split along confessional lines – separate for Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Greek Catholics (Uniates), ‘Russians’ (Orthodox Christians), and Jews. Very few schools aspired to be interdenominational (‘mixed’). Because of these religious divisions, various other languages alongside Latin were also employed at schools so as to reflect this confessional variety. They consisted of Magyar among the Catholic and Calvinist nobility and peasantry, German among the urban Lutheran population, Church Slavonic (obviously, in Cyrillic) among Uniates and Orthodox Christians (including Walachians in Transylvania), as well as Hebrew (written in its specific script) among Jews. After the 1784 edict, German began replacing Latin but this process was never completed, and was largely reversed at the beginning of the 1790s. What remained of the educational reform and the temporary imposition of German as an official language and medium of education was the requirement for learners to master the Roman (Antiqua) and Gothic versions of the Latin alphabet. The former was to be employed while writing in Latin or Magyar, the latter in German. As of the mid-1790s, the social and political disruption caused by the French Revolution (embodied in the Martinovics conspiracy) convinced Vienna to roll back reforms in order to bolster the destabilized state apparatus that could be destroyed if revolution spread to the Habsburg realms. The confirmation of the role of Latin as the medium of education in Hungary allowed for a return of some elements of the old status quo, but since the 1780s the question of language had become an increasingly politicized element of social and cultural reality. One (especially if a nobleman or burgher) could not speak simply in order to communicate any more. One had to speak in something reified as ‘a language.’ And soon, one’s choice of one language or another amounted to a political statement (Barany 1971: 334; Kontler 1999: 211–212). This acceptance of language as an instrument of politics also took place due to the reaction of the Hungarian nobility and thinkers to repeated highhanded assertions that the Magyar language was heading for extinction. For instance, in 1777, Friedrich Wilhelm von Taube (1728–1778) opined that German would gradually but surely replace Magyar in Slavonia and all the other Hungarian lands. In his unfinished Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791, Riga and Leipzig, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1800, London), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) devoted a chapter to the Slavs. Herder foresaw that these ‘charitable, hospitable to excess, lovers of pastoral freedom, [. . .] foes to plunder and rapine [. . .] will at last awaken from [their] long and heavy slumber, will be freed from [the] enslaving chains, [and] will use as [their] own the beautiful regions from the Adriatic Sea to the

436 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Carpathian Mountains, from the Don to the Moldau.’ This prediction involved the replacement of Magyar with Slavic languages. In the same work, Herder repeated his prophecy stating that the Magyar-speakers would be diluted in ‘the ocean of the surrounding German-, Slav- and Walachian-speakers.’3 The writings of Herder had been known in Hungary, where they were commented on in Latin tracts, since the very beginning of the 1790s. This made the issue of language into (even more of) a political question when the elites noticed that Magyar was the native language of a minority of the country’s population. For example, in 1853, out of Hungary’s 14.5 million inhabitants (including Croatia), merely 5.5 million spoke Magyar. The idea that a language, as a marker of a nation, should be made into the legitimizing basis of statehood would make the Kingdom of Hungary appear illegitimate. The renewed support for Latin as the official language of Hungary was a logical solution to this dilemma. At the 1790 diet, the nobility of Croatia protested against the proposed adoption of Magyar as the official language in the kingdom, let alone in their own country. They stood fast for Latin. But unlike on the territory of former Poland-Lithuania where ethnolinguistic movements started emerging in earnest after 1864, this process commenced considerably earlier in the Kingdom of Hungary. It was a reaction to adding the novel ideological element of the Magyar language to the traditional assertion of political separateness of Hungary vis-à-vis other Habsburg lands, which rested on purely historical and legal grounds. The kingdom’s non-Magyarophone inhabitants did not fail to take the hint. A Slavonian (Croatian) grammar, Nova Slavonska, i nimacska grammatika (New Slavonian and German Grammar), authored by Matija Rel(j)kovi´c (Mathia Relkovich, 1732–1798) was published in 1764 in Agram (Zagreb). Juraj Papánek (1738–1802) in his Latin history of the Upper Hungarian Slavs (or future Slovaks) stresses that they descended from Slavs that had arrived in this area in the 4th century. His thesis equally legitimized the claims to autonomy forwarded by Slovaks and Croats. Anton Bernolák (1762–1813) in his Latin literary history (1787) and grammar (1790) proved that the Slavic vernacular of Upper Hungary could be made into a distinctive written language. The former monk from Hungary’s Banat, Dositej Obradovi´c (1739–1811), wrote in and propagated the use of the vernacular Serbian language. His memoirs are the first major work printed in vernacular Serbian. Obradovi´c taught the most significant codifier of the Serbian and Serbo-Croatian language – Vuk Karadži´c, and at the end of his life was involved in organizing the Serbian-language education system in Ottoman-held Serbia where an uprising raged from 1804 to 1813.4 In 1780, the Latin grammar of the Daco-Roman(ian) or Walachian language (Elementa linguae Daco-Romanae sive Valachicae, Vienna) was printed for use in Transylvanian schools. A year later, this textbook’s author, Samuil Micu-Klein (1745–1806, grandson of Bishop Ion Inochente Micu-Klein), published his Historia DacoRomanorum sive Valahcorum (Daco-Roman[ian] or Walachian History, Vienna).

The Hungarian Case

437

He stated that there was continuity of history between the ancient Dacians and the contemporary Walachians in the territory of Transylvania (Adler and Menze 1997: 300–301; Cox 2002: 41, 48; Kontler 1999: 216, 226; Petro 1995: 44; Pynsent 1994: 63; Sundhaußen 1973: 12, 72; Viator 1908: 434). During the time of Theresian and Josephine reforms, the Magyar aristocracy started attending the new educational institutions of higher and military learning at Vienna. Apart from ensuring that the future elites of Hungary would speak German and be integrated with the elites stemming from other Habsburg lands, the Magyar aristocrats also acquired French. Through this language, they gained immediate access to ideas and news flowing from Western Europe. German-speaking Lutheran burghers of the Hungarian towns achieved the same by attending Lutheran universities in Wittenberg, Halle, Leipzig or Jena. In Hungary, there was an attempt at merging burghers and nobility so that they would be transformed into Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class of noble and burgher origins) as had already happened in the Holy Roman Empire. In interdenominational schools for the kingdom’s elite, classes were conducted in Magyar on one day and in German on the next. In the second half of the 18th century, Burghers and noblemen alike hoped that they could form a renewed Hungarian natio, a natio that would be transformed into the modernized Hungarian nation, whose members, irrespective of their native tongues, would remain loyal to the kingdom united by the lasting tradition of its institutions. The tide of ethnolinguistic politics dashed these hopes. At the beginning of the 19th century, the burghers and noblemen accepted that to remain the elite of Hungary they had to speak Magyar. The days of Latin as the lingua franca of the kingdom and its elites were numbered. In 1810, no one still saw any contradiction in the inscription over the entrance of Pest’s Germanlanguage theater that announced it in German as Ungarische Nationaltheater (Hungarian National Theater). This was bound to change soon, however. György (Georg) von Bessenyei (1747–1811), who renewed Magyarophone literature by writing fiction in this language, committed his first works to paper in German. The leader of the Hungarian reform movement, Count István (Stefan) Széchenyi (1791–1860), spoke better German than Magyar. Count Lajos (Ludwig) Batthyány (1809–1849), who served as the Prime Minister of the first Hungarian government established in the course of the 1848–1849 revolution, learned Magyar as an adult. His first language was German. Ferenc (Franz) Verseghy (1757–1822), one of the reformers of the Magyar language, wrote poems in German, as did such renowned Magyarophone writers as Mihály (Michael) Vörösmarty (1800–1855) and Sándor (Alexander) von Kisfaludy (1772–1844). These important figures of Hungarian history and literature shared the German language with Josef Dobrovský and František Palacký, who shaped the Czech language and national history, as well as with Jan Kollár and Pavol Jozef

438 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Šafárik (Pavel Josef Šafaˇrík, Paul Joseph Schaffarik), who did the same for the Slovak language and national history. To a certain extent, Samuel Bogumił Linde, the compiler of the first authoritative dictionary of the Polish language, also falls into the same category. Thanks to his German-speaking background and education at Germanophone universities, he employed the standardization paradigm of the German language in order to make Polish into a ‘modern language.’ The very same pattern was later copied in the case of Magyar, Czech, and Slovak, but unlike in the case of Polish, there was no continuity in the use of Magyar and Czech. (Slovak was a totally new language whose creation began in the mid-19th century). The written tradition of both these languages came to an end in the 17th and 18th centuries, so that they had to be, to a certain degree, reinvented anew in the first half of the 19th century. A few Magyar and Czech publications, which came off the press in the intervening period, at best amounted to quite a tenuous continuity. The movement for making Magyar into a written language equal in versatility to German or French commenced in the 1770s and 1780s. In 1772, the writer György Bessenyei published his play in his native language. This is considered the starting point of modern Magyar language and literature. Others opt for 1780, when the first Magyarophone periodical Magyar Hírmondó (Hungarian Courier, 1780–1788) started publishing. In his 1778 pamphlet published in Vienna, Magyarság (Magyardom), Bessenyei famously proclaimed that ‘no nation on the globe has ever acquired wisdom and depth before incorporating the sciences into its own vernacular. Every nation has become knowledgeable by [using] its own and never a foreign language.’ He adopted the strong thesis that modernization can be achieved only through ethnolinguistic nationalism. Thinking of their multi-ethnic kingdom, St Stephen (reigned 997–1038), the first Christian king of Hungary admonished his son that ‘unius lingue uniusque moris regnum inbecille et fragile est’ (the kingdom which has one language and a single custom is weak and frail). He then added that the newcomers from abroad, usually Germanic-speaking settlers from the Holy Roman Empire, not only brought ‘diversas linguas et consuetudines’ (diverse languages and customs), but also ‘diversa documenta et armas’ (documents [that is, novel legal practices] and equipment [that is, novel technologies]) much needed in the realm. This tradition of multiethnic Hungary was approaching its end when, in the name of the nation, politics was increasingly combined with official monolingualism at the end of the 18th century. In line with this attitude, the primacy of Magyar over other languages began to be asserted in administration, education, and public life. Bessenyei’s attitude was not a jot different from that of Kołła˛taj who, in 1773, had made Polish into the medium of KEN’s educational system in PolandLithuania. The continuing tradition of Polish as a language of politics and education dated back to the 16th century. In the previous centuries, it had

The Hungarian Case

439

paralleled and even outshone Latin as a lingua franca of the Commonwealth of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Hence the final legal confirmation of this fact did not cause widespread opposition, unlike in Hungary. In this kingdom, the imposition of German in place of Latin created vociferous advocates of Magyar. In turn, the growing political and social role of this latter language elicited the same reaction on the part of Hungary’s nonMagyarophone inhabitants (Barany 1971: 339; Dralle 1991: 173; Forgács 1999: 142; Kontler 1999: 216; Kósa 1999: 67; Sundhaußen 1973: 12–13; Szelényi 2003: 121–122, 133, 140, 142; Tornow 2005: 323–325).

Magyar: From codification to official language The ‘period of language renewal’ (a nyelvújítás kora) received its initial boost in the form of Bessenyei’s works. In his 1781 pamphlet (published in 1790), he called for establishing a Hungarian Academy of Sciences that would encourage development of scholarship on and in the Magyar language. The French prescriptive example, complete with an academy that guarded the ‘correctness’ or ‘purity’ of a language, won the day. At the time of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, the French language and the French state appeared as the beacon of modernity and progress. János Batsányi (1763–1845) (who together with Ferenc Kazinczy [1759–1831] established the first Magyarlanguage literary magazine, Magyar Múzeum [The Magyar Museum] in 1788) wholeheartedly endorsed the French model of national modernization in his 1792 revolutionary poem, ‘A franciaországi változásokra’ (On the Changes in France). Besides, throughout the 18th century, Central European aristocrats and aspiring intellectuals had already acquired French as a counterbalance to Latin, often perceived as ‘backward.’ The surge of public interest in Magyar is clearly indicated by the fact that while in 1751–1770 only three grammars of this language appeared, they numbered 31 in the following three decades. The effort was crowned with Miklós (Johannes Nikolaus) Révai’s (1750–1807) monumental, two-volume, Latin-language Grammatica Hungarica (Grammar of Magyar, 1803, Pest), which influenced the development of comparative and historical linguistics as developed by Franz Bopp (1791–1867) and the brothers Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl (1786–1859). Révai was also the editor of Magyar Hírmondó, and since 1802, he held the first chair in the Magyar language, established at the University of Pest in 1791. At that time, the German-speaking character of Buda and Pest began to change, though Magyar-speakers did not constitute the majority of Budapest’s inhabitants prior to the 1870s. In 1789, nomen omen the year of the French Revolution, the first Magyarophone newspaper Erdélyi Magyar Hírviv˝ o (Magyar Courier of Transylvania) started publishing in the Transylvanian capital of Klausenburg (Cluj) in answer to the German-language newspaper Siebenbürger Zeitung (Transylvanian

440 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Newspaper) established at Kronstadt (Brašov) in 1784. In 1792, the Magyarlanguage theater opened in the Klausenburg. Nine years later, the Transylvanian Association for the Cultivation of the Magyar Idiom (Erdélyi Magyar Nyelvmível˝ o Társág) emerged in another Transylvanian city, Neumarkt (Tîrgu Mure¸s). In 1802, (not unlike Count Józef Ossolinski, ´ who 15 years later founded Ossolineum at Lemberg [Lviv]) Count Ferenc Széchenyi (1754–1820) donated his library and collections to the Hungarian nation. In 1807, the Diet provided the necessary matching funds for the founding of the Hungarian National Museum and Library in Pest. A year earlier, in the same city, the Magyarophone newspaper, Hazai Tudósítások (Reports from the Homeland), started publishing. Its paramount goal was the promotion of the Magyar language. Also the 1805 imperial decree to publish all Hungarian laws in Latin and Magyar bolstered this ambition. The institutional and conceptual scene was set for the emergence of the full-fledged Magyar language movement. The minor poet and novelist, Ferenc Kazinczy, was imprisoned for six-and-half years due to his involvement with the Martinovics circle. He was freed in 1808 and rejoined the language reform movement as its leader. Kazinczy immediately emphasized that his goal was ‘the elevation of Magyar to the stage of a civil idiom,’ that is, a language as versatile in meeting the needs of modernity as French or German. The following year, in the context of his efforts and undertakings for the sake of this language, he added that the central idea of his work was ‘nothing but nationalism.’ Kazinczy, as Bessenyei, perceived the Magyar language as the basis of the emerging ethnic Magyar nation. Similarly, Poland-Lithuania’s KEN activists saw the Polish language as an ersatz fatherland for the PolishLithuanian natio after the partition of their state (Barany 1971: 336, 348, 355; Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 280; Edwards 1994: 156–157; Forgács 1999: 140–141; Klimó 2003: 81; Sundhaußen 1973: 86; Tornow 2005: 325; Trabant 2006: 246–247). Kazinczy was aware of Herder’s prediction that the Magyar language was bound to disappear, but called him a ‘false prophet.’ Adelung’s works on language, and especially his dictionary of the German language, provided him with guidance how to go about the modernization and standardization of Magyar. In 1819, Kazinczy published his translation of Christoph Martin Wieland’s (1733– 1813) Über die Frage Was ist Hochdeutsch? (On the Question of What Standard German Is, 1798, Leipzig). Wieland proposed that good writers should shape and polish the national language so as to prevent imposition of the speech of the elites from a country’s most developed province as the language of the nation. This became the bone of contention between Kazinczy’s camp of neologists and orthologists. The former stood for overhauling Magyar with the use of native neologisms as well as for ‘cleansing’ this language of Latin, German, and other foreign (especially Slavic) influences as well as dialect-specific elements. The similar 18th-century process of standardizing German based on the replacement of

The Hungarian Case

441

Latin and French linguistic loans served Kazinczy and neologists as a ready-made model. He and his supporters prolifically translated from German and French into reformed Magyar. Conservative orthologists opposed this trend, settling for the Magyar language as it was, with its linguistically diverse lexical stock, dialectal differentiation, and the three written varieties of this language from the west (Transdanubian region), the northeast (along the upper reaches of the Theiss [Tisza] river), and Transylvania. Due to the conservative reaction in the Austrian Empire the Magyarophone natio and intellectuals were barred from participation in politics reserved for the monarch and loyal aristocrats, who would take into account the interest of the whole empire and not its regions such as Hungary. Thus the Magyar language was the sole arena where ethnically minded Magyar nationalists could play out their early arguments. The struggle between orthologists and neologists became most heated in 1813–1815. The moderate camp of neologists won when, in the 1820s, all the significant writers stood on the side of language reform and wrote in this freshly neologized Magyar. In 1825, Vörösmarty’s Zalán futása (The Flight of Zalán) sealed the victory. This epic poem on the Magyars’ conquest of Hungary attained a similar status as a national treasure in Hungary to its Polish counterpart, Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (Sir Thaddeus, Paris) published 9 years later. (However, Vörösmarty’s epic was soon forgotten, while Pan Tadeusz still features prominently on lists of assigned reading in Polish schools.) At the 1825 diet, Count István Széchenyi (1791–1860), son of Ferenc Széchenyi, brought about a law that established the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia), which incurred Vienna’s displeasure. Committed to the Habsburgs and monarchy, he worked for the economic and institutional reform of Hungary within the Austrian Empire. He hoped that like their English counterparts, Magyar aristocrats would take the leadership of the reform. Actually, few did so, hence Széchenyi remains such a towering figure in Hungarian history. In 1827, he founded the National Casino (that is, club or organization), which soon spawned a network of similar clubs throughout the country. Although the network of these casinos was established to spread the tenets of liberal reform, which Széchenyi intended for Hungary, with time it became a significant conduit for the spread of ethnic Magyar nationalism. With the administration, the university, the National Museum, the National Library and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences concentrated in Pest, other centers of Magyar culture waned. The Transylvanian variety of written Magyar fell out of use, while the northeastern one became the dialectal basis of standard Magyar with some additions from the western variety. The poet Károly Kisfaludy (1788–1830), younger brother of Sándor Kisfaludy, established the first significant Magyarophone literary magazine, Aurora,5 in Pest. Vörösmarty, together with other significant poets and writers, contributed to this journal.

442 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

They organized a literary center in the economic and political center of Hungary, and in this manner shaped standard Magyar, which the Magyarophone elite accepted as their national language. Young Gergely István Czuczor (1800–1866) also participated in this circle. He observed the forming of standard Magyar, which, together with János Fogarasi (1801–1878), he would record in the first multi-volume authoritative dictionary at the end of his life. The foremost task of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was the cultivation of the Magyar language and literature. In 1832, the academy published Magyar helyesírás és szóragasztás f˝ obb szabályai (The Significant Rules of Magyar Orthography and Declension, Buda), just 2 years after the publication of a Polish-language work of the same kind (Rozprawy i wnioski o ortografii polskiej). Six years later, the academy produced the pocket Hungarian-German dictionary that omitted many neologisms proposed in the course of the language reform. This reinforced the dominant position of the moderate neologist camp patronized by Vörösmarty. The academy’s 1844 work A Magyar nyelv rendszere (The System of the Magyar Language, Buda) cannot be overestimated as it provided the basis for the compilation of school grammars and practical handbooks of Magyar grammar. Since that moment, the school system spread widely among users the syntax and vocabulary of this language as set by neologists. Orthologists lost the struggle to keep the Magyar language as it was, complete with its numerous non-Magyar loan words and grammatical structures spread out among the written language’s three regional varieties (Barany 1971: 356; Benk˝ o and Imre 1972: 277, 282, 287; Fodor 1983: 58; Kósa 1999: 69–71; Schiewe 1998: 100; Varga 1993: 268). The year 1844 is especially significant if one remembers that then the diet finally accepted Magyar as the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary. The road to this outcome was rather complicated. Already at the 1790–1791 session of the joint Hungarian-Croatian Diet, it was demanded that Magyar should be introduced as the official language throughout the kingdom. Croatian and conservative deputies disagreed. Magyar did not replace Latin, but education and cultural activities in this language spread gradually. Even in Croatia, the Sabor (regional parliament) agreed to the introduction of Magyar at schools as an optional subject. After the lapse of almost 15 years, the emperor convoked the Hungarian Diet in 1825 (Transylvania’s Diet was allowed to convene only 9 years later). It was the sign that the period of staunch absolutism was coming to an end. The language law, which this Diet passed, introduced Latin-Magyar bilingualism in Hungary’s state institutions, but preserved the actual domination of Latin. Despite the Croatian deputies’ protests, the Diet made Magyar into the medium of instruction at schools. These deputies could not help it because, each Hungarian komitat (county) was allowed two delegates, while all the three Croatian komitats together, just two deputies.

The Hungarian Case

443

The introduction of Magyar in Croatian schools was delayed because it was not clear if Croatia could be considered part of ‘the country.’ Traditionally, Croatia had been a distinctive part of Hungary or a separate land united with Hungary through the person of the monarch. In 1715, Vienna had excluded the internal matters of Croatia from the jurisdiction of the Diet, but 8 years later this Diet proclaimed Croatia an indivisible part of Hungary. Between 1767 and 1779, Vienna administered Croatia directly via the Croatian Royal Council. Afterward, matters Croatian were transferred to the Lieutenancy Council, and in 1785, Croatia disappeared as an administrative unit. In addition, the Croatian Komitat of Agram (Zagreb) had been merged with the Hungarian Komitat of Fünfkirchen (Pécs) in line with the centralizing Josephine reforms. In 1790, the organization of the Habsburg realms reverted to the status quo ante. In 1809, Napoleon made southwestern Croatia (less Zagreb and Slavonia) into Illyria. As of 1815, once again, Croatia-Slavonia was a separate administrative unit in the centralized Austrian Empire. Dalmatia, gained from the defunct Venetian Republic, was more closely attached to the empire’s Austrian section. This historical, legal, and administrative tradition of Croatia’s separateness vis-à-vis the rest of Hungary allowed for temporization in the introduction of Magyar as a medium of school instruction, though the 1830 diet made the Croatian deputies accept this measure. In reaction, the Sabor accepted as its program the main theses from Count Janko Draškovi´c’s (1770–1856) political pamphlet of 1832. The Sabor demanded an independent Croatian government and Štokavian as the official language. Also in 1832, Draškovi´c’s friend and the first codifier of modern Croatian, Ljudevit Gaj, wrote the poem Horvatov sloga i zjedinjenje (Croatian Concord and Unity). It copied the refrain of Józef Wybicki’s (1747–1822) Pie´sn´ Legionów Polskich we Włoszech (The Song of the Polish Legions in Italy, 1797). These legions had fought in Napoleon’s armies hoping that he would re-establish Poland-Lithuania. Wybicki’s song functioned as an unofficial anthem in the Duchy of Warsaw, and became a popular military march played in the Polish Uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864. After World War I, in 1926, it was made into the Polish national anthem. In the course of the 19th century, numerous Slavic national movements adopted the famous refrain in their own national songs, namely, ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zgine˛ła’ (Poland has not yet perished). Similarly, Gaj wrote, ‘Još Hrvatska ni propata’ (Croatia has not yet perished). In 1834, the Slovak student in Prague, Samo (Samuel) Tomašik (1813–1887), wrote (originally in Czech), ‘Hej, Sloveni ešte naša slovenská reˇc žije’ (O, Slavs [Slovaks], there still lives our Slavic [Slovak] language). Due to this song’s potent dual Slovak national and Pan-Slav character, it functioned as an informal Slovak national anthem, but was also popular among Czechs and Moravians before 1918. Obviously, the Hungarian administration strove to suppress it. In 1862, Pavlo Chubynskyi (1839–1884), an ethnographer from Kiev (Kyiv), wrote ‘Shche ne vmerla Ukraina’ (Ukraine has not yet perished),

444 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and 2 years later his song was officially performed as a national anthem in the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) theater in Lemberg, Galicia. Tomašik’s song was the national anthem of Slovakia in 1939–1945, and of Yugoslavia in 1945–1992. Chubynskyi’s song was Ukraine’s national anthem in 1917, and once again was adopted in the same role in 1992. The actual beginning of Croatian ethnolinguistic nationalism dates back to Gaj’s newspaper Novine Horvatske (Croatian News, 1835). Seven years later, the cultural-cum-political organization, Matica Ilirska (Illyrian Cultural Organization6 ), was founded. It copied the model of Matica Srpska (Serbian Cultural Organization) set up in the Hungarian town of Neusatz (Novi Sad) in 1826, which, 5 years later, had been followed by the Matice cˇeska (Czech Cultural Organization) founded in the Bohemian capital of Prague. The adjective ‘Illyrian’ harked back to Napoleon’s Illyria and the then current belief that the Croats along with other Southern Slavs were descendants of the ancient Illyrians. As in the case of the Transylvanian Walachians, who claimed to be descendants of the ancient Dacians, and in the case of the Upper Hungarian Slavs, who maintained that their forefathers had come to this area in the 5th century, this thesis allowed Croatian nationalists to justify their claims to political autonomy. Faced with this ancient pedigree and lineage, the arrival of the Magyars into the Danube basin at the turn of the 9th century seemed rather late. The highly ideologized use of the words ‘Illyria’ and ‘Illyrian’ in the Croatian endeavors to win some concessions from the Hungarian government caused Vienna to ban the use of these terms in Croatia (1843). The Croatian aristocracy as well as most of the local nobility from the vicinity of Zagreb did not agree with this radical course of Croatian ethnic nationalism. Gaj and his supporters called them Mad¯aroni (Madjaroni) in Croatian (or Magyarones in Magyar), that is, ‘lovers of all things Magyar.’ In 1841, they founded a Croatian-Hungarian Party. They demanded the use of their Kajkavian written language (different from Gaj’s Štokavian-based Croatian), the introduction of Magyar as the official language and a close alliance with Hungary that would lead to a centralized Hungarian state, which would include the Croatian-speaking ethnic territories. Croatian nationalists replied with the founding of the Illyrian Party in the very same year of 1841. The ban on the word ‘Illyrian’ forced the party to change its name to the Croatian National Party. In 1843, the young nobleman and supporter of Croatian nationalism, Ivan Kukuljevi´c Sakcinski (1816–1889), was the first deputy of the Sabor who dared not to speak in Latin. He spoke in Croatian and in support of this language, ‘A dead Roman language and the living Hungarian [Magyar] and Italian languages, these are our masters; the living ones threaten us, the dead one is clutching at our throats.’ By that time, the tradition of Latin, common to all the natio Hungarica, was irrevocably lost. The staunch support of the Magyars and the Croats for their

The Hungarian Case

445

respective national languages added a linguistic dimension to the historical and legal separateness of Hungary and Croatia. All was poised for a novel politicized ethnic conflict. This kind of ethnonational clash has been fairly typical in Central and Eastern Europe since the second half of the 19th century. At the 1844 Diet, which introduced Magyar as the official language in the Kingdom of Hungary, the Croatian deputies were forbidden to speak in Latin. Only Magyar was permitted. The Croatian representatives left in protest.7 The Diet also decided that Magyar should become the official language of Croatia in 6 years. Emperor Ferdinand I did not confirm this ruling, but secured that Croatian delegates in the Diet should begin to speak in Magyar within 6 years (Forgács 1998: 105; Goldstein 1999: 54–65; Seton-Watson 1965: 178; Sundhaußen 1973: 164; Varga 1993: 51, 89–90). These measures never fully came into force as the events of the revolutionary year 1848 and the Hungarian War of Independence (1848–1849) intervened. Although the introduction of Magyar as the official language was much less contentious in Hungary proper, the process was not unidirectional. The main impetus for this solution was the pragmatism of Josephine reforms and the desire for modernizing Hungary so that it could catch up with the level of development achieved in France or England. Emperor Joseph II wished for the same when he imposed German as the official language of all the Habsburg lands in 1784. But in the case of Hungary, it did not help much, as equally few Magyars could speak either Latin or German. At that time, according to the contemporary estimates that excluded clergy, out of the 136,000 noblemen of Hungary and Croatia who constituted the natio Hungarica, 15,000 actually had a reasonable command of Latin. In 1830, the Diet forbade employing civil servants who did not know Magyar. But this was not a sufficient incentive for non-Magyar-speakers to learn this language. Elementary education was in the native tongue of a given community, while Latin remained the sole medium of instruction in secondary and higher education schools. Magyar was taught as a subject. The 1840 Diet was decisive, as it required all clerical appointment to be conditional on knowledge of Magyar. The same applied to teachers – new ones entering the profession had to know the language, and those already teaching were to acquire it in a definite period of time. In 1841–1843, the komitat assemblies passed a dazzling array of laws that aimed at making Magyar the language of each Hungarian komitat and, by default, of all Hungary and its people. The usual problem was that the Austrian authorities refused to recognize documents done exclusively in Magyar. For a while some documents were used in bilingual versions with Latin or German featuring as the second language. Due to the dynamics of ethnonational strife, Latin was preferred because Magyars perceived the German-speakers as the Other. At the height of the controversy with the authorities in Austria, most of the Hungarian komitats decided to reciprocate and not to recognize

446 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

documents done in German. Until 1844, the compromise was to issue documents in Magyar and Latin if earmarked for circulation in the entire Austrian Empire. Hungarian reformers famously proposed that ‘only one nation can inhabit a country at any one time.’ Hungary’s Magyar elites had already espoused the rhetoric of the ethnically homogenous nation-state (though at that time it usually meant nothing more than the assertion of the primacy of Magyar in administration, schools, and public life in general). The liberal movement for language and economic reform from the beginning of the 19th century gave birth to clearly defined ethnic Magyar nationalism in search of its centralized and homogenous nation-state. As in the case of Polish in Poland-Lithuania prior to the partitions, in Hungary proper close to 90 percent of the nobility spoke Magyar. Even if one included Croatia in this calculation, the total dropped not more than by 5 percent. And at least 80 percent of nobles defined themselves as ethnically construed Magyars. The change from the natio Hungarica to Magyar nation was swift during the 1830s and 1840s. What troubled Magyar ethnic nationalists was that even in Hungary proper (without Croatia) Magyars constituted hardly more than 40 percent of the total population. In 1850, Hungary’s sizeable ethnolinguistic communities of Walachians, Upper Hungarian Slavs, and German-speakers accounted for 19, 15 and 12 percent of the population, respectively. Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894), the radical leader of the reformers and Magyar ethnic nationalists, opined that ‘a Magyar middle estate was what the Magyar nation needed above all.’ István Széchenyi had trusted in the Hungarian aristocracy as the force that would overhaul the natio Hungarica into a civic Hungarian rather than ethnic Magyar nation. Kossuth observed that in Western Europe the middle class was the nation, as the right to vote was limited to propertied males at that time. He wished to follow this model in building the ethnic Magyar nation. Unfortunately, out of over half a million burghers, only 43 percent defined themselves as Magyars. The rest was composed of Germanspeakers, including Jews. This was the reality any Hungarian politician had to take into account. After serving a 4-year-long sentence in prison for radical activities that promoted Magyar nationalism, Kossuth established Pesti Hírlap (Pest Newspaper) in 1841. This periodical became the mouthpiece of Kossuth’s radical camp of reformers. He agreed that the languages of non-Magyar-speakers should be respected, and their use could not be restricted in the private sphere of one’s home and family. But Kossuth could not stress more that once Hungarian was the language of education, teaching sciences in a Slavic language ‘would [. . .] forever remain an absurdity.’ His camp argued that Hungary needed one official language only, as was the case in the most developed states of that time, namely, France, Prussia, and the United States.

The Hungarian Case

447

István Gorove (1819–1881) summarized this line of thought in his 1842 book Nemzetiség (Nationality, Pest). He looked to England as the beacon of modernity and nation-building, as clearly seen from the motto taken from a poem by Lord Byron (1788–1824), which Gorove quoted in the original: Oh! My own beauteous land! So long laid low So long the grave of thy own children’s hopes What is there wanting then to set thee free Her sons may do this with one deed – Unite. Gorove saw popular education in Magyar as the instrument that would make Hungary’s multilingual population into the Magyar nation. To this end, he suggested that the Diet oblige landowners to build Magyarophone schools in every village with a considerable number of non-Magyar-speakers. This free and compulsory education would be directed at children aged four to seven so as to ensure that they acquire Magyar perfectly. István Széchenyi disapproved of the reformers’ forceful Magyarization campaign. His former political supporter, Baron Miklós Wesselényi (1796–1850), who later sided with Kossuth, also appealed for moderation. In his Szózat a Magyar és szláv nemzetiség ügyében (An Appeal in the Cause of the Magyar and Slav Nationalities, 1843, Klausenburg [Cluj]), Wesselényi declared that it was the Diet’s right and duty to pass a law that would provide for punishing those impeding the legal use of Magyar as well as those agitating against non-Magyar-speakers (Gorove 1842; Szász 1989: 48; Varga 1993: 37–38, 53–60, 68, 71, 262, 268, 271).

Magyarization and the rise of national minorities In reality, this evenhandedness faltered. As earlier, the rise of ethnic Magyar nationalism incited the development of its Croatian counterpart, the pressure of the official policy of Magyarization brought about the reaction on the part of the North Hungarian Slavs and the Walachians of Transylvania. The former could look for guidance in organizing their national movement to Bohemia’s Czechs and the latter to the Romanian national movement that rapidly unfolded across the border in the semi-independent Ottoman Principalities of Walachia and Moldavia. Contemporary observers saw Magyarization and the non-Magyars’ reaction against it as a ‘war of races.’8 To prove this point, they repeatedly quoted the oft-repeated Magyar proverb ‘Tót nem ember, kása nem étel, telega nem szekér’ (A Slovak [Slav] is no man, millet is no real food, a cart is no coach). Similar sayings and doggerels equally taunted German-speakers and Walachians. Interestingly, the Magyar word tót is derived from the Germanic term Teutsch, Deutsch for a Germanic or German-speaker. Perhaps when the Magyars arrived in the Danube basin, they first came into contact with the Slavic-speakers

448 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in Greater Moravia and in the eastern marks of the Frankish Kingdom. The Germanic-speakers in this kingdom referred to themselves as Teutsch (Deutsch), and the Slavic-speakers in the borderland areas knew this ethnonym too. In the Magyar usage, tót came to denote any Slav but especially those from Upper Hungary and Croatia. With time, this word acquired pejorative meaning, while Magyar-speakers accepted the Slavic ethnonym német for a German. Nˇemec in Czech, Niemiec in Polish, and Nemec in Slovak come from the Slavic adjective niemy – ‘mute.’ To Slavs the speech of Germanic-speakers was unintelligible, which in the eyes of the former made the latter seem as incapable of speech (Benk˝ o 1976: 951–952). During the 1830s and 1840s, the Slavophone clergy of Upper Hungary began to see themselves and their Slavic-speaking parishioners rather as Slovaks and less as Protestants and Catholics or Slavs and Hungarians. Unlike in the case of Croatia (or, to a lesser degree, Transylvania), there was no historical or juridical tradition that would make Upper Hungary into a separate region or administrative unit. Understandably, by default, Magyar was used in this region as the official language and the medium of education. Between 1802 and 1812, 24 various and usually komitat-level laws were issued to this end. When absolutism was reinstated in the Austrian Empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars Latin returned and there were no further attempts at broadening the already established public sphere where Magyar was used. Liberalization brought about a new wave of Magyarization. Between 1830 and 1843, 28 new Magyarizing laws were issued in various komitats in Upper Hungary, before Magyar became the official language of entire Hungary in 1844. Even if Slavophone Upper Hungary’s nobility invariably saw themselves as an integral part of natio Hungarica, when the novel ethnolinguistic entity of the Magyar nation began to emerge, they tended to side with it. These nobles perceived the novel process of nation-building through the spectacles of estate differentiation. For them, there was no contradiction as long as peasants remained beyond the pale. In the eyes of this nobility, the Magyar nation appeared as coterminous with the Hungarian natio, not unlike in the case of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility who, until the mid-1860s, basically equated the Polish nation with themselves and the Polish-speaking intelligentsia. There was no place for Polish-speaking peasants or non-Polonophone middle class in this early concept of ethnically construed Polish nation. Understandably, many a Slavophone nobleman of Upper Hungary accepted the newly codified Magyar language as his national language and mother tongue to be used in everyday life. Slovak nationalists disparagingly dubbed these Slavophone noblemen of Upper Hungary turned ethnic Magyars as Madjarons. They borrowed this term from Croat nationalists, who had coined it (Mad¯arons) for branding a similar proMagyar attitude widespread among the Croatian aristocracy and the Croatian nobility in the Komitat of Zagreb.

The Hungarian Case

449

The Lutheran Pastor Jan Kollár (Johann Kollar, 1793–1852) and Šafarík, a scholar of Lutheran background, were the first significant Slavic-speakers of Upper Hungary to emphasize the ethnic difference of the region’s Slavophone population vis-à-vis the rest of Hungary’s inhabitants. They did not support any independent Slovak national movement but rather foresaw its union with the Czechs, which together would constitute a part of some Panslavic nation. For instance, Kollár declared, in Latin, ‘Ego gente Slavus’ (I am a Slav), and the members of his congregation he served at Pest spoke Slovak/Slavic and German. The clergy was the only social force, which for the sake of the better understanding of the Gospel among their Slavophone parishioners, took into account their linguistic distinctiveness. These clergymen did not sympathize with the Magyarone nobility, but they did not appeal for some ethnically based Slovak nation, either. Kollár’s 1821 article ‘Etwas über die Magyarizierung der Slawen in Ungarn’ (On Magyarization of the Slavs in Hungary) was written for the sake of defending civic rights in Hungary, and not to promote Slavic or Slovak ethnic nationalism. In addition, the confessional cleavage between Catholics and Protestants still ran deeper among Upper Hungary’s Slavophone peasants than any ethnic difference. Catholics, who accounted for six-sevenths of the population, used Bernoláˇctina while Protestants Bibliˇctina as their written languages, which fortified the confessional divide. The first Slovak newspaper in Bibliˇctina Týdenník aneb Císaˇrské královské národní noviny (The Weekly, or the Imperial-Royal National Newspaper, 1812– 1818) appeared in Preßburg. But during the 1830s, Magyarization pressure brought both religious communities closer together. In 1834, they established the Spolok milovníkov reˇcí a literatúry slovenskej (Association of Lovers of the Slovak Language and Literature) and published their periodical Zora (Aurora) in Bibliˇctina and Bernoláˇctina. The divide was crossed and the ethnonym Slovak (slovenski) started entering the common usage. But the emergence of ethnic Slovak nationalism was due to the radicalism of the new generation of Slavophone Lutheran intelligentsia. Their leader was L’udovít Štúr (Ludwig Stür, 1815–1856). In response to Kossuth’s program of ethnonational Magyarization of Hungary, they authored in 1842 the Slovensky prestolny prosbopis (Slovak Regional Written Request), which was delivered to Chancellor Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859). This document asked the emperor to protect the Slovak language and Slovak-language schools; it further requested a separate censor for Slovak books, a chair for the Slovak language at the University of Pest, and the use of Latin instead of Magyar in church registers. Vienna disregarded this petition, while this document enraged Magyar authorities and reformers. The failure also taught Štúr that for his later political actions he should seek support among Catholic Slovaks, who constituted the vast majority of the Slovaks. At that time, the question of language was not so much pressing for Slavophone Catholics, as priests tended to accommodate the linguistic needs of their parishioners and

450 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Latin remained the sole official and liturgical language of the Catholic Church until the late 1960s. In 1844, Štúr established the Slovak cultural and educational society Tatrin9 in Liptau-Sankt-Nikolaus (Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš). A year later, having placated Vienna with his repeated pledges of loyalty to the Habsburgs and the political order established at the Congress of Vienna (1815), Štúr was allowed to publish the Slovak newspaper, Slovenskje národˇ nje novini (Slovak National Newspaper). In 1846, he published his first treatise, Náreˇcja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaˇ nje v tomto náreˇcje (The Slovak Dialect and the Need to Write in This Dialect, Preßburg), which was closely followed by his Nauka reˇci slovenskej (Grammar of the Slovak Language, Preßburg). With this grammar, on the basis of the central Slavophone dialects of Upper Hungary, Štúr codified the Slovak language as separate from Czech. The first book printed in this language was the second volume of the literary annual Nitra (1844). The previous volume had been published in Bibliˇctina. Neutra (Nitra) is an old city, the beginnings of which date back to the times of Greater Moravia. In his 1780 work, Papánek had pointed to this polity as the possible beginning of statehood-oriented history for the Slavs in Upper Hungary. Four years later, Juraj Sklenár (Georgius Szklenár, 1745–1790) published his Latin history of Greater Moravia (Vetustissimus magnae Moraviae, Preßburg) and the incursion of the Magyars, who had destroyed this Slavic state. Since that time, Greater Moravia had continued to feature in Slovak national mythology as their ‘first nation-state.’ Following this ‘obvious knowledge,’ Štúr had organized trips since 1836 to the ruins of the Greater Moravian stronghold in Theben (Devín) near Preßburg. The historical-linguistic basis of Slovak nationalism was ready. Nitra’s editor, Jozef Miloslav Hurban (1817–1888), was one of Štúr’s Lutheran friends. Hurban famously proclaimed that it was ‘the Slovak language that has resurrected Slovakia.’ On the ideological platform described above, Štúr was elected in 1847 to the Hungarian Diet from the town of Altsohl (Zvolen). It was the first significant political success of Slovak nationalism (Boyen and Massoch ˇ 1851: 10; Duroviˇ c 1980: 213; Giza 2000: 31, 36; Mikus 1973: 22; Ormis 1973: 169–176; Petro 1995: 44–45, 66–67; Rapant 1947: 50–51, 241–246; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 27, 29–32; Viator 1908: 59–89). Transylvania was a transitory case between Croatia, perceived as a separate entity within the Kingdom of Hungary and Upper Hungary, which seemed to the Magyar nobility an integral part of the state. After the victorious wars with the Ottoman Empire and the uprising of the Magyar nobility led by the Transylvanian Prince Rákóczi, Vienna reiterated the religious freedom accorded to the nationes of Magyars, Szeklers, and Saxons (1691), but separated it from the rest of Hungary in order to directly administer this region. At the beginning of the 1770s, Transylvania’s population of 1,066,000 (less the military border with the Ottoman Empire) was composed of 558,000 Orthodox Christians, 140,000 Calvinists, 131,000 Lutherans, 119,000 Greek Catholics (Uniates),

The Hungarian Case

451

89,000 Catholics, and 29,000 Unitarians. Lutherans usually represented the German-speaking Saxons. The vast majority of Calvinists, Catholics, and Unitarians represented Magyars and Szeklers (250,000). But Orthodox Christians and Greek Catholics, who added up to 677,000, or 63.5 percent of the total, were the Romancephone Walachians. Throughout the 18th century, the Transylvanian Diet repeatedly refused to recognize the Greek Catholics (that is, Walachians) as the fourth natio of this land, though at the end of the 17th century, the Orthodox clergy had signed the union with the Catholic Church exactly for this purpose. The political struggle brought about the rise of the Walachian Uniate cultural center in Blasendorf (Blaj). In this town, beginning in 1754, Walachian religious schools opened with Church Slavonic and Walachian as languages of education. This gave rise to educated clergy collectively known as the S¸ coala Ardelean˘ a (Transylvanian School). Thirty years later, in 1784, the Josephine reforms overhauled the old order. German replaced Latin and Magyar as Transylvania’s official language, the Szekler and Saxon autonomous territories disappeared, and the region was divided into 11 regular komitats. In the wake of these changes, the Walachian peasants started a revolt demanding an end to all serfdom obligations, which was crushed in 1785. Leopold II, who ascended the throne in 1790, was expected to do away with most of the sweeping changes introduced by his predecessor. Before the monarch convened the Transylvanian Diet (1791), Greek Catholic leaders drafted the Supplex Libellus Valachorum (Supplication of the Walachians to the Monarch) so as to prevent any worsening of the legal status of the Walachians. The authors of this supplication drew on, and developed the ideas of the Greek Catholic Bishop, Ion Inochente Micu-Klein (1692–1768), who identified the Dacians and Trajan’s Roman colonists as the ancestors of the Walachians in Transylvania, Walachia, and Moldavia. The supplication requested official recognition for the Walachians (Gentis Valachicae) as Transylvania’s fourth natio (irrespective of their religion and non-noble social status) and the use of Walachian names for localities where Walachians constituted the majority of the inhabitants. The emperor passed this document to the Diet at Klausenburg, which indignantly rejected it. Despite this, the supplication became the program of the later religious leaders of the Walachians, and ethnic Romanian nationalists chose to refer to it during the first half of the 19th century. Since the end of the 18th century, Russia regularly had warred with the Ottoman Empire. In the 1820s, Greece emerged as the first semi-independent Balkan nation-state (before gaining full formal independence in 1832). In the Treaty of Adrianopole (Edirne, 1829), St Petersburg made the sultan grant autonomy to Walachia and Moldavia, which Russia guaranteed by occupying both these principalities until 1834. The Russian administration granted both states Organic Statutes (Constitutions), and in 1846–1847, they contracted

452 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

a customs union. Between 1782 and 1846, 37 Walachian-language periodicals appeared in Walachia and Moldavia, and the first daily, Romania, started publishing in 1838 in Bucharest. There emerged consensus among the intellectual and governing circles of both principalities that the ethnonym ‘Romanian’ should replace the erstwhile ‘Walachian,’ as Bishop Ion Inochente Micu-Klein had proposed in the 18th century. Ethnic Romanian nationalism had much better conditions for development in Walachia and Moldavia than in Transylvania tightly-controlled by Vienna and the Magyar nobility. But prior to 1848, six Walachian-language periodicals appeared in Transylvania, including the Gazeta de Transilvania (Transylvanian Newspaper, 1848), which was read in Bucharest. A member of the still active Transylvanian School, Petru Maior (1761–1821), published his Istoria pentru începutul românilor în Dacia (History of the Origin of the Romanians in Dacia) in Buda in 1812. At that time, a controversy flared up whether the claim was true at all. First, German-speaking scholars disagreed and claimed that Walachians arrived in Transylvania from the Balkans in the early Middle Ages. Magyar intellectuals followed this line of thought, while Romanian national scholars stood fast by the theory that maintains the historical continuity of Romanian settlement in Transylvania, Walachia, and Moldavia since antiquity. Meanwhile, Romanian leaders protested against forced Magyarization especially in the first half of the 1840s. Further, Walachian/Romanian and Slovak opposition to Magyarization, and requests for wider use of non-Magyar languages were voiced most vociferously in 1848. It is important to note that the squabble about language did not affect the German-speaking Swabians and Saxons living in Hungary. The introduction of German in 1784 played into their hands. Even when this decision was revoked, German maintained its privileged position in their communities and throughout the Austrian Empire. Magyar nobility had no legal or economic power to apply Magyarization policies on them. It was the German-speakers themselves, who, on the basis of traditional patriotism of natio Hungarica, chose to learn Magyar so as to become part of the forming Magyar nation. This did not mean resigning from German, which Magyar nobility and intellectuals sought to acquire perceiving it as ‘more developed and useful than Magyar.’ Hence, unlike the other instances discussed above, the rise of Magyar nationalism did not incite German ethnic nationalism. The slight exception to the rule were some of Transylvania’s Saxons, who disagreed with the loss of privileges they had enjoyed before the scrapping of their status of a separate natio. Last but not least, Serbs living in Hungary’s Vojvodina (Vajdaság)10 had their important journal Serbske narodne novine (Serbian National News) published in Pest. They leaned more to Magyar reformism than to Serbian radical nationalism. But the Magyar elites remained worried that sooner or later Vojvodina’s Serbs might espouse the program of Serbia’s territorial expansion into the lands of Tsar Dušan’s (reigned 1344–1355) Serbian empire, as proposed in 1844 by

The Hungarian Case

453

Serbia’s Interior Minister, Ilija Garašanin (1812–1874). Magyar nationalists saw this Serbian goal as part of some larger Panslav conspiracy that would help Russia dominate all the Slav-speaking and Orthodox lands at the cost of tremendous territorial losses to Hungary, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire. They did not distinguish between Kollár’s pro-Austrian Austro-Slavism and secessionist and pro-Russian Pan-slavism. The policy of Magyarization that pitted Magyar against all other languages spoken in Hungary overshadowed such significant differences and fuelled what was called a virtual ‘war of languages,’ especially in Croatia and Upper Hungary (Bulei 1998: 65, 72–74; Castellan 1989: 107, 110– 113, 127; Cox 2002: xvi; Magocsi 2002: 65–66; Molnár 2001: 180–181; Prodan 1971: 10, 16–17, 407; R˘ adu¸tiu and Gyémánt 1975; Spira 1977: 2–3).

The War of Independence The revolutions of 1848 were the embodiment of the political hopes of Europe’s nationalists, who called this period the ‘springtime of peoples’ (Völkerfrühling in German). First uprisings, identified with this period, broke out in Palermo and Naples. Further, revolutionary unrest followed on 23 February in Paris, on 13 March in Vienna, and five days later in the Prussian capital of Berlin. On 18 May, the German National Assembly convened in Frankfurt. It was the formative event that translated the ideas of German nationalism into the vocabulary of politics. The Habsburgs were faced with the stark choice. The German Confederation, established in 1815, comprised the predominantly German-speaking states of the former Holy Roman Empire, including the western (non-Hungarian) section of the Habsburgs’ realms. Choosing German nationalism would destroy their multiethnic empire. The Habsburgs opted for fortifying their rule in the Austrian Empire. In the longer run, it meant losing to Prussia the battle for dominance in Germanophone Central Europe. After Berlin defeated Vienna in the Seven Weeks’ War (1866), the way for establishing the first Central European nation-state was open. In 1871, the German Empire was founded. In June 1848, in the Bohemian capital Prague, the Czech historian and national leader, František Palacký, convened the Slav Congress to counterbalance the German National Assembly in Frankfurt. Various Slavic ethnic groups of the Austrian Empire were represented in greatest numbers. Efforts to attract Poles failed, because Polish leaders, like their Magyar counterparts, believed that any kind of Pan-slavism must play into the hands of Russia. In the eyes of Polish nationalists, the Russian Empire was the largest obstacle in the way of re-establishing Poland-Lithuania as a Polish nation-state. Like the Magyars, Polish leaders were not interested in Austro-Slavism, which, if successful, would prevent incorporation of Galicia into the future Polish nation-state. The sudden weakening of Vienna’s hold on the empire was the moment when Kossuth forced his radical program on the Preßburg Diet. On March 15, the

454 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Twelve Points were published without permission of the censor, together with the flamboyant National Song by the poet Sándor Pet˝ ofi (1823–1849), Rise, Magyar! is the country’s call! The time has come, say one and all: Shall we be slaves, shall we be free? This is the question, now agree! For by the Magyar’s God above We truly swear, We truly swear the tyrant’s yoke No more to bear! [. . .] Since then, Pet˝ ofi overshadowed Vörösmarty in stature as a national poet of the Magyars. The emperor bowed to these demands and allowed for the forming of a separate Hungarian government and National Assembly (in place of the Diet), establishment of the Hungarian national bank and national army (Honvédség11 ), introduction of the national currency (forint), and the union with Transylvania. Despite his bitter disagreements with Kossuth, Széchenyi also joined the first Hungarian government headed by Count Lajos Batthyány (1806–1849). Against the interest of the Magyar nobility, the government did away with serfdom. It learned from the Polish mistakes. The Polish 1830–1831 uprising12 collapsed and the 1846 one never took off, because the PolishLithuanian nobility refused to free their serfs. By excluding the peasantry from the commonality of the nation, Polish leaders conserved the Polish-Lithuanian natio, and, thus, prevented the emergence of the Polish ethnic nation until the end of the 19th century. In contrast, already in 1848, Magyarophone peasants began to enter the Magyar nation and espouse Magyar nationalism. (The Polish national leaders failed to learn this lesson again. Hence, the 1863–1864 uprising was defeated, because not the Polish-Lithuanian nobles, but the tsar freed peasants from serfdom.) Encouraged by the Magyar success, Hungary’s other national movements also tabled their own demands. Vienna, preoccupied with the revolutionary events in Austria, Venetia, and Bohemia, did not intervene. The emperor trusted that the avalanche of various national demands in Hungary would check the radicalism of the Magyars. At the end of March 1848, the Sabor (Croatian National Assembly in Zagreb) adopted the National Demands (Narodna zahtijevania), which appealed for the establishment of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia within the Hungarian framework of the Austrian Empire. Basically, Croatian leaders wanted the same rights as the Magyars had already won. On 3–5 May, a meeting at Blasendorf, known as the National Assembly, gathered over 40,000 Romanians (Walachians). They protested against the incorporation of Transylvania into Hungary, demanded official status for the

The Hungarian Case

455

Romanian language in Transylvania, as well as an equal status as natio for the Transylvanian Romanians. On 11 May, the Slovak general gathering in LiptauSaint-Nikolaus adopted a declaration known as the Demands of the Slovak Nation (Žiadosti slovenskeho naroda). Slovak leaders demanded official recognition of the Slovaks as a nation, official status for the Slovak language in Upper Hungary’s predominantly Slovakophone areas, reorganization of Hungary into a country of equal nations each with its own parliament, and equal representation for all the nations living in Hungary. To complicate matters even further, Serbs demanded autonomy, and Transylvanian Saxons, like Romanians, opposed union of their region (Szász szék, or Saxon autonomous territory in Transylvania) with Hungary. The Hungarian government rejected the demands of the national minorities. This made the minority leaders distrustful of Hungary and fortified their support for the emperor as the only force that could prevent the emergence of a unified Magyar nation-state. Serbs in Banat (eastern Vojvodina) embarked on a revolt against royal (Magyar) forces. The Slovaks were on the brink of rebellion. Later, they even organized a group of pro-Austrian volunteers, who entered Upper Hungary from Moravia, but proved an ineffectual force that failed to instigate a Slovak military rising. Actually, more Slovaks joined the Magyar Honvéd militia. Similarly, the Slovak National Council’s 19 September declaration of separation of Slovakia from Hungary did not elicit any meaningful support among Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speakers. Vienna helped to equip the Croatian army commanded by the Ban (governor) of Croatia, General Josip Jelaˇci´c (also Josef Jellachich or Jellaˇci´c, 1801–1859), who attacked Hungary on 11 September. Soon Austrian forces joined the war.13 In December, Francis Joseph ascended the throne. Magyar leaders refused to recognize him as king because he had not been crowned in Hungary. At the end of February 1849, the emperor abolished the 1848 laws that had legalized the Magyar revolution. On 13 April, the Defence Committee presided by Kossuth, declared the independence of Hungary and deposed the Habsburgs. That is why this war is known as the ‘War of Independence’ in Magyar historiography. The two Polish generals, Józef (József) Bem (1794–1850) and Henryk Dembinski ´ (1791–1864), commanded Magyar armies in which numerous Polish volunteers also served. Russia was afraid that, if the Magyars won the war, the wave of national revolution could spill into their Kingdom of Poland. Bearing this possibility in mind, at Vienna’s request, Russian imperial forces (300,000 troops in total) fell on the Magyar armies in the second half of June. Kossuth fled the country. On August 13, the Magyar troops surrendered to the Russians at Világos (¸Siria). This defeat sent a wave of refugees, mostly aristocrats and intellectuals, to Western Europe, but also to the Ottoman Empire. Around one thousand of them formed the center of Magyar intellectual life in Western

456 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Europe. A similar group of Polish-Lithuanian émigrés had been active there since the defeat of their 1830–1831 uprising. To forestall the unavoidable, on 29 July, at its last refuge, Szegedin (Szeged), the Parliament emancipated Jews and passed the first law on national minorities. This law gave minorities the freedom to use their mother tongue at the local administrative level, in courts, in elementary education, and even in these detachments of the national guard located in non-Magyarophone komitats. Later, Kossuth and his Magyar émigré political circle proposed the formation of a Danubian Confederation of autonomous nation-states for all of Hungary’s ethnic nations. All these measures and ideas came too late to save independent Hungary. The same mistake was repeated by the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Charles I (ruled 1916–1918). He proclaimed federalization of the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy on 16 October 1918, a mere half month before the volley of declarations of independence that created numerous nation-states after World War I. This proclamation came too late to save Austria-Hungary (Castellan 1989: 128–129; Goldstein 1999: 68; Magocsi 2002: 78–79; Mannová and Holec 2000: 196; Molnár 2001: 184–195, 246; Schulze 1998: 124–125; Seton-Watson 1965: 187; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 33–34).

Magyar: The state language In the aftermath of the revolutions and the Hungarian War of Independence, it was Vienna’s turn to suppress nationalists and supporters of federalism. In 1850, Francis Joseph, like his late 18th-century predecessor Joseph II, set out on the absolutist policy of centralization. Transylvania, Croatia-Slavonia, and Vojvodina (renamed as the Serbian Voivodeship) were separated from Hungary. The kingdom’s 46 historical komitats were replaced by five bureaucratic districts. No legislative bodies were convened. German was imposed as the official language of all the Austrian Empire. This period of ‘neo-absolutism’ lasted for a decade. In 1859, Austria suffered a crushing defeat in Lombardia, unable to prevent the creation of the Italian nation-state. Vienna lost this province as well as dynastic control over Tuscany, Modena and Lucca to Italy. In order to remain in the European club of great powers, the emperor set out on the course of liberalization in 1860, and the following year democracy began in the Austrian Empire with the founding of the bicameral Reichsrat (Imperial Parliament) in Vienna. With these measures a semblance of the pre-1848 order was introduced. But the concessions were too little for Magyar, Croatian, and Czech politicians who refrained from participating in the Reichsrat. This continual obstruction of its activities led the emperor to suspend it in 1865. A year later, Prussia defeated the Austrian Empire that stood in the way of the German nation-state. Simultaneously, Vienna lost Venetia.

The Hungarian Case

457

In order to preserve the empire, Francis Joseph could federalize it or share power with a partner. He chose the latter solution, accepting Ferenc Deák’s (1803–1876) 1865 proposal of Ausgleich (Kiegyezés in Magyar, or compromise). In 1867, the Hungarian National Assembly assembled in Pest and the Reichsrat in Vienna agreed to transform the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy, composed of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat. The latter part of the monarchy became known as the Austrian Empire. The Magyars received their own nation-state, composed of historical Hungary, including Transylvania, Croatia, and the Serbian Voivodeship (Vojvodina). Organizing their state, Magyar politicians hoped to emulate the French centralistic model, complete with one language only. In 1873, Buda, Pest, and Óbuda were merged into the new Hungarian capital of Budapest. What united Hungary with Austria were the common institutions of the army, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the person of the monarch, who reigned as king in Hungary and as emperor in Austria. Kossuth prophesied that the 1867 Ausgleich would prove disastrous for the Magyar nation. On the contrary, Hungary developed as never before. The only dent in the unity of the Magyar nation-state was Croatia-Slavonia. Due to the province’s long-established status of legal separateness, the Hungarian government had to contract a 1868 Nagodba (compromise) with the Croatian Sabor. This document closely followed the Ausgleich. The Croats were officially recognized as a nation with a right to cultural autonomy within Hungary, but had to cede the Adriatic port Fiume (Rijeka, which was incorporated directly into Hungary), and agree to the subjection of the Croatian ban to the Hungarian government. Unlike in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, the Nagodba was a compromise of unequal partners. The Nagodba declared the founding of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, but it remained a dead letter in the case of the last province. Vienna did not agree to any union of Croatia-Slovenia with Dalmatia, which remained in the monarchy’s Austrian section. But the Croats openly, and Vienna and Budapest tacitly treated all three provinces as the Croatian nation-state. (This was a predicament similar to that suffered by Czech nationalism, which futilely appealed to Vienna to re-create a union of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia). In addition, to ensure the working majority in the Reichsrat in the face of the growing Czech obstructionism, Vienna also granted broad cultural and political autonomy to the Poles in Galicia. In this general shape, Austria-Hungary survived until its dissolution in 1918. Numerous Magyar and Polish politicians served as common ministers of AustriaHungary and prime ministers of the Austrian government. (On the contrary, only ethnic Magyars staffed the governments of Hungary.) The Austro-German alliance fortified the position of the Dual Monarchy in Europe and shielded Vienna’s interests in the Balkans from Russian, which hoped to extend its

458 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

influence there among Orthodox Slavic-speakers. In 1878, Austria-Hungary occupied the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina and annexed it in 1908. This made the Dual Monarchy a main player in the Balkans and also in the national politics of the South Slavs. Hungary reached its zenith of liberalism and stability during the long term of Kálmán Tisza’s (1830–1902) government, which lasted from 1875 to 1890. In 1896, Hungary celebrated the Millennium of the Magyar conquest of their country. No efforts were spared to make this event memorable. The Magyar nation rejoiced in its Magyar nation-state. The attraction of this success was such that almost one million Hungarian Jews adopted Magyar as their mother tongue, as they did German in Germany and Austria. (A similar feat in willing cultural and linguistic assimilation of Jews was not repeated further east until the establishment of the Soviet Union.) Other ethnolinguistic national minorities living in Hungary opposed Magyarization, which (especially after 1895) became official policy despite the 1868 Nationalities Law that guaranteed the minorities elementary education in their mother tongues. The 1868 law on popular education provided by the state did not help the minorities, because it furthered the use of Magyar in state schools. Initially, it did not matter much because most schoolchildren attended denominational schools owned by various Churches. These schools provided education in minority languages. In 1907, elementary education was made free and compulsory, but it was to be provided only through the medium of the Magyar language. By that time, most Churches had bowed to the Magyarizing pressure and withdrawn minority languages as a medium of instruction from the denominational schools. The only possibility for education in minority languages was in private schools founded by the minorities themselves in the face of the staunch opposition of the Hungarian state administration. The idea of Magyar ethnic nationalism did not merge well with the reality on the ground. Half of Hungary’s inhabitants did not speak Magyar (the influence of Magyarization was especially weak in rural areas) and refused to consider themselves members of the ethnically-defined Magyar nation. To the minorities’ (usually narrow) elites it was the betrayal of the centuries-long ideal of natio Hungarica, and left them no choice but to become leaders of various emerging ethnolinguistic national movements, which coalesced in the face of increasingly forced Magyarization. Magyarization worked best in the case of Jews, who did not have their own national movement (until the turn of the 20th century) or nation-state to which they could look for help and support (Israel was founded in 1948). Almost all of them spoke Magyar and over 55 percent identified themselves as Magyars (in 1910). Between 1867 and 1918, 75,000 changes of surnames were registered (quite a rise from 2179 surname changes in the years 1835–1866). Almost 60 percent of the changes were carried out with regard to Jewish surnames (almost 20 percent with regard to German surnames, almost

The Hungarian Case

459

15 percent with regard to Slovak surnames, 3.5 percent with regard to Magyar surnames, 3 percent with regard to Romanian surnames, and 2 percent with regard to Croatian surnames). Out of all the non-Magyars (including Jews), only 16.4 percent of them knew Magyar in 1890, and only 0.4 percent more 10 years later. The share of Magyars in Hungary’s population (without Croatia) rose from 41.5 percent in 1850 to 46.7 percent in 1880 and 54.5 percent in 1910. (Hence, Magyarization worked, though more slowly than Budapest hoped.) But should Croatia be included in this calculation, the Magyars constituted a mere 45.4 percent of Hungary’s population in 1900. During World War I, it proved too weak a legitimization for historical Hungary put in the role of Magyar nation-state. The Allies agreed that Central Europe should be reorganized on ethnonational basis. There was no place for multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Austria-Hungary on the political map of Europe. In autumn 1918, a cascade of declarations of independence followed. Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Southern Slavs proclaimed their separation. Washington recognized the right of Transylvania’s Romanians to self-determination. Rump Austria declared its independence. Hungary belatedly separated itself from its king, hoping to preserve territorial integrity. In agreement with the provisions of the Trianon Treaty (1920), Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and three-fifths of its population to Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Austria, Poland, and Italy. This rump Hungary became almost ethnically homogenous, with 90 percent of Magyars, 7 percent German-speakers, and 2 percent Slovaks. On the other hand, the Magyars remaining beyond this new Hungary’s borders, as national minorities, numbered, 1.7 million in Romania, 1 million in Czechoslovakia, 0.6 million in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and 26 thousand in Austria (Goldstein 1999: 81–84; Gyáni et al. 2004: 286; Kneževi´c 1989: 91; Kochanowski 1997: 67–68; Kontler 1999: 282; Kopy´s 2001: 145–146; Molnár 2001: 202, 207–227, 242, 246–248; Puttkamer 2004: 98; Szász 1989: 48; Viator 1908: 434–435). The political events of the years 1849–1918 are duly reflected in the development of the Magyar language. After 1849, German became the sole language of administration as well as the medium of education at the University of Pest and in secondary education. In 1856, it was decided to Germanize all secondary education within the following 6 years. All these Germanizing measures put Magyar on defence. As in the Polish case, when there was no state or even region identified as Hungary, language became the Magyars’ ersatz fatherland. Not surprisingly, the extreme purism of newly coined Magyar neologisms was the answer to Germanization. At that time, the vocabulary of natural sciences and technology was Magyarized (40,000 terms), however, never to the point of replacing international terminology derived from Latin and Greek. Magyarophone secondary education was never fully Germanized, because political

460 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

liberalization intervened in 1860. It was allowed to reintroduce Magyar in administration and secondary education. But Vienna’s acceptance extended also to Croatian and Slovak, and 3 years later, to Romanian too. Interestingly, Sabor deputies had to choose the name of this language. From the proposed ‘vernacular,’ ‘Croatian-Slavonian,’ ‘Croatian or Serbian,’ and ‘Yugoslavian,’ they settled for ‘Yugoslavian.’ Vienna saw it as an unjustified political statement, which upheld the political significance of the 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement which proclaimed the Serbo-Croatian language. The following year, ‘Croatian’ was affirmed as this language’s proper name, which disentangled it from the politics of Yugoslavism and Pan-Slavism, seen as irredentist or irresponsible by the Austro-Hungarian administration. In 1867, Magyar was elevated to the rank of sole official state language of Hungary with the partial exception of Croatia-Slavonia, where, in line with the provisions of the 1868 Nagodba, Croatian was to fulfill the role of the official language. With regard to other languages, the 1868 Nationality Law allowed for their unhindered use in elementary and secondary education, communal assemblies, and churches. This law specifically did not apply to Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia but reaffirmed the right of Croatian deputies to speak in their language in the Hungarian Parliament. After 1867, all place-names were Magyarized and all university-level education was to be transmitted via the medium of this language at the University of Budapest, construed as the Magyar National University. The only exception to the official use of Magyar was the army’s language of command; German remained in this position throughout Austria-Hungary. Magyar politicians took it as an offence to their nation, but the language of command was limited to some 150 specialized words, the proficient use of which never actually allowed a soldier to speak fluent German. The secure position of Magyar in post-Ausgleich Hungary did not mean that linguistic purism disappeared. Magyar intellectuals still perceived their national language as a poorer cousin of German in the Dual Empire. On the other hand, the national-linguistic aspirations of the minorities made the Magyar language appear as a beleaguered fortress. As a result, the trend was to ‘guard’ the language against any foreign influences. Understandably, the journal devoted to the development of Magyar was named Magyar Nyelv˝ or (The Guardian of the Magyar Language). It was established in 1872 and is published to this day. Within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Magyar Nyelvi Bizottság (Commission for the Magyar Language) was founded in order to oversee and coordinate Magyar language politics in Hungary. Between 1862 and 1874, the six volumes of the first authoritative dictionary of Magyar, A magyar nyelv szótára (The Dictionary of the Magyar Language), were published in Pest. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences supported this groundbreaking work authored by István Czuczor and János Fogarasi. Unlike the similar dictionaries of the Polish and Czech languages (by Linde and Jungmann

The Hungarian Case

461

respectively), their Magyar counterpart was exclusively monolingual. In that it was similar to Jan Karłowicz’s (1900–1927) Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. Czuczor and Fogarasi’s Magyar dictionary constituted the necessary basis for the introduction of Magyar as the official language in almost all the public spheres of life in Hungary. Other lexicographic works supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences followed soon in emulation of similar dictionaries that made Western European languages into ‘scientifically established entities.’ In 1890–1893, Gábor Szarvas (1832–1895) and Zsigmond Simonyi’s (1853–1919) three-volume Magyar nyelvtörténeti szótár (Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language) was published. Each word in it is followed by its equivalent in Latin and German not unlike in Linde’s and Jungamann’s dictionaries. Earlier than Karłowicz’s dictionary of the Polish dialects, the two volumes of József Szinnyei’s (1857–1943) Magyar tájszótár (Dictionary of the Magyar Dialects) came off the press in 1893 and 1901, respectively. In 1914, the publication of Zoltán Gombocz (1877–1935) and János Melich’s Magyar etymológiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language) commenced but was never completed. Not surprisingly, all these works appeared in Budapest, which had been established as the very center of Magyar political, cultural, and economic life since the 1820s. While during the Great War Central Europe faced radical transformation in agreement with the national principle, Magyar, out of the other Central European languages, enjoyed the widest range of lexicographic and scholarly works that codified it and standardized its usage. Only German lexicography surpassed its Hungarian counterpart in this region of the old continent. An increase in the number of graduates from Magyarophone universities facilitated the process of standardization of the Magyar language and the dynamic spread of its use. A second Magyar-language university was established at Kolozsvár (Cluj, Klausenburg) in 1872. Two others were set up in 1910 in Pozsony (Bratislava, Preßburg) and Debrecen. In 1895, the Eötvös College was founded in Budapest, modeled on Paris’s famous École Normale Supérieure. This college was named after Baron József Eötvös (1813–1871). He had introduced popular elementary education in Hungary, and together with Déak conceived the 1868 Nationality Law. The cultural, economic, and social life of the Magyar nation was played out in the arena of various associations. Their number skyrocketed from 579 in 1862 to 4000 in 1881 and 10,000 in 1914. The publication of A magyar nyelv szótára was paralleled by the production of the 13 volumes of the first Magyar encyclopedia, Egyetemes Magyar enciklopédia (The Universal Magyar Encyclopedia). From the denominational viewpoint, it was a Catholic encyclopedia that appeared between 1859 and 1876 at Eger. In its scope, this work followed the example of the Czech-language encyclopedia Slovník nauˇcný. However, it was only A Pallas nagy lexikona (Pallas Great Lexicon) that fully emulated the German-language conversation lexicon in extent (800page volumes) as well as in the illustrated material. This work of 18 volumes was

462 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

brought out at Budapest in 1893–1904. This encyclopedia’s enlarged edition in 21 volumes was published in 1925. Like Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný in the Czech Republic, A Pallas nagy lexikona remains the most comprehensive encyclopedia in its country. Kálmán Szily’s (1838–1924) two-volume A Magyar nyelvújítás szótára (Dictionary of the Magyar Language Reform, 1902–1908, Budapest) gathered the lexical achievement of the language reform. Out of the 10,000 entries recorded 8,000 remain in current use. The broadly defined language reform movement produced around 100,000 coinages between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Magyar thrives on these words standards. The 20th-century coinages (prior to the fall of communism in 1989) accounted for less than 7 percent of all lexemes in use. The number of foreign words did not exceed the mark of 3 percent. These changes render many 18th-century Magyar texts (particularly specialist ones) hardly intelligible to modern users of this language, especially due to the expunging of Latin and German linguistic loans (Castellan 1989: 144; Fodor 1983: 61–62, 79–84; Forgács 1998: 106; Goldstein 1999: 76; Janich and Greule 2002: 324–325; Kósa 1999: 71; Molnár 2001: 221–223, 230, 234; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 36; Viator 1908: 429–433). Paradoxically, when there was no political, cultural, or social force to endanger the elevated position of Magyar, the perceived insecurity of Magyar was at its highest. In 1905, it was even proposed that a Central Office for the Protection of the Magyar Language should be founded. Probably, it was a function of Budapest’s policy of Magyarization. This policy took off after Déak’s and Etövös’s influence on Hungarian politics waned. The symbolic moment is 1875 when Tisza became the prime minister. In the same year, he ordered the closing of the Matica slovenská (Slovak Cultural Organization), which had been established in 1863 in Sankt Martin (Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). A year earlier, the three Slovaklanguage secondary schools were dissolved. Upon taking office, Tisza famously declared that ‘there can be only one visible nation in the frontiers of Hungary.’ His stance was the logical conclusion of following the tenet of Magyar politikai nemzet (Hungarian/Magyar political nation) developed in the 1830s. It followed the French definition of nation that claimed all the inhabitants of France as the French nation. This did not blind Magyar politicians to the fact that one could distinguish various groups among Hungary’s inhabitants, varying from one another in language or faith. But it made them into ‘peoples’ not nations. It was, however, up to the Magyars to mold the cultural and institutional shape of Hungary. In 1908, Kálmán Széll (1843–1915), formerly Prime Minister of Hungary (1899–1903), stated in no uncertain terms: ‘The Magyars have conquered this country for the Magyars and not for others. The supremacy and the hegemony of the Magyars is fully justified.’ This act of conquest alone made them into the founders of the Hungarian/Magyar nation. This conflation of the civic and ethnic understanding of nation was made easy by the Hungarian usage

The Hungarian Case

463

of magyar, which can be translated as either ‘Hungarian’ or ‘Magyar.’ Pairs of two different words came in use to reflect this highly political distinction in Hungary’s minority languages, for instance, mad’ar vs uhor in Slovak, mad¯ar vs ugar in Croatian, madžar vs oger in Slovenian, maghiar vs ungur in Romanian, or Madjar vs Ungar in German. This development dates back to the 1840s when ethnic Magyar nationalism coalesced as the legitimizing ideology of Hungary. Magyarization was played out in the arena of language in blatant breach of the provisions of the Nationality Law. Because the status of official language was reserved for Magyar only, a good indicator of Magyarization was the medium of instruction in schools. The number of Magyarophone schools rose from 5819 in 1869 to 11,742 in 1906. During the same period, in Hungary proper (without Croatia) the number of schools with other languages as a medium of instruction plummeted. German ones from 1232 to 271, Romanian from 2569 to 2440, Slovak from 1822 to 241, Croatian and Serbian from 252 to 165, Ruthenian from 473 to 23. Transylvania’s Romanians led the coalition of non-Magyar-speakers against Magyarization in Hungary proper because they could look for guidance to Romania. Romania was founded on the basis of the 1859 union of Walachia with Moldavia, and gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. The Transylvanian Romanians intensified their political and educational activities in the 1890s. In 1893, some Romanian, Slovak, and Serbian leaders met in Vienna, and 2 years later in Budapest. In 1895, they formed a self-styled Congress of Nationalities and coordinated their activities against Magyarization. But without too much success: in 1897 Budapest Magyarized the still Germanophone place-names in Transylvania. Earlier, Czech leaders had shunned closer contacts with Slovaks, because they limited their national postulates to the historical lands of the Czech Crown, namely, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Forging a link with Upper Hungary’s Slovaks would go against this logic, as Upper Hungary had never belonged to the Czech Crown. On the other hand, such a move would irk Budapest to the detriment of Czech national aspirations in the Reichsrat. However, the loyalty and cooperation of Magyar-dominated Hungary and the Galician Poles ensured Vienna saw no point to grant any serious concessions to the Czechs. The new generation of Czech nationalists supported cooperation with the Slovaks on a purely ethnolinguistic basis. In 1896, a group of Prague intellectuals called for the ˇ creation of a ‘Czechoslovak language.’ Two years later, the Ceskoslovanská Jednota (Organization of Czechoslav [Czechoslovak] Unity) was founded, and Hlas (Voice), the mouthpiece of supporters of Czechoslovakism, started publishing at Prague. Interestingly, like Kossuth in his exile program for a Danubian Confederation, the Romanian intellectual Aurel Popovici (1863–1917) proposed, in 1906, federalizing the Dual Monarchy into a United States of Greater Austria.

464 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Although this project met with great reservations on the part of Romanian leaders, it annoyed Magyar politicians and convinced them to press on with Magyarization. Federalization would deprive them of Hungary as their Greater Magyar nation-state. They also saw the development of the Czechoslovak movement as a clear sign of Pan-slavism that would play into Russia’s hands, thus endangering the continued existence of Austria-Hungary. The only part of Hungary legally exempted from the direct pressure of Magyarization was Croatia-Slavonia. After the Nagodba, the Croatian nation and its language were officially recognized. This agreement even required the Hungarian king to say his coronation oath also in Croatian. In 1874, the Croatian-language university opened in Zagreb. The limiting of the Nagodba commenced with the 1881 liquidation of the military frontier, which led to the incorporation of this region into Croatia-Slovenia. As a result, in the enlarged province, the share of Serbs grew to one-quarter in the population of 2.6 million, and partly unmade this province’s character as ersatz Croatian nation-state. In 1881, the display of the bilingual Magyar-Croatian coat-of-arms at the financial administration building in Zagreb sparked demonstrations that turned into a veritable ‘language war,’ and required imposition of a state of emergency. Croatia’s modern ethnolinguistic national movement emerged from this commotion. Kálmán Tisza’s long premiership was paralleled by Count Károly KhuenHéderváry’s (1849–1918) term in office as the Ban of Croatia from 1883 to 1903. He played Croats against Serbs, which allowed him to ignore the Nagodba and further Budapest’s policy of Magyarization. In 1883, Khuen-Héderváry introduced Hungarian national symbols in common Hungarian-Croatian offices located in Croatia-Slavonia. In 1892, he ordered Magyarization of place-names in Croatia. In 1903, Hungary rejected Croatian demands for financial independence. The ban quelled demonstrations, and suppressed the Croatian press. This led to cooperation between Croats and Serbs, who won a Sabor majority in 1908, just in time to condemn the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Budapest replied in kind making Magyar the operative language on Croatian railways, the last non-Magyarized common Hungarian-Croatian institution. Moreover, in Croatia-Slavonia’s schools for civil servants, Magyar was made into the medium of instruction. The tension never ceased. Later, ethnic Croatians were nominated to the position of ban, but this failed to placate Croatian nationalists. In 1912, the Sabor was dissolved and the Croatian Constitution was suspended. The following year, Magyar inscriptions were removed from public buildings but the offending bilingual coat-of-arms remained in place (Boia 1977: 107– 125; Castellan 1989: 147–148; Forgács 1998: 107; Goldstein 1999: 92–93; Jászi 1929: 321; Johnson 1985: 43–44; Kneževi´c 1989: 92–94; Kopy´s 2001: 40–42; Kostický 1963; Kulísek 1964: 354; Lukacs 1988: 126; Maxwell 2004; Varga 1993: 42; Viator 1908: 213, 437).

The Hungarian Case

465

The politicization of language that led to national conflict in Hungary should not overshadow the everyday practice of multilingualism. More often than not it was pragmatic, peaceful, and grassroots. A person wishes, first of all, to lead a satisfying life in any social and political circumstances. In Hungary the growing excesses of Magyarization inevitably added to the gradual radicalization of the population, especially the educated elites of the minorities. But rebellions arise only when a large section of society has nothing to lose, or something substantial to gain. This time arrived in Austria-Hungary after the economic, political, and social tribulations of the Great War. Only then was the situation ripe for a change, but not without the active involvement of the leaders of various national movements. After 1918, the Allies necessarily played the role of midwife to this novel reality of ethnolinguistic nation-states desired by these movements. The best example of the everyday practice of multilingualism at the grassroots level was the phenomenon of ‘children exchange’ in the region of Pozsony. Since the Turkish wars in the 16th century, it had been a multilingual area where in the same locality vernaculars spoken at home and in streets could be labeled as Croatian, German, Magyar, and Slovak. This multiplicity of idioms obstructed communication, because these languages were not mutually comprehensible, with the exception of Slovak and Croatian. In the latter case, Slavic commonality allowed for imperfect communication between Slovakand Croatian-speakers. Faced with this predicament burghers and villagers developed their own practical solution. Schools were of no help. They did not cater to everybody and offered education exclusively in Latin first, then in German, and later in Magyar with little concessions for other languages. These concessions had largely disappeared by the beginning of the 20th century. Families exchanged their children with neighbors in a locality or the vicinity. Living for one to three months as members of such an exchange family, the children acquired its home language. As a result, before reaching adulthood all the children were practically quadrilingual, even if illiterate when they attended no school. This system survived until World War I, but in a more personalized manner it continued well into the 1960s, especially in the case of Magyars living in Czechoslovakia. They made sure their children would become proficient in Slovak by sending them to live with their Slovak-speaking friends. The multiethnic roots of today’s Magyar culture show up in numerous Slavic and German surnames spelled in agreement with Magyar orthography. Interestingly, the most hailed Magyar national poet-hero, Pet˝ ofi, was a son of an assimilated Serbian father and a Slovak mother. Similarly, the famous Polish national poet, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), was a son of a Jewish mother and a Polonized Ruthenian (Belarusian) noble, who inculcated him with patriotism to the defunct Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Liszka 1996; Molnár 2001: 177; Snyder 2003: 28–29).

466 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Another interesting phenomenon connected to the increasingly sterner policy of Magyarization in the Kingdom of Hungary during the Ausgleich period (1867– 1918) was Budapest’s tacit acceptance of other languages at least in church, school, and local publications for ethnically non-Magyar populations, which remained or became staunchly pro-Magyar on the basis of traditional Hungarian civic patriotism. In the vision of such civic patriotism, Hungary was a home to all its inhabitants, irrespective of the various languages they might speak. At the end of the 19th century, it became obvious that the possibility of Hungarian civic nationalism lost with the attraction of its Magyar ethnic counterpart. But in many cases, religious difference and historical vicissitudes prevented some nonMagyar populations from merging with their close co-ethnics, who had already embarked on the reactive process of shaping their own ethnic nationalisms in reply to Magyarization. On the linguistic plane, the pro-Magyar (though ethnically non-Magyar) groups often expressed their political choice by using Magyar orthography to write their languages. This allowed for making the groups’ local dialects into languages separate from standard languages created by their co-ethnics engaged in various nation-building efforts. As a result, the standard languages were cast in the role of national languages. On the other hand, the pro-Magyar groups were content with diglossia, which prescribed the use of their languages in church, school, and local publications, while reserving for Magyar the elevated status of the language of state politics, administration, economy, and higher education. Most of the Slovaks were Catholics, but one-seventh of them professed Lutheranism. However, the Slavophone population of the Upper Hungarian Komitat of Sáros (Šariš) was Calvinist. Although Catholicism predominated among Magyars in the Habsburgs’ Royal Hungary, most Magyars professed Calvinism in Transylvania, which made the religion a second ‘national faith’ of the Magyar nation. Beginning in 1750, a handful of religious books in Magyar spelling were produced in the idiom of the Sáros Slavic-speakers. Unsurprisingly, they called it sariskij jazik (Sáros language). Under the influence of developing Slovak nationalism but in opposition to it, the Sáros-speakers dubbed their language csiszta szlovenszka recs (pure Slavic/Slovak language) at the close of the 19th century. At the beginning of the following century, with Budapest’s support, they switched to standard Slovak spelling, but retained their pro-Magyar stance. The tradition of this literacy became part of the brief ‘Slovjak’ national movement, which, in 1918, culminated in the establishment of the short-lived pro-Hungarian Slovjak People’s Republic with its capital in Kassa (Košice). Later, neither Slovjaks nor politicians used Slovjak language and culture for political projects, with the exception of World War II, when Budapest again encouraged Slovjak separatism in order to improve on its legitimization of the annexation of southern Slovakia in 1938. After 1945, Slovjakism became East Slovak regionalism, and at the turn of the 21st century, Slovak linguists finally incorporated

The Hungarian Case

467

the East Slovak (Slovjak) literacy into the canon of Slovak writings, under the novel name of ‘Cultural Eastern Slovak’ (kulturna vychodoslovenˇcina). In the west of the Komitat of Zala, north of the River Mura (Mur), the Slavophone population of Lutherans and Catholics resided. In Slovenian, the area is referred to as Prekmurje, or the ‘land beyond the Mur.’ The AustrianHungarian administrative border and Protestantism isolated the Slavic-speaking group from their overwhelmingly Catholic co-ethnics in southern Styria, who became Slovenians. In the south, the River Mura separated them from another group of Slavic-speaking Catholics, who decided to identify as Croats. Although the latter lived next to the border of (not in) Hungary’s autonomous CroatiaSlavonia, their region was included in the Croatian Diocese of Agram (Zagreb), which proved crucial for their decision to adopt the Croatian national identity. The earliest Prekmurjan manuscripts originated in the 17th century, the first Protestant book in the Prekmurjan language came off the press in 1715, and the first Catholic one in 1780. The Prekmurjan writers of both confessions used Magyar orthography, though they increasingly adopted diacritic letters common to standard Croatian and Slovenian. (As in the case of standard Slovak, the diacritic letters were originally borrowed from standard Czech.) When Slovenian nationalism developed in the second half of the 19th century, the Prekmurjans preferred to refer to themselves as ‘Winds,’ and to their language as ‘HungarianWindish.’ After the Great War, the incorporation of Prekmurje into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes extinguished the Prekmurjan literacy, which merged with the Slovenian literacy by the 1930s. Prekmurjans continued to use their language in the United States and in the area of the town of Vendség, which remained in Hungary. South of Prekmurje, in the northern corner of historical Croatia, between the Rivers Drava and Sava, the Slavophone population expected protection from the Habsburgs’ Royal Hungary during the wars with the Ottoman Empire. They ´ spoke the Kajkavian dialect, which was distanced from the Cakavian one in which early Croatian literature (written with the use of Italian orthography) flowered in southern Croatia and western Dalmatia. During the Reformation, Hungarian Calvinists inspired the use of written Kajkavian for proselytizing, which also meant the employment of Magyar spelling. The first book in ´ Kajkavian was published in 1574. After the 1830s, Cakavian literacy was largely extinguished, because the leaders of the nascent Croatian national movement settled on another dialect as the basis of their standard language, Štokavian, also shared by the Serbs, the Montenegrins, and Bosnia’s Slavophone Muslims. Kajkavian intellectuals (many of whom professed Calvinism) remained more pro-Hungarian than the rest of the Croats, alienated from the latter by the making of Catholicism into the ideological basis of Croatian nationalism to the exclusion of Protestantism. However, the increasing danger of Magyarization convinced the Kajkavian intellectuals to adopt Croatian national identity.

468 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The last Kajkavian book in Magyar spelling came off the press in 1859. When ´ Cakavian and Kajkavian literacy revived at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a reaction against the project of merging the Croats into a proposed Yugoslav (South Slav, or Great Serbian) nation. Indirectly, this movement played into the hands of Budapest and Vienna, which saw Yugoslavism as a danger to the ´ Dual Monarchy. Cakavian and Kajkavian writers used Croatian orthography, and after 1918, strove to reaffirm the separateness of the Croatian nation in Yugoslavia increasingly dominated by the Serbs. ´ Although Cakavian Croatian was written in Italian spelling, a group of ´ Cakavian-speaking refugees, who at the turn of the 16th century fled the advancing Ottoman armies to the safety of Burgenland in western Hungary (today, in eastern Austria), soon adopted Magyar orthography. This gave rise to the Burgenland Croatian language. After the initial manuscripts produced in ‘Burgenlandian’ during the 16th century, the first book in Burgenland Croatian was published in 1732. Because German, not Magyar, was the lingua franca of Burgenland, many Germanisms entered Burgenland Croatian. This ´ still separates the language from the Cakavian literacy in Croatia, even after the Burgenland Croats adopted modern Croatian orthography at the close of the 19th century in reply to the excesses of Magyarization. Due to the Germanophone character of Burgenland, most of the province was apportioned to Austria in 1921. Burgenland literacy survives there to this day. In 1738–1741, a similar group of Slavophone refugees arrived from the Rhodope Mountains in historical Bulgaria, and settled in Hungary’s Banat. Their ancestors converted to Catholicism under the influence of the Franciscans from Bosnia, busy uprooting Bogomilism. In 1616, Vienna coaxed the sultan to grant religious freedom to Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. However, the Catholic converts became the target of Ottoman fury when in 1688, Austria used them to stage an anti-Ottoman uprising in Chiprovtsi (today in northwestern Bulgaria). The refugees settled in the vicinity of the town of Vinga (today in Romania), south of the Maros (Mure¸sul) River. They referred to themselves as Paulicians, which was a vague memory of persisting Mainchaeism in the Balkans. (It dates back to the Byzantine times, when in 970, 200,000 Armenians guilty of belonging to the Paulician sect were expelled from the Caucasus to the Balkans. But their heresy survived, and in the 11th century, gave rise to Bogomilism in Bosnia.) The first book in Paulician (Banat Bulgarian) was published in 1851; it employed a mixed Magyar-Slovenian orthography. The 1866 textbook of the language dropped the glottonym ‘Paulician’ in favor of ‘Bulgarian,’ and adopted a version of Croatian spelling. This change was dictated by Budapest’s policy of Magyarization, but their Catholicism prevented the Banat Bulgarians from accepting Cyrillic-based standard Bulgarian. After World War I, Banat was divided between Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; however, most of the Banat Bulgarians found themselves in Romania. In the 1930s, their literacy revived, but

The Hungarian Case

469

in communist Romania they were treated as a Bulgarian minority, so they were not allowed to express their separate ethnolinguistic identity. This changed after the fall of communism, when the Banat Bulgarians again changed the name of their group and language from ‘Bulgarian’ to ‘Paulician.’ At the turn of the 18th century, Catholic Slavophone refugees from Dalmatia and Herzegovina and their Orthodox counterparts from Bosnia arrived in Hungary’s Vojvodina, and settled mostly in the vicinity of Maria-Theresiopel (Szabadka in Magyar, today Subotica in Serbia). The former went by the name ‘Bunjevci’ and the latter by that of ‘Šokci.’ The Šokci were less numerous and gradually converted to Catholicism. Both groups spoke closely related varieties of the same dialect, Štokavian, which became the basis of SerboCroatian, and at present serves the same function for standard Bosnian, standard Croatian, and standard Serbian. The first manuscript in the language of the Bunjevci and Šokci appeared in the 18th century; they were written in the Latin script with the use of Magyar orthography. With the rise of Magyarization pressure in the 1860s, Croatian and Serbian nationalists replied in kind by claiming the Bunjevci and Šokci as ‘Croats’ or ‘Catholic Serbs’ for their respective national projects. The clash of the three nationalisms cancelled out the influence of one another, which, as a result, preserved the Bunjevci and Šokci as separate groups. But the first books printed in their languages, which were published in the 1860s, employed Latin-based Croatian spelling in preference to Magyar orthography, which persisted in handwritten documents. Moreover, in 1899, 1200 Šokci converted to Orthodoxy, which meant their gradual merger with the Serbs, whereas the remaining Catholic Šokci became indistinguishable from the Bunjevci. After 1918, Vojvodina was granted to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, but the separate Bunjevcian literacy survived in the interwar period. However, there was no place for it in communist Yugoslavia, because the logic of this federal state would require Belgrade to recognize them as a separate nation; an unwanted complication in the already staggeringly multinational autonomous Vojvodina. In the wake of the post-Yugoslav wars, in 2005, Belgrade recognized the Bunjevci as a national minority and their language as well in order to counter Zagreb’s claim that they were part of the remaining Croatian minority in Serbia. In 2006, the subject ‘Bunjevcian language and national culture’ was introduced to Bunjevcian schools. Apart from the aforementioned languages (often referred to as ‘[historical] Hungary’s micro-languages’), which (at least initially) employed Magyar orthography, there were some that never did. In the ideological strife, which developed in the mid-1840s between the proponents of the then proposed standard Slovak and those of Bibliˇctina (or the Biblical language, modeled on the Bohemian chancery language of the Kralice Bible), Budapest sided with the latter. The supporters of Bibliˇctina dubbed it ‘Old Slovak,’ and made the language into the sign of their loyalty to Hungary, while claiming that standard

470 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Slovak was part of the ‘Pan-Slav danger.’ Budapest made Bibliˇctina into an auxiliary language in Upper Hungary, and strove to limit the popularity of standard Slovak. The latter gained wide following during the three last decades of the 19th century, and thus became the rallying point against Magyarization. Bibliˇctina survived in its semi-official capacity until the turn of the 20th century. However, had it really stifled the development of standard Slovak, as Budapest wished, the rise of Slovak nationalism might have been stunted or even stopped by presenting it as a mere appendage of the Czech national movement. Such a situation would have played into the hands of the Magyarizers, since the Czech leaders did not claim Upper Hungary (Slovakia) for a proposed Czech nation-state until the close of the Great War. A similar case is posed by the (Carpatho-) Ruthenian (Rusyn) language. After the 1646 union signed at Ungwar, the Orthodox Slavophone population of eastern Upper Hungary (from the Komitat of Sáros to the Komitat of Máramores [today Maramure¸s in Romania]) entered the Catholic Church with their own Slavic liturgy. Maria Theresa changed their name of ‘Uniates’ (considered derogative) to ‘Greek Catholics.’ The oldest manuscripts in this region, invariably composed in Church Slavonic, date back to the 12th century. The local Slavic vernacular entered Cyrillic manuscripts as early as the 15th century under the influence of the Ruthenian literacy in Poland-Lithuania. It appears that the earliest book in Ruthenian was published in 1797. In 1848, the Ruthenian national movement developed more dynamically than that of the Slovaks. After 1867, Magyarization suppressed Ruthenian nationalism, and the Ruthenian language was renamed ‘Hungarian-Ruthenian.’ A handful of Ruthenian priests and intellectuals advocated the incorporation of their homeland to Russia, which caused Budapest to persecute the Ruthenians and to impose a Magyarstyle Latin alphabet on their publications in 1916. In 1918, a pro-Ukrainian faction appeared as well. The Ruthenian homeland was incorporated into interwar Czechoslovakia under the name of ‘Subcarpathian Ruthenia.’ Although Prague paid lip service to the development of the Ruthenian language, in reality, first Galician Ukrainian and then Russian was employed in Ruthenian schools. The Ukrainian faction proclaimed the independence of ‘Carpathian Ukraine’ in 1939, but after a few days the Hungarian troops annexed the new nation-state. Budapest turned it into a semi-autonomous ‘Carpathia’ with two co-official languages, Magyar and Cyrillic-based Hungaro-Ruthenian. In 1945, the region, now dubbed ‘Transcarpathian Ruthenia’ was incorporated into the Soviet Union’s Ukraine. Russian and Soviet standard Ukrainian replaced all other languages. No expression of Ruthenian identity or culture was allowed. The Ruthenian language survived among Ruthenians in Vojvodina, who had settled there in the vicinity of Neusatz (Novi Sad) in the mid-18th century. The first book in their language was published in 1904. In communist Yugoslavia, their language was recognized as co-official in Vojvodina, which spurred the

The Hungarian Case

471

development of the ‘Yugoslav Rusyn language.’ Like the Bunjevci, the Rusyns in Vojvodina numbered 20,000, but a quarter of them decided to identify themselves as Ukrainians, which makes the region’s Rusyns less numerous than the Bunjevci. After the fall of communism, the Rusyn diaspora from Northern America facilitated the rise of Rusyn literacy in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. This Cyrillic-based literacy is split among various standards based on different dialects, and not all Rusyn-speakers side with the current Rusyn national project. On the other hand, although most Rusyns live in Ukraine, Kyiv aggressively discourages any Rusyn national or ethnic identity there. As a result, at present, only Yugoslav Rusyn continues to be used in official capacity. Last but not least, Budapest liked to see Bosnia (occupied in 1878 as a joint territory of Austria-Hungary) as a historically Hungarian land. Between 1882 and 1903, the Magyar politician, Béni (Benjamin) Kállay (1839–1903), was entrusted with the administration of Bosnia. In this capacity, he hoped to induce the coalescing of a Bosnian nation, which would lessen the impact of Yugoslavism or Great Serbianism, which could endanger Hungary’s southern borderlands. After the arrival of the occupation administration, German was introduced as the official language, but until 1890, most official publications for public use were printed in Ottoman (Old Turkish) in the Arabic script and in Serbo-Croatian in Cyrillic and, sometimes, in the Latin alphabet. In addition, Slavophone Muslims published their newspapers and books in Slavic but with the use of Arabic characters. In 1890, Kállay sponsored the publication of a grammar of the Latin script-based Bosnian language. Hence, apart from German, Bosnian replaced all the other co-official languages. The policy of building a Bosnian nation complete with its Bosnian language was terminated in 1907, a year before Austria-Hungary annexed the region. Serbo-Croatian, in its Latin and Cyrillic variants, replaced Bosnian. In 1915, the use of Cyrillic was prohibited to stem the inflow of Serbian propaganda to Bosnia. In interwar and communist Yugoslavia both alphabets were used in the region. But between 1941 and 1945, Bosnia was part of the Independent State of Croatia, where Croatian written in Latin characters was the sole official language. After 1945, Bosnia’s Muslims were recognized as a nation, which in the wake of the post-Yugoslav wars, in 1995, gave rise to independent Bosnia complete with the Bosnian (Bosniak) nation and its Latin alphabet-based Bosnian language. Interestingly, neither Budapest’s coaxing nor stern Magyarization managed to produce the rise of a non-Slavic micro-language among some pro-Hungarian populace. It appears that the situation of Transylvania’s Romance-speakers was most opportune for such a project. First, they were split on the confessional basis into Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Second, the shift from Cyrillic to the Latin script for writing their language was faster here than in the principalities of Walachia and Moldavia. However, the confessional split and scriptural difference did not prevent Transylvania’s Walachians

472 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(Romanians) from merging with their co-ethnics in the principalities into a Romanian nation. Maybe the answer to this paradox is the fact that Magyarization was less successful in Transylvania than elsewhere in the Kingdom of Hungary. On the other hand, the center of Romanian national movement was initially in Transylvania before it moved to the principalities united as Romania in 1861 (Bunjevaˇcke novine 2006; Dulichenko 1981: 88–90, 2003: 11– 12, 85–86, 207, 309–310, 2004: 100–102, 143–144; Tornow 2005: 286, 458–461, 595–597).

The mythologization of language in the interest of the nation The steeping of Magyar nationalism in language showed also in other fields besides codification of the Magyar language, Magyarization of Hungary’s administration and education, and suppression of the public use of other languages than Magyar. One of the results of the European Enlightenment was science, that is, the secular search for the truth about the world and people through reasoning. On one hand, this development contributed to distancing state from religion, while, on the other, it made legitimization of statehood partially dependent on scholars’ findings and opinions. Understandably, when ethnically defined nations and nation-states were built in Central Europe in the course of the 19th century, academies of sciences became a significant element of national politics. Academics mostly invested their time and efforts into objective research, but they did not forget to mold their projects in such a way that they would support or at least go along with the local nation-building endeavors. If a scholar’s line of research failed to meet these requirements, his prestige was at stake, and he could not count on receiving funding any more. The biblical image of the tower of Babel and its confusion of tongues seized the minds of Europe’s thinkers. They believed that all languages emerged from the common tongue in which Adam and Eve conversed in Eden. In the 16th century, the tentative agreement was that Hebrew was this ur-language. But soon counterclaims followed. The term ‘language of Babel’ became an emblem of antiquity and nobility, hence a useful instrument of power legitimization. It was proposed that Tuscanian (Italian), Castillian (Spanish), Dutch, Swedish, or German was the first language. In turn, all other languages were believed to have stemmed from it. This ‘logically’ justified domination of one state or natio over all others. The Bible ceased to be the ultimate source of knowledge and legitimacy after the religious wars ended with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Later, less biblical claims to the distinction of ‘first language’ were tabled. Some maintained that German was the ‘language of nature,’ and in his famous 1782 work, Antoine Rivarol (1753–1801) stated that the French language was universal and it should be spoken in all Europe.

The Hungarian Case

473

Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, these claims to primacy for one’s language took on increasingly nationalist overtones. None of the established nation-states or aspiring national movements wanted to be outshone by its neighbors. The logic of the ‘historical argument’ was to ‘prove’ that one’s national language was older than the neighboring tongues. Obviously, the fact that languages change through time did not feature in this discourse. The reification of a language through writing was taken at its face value not as an imposition on but the reflection of sociolinguistic reality. Under the influence of scholars, people began to perceive languages as discrete entities, which have moved unchanged through time and space (Calvet 1974: 17–20, 1998: 48–49; Eco 1995: 95–101). The Magyar language was as much a mystery to Europe as to Magyars themselves. Within the families of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, vernaculars remained similar to one another. It was apparent that Latin was the immediate source of the Romance languages and, though to a lesser degree, Church Slavonic (Old Slavic) of the Slavic tongues. The Germanic languages, though initially perceived as ‘barbarian’ in the Roman Empire, could claim ancient lineages going back to Norse runes, the Gothic translation of the Bible, and the extensive corpus of writings in Anglo-Saxon. In this context, Magyar stood alone, underlining the perceived foreignness of the Magyars in Europe. In order to be accepted as a full and legitimate member of ‘civilized Europe,’ the Hungarian nobility adopted Latin as their language and kept it much longer than any other states in Western and Central Europe. But it was not enough; they needed a historical lineage that would be illustrious and credibly (on the terms accepted in a given period) explain the origin of the Magyars. Through the Renaissance, Ptolemy’s (100?–170?) map and description of the known world provided the scholarly basis for explaining origins of various peoples. Since the 15th century, the nobility of the Kingdom of Poland had claimed descent from the Iranian Sarmatians, who in the 1st century BCE came into contact with the Romans along the banks of the Danube. To match this illustrious lineage, the nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania maintained they were descendants of the ancient Romans themselves. Later, this myth gave rise to the theory that the Lithuanian language was identical with archaic Latin or its direct offshoot. In 1843, Mickiewicz proposed that Lithuanian is a close cognate of Sanskrit, and the Lithuanians a ‘lost tribe of Hindus.’ The promoters of Lithuanian faced a similar predicament as Magyar-speakers, their idiom was dissimilar from all the illustrious languages of Europe. When PolandLithuania stabilized as a polity all its nobility tended to speak about themselves as ‘Sarmatians’ and their country as ‘Sarmatia.’ Biblical imagery came to the picture when a need arose to explain the estate stratification of the society. In the 16th century, the belief arose that all the population living in Poland-Lithuania stemmed from Noah’s three sons. The popular saying encapsulated this view

474 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

‘tu Sem ora, Cham labora, Japhet rege et protege’ (you, Shem, pray, Ham, work, and Japheth, rule and protect). Obviously, the nobility stemmed from glorious Japheth, Jews from Shem, and peasants from cursed Ham. The appellation of cham (Ham in English) became a synonym of serf. The same view of social relations also obtained in Hungary though moderated by the disappearance of serfdom on the Hungarian territories in Ottoman control. As of the first half of the 16th century, the Hungarian nobility saw themselves as descendants of the Huns, perhaps Turkic-speaking pastoralists, who between the 420s and 450s established the center of their kaganate between the Danube and Tisza rivers and successfully warred with the Roman Empire. They even earned their king Attila the nickname Flagellum Dei (Scourge of God). This was a heroic past to which Magyar nationalists aspired to continue their attachment in the 19th century. The fact that the kaganate overlapped with the territory of Hungary lent a degree of credibility to this claim. The term Hunnia (the land of the Huns) was coined as a glorious synonym for Hungary. Later, it fell out of use, because at the end of World War II, Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross regime employed this term in its propaganda. Magyarization was in full sway during the second half of the 19th century. There was a realization of the widespread social need to make Magyarness more authentic, and one way of achieving this goal was by going back to pre-Christian roots. In that period, Attila and Árpád became popular first names for Magyar boys, as proved by the first names of the famous Magyar poet Attila József (1905–1937) and of the Hungarian President Árpád Göncz (1922–). Even Francis Joseph was referred to as ‘another Árpád’ in his capacity as King of Hungary. Árpád was one of the leaders who led the coalition of Magyar and Turkic tribes from the shores of the Black Sea to Pannonia. The oldest surviving Magyar literary writings, recorded in the 12th century, praise Árpád as the conqueror of Hungary. Beginning in the 15th century, ancient Pannonia made a lasting appearance as an appellation for Hungary. It allowed the nobility to claim some connection with the Roman Empire and early Christianity, apart from extolling Hungary as the lands of St Stephen’s crown. Vajk, christened Stephen (ruled 997–1038), was the first Christian ruler of Hungary, crowned in 1000 or 1001 with the insignia received from the Pope. Although it was Maria Theresa who initiated the official cult of St Stephen in the second half of the 18th century, this cult gained mass national following among the Magyars only during the 1860s. Special respect was paid to the holy relic of the saint’s right hand. Furthermore, the cult added a new dimension to the centuries-old admiration for the Crown of St Stephen as the symbol of Hungarian statehood. This term functioned like the Czech ‘Crown of St Wenceslas’ (ruled 921–929) for denoting Bohemia. In 1891, St Stephen’s Day (August 20) was proclaimed Hungary’s main national holiday. Since then, it has vied for primacy with March 15, the date when the Hungarian revolution broke out in 1848. Obviously, official celebrations of the latter date were allowed only

The Hungarian Case

475

after Hungary gained independence in 1918. In 1905, after its half-century-long construction, St Stephen’s imposing basilica opened in Budapest. This Catholic strain of Magyar nationalism was designed partly to ‘save the land from Calvinists and Jews,’ as well as to oppose the pagan dimension of the Millennium of 1896 that had extolled the Magyar conquest of the Danubian basin. Language was an altogether different matter, which resisted such glorious mythologizations. The first idea was to pair Magyar with Hebrew as ‘equally foreign’ to all other European languages. This related the Hungarian nobility with Jews, which, ideologically speaking, was a poor ploy. Jews were perceived as a defeated people and ‘slayers of Christ.’ Nobles chose to regard their idiom as stemming from the Hunnish or Scythian language. The Scythians were an Iranian people who thrived in the steppes north of the Black Sea from the 8th to 3rd century BCE. The Greek writer Herodotus (484–425 BCE) wrote about them in his History. Like Ptolemy’s works, this book served as another source to find a people’s ‘glorious origins.’ In the 18th century, the belief developed that Magyar was one of the ‘Oriental languages.’ This broad category clustered together the written languages of the Middle East, anything from Hebrew and Arabic to Turkish and Persian. In 1786 in Calcutta, Sir William Jones (1746–1794) famously postulated the common origin of Latin and Sanskrit. This was the beginning of the linguistic venture, which uncovered the lattice of genetic relationships among various idioms now grouped in the Indo-European family of languages. Earlier, the Jesuit János Sajnovics (1733–1785) had demonstrated genetic relationship between Magyar and Saami (Lapp) in his 1770 Latin work. It was the beginning of research that yielded the Finno-Ugric family of languages. Derided as ‘kinship smelling of oil fish,’ this relationship was rejected as less glorious than the imagined Scythian-Hunnish connection. Pál Beregszászy Nagy (1750–1828) supported the erroneous opinion on the Scythian-Hunnish origin of the Magyar language in his works. In response, Sámuel Gyarmathi (1751–1830), in his 1799 publication, clearly delineated genetic relationships between Magyar, Finnish and other Finno-Ugric languages. He also pointed out a plethora of Turkish linguistic loans in Magyar. In the 19th century, this spurred the rise of the spurious theory that Magyar was a Turkic language. An additional ‘argument’ seemed to be the fact that Magyars, like Turkic peoples, employed runes to record their earliest texts. Certainly, the same script may be employed for writing in widely different languages, as proved by the widespread use of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. In the 1870s and the 1880s, a major dispute erupted in the Hungarian academic circles whether Magyar was of Finno-Ugric or Turkic origin. Although the former belief (as scientifically proved) prevailed, the belief in the Turkic relationship continued as more illustrious. It was also ideologically useful. Since the mid-19th century, German scholars started researching ‘Turan,’ in Persian, the ‘non-Aryan lands’ north of Persia. At the end of the 19th century, the political

476 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

movement of Pan-Turanianism developed. According to the now discarded theory that postulated their common origin, this movement sought to unite all the Turkic, Tatar, Uralic, and Finno-Ugric peoples living in Turkey and across Eurasia from Hungary to the Pacific. Some Magyar politicians and intellectuals sought to encourage Pan-Turanianism as a means of uniting Turks and Magyars against the Slavs and Pan-slavism. This idea slid into oblivion when Hungary and Turkey lost their common border after World War I. When Sumerian studies developed in the last decades of the 19th century, similarities were noticed between some Magyar and Sumerian words. In the first half of the 20th century, this coincidence (which does not prove any genetic relationship) galvanized amateur Magyar linguists to state that none other than Magyar was the language of ancient Sumer. This, in their view, made Magyar into the oldest surviving language, if not the ur-parent language of all others. Likewise, the quaintly named ‘sun theory’ claimed the same status for the Turkish language during the second half of the 1930s. At present, these claims that Magyar is of Turkic, Sumerian, or even Celtic or Etruscan origin do not belong to the mainstream of Hungarian linguistics. They straddle a no-man’s land between science, folk beliefs, and urban legends. But books devoted to these theories still are written, published, and even sold in Budapest’s scholarly bookstores. New publications propagating these spurious theories became especially numerous in Hungary during the period of the post-communist transition (Berˇci´c 1859; Bobula 1961; Borowski 2001: 70–71, 172–173; Hajdu 1975: 16–17; Helfferich 1868; Klaniczay et al. 1964: 12–13, 28–29, 33; Klimó 2003: 126; Kósa 1999: 36–37; Kosáry 1987: 160–162; Laut 2000: 48–52; Maxwell 2004; Molnár 2001: 13; Nemes 2007; Sinkó 1994; Snyder 1984: 121–123, 2003: 37; Weaver 2004). There was no such need to legitimize the place of the Polish, Czech, or Slovak language in European history. These three languages were accepted as rightfully ‘European,’ though, from the Western European viewpoint, maybe of a somewhat baser pedigree than the Romance and Germanic languages. In the case of Polish and Czech, fantastic claims to their historical primacy were limited by these two languages’ credible continuity of literacy traditions dating back only to the 16th and 15th centuries, respectively. What preoccupied historians and linguists more were differences between Czech, Polish, and Slovak that would allow reifying them as separate entities from the all-too-well-realized Slavic commonality. It was quite a long process. In the 15th century, the linguagia (idioms) of the Poles, Moravians, and Slavs of Upper Hungary were considered parts of the Czech language with its font in Bohemia. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Czech waned gradually replaced by German in its role of the official language in the lands of the Czech Crown. Polish was then in ascendancy, which was reflected in the contemporary thinking on this language. The prevalent view was that Polish was the language of Poland-Lithuania. Some even claimed that

The Hungarian Case

477

it was synonymous with the Slavic language, that is, the language of all the Slavs. Hence all the Slavic idioms were mere dialects of Polish. Another opinion limited the term ‘Polish’ to the speech of the Slavophone inhabitants of Wielkopolska and Małopolska, which made the Slavic idioms of Silesia and Mazovia different from Polish. Until the final partition of Poland-Lithuania, some also tended to name Polish as ‘Sarmatian’ when employed in the meaning of the common Slavic language, composed of such dialects as Church Slavonic, Russian, Polish, Sorbian (Wendisch), Bohemian, Slovenian (Windisch), Croatian (Illyrian), Serbian, and even Lithuanian and Latvian. After the partition, Polish ceased to be a significant official language, and Russian had not attained this role yet in the Russian Empire, where German and French were still preferred in this function. In this context, Christian Gottlieb von Arndt (1743–1829), in his 1818 book Ueber den Ursprung und die verschiedenartige Verwandtschaft der europäischen Sprachen (On the Emergence and Variegated Interrelatedness of the European Languages, Frankfurt am Main), spoke of the ‘Slavic languages or the dialects of the Slavic language.’ With the disappearance of the unified government of the lands of the Czech Crown following the battle of White Mountain (1620), not only the use of chancery Czech declined, but the power center of Prague also disappeared. This allowed for the emergence of the Bohemian (Czech) and Moravian written languages. Chancery Czech as employed by Slavophone inhabitants of Upper Hungary also diverged into the two different Catholic and Protestant variants. In the 18th century, Poland-Lithuania waned and eventually disappeared, so there was no state that would use and support the Polish language. At the same time German emerged as a standardized language to be used by all the inhabitants of the Germanicphone states within the German Confederation. This unification of the German nation (and, later, of the German nation-state) through the language made up from such highly variegated even mutually unintelligible dialects as Allemannic and Low German gave rise to the idea that a similar path should be followed in the Slavophone world. In his 1826 work Elementa Universalis Linguae Slavicae (The Elements of the Universal Slavic Language) published in Buda, Ján (János) Herkel (Joanne Herkel Panonnio) proposed creating a common written Slavic language, and also coined the term ‘Pan-Slavism.’ Kollár developed this idea in his 1837 study Über die Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation (On Reciprocity Between the Various Tribes and Dialects of the Slavic Nation, Pest). While Herkel believed that there were numerous Slavic nations, which should establish their common Slavic language, Kollár maintained that there was one Slavic nation, a nation that still lacked its own written language. Kollár’s was the basic statement of Pan-Slavism to which later authors referred. The idea that there was one common Slavic language was not novel. Before Herkel and Kollár, Dobrovský, Ch G von Arndt, and Linde also had espoused this idea. The project of creating (or re-creating) a common Slavic language dates

478 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

back to the 16th century. In his De origine successoribusque Slavorum (On the Origin of the Present-Day Slavdom, 1525, Venice), the Croatian (Dalmatian), Vinko Pribojevi´c (Vincenzo Pribevo, Vincentus Priboevus), as well as the Polish-Lithuanian Protestant, Jan Ma˛czynski ´ (1520–1584), in his Lexicon latino-polonicum (Latin-Polish Dictionary, 1564, Königsberg [Kaliningrad]), propounded unity of all the Slavic peoples as indicated by affinity of their respective vernaculars. The Croatian Catholic priest theologian, Juraj Križani´c (lurü Krizhanich, 1618–1683), who spent almost two decades as a missionary in Muscovy, in 1667, sent a letter to Tsar Alexis (ruled 1645–1676) in which he wrote that it was necessary and quite possible to unite all the Slavs in a common state, where they would speak a common language. Later, he worked out a ‘common Slavic,’ or a merger of elements from Church Slavonic, Croatian, and the Muscovian vernacular. He wrote his numerous books in this constructed language, and they gained quite a popularity when they were published for the first time in Moscow between 1848 and 1860. Križani´c hoped that a common Slavic language would be the first step to a religious unity of all the Slavs (he actively advocated a union of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches), which in turn, would make it possible for the rise of a common Slav state under the rule of the Russian tsar. The idea of especially linguistic unity of the Slavs proved attractive to Linde and Jungmann, the compilers of the first authoritative dictionaries of Polish and Czech, respectively. They introduced to both languages several thousands of Slavic loan words so as to emphasize their Slavic nature. Between 1800 and 1914, at least nine projects of creating a common Slavic language were put forward. Within his grander scheme of Pan-slavism, Kollár was the first to define the ‘Czech tribe’ of the postulated Slavic nation as consisting of Slovaks, Bohemians (Czechs), Moravians, Silesians, and Sorbs (Lusatians), in his anonymously pubˇ lished book Hlasowé o potˇrebˇe jednoty spisowného jazyka pro Cechy, Morawany a Slowaky (Voices on the Need of the Common Written Language for the Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks, 1846, Prague). It became the classical work for those late 19th-century Czech and Slovak activists, who proposed the creation of the Czechoslovak nation and language. The idea of lumping Czech and Slovak as the Czechoslovak language composed of the two dialects of Czech or Slovak, or as a separate branch of the West Slavic languages made up from the two kindred languages of Czech and Slovak, became popular throughout Europe as of the mid-19th century. Czech and Slovak nationalists were looking for legitimization of their claims to separate nationhood and national statehood rather on the basis of history than language. The stable inclusion of the Slavophone population of Bohemia, Moravia, and Upper Hungary, first within the Holy Roman Empire and Hungary, and then, within the Austrian Empire did not allow Poland-Lithuania or, later, Polish nationalists to claim this populace as ‘Polish.’ On the other hand, as of the 18th century, it was clearly realized that, from the vantage of language,

The Hungarian Case

479

they were different from the German- and Magyar-speakers. What Czech and Slovak nationalists lacked was a historically based claim to separateness. At the end of the 18th century, Dobrovský pointed to the fact that the center of Greater Moravia was located in Upper Hungary and Moravia, and that the Church Slavonic language was first committed there to parchment. He stressed that Catholic liturgy in this language survived in Bohemia through the Hussite times in the 15th century. In 1836, Palacký codified this reading of history in his Geschichte von Böhmen (History of Bohemia, Prague). He noted that before Slavs settled in this land in the mid-5th century, Celtic and Germanic populations had thrived in Bohemia and Moravia. But he also adds information on the Frankish warrior merchant Samo, whose 6th-century short-lived realm might have its center in southern Moravia. Following the revolutionary events of 1848, Palacký made this vision into straightforward Czech national history in his five-volume Dˇejiny národu ˇ ˇceského w Cechách a na Morawˇe (History of the Czech Nation, 1848–1876, Prague), the Czech translation of his above-mentioned Geschichte von Böhmen. Interestingly, Palacký’s monumental monograph commenced as a commission from the Committee of the Bohemian Estates (hochlöbliche Herren Stände). Not to be outdone, the Committee of the Moravian Estates (höhes mährisch Landes-Ausschuss) commissioned Beda Franziskus Dudík (1815–1890) to write the equally monumental Mährens allgemeine Geschichte (General History of Moravia, Brünn/Brno). Its 12 volumes were published between 1860 and 1888, while the Czech translation Dˇejiny Moravy (History of Moravia, Brünn/Brno) even faster between 1875 and 1884. As the Czech title clearly indicates, Dudík had no hope or intention to transform his history into the ideological blueprint for some Moravian nation though Greater Moravia would function more aptly in the role of the predecessor of a Moravian than the Czech nation. Slovak national activists first sought to emulate the example of the Czech national movement before the idea of sharing a common past became popular among the proponents of Czechoslovakism at the end of the 19th century. The late 18th-century Latin histories of Slavs written in Upper Hungary by Juraj Papánek, Juraj Sklenár (1745–1790), and Juraj (György) Fándly (1750– 1811) extolled the Christian character of Greater Moravia (Magna Moravia) as opposed to the ‘heathen Magyars’ who destroyed this realm. Encouraged by Jungmann, Šafárik (Šafaˇrjk) developed this vision of a one-thousand-year history of the Slavs in his monumental Czech-language Slowanské starožitnosti (Slavic Antiquities, 1837, Prgaue). But it was Šafárik’s Lutheran co-religionist Ján Hollý (Joannes Holly, Gan Hollí, Gan Hollý, 1785–1849), who imprinted the vision of Greater Moravia and the tradition of Cyrillo-Methodian literacy on the ideological blueprint of Slovak nationalism. He did this with his epic poems written in Bernoláˇctina. Swatopluk (Svatopluk, 1833, Tyrnau [Trnava]) hailed an important Greater Moravian ruler who reigned in 870–894. CirilloMetodiada (Cyrilo-Methodiana, 1835, Buda) focused on the struggle of saints

480 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Cyril and Methodius against pagans and the Franks. Finally, Slaw (Slav, 1839, Buda) revolves around the origin of the ethnonym ‘Slav.’ In his opus Hollý imagined heroic past that could be equally well used by Slovak and Czech nationalists as well as Pan-Slavists. And they did. In the second half of the 19th century, it became popular in Upper Hungary to name Slavophone male babies Samo and Svatopluk. On the Pan-Slavist platform, the name of the 14th-century ruler of medieval Serbian empire, Dušan, also gained lasting popularity, especially after Palacký, in his history of the Czech nation, chose to point to close parallels between Slavic law in Bohemia and Dušan’s empire. This novel historicizing naming practice counterbalanced the ideological brunt of Magyarization expressed in baptizing boys as Attilas and Árpáds. Last but not least, the Preamble of the 1993 Constitution of newly independent Slovakia openly refers to the ‘spiritual heritage of Cyril and Methodius’ and the ‘historical legacy of the Great Moravian Empire,’ which reaffirms these elements as the very basis of Slovak nationalism (Arndt 1818: 65; Bagin 1993; Constitution of Slovakia 2004; Dobrowsky 1936: 6–14; Dudík 1860: V; Havlík 1993; Lewaszkiewicz 1995: 102–103; Otwinowska 1974: 166, 179; Palacky 1836: V, 18–118; Palacký 1854: 293–339; Petro 1995: 44–50, 54–60; Šmahel 1969: 191; Talvj 1852: XIV; Tornow 2005: 315–316). Having noted that the idea of the primacy of the Polish language did not play an important role in Polish-Lithuanian or Polish history, it is interesting to mention several figures, whose works could provide a necessary ideological basis, had anyone cared to use them in such a manner. Already at the beginning of the 17th century, the Franciscan composer, Wojciech De˛bołe˛cki (1585–1646), maintained in his Wywód (Tract) that Adam and Eve spoke Polish in Paradise. He used interchangeably the terms Slavic and Polish language, and stated that all other languages emerged from this edenic Slavic/Polish. In his meticulously researched and posthumously published Harmonja mów (Harmony of Languages, 1895, Vilnius), Adam Jocher (1791–1860) attempted to prove the same thesis that Polish was the first human language. When this claim turned out to be too ridiculous, the famous linguist and lexicographer, Jan Karłowicz, propagated the view that Polish was the most ‘central’ of all the Slavic languages. This central location was to make it into the most ‘Slavic,’ ergo, best Slavic language out of all of them (Bystron ´ 1995: 20–22).

6 The Czech Case: From the Bohemian Slavophone Populus to Czech Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation

[W]e share the same noble Slavic idiom, and the sublimity of the same noble language. Emperor Charles IV (King Charles I of the Crown of the Czech Lands) in his 1355 letter to Emperor (Tsar) Stephen Dušan of Serbia.1 (in Stankiewicz 1984: ix) The first and best of all the Slavic dialects is the Czech language, which is [not spoken only by the Bohemians] but also by the Moravians and, partly, by the Silesians. Jan Blahoslav (Blažek) (1523–1571), a bishop of the Czech Brethren, translator of the New Testament (1564), he also authored a Czech-language grammar of the Czech language (1571, published only in 1857), from which the above quotation was taken (Orło´s 1993: 28; Siatkowska 1992: 118–119). Wherever your language and your nationhood are disregarded you are oppressed, no matter how liberal the country may be. [. . .] [W]here your language is excluded from schools and offices, freedom is taken away from you, from your nation, more than by police or by censorship. [. . .] [W]here your national language is excluded from offices and schools, the mouth of the people is tightly locked. Karel Havlíˇcek Borovský in Národní noviny, 1848 (In Fishman 1997: 202) If Austria did not exist she would have to be invented in the interest of Europe and then Humankind.2 František Palacký, 1848 (In Monarchie 2007) 481

482 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Estates politics Bohemia emerged as a separate polity after the Magyar conquest of Greater Moravia. The Frankish protection that extended to Bohemia attached this country to the empire, while Moravia became a province permanently linked to the Principality of Bohemia in the late 1020s. In 1079, Moravia was organized as a margraviate. Usually sons or younger brothers of the Bohemian princes reigned as margraves of Moravia, which emphasized the separateness of Moravia vis-àvis Bohemia. A similar arrangement developed in Poland-Lithuania where sons or younger brothers of the King of Poland ruled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Tˇreštík 1999: 140). In 1197, Bohemia was made into a kingdom within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor still crowned the King of Bohemia, as earlier he had crowned the Prince of Bohemia. Bohemian King Charles I (reigned 1346– 1378) was himself crowned Emperor in 1355 and moved the imperial capital to Prague. In 1348, he founded the first Central European university in this city and made Bohemia, with its possessions, into a distinctive unit of the lands of the Czech3 Crown. This crown comprised Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia (gained in the 1320s and 1330s), and Upper Lusatia. In the course of Charles’s reign, Lower Lusatia and Brandenburg were added as well. But with time, the concept of the lands of the Czech Crown stabilized as consisting of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. In 1526, the Habsburgs took over the Czech Crown along with the Kingdom of Hungary. From that time until 1918, the fate of Central Europe was inexorably connected to the fate of the Habsburg dynasty. Emperor Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612) moved the imperial capital to Prague again. This added to the political and economic prestige of this city. In Poland, the capital moved from Gniezno to Poznan, ´ and to Cracow. In Poland-Lithuania, it moved again to Warsaw. In medieval Hungary, the capital, as the seat of temporal and ecclesiastical power, moved variously between Visegrád, Esztergom, Székesfehérvár, and Buda. In the late 14th century, Buda won the contest, but not for long. In 1541, the Ottomans seized the city, and the Habsburgs moved the Hungarian capital to Preßburg (Bratislava). The capital was moved again to Buda in 1784, but Preßburg remained the coronation city of the Hungarian kings until 1830. In 1873, the Hungarian capital of Budapest was founded with the merger of Buda, Pest and Óbuda. In this context, the steady continuity of Prague as the capital is an exception in Central European history. The city has always been a capital, though the political entities that it has served in this capacity changed quite often and included the Principality and Kingdom of Bohemia, the lands of the Czech Crown, the Holy Roman Empire, the Crownland of Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Czecho-Slovakia, and recently the Czech Republic. Although Slovakia was established as a semi-separate polity

The Czech Case

483

in 1918, there was some vacillation if the ‘Magyar-German city’ of Bratislava, located next to the Austrian border, should be the capital of Slovakia rather than the long-established Slovak patriotic and cultural center of Turˇciansky Svätý Martin placed farther away from the borders. Some even proposed Banská Bystrica, located in the center of the country. Eventually, the continuing competition between Bratislava and Turˇciansky Svätý Martin to be the Slovak capital was decided in favor of the former in the late 1950s (Krekoviˇc 2005: 153; Tˇreštík 1999: 147). The lands of the Czech Crown were the most economically developed part of the Habsburg realm. Although Habsburg rulers combined the titles of Emperor, King of Bohemia, and the position of Moravian Margrave, they preserved the traditional political and administrative makeup. The lands of the Czech Crown remained a separate entity within the empire. As constituent lands of the Czech Crown, Moravia and Silesia retained their separateness vis-à-vis Bohemia. This political-cum-administrative arrangement survived until 1918. There were several changes though. First, in 1740–1742, Prussia seized most of Silesia. The one-eighth of this province that remained with the Habsburgs came to be known as Austrian Silesia as opposed to Prussian Silesia. Then, in 1806, Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, but the lands of the Czech Crown found themselves inside the Austrian Empire that had been established 2 years earlier. In 1815, these lands were included in the Vienna-dominated German Confederation. This confederation overlapped with the western half of the empire, because Hungary, that is, the empire’s eastern wing, remained outside the confederation. In 1866, the German Confederation was dissolved and, a year later, Austria-Hungary came into being. The lands of the Czech Crown remained in the Austrian (Germanophone) section of the Dual Monarchy. Thus, the intimate connection of the Czech lands with the Germanic- or German-speaking world lasted for a millennium, from the late 9th century to 1918. Likewise, Slavophone Upper Hungary (Slovakia) was part of the Magyarophone Kingdom of Hungary for the same length of time. The important difference is that Upper Hungary never formed an administratively separate entity within Hungary. The distinctive status of the lands of the Czech Crown in the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria-Hungary was similar to that of Croatia-Slavonia and Transylvania in the Kingdom of Hungary. In the wake of the religious wars that took place between the early 15th century and the mid-17th century, the domination of Catholicism in the Czech lands was reasserted after 1620. The overwhelmingly Protestant and usually bilingual (Czech- and German-speaking) Czech nobles lost their power contest with the Habsburg emperor, and were forced to leave Bohemia and Moravia, or convert to Catholicism. Their property and mansions were seized and granted to loyal Catholic nobles who arrived in the two regions from all over the Holy Roman Empire. The new nobility was overwhelmingly Germanophone,

484 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

though some learned chancery Bohemian or the local Slavic dialect of their serfs. This increasingly homogenous, Catholic and German-speaking character of the Habsburg realm (apart from Hungary), constituted the foundation, which helped Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II introduce their centralizing and modernizing reforms. These reforms weakened the political influence of the estates and the traditional links among various lands within the Habsburg realm. Joseph II refused to be officially crowned in Prague as the King of the lands of the Czech Crown because this would emphasize the separateness of this entity within the Habsburg realm. But the shock of the French Revolution and the backlash of the nobility against the reforms convinced Leopold II to revoke most of them. In 1791, unlike his brother, he agreed to be crowned in Prague. But at the insistence of the Moravian estates, who had consented to participate in this event, the monarch stopped at the Moravian capital of Brünn (Brno) on his way back to Vienna, and confirmed the separateness of the margraviate. After Leopold’s death the following year, the delegation of the Moravian estates agreed to pay homage to Francis I during his coronation in Prague, but at an audience separate from that granted to the Bohemian estates. His successor Ferdinand I received the Czech Crown in the capital of Bohemia in 1836. No representation of the Moravian estates was present at his coronation, which was interpreted in Moravia as the final reaffirmation of the margraviate’s independence from the Kingdom of Bohemia. The last two emperors, Francis Joseph and Charles I, never agreed to be crowned in Prague and remained loyal to the idea of the Dual Monarchy in the framework of which they received the Austrian imperial crown in Vienna and the Hungarian royal one in Buda (Budapest). In addition, they also ruled as King of Bohemia, Margrave of Moravia, and Prince of Silesia. The emperors accepted these positions as part of their other numerous hereditary titles, the right to which the Habsburgs did not have to confirm in formal coronations. Tradition was legitimization enough. The historical and legal distinctions between Bohemia, Moravia and the Czech Crown largely disappeared in the Czech language. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the Magyar language in relation to Hungary. In Magyar, the adjectives ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Magyar’ are rendered by one word only, magyar. In Czech, the multiethnic Kingdom of Hungary was known as Uhersko and the post-1918 ethnic nation-state of the Magyars as Mad’arsko. The Slovak counterparts are Uhorsko and Mad’arsko. However, in Magyar, there is no terminological distinction between these two different polities; the term Magyarország covers both of them. Similarly, although in English, Latin, and German one can draw a clear distinction between Bohemia and the Czech lands, this is not reflected in Czech. ˇ In this language, Bohemia is Cechy, and the Czech Crown Koruna ˇceská. Followˇ ing the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the less formal term Cesko gained currency for referring to Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia as an entity ˇ opposed to Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Being a singular noun, Cesko

The Czech Case

485

4 ˇ had the obvious advantage over plural Cechy. The latter suggested plurality and multiplicity, and the former unity and singularity sought by Czech nationalists who planned to build a unified and homogenous Czech nation-state before ˇ Czechoslovakia became a plausible option late in World War I. The term Cesko entered the political discourse in 1968 when Czechoslovakia was transformed ˇ into the federation of the Czech Socialist Republic (Ceská socialistická republika) ˇ and the Slovak Socialist Republic (Slovenská socialistická republika). Cesko became the popular synonym for the former socialist republic, and conveniently blurred the historical distinction between Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Local patriots in the two latter regions disliked this development. But prior to 1945, it was justified by the ‘German menace’ against which all the Czechs had to stand together united despite any differences that might divide them. After World War II, the unifying thrust of communist totalitarianism silenced not only Moravian and Czech Silesian regionalisms, but, to large extent, also Slovak nationalism until 1968. Following the division of Czechoslovakia into the nation-states of the Czechs and the Slovaks in 1993, there was a proposal to name the Czech nation-state ˇ Cesko. This would have conflated the Czech-language name of the western half of this new state (Bohemia) with the Czechophone name for the entire nationstate. In the context of newly reestablished democracy, changes unilaterally imposed by Prague were not accepted gladly by the inhabitants of Moravia and Czech Silesia, who, in this context, perceived the city as the capital of the rival ˇ region of Bohemia. Due to their staunch opposition, the idea of the name Cesko ˇ was dropped in favor of the ‘Czech Republic’ (Ceská Republika). On the other hand, Prague did not accept their proposal that the new nation-state should be ˇ named ‘Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia’ (Cechy-Morava-Slezsko), or ‘Bohemia-Moravia’ ˇ (Cechy-Morava). The dissenting voices of Moravian and Silesian regionalists produced a compromise in the form of the national coat-of-arms of the Czech Republic, which incorporates Bohemia’s doubled coat-of-arms (lion), and the single coats-of-arms of Moravia (checkered red and white eagle) and Czech Silesia (black eagle.) Despite the official compromises, in popular speech, Czechs, especially those ˇ from Bohemia, tended to speak interchangeably about Cesko and the ‘republic,’ as shorthand for the official ‘Czech Republic.’ Eventually, in 2004, the Czech ˇ Senate recommended that the short form Cesko should be used in preference ˇ to the Ceská Republika. This recommended usage is reflected in popular German in which the Tschechische Republik is referred to as Tschechien or Tschechei. ˇ The curious Czech-German term Cechien for referring to the Czechophone lands of Bohemia (Böhmen) and Moravia (Mähren) appeared in the late 19th century when the multilingual communities of the Bohemians and Moravians irreversibly split into the Czechs and Germans. In 1919, German-speakers referred to Czechoslovakia as Tschechien or Tschechei before the form Tschechoslowakei was

486 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

accepted as official. Tschechei became popular among Czechoslovakia’s Germans in the 1930s, for denoting the Czech-speaking areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. This concept allowed for singling out the German-speaking areas of these three regions, and these areas became jointly known as the Sudetenland. There was another proposal to call the Czech-speaking areas Böhmerland (‘Bohemialand’), but Tschechei prevailed. When the Czech Republic was founded in 1993, the controversy about how to refer to this state in German flared up again. To a German-speaker, Tschechien sounds somewhat ridiculous, and Tschechei a bit ungrammatical, hence, like in Czech, one says Tschechischen Republik, though it is longish. In popular speech, Tschechien sometimes pops up. English ‘Czechia’ is modelled on it, and seems to replace the official ‘Czech Republic’ more often than Tschechei Tschechischen Republik. In the Polish language, the notion of Czechy normally lumps all the Czech lands as a unit, and only a specialist realizes it may stand for ‘Bohemia.’ Because of this long-established onomastic tradition, a Polish-speaker finds the name ‘Czech Republic’ (Republika Czeska) cumbersome, and usually sticks to ambiguous Czechy. The situation is the same in the case of the Magyar language. Csehorság functions as shorthand for the Czech Republic (Cseh Köztársaság), though originally it meant ‘Bohemia.’ In Polish and Magyar, the term ‘Moravia’ exists (Morawy, Morvaország), but fell out of general use after the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Whereas the lack of distinction between the concept of Hungary and the Magyar nation-state in the Magyar language (invariably rendered Magyarország) allowed Magyar nationalists collapse the former into the ˇ ˇ ˇ latter, Czech nationalists who use Cesko, Cechy, or Ceská Republika may conveniently overlook the ethnopolitical differences between Bohemia and Moravia in the interest of the unified Czech nation-state. In Slovak, the terminology and ˇ its functioning is exactly the same as in Czech, that is, Cechy refers to Bohemia ˇ and the Czech Republic, while Cesko is increasingly more popular and stands for the latter polity (Havlík 1993: 38,137–138, 144, 179; Heck and Orzechowski 1969: 193; Lemberg 1993; Tomaszewski 2006: 378). ∗

∗

∗

In the course of his 1781 reforms, Joseph II extended religious toleration to Lutherans, Calvinists, and Orthodox Christians, but not to the Czech Brethren, religious descendants of the Hussites. In order to be tolerated in the Czech lands, they had to become members of one of the accepted Churches. The number of remaining Protestants sank rapidly after the confirmation of rule of the Catholic Habsburgs in the Czech lands following the defeat of the Protestant estates in the Battle of White Mountain (1620), and in the wake of the ensuing Counter-Reformation. Throughout the 19th century, Bohemia and Moravia were overwhelmingly Catholic. Catholics accounted for about 95 percent of

The Czech Case

487

the entire population, while Protestants and Jews for 2 percent each. The only exception to this rule was the eastern half of Austrian Silesia, where Protestants made up one-fifth of the population (and Jews were more numerous as well). Actually, only there, in Teschen (Tˇešín, Cieszyn) did the sole Protestant parish in the Habsburgs’ non-Hungarian possessions survive throughout the Counter-Reformation (Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný 1901: 638; Rieger 1862: 344). Religion and the lands of the Czech Crown remained the main loci of the identity of the nobility, burghers, and populus (population outside the estates). Whatever differences might exist, all of them were united in their loyalty to the monarch, who since 1526 had invariably been a Habsburg. In addition, the Habsburg monarch concentrated in his hands the previously separate positions of the emperor, the King of Bohemia, the Margrave of Moravia and the Prince of Silesia. This stable modus vivendi began to crumble under the pressure of the novel ideas about nation and equality spawned by the French Revolution and forcefully spread all over Europe by the Napoleonic armies. The ground for the coming changes had been prepared by the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, which weakened the political influence of the estates as well as their economic basis due to the partial phasing out of serfdom. In emulation of France and the United Kingdom, where the vernacular had replaced Latin as the language of administration and education in the 16th century, Joseph II introduced in 1784 German in place of Latin as the language of administration and secondary and university education in his lands. The reaction against the centralizing reforms set in after the death of Joseph II. Hence, Vienna was not in a position to enforce unification of the state as Paris and London had managed, overhauling France and the United Kingdom into practically monolingual polities. In effect, the reforms stopped mid-way. The former cultural unity guaranteed by Latin, and the political one grounded in the estates, unraveled in the Habsburg lands. However, Vienna was not able to replace this political-cumcultural unity with the Western European model of the centralized state. In Western Europe, nation-states emerged at the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the following one. At that time, the Austrian Empire evolved as a pragmatic cluster of variegated lands of various statuses. The first half of the 19th century saw the rise of ethnic national movements. They were not counterbalanced by an equally potent political force, which deepened the overall diversity of the Austrian Empire. On the one hand, the economic development of this empire (contrasted with Russia’s much poorer performance in this regard) legitimized Habsburg rule. But the even more rapid industrialization in Prussia made the empire look backward and increasingly illegitimate after the political standard of ethnic nationalism entered Central Europe with the founding of the German nation-state in 1871. The overhauling of the empire into dual Austria-Hungary (1867) only added to this tension, as the Austrian half of the monarchy retained its diverse character. On the contrary, inside

488 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Dual Monarchy, Hungary emerged as the Magyar nation-state-in-themaking. Open-ended politics of pragmatic multiculturalism did not merge well with nationalism in pursuit of ethnolinguistic homogeneity. The long-established tradition of administrative and political separateness of the lands of the Czech Crown (under the disputed leadership of Bohemia) made them similar to Croatia, which claimed unity with Slavonia and Dalmatia. Vienna could not deny that the Czech lands had a juridical and historical right to be treated as a separate entity. This lent continued attraction to Landespatriotismus, or the feeling of loyalty and patriotic attachment to Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. At first, this region-based patriotism was limited to the narrow class of the natio composed from the nobility and richer burghers, which earned it the name of ‘patriotism of the nobility’ (šlechtický patriotismus). The loyalties of the nobility had been of composite nature, that is, a noble tended to identify with several polities, regions, and localities at any given time. Until the founding of the lands of the Czech Crown, they had sworn fealty to the Holy Roman Empire and Bohemia or Moravia. The Czech Crown merged both regions (and Silesia) into this new unit. But this freshly forged unity deteriorated during the religious wars and disappeared after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Over 100,000 (usually Czech-speaking) nobles and burghers with their families left the Czech lands. The Czech Crown disappeared as an effective locus of loyalty, so the nobility’s identity was once again shaped by their allegiance to the empire, and the regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. In addition, the nobility and burghers, having fused into the natio of estates, spoke and wrote mainly in German. The chancery Bohemian (Czech) language of the Prague court had fallen into disuse during the 17th and 18th centuries. Whereas between 1526 and 1620, about 1900 Czech-language book titles appeared, Czech-language book production came almost to a standstill in the course of the 17th century. Some crusading Catholic nobles prided themselves that they burnt tens of thousands copies of heretic (that is, Protestant, and mainly Czech-language) publications up till the beginning of the 18th century. Between 1729 and 1770, three editions of the Index Bohemicorum librorum prohibitorum et corrigendorum (Index of the Prohibited Bohemian Books, Prague) appeared. The index recorded mostly Czech-language books published between 1414 and 1620. The few Czech-language publications, which came off the press between 1620s and 1770s, were overwhelmingly of religious and devotional character. Due to this increasing lack of use, chancery Czech acquired a wealth of dialectal differences and various linguistic loans from German, depending on where it was used. This differentiation, combined with strong regional loyalties, gave rise to the region-based classification of Bohemian, Moravian, and (sometimes) Silesian as separate Slavic languages. This division was not an entirely modern phenomenon. The strong and continued separate regional identities of Moravia

The Czech Case

489

and Bohemia engendered the practice of naming the Slavic chancery language employed in Moravia as ‘Moravian’ (idioma moravicale, moravice dicitur, in vulgari moravico) or ‘Slavic’ (lingua Slavonica). This phenomenon dates back at least to the 13th century. In the mid-19th century, the term ‘Czech’ (czechisch, ˇcechisch, tschechisch) in German usage began to replace ‘Bohemian’ as the name of the language, following the Czech-language example. This agreed with František Palacký’s (Franz Palacky, 1798–1876) post-1848 methodological approach, which combined the Slavophone population of Bohemia and Moravia as the ‘Czech nation,’ which spoke its own specific Czech language. Austrian and Prussian (German) offices disagreed, and continued to distinguish between the Moravian and Bohemian language until 1918. In Moravia, weary of the dominant position of Prague and Bohemia in the Czech lands, the Germano- and Slavophone elites officially termed their written Slavic language as ‘Moravian,’ ‘Slavo-Moravian,’ or simply ‘Slavic.’ This practice disappeared after the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Even when the Moravian language was written out of sociolinguistic reality in the interwar period, the English term ‘Bohemian’ and the German one Böhmisch continued to denote the Czech language until the late 1920s. To add to the confusion, since the 1830s, it had been proposed that there was, or should be, some ‘common Czech,’ ‘Czecho-Slovak,’ or ‘Czechoslovak’ language based on, or composed of, the tongues of the Bohemians, Moravians, Silesians, Slovaks, and even Sorbs. There was no agreement whether this Czechoslovak idiom ought to be a language of its own, or a dialect of the common Slavic language to be spoken by the Slavic nation. The former (Czechoslovak) solution would make Bohemian, Moravian, and Slovak (later discussions avoided Silesian and Sorbian) into dialects. On the other hand, the latter (Pan-Slavic solution) would transform Bohemian, Moravian, and Slovak into subdialects of the Czechoslovak dialect of the Slavic language (Arndt 1818: 85; Graus 1980: 161; Hannan 1993; Junga 1920; Kollar 1837: 12; Rank 1920; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 15, 21; Šafaˇrjk 1837: 483; Schleicher 1850: IX; Šmahel 2000: 61–64; Talvj 1852: 123; Triest 1864; Žáˇcek 1995).

Language enters politics Discussion of the nature and classification of the speech of the Slavophone inhabitants of the Czech lands commenced with Josef Dobrovský’s (Dobrowsky, 1753–1829) seminal Geschichte der Böhmichen Sprache (History of the Bohemian Language, 1792, Prague) and had not been completed by 1939, because in interwar Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak was declared as the official language of this nation-state of the Czechoslovak nation. Only the founding of an independent Slovakia on the eve of World War II permanently split Czechoslovak into the Czech and Slovak languages. Dobrovský wrote about the dialects of the Slavic language. He accorded the greatest importance to Russian, as at that

490 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

time the Russian Empire was the apparent leader of the ‘Slavic world.’ Polish earned the second place because Poland-Lithuania still stood on its last legs. Dobrovský classified Bohemian as the leading dialect of the group composed also of Moravian, Silesian (as spoken in the western half of Austrian Silesia), and Slovak of Upper Hungary (Slowakisch in Ober-Ungarn). Silesian of the eastern half of Austrian Silesia he grouped together with Polish (Dobrowsky 1936: 71–72). The natio of the lands of the Czech Crown (or rather the nationes of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia) did not take much interest in the issue of language prior to the modernizing reforms of Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II. Members of the estates conversed and wrote in German, while the administration and the learned used Latin also. When some members of these nationes knew the Slavic speech of the populus (that is, peasantry and poor urban dwellers), they hardly ever took care to commit it to paper, and if they did, they almost never perused Protestant (ergo ‘heretic’) writings in chancery Czech to check on their grammar or spelling. It was a different story with the clergy of variegated social backgrounds who gained literacy in increasingly antiquated chancery Czech in order to ensure efficient pastoral services for their Slavicspeaking parishioners in a written language that would be closest to their speech. However, the social acceptance and dominance of German was so strong that the first Czech-language newspaper Pražské poštowské nowiny neboli ˇceský postilion (Prague Post, or Czech Postillon, 1719–1772) went defunct for the lack of subscribers. The 1784 replacement of Latin with German and the gradual widening of elementary education in the latter language made the question of language into a burning one. In 1773, Count Franz Josef Kinsky published, in German, his appeal for teaching the Bohemian language and history, which was a clear expression of Bohemian Landespatriotismus. He did not defend Czech ethnolinguistic identity, of which there was little, if any, consciousness then, but rather strove to protect the traditional regional privileges of the Bohemian estates that the centralizing reforms endangered. Other ‘defences’ of the Bohemian language followed and gradually moved from Bohemian regionalism to the espousal of the Czech ethnolinguistic program. The first defence written in Czech came off the press in 1783. In the meantime, two Czech-language chairs in pastoral theology were set up at the theological seminaries in Prague and Olmütz (both in 1778). Thus, the (chancery) Czech language returned to higher education. Czech-language textbooks were published for the growing educational system, despite the intensive promotion of German as the official language. Bilingual teachers were in short supply, so Czech instruction remained the norm at the elementary level. In 1780, a new edition of the Czech Bible was printed. Six years later, the first permanent Czech-language theater opened in Prague and the first Czechophone periodical commenced publication, also in the Bohemian capital. The 1780s afforded the hope that the historian Franz Martin Peltzl’s

The Czech Case

491

(František Martin Pelcl, 1734–1801) prediction that German could push the Czech language out of Bohemia and Moravia in half a century would not come true. Rather, 1791, the year when Peltzl voiced this opinion, saw two milestones in the process of official recognition of Czech as a full-fledged language: a chair in Czech language and literature was founded at the University of Prague, where German had superseded Latin as the medium of instruction in 1784 (with the exception of philosophy, which continued to be taught in Latin until 1825); and Czech was used ostentatiously during the coronation of Leopold II at Prague. Peltzl was the first holder of the chair. In 1789, with the publication of Krameryusowy císaˇrsko-králowské Pražské Poštowské Nowiny (Kramerius’s Imperial-Royal Prague Post), the new (as yet unbroken to this day) tradition of the Czechlanguage press was begun. The following year, the newspaper’s owner, Matˇej Václav Kramerius (1759–1808), founded a Czech-language publishing house, which founded the new tradition of the Czech-language book industry. Between 1791 and 1796, the Czech translation of Peltzl’s three-volume German-language history of Bohemia was published, which after over a century of discontinuity re-inaugurated the use of Czech as a language of scholarship. It was, however, Dobrovský who firmly placed Czech among other European languages, which he achieved with his authoritative Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache und Literatur (History of the Bohemian Language and Literature, 1792, Prague). In 1809, he published his Lehrgebäude der böhmischen Sprache (Learning System of the Bohemian Language, Prague). Further codifiers of the Czech language took it as the foundation of their project of how to standardize the Czech language. Dobrovský’s clear exposition of the Czech language was unique and exemplary. It even served as the model for grammars of other Slavic languages, especially Slovenian. The problem was that Dobrovský’s grammar referred to the 16thand 17th-century Czech of Protestant writers as the model to be emulated. This chancery Czech of three centuries earlier was very distant from the everyday Slavic speech in Bohemia. Dobrovský’s two works were republished in revised editions in 1818 and 1819 respectively, setting the standard for the future development of the Czech language (Agnew 1986: 591–597; Auty 1980: 174–175; Basaj 1999: 162–163; Heck and Orzechowski 1969: 196; Krofta 1946: 593; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 27, 29; Sayer 1998: 69; Seton-Watson 1965: 162; Šolc 1881: 335, 338). Although during the 1780s and 1790s, Czech was firmly established as a written language complete with its institutional infrastructure of schools and research centers, Dobrovský had little confidence in the future of Czech, which he had decided to research as a scholar. Dobrovský is credited with the creation of Slavic philology, but beyond that he had no wish for or vision of the establishment of a Czechophone ethnic nation of the Czechs. The ideal of the Czech ethnic nation was worked out by the next generation of Dobrovský’s students and followers: Josef Jungmann (1773–1847), Václav Hanka (1791–1861), Palacký

492 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and Pavel Josef Šafaˇrík (Pavol Jozef Šafárik, 1795–1861). Because of Dobrovský’s pronounced lack of nationalist enthusiasm, Jungmann called him a ‘German of Slavic sympathies.’ Dobrovský was a Bohemian, a believer in Bohemian Landespatriotismus, not unlike Count Kinsky. Still in the spirit of Bohemian patriotism, the Königlich-Böhmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences) was established in 1790, and the Bohemian Museum founded in Prague in 1818. A change toward Czech ethnic nationalism began in 1827, when, in addition to its German periodical, the museum commenced the publication of the first scholarly journal in Czech. At that time, this society also acquired its Czech-language name, the Kralovská cˇeská spoleˇcnost vˇedecká, which is a literal translation of the German one. Four years later, the Matice cˇeska (Czech Cultural Organization) was established following the example of the Matice srbska (Serbian Cultural Organization). It supported the publishing of scholarly works in Czech, written by scholars cooperating with this museum. The ground for the shift from Bohemian regional (non-ethnic) patriotism to Czech nationalism was prepared during the last decade of the 18th century, and in the first three decades of the following century. This period coincided with the slow spread of the use of Czech in elementary and secondary education, in the press, book publishing and research. Czech, as an auxiliary medium of instruction, was employed in secondˇ ary schools in Prague (1802), Königgrätz (Hradec Králové, 1802), Budweis (Ceske Budˇejovice, 1815), and Pilsen (Plzen, ˇ 1815). In 1822, Jan Kollár (Johann Kollar, 1793–1852) established a secondary school in Pest, where Czech and Bibliˇctina functioned as languages of instruction. Further chairs of Czech language and literature opened at the secondary schools in Preßburg in Upper Hungary (1803) and Olmütz in Moravia (1831). The latter chair was transferred to the Moravian capital of Brünn in 1847. In an 1810 decree, the Bohemian authorities emphasized that clergymen and civil servants in Bohemia should have a command of Czech. Six years later, another decree insisted that secondary school teachers ought to know this language too, so as to be able to provide instruction in it. This requirement was extended to court clerks in 1843. All these measures were copied (however, to a lesser degree) in Moravia, but almost not at all in Austrian Silesia. The number of Czechophone elementary schools in Bohemia grew from 1328 in 1791, to 2020 in 1851; and German-language ones from 1042 to 1442. As in Hungary, where towns were mainly German-speaking and the countryside Magyarophone, in the Czech lands, Czech was spoken outside predominantly Germanophone towns. The complication was that a German-speaking countryside skirted the western, southern and northern borderlands of Bohemia, Moravia’s southern and northern borders, and most of the western half of Austrian Silesia. In 1857, Czech- and German-speakers accounted for 64 and 36 percent of Bohemia’s population, respectively. In 1890, the corresponding numbers for Moravia were 70

The Czech Case

493

and 30 percent. Not unlike in Hungary, where most towns became Magyarized by the mid-19th century, the same process unfolded in Bohemia and Moravia. It peaked in the 1880s, a decade later than in Hungary. For instance, in 1847, the population of Prague consisted of 66,000 German-speakers, 6000 Yiddishor German-speaking Jews, and 37,000 Czech-speakers. In 1880, the respective numbers were 23,000, 15,000, and 213,000. In Austrian Silesia, German-speakers remained the plurality (44 percent) until 1918. Czech and Polish statisticians variously allotted the Slavophone remainder of the population between the Czech and Polish nations. Poles usually accounted for over 30 percent and Czechs for over 20 percent. However, the Germanophone inhabitants constituted the majority of the inhabitants in the western half of this crownland, and the Slavophone (mostly Polish) in the eastern half (Agnew 1986: 597; Auty 1980: 176–177; Heck and Orzechowski 1969: 196; Herrity 1973: 368, 375; Kamusella 2001; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 196; Meillet 1928: 434; Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný 1893: 192; Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný 1901: 638; Rieger 1862: 345; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 29–30; Sayer 1998: 97; Šolc 1881: 338–342; Szyjkowski 1948: 13; Tornow 2005: 478; Waldenberg 1992: 44). In 1811, Jungmann showed the viability of Czech as a literary language when his translation of Milton’s entire Paradise Lost was published. In 1817 and 1818, Hanka announced the discovery of the two astonishingly rich and extensive Czech-language manuscripts from the 10th and 13th centuries, which were useful to those scholars striving to establish a long-lasting pedigree of written Czech. Only in 1886, would the scholar and future first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), dare to show that these manuscripts were hoaxes. Palacký believed in their authenticity and used them as genuine documents for his analysis of early Czech history. Jungmann’s Slovesnost (Word-Formation, 1820) set the rules of Czech word-formation. These rules were reaffirmed when the second edition was brought out in 1846. In the meantime, in emulation of Samuel Bogumił Linde’s authoritative dictionary that standardized the Polish language, Jungmann compiled his five-volume Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague). Besides Polish, he also drew on Russian and other Slavic languages to fill in lacunae in the Czech lexicon. Jungmann’s dictionary also marked the completion of the emergence of the Czech language from the cultural commonality with German, which until the 1820s was marked by the almost uniform production of Czech books in the Gothic font. Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký was printed in Antiqua, with the exception of the German words and phrases, which were given in Gothic characters, as in Linde’s dictionary. This switch of Czech-language publications from the Gothic to Antiqua type was possible thanks to Dobrovský and his friend, Jan František (Johann Franz) Tomsa (1750–1814), who had developed the Czech version of the Antiqua between 1798 and 1799. Also during the 1830s, an important switch

494 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in grapheme-phoneme correspondence took place. The new graphemes [j] and [v] replaced the old ones [g] and [w] standing for the phonemes /j/ and /v/. The grapheme [v] helped to differentiate Czech from German and Polish, which continue to use [w] for the phoneme /v/, whereas the introduction of [j] did away with the confusion when [g] represented the phoneme /j/ and [g] ˙ the phoneme /g/. At that time, the grapheme [ł] standing for /w/ disappeared, as the phoneme was not used in newly codified standard Czech. Šafaˇrík is credited with this change, which helpfully deepened the difference between Czech and Polish, where the grapheme is used to this day. However, these innovations spread rather slowly as there was no central Czech academy of sciences. Jungmann preserved the old usage (that is, [w] for /v/, [g] for /j/, and [g] ˙ for /g/) in his dictionary, and Palacký clung to it in his Dˇejiny narodu ˇceskeho (History of the Czech [Bohemian] Nation, Prague). Together with Jungmann’s dictionary, Palacký’s history (published during the 1850s and several times re-published in the second half of the 19th century) lent authority to the old usage. The change in graphemes was increasingly slower in Moravia, and especially so in Austrian Silesia, which reinforced the popular belief that Bohemian (or standard Czech) was different from the Moravian language used in writing in Moravia and Austrian Silesia. These old graphemes, as well as the consistent use of the Gothic font for writing and printing in Moravian survived in Germany’s southernmost Upper Silesia until 1920. Jungmann’s lexicographic feat was possible because an extensive GermanCzech dictionary was published in 1788, and its Czech-German counterpart in 1807–1808. In 1791, an equally extensive Czech-German-Latin dictionary came off the press. Even more important was Dobrovský’s two-volume Deutschböhmisches Wörterbuch (German-Bohemian Dictionary, 1802 and 1821, Prague). But it was Josef Franta Šumavský (1796–1857) who tentatively completed Jungmann’s dictionary with its two-volume close counterpart, Úplný nˇemeckoˇceský slovník (Complete German-Bohemian Dictionary, 1843–1847, Prague). The grammatical and lexicographic base of standard Czech was ready. Publications of the Bohemian Museum, and its scientific periodical contributed strongly to the development of technical and scientific vocabulary during the 1830s and 1840s. The goal was to make Czech versatile enough for use in any sphere of life in modern state and society. In 1853, an important step was taken in this direction with the publication of the 350-page-long Nˇemecko-ˇceský slovník vˇedeckého názvosloví pro gymnasia a reálné školy/Deutsch-böhmisches Wörterbuch der wissenschaftlichen Terminologie für Gymnasien und Realschulen (The German-Czech Dictionary of Scientific Terminology for Secondary Schools, Prague). It was Šafaˇrík who supported the compilation of this groundbreaking work, and he wrote the preface to it. But Czech could not be a truly national language unless cleansed of numerous Germanic words and phrases, because language equated nation in Central European political thought. The so-called ‘reform’ of the Magyar language

The Czech Case

495

aspired to do the same, to ‘purify’ this language especially from Latin but also German and French linguistic loans. Hence established Czech words of Germanic origin were replaced, tyátr (theater) with the medieval word divadlo, luft (air) with Russianism vzduch, and handl (commerce) with its Slavophone synonym obchod. This puristic streak strengthened during the second half of the 19th century when the German-Czech tension reached its heights, and continued well into the 1930s. Although Magyar linguistic purism reached its heights between the 1820s and 1870s, the penchant for attacking ‘ugly Germanisms’ also continued in Hungary until World War II (Auty 1973; Auty 1980: 176–177, 181; Heck and Orzechowski 1969: 197; Janich and Greule 2002: 304; Orło´s 1993: 42–48; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 27; Sayer 1998: 70–71).

Landespatriotismus, Czech nationalism, and Pan-Slavism The terminology of the Central European ethnic national movements focused on the idea of national ‘awakening’ and ‘renaissance.’ Nationalists who were building their proposed nations before starting to demand separate nation-states for these nations, strove to legitimize their projects on the ground that they were presumably awakening the long-established but so far sleeping nations. That is why, in Czech historiography, the period before 1848 is known as národní obrození, that is, ‘national renaissance or re-awakening,’ while the early Czech nationalists earned themselves the sobriquet of buditele, or ‘awakeners.’ All this very evocative and potent terminology, which ethnic national movements from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe have employed time and again, dates back to Herder’s classical work Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Man that was published in the German original in 1784 in Riga and Leipzig. In Book XVI, he devoted Chapter IV to the Slavs. Herder describes them as industrious, peaceloving peoples who were unjustly suppressed by numerous nations (Nationen) of German origin (vom deutschen Stamme). In the original, Herder refers to the Slavs as ‘Völker’ (peoples), while the 1800 English translation employs the term ‘nations.’ Herder concludes this chapter hoping that ‘these now deeply suppressed, but once industrious and happy people[s], will at length awake from their long and heavy slumber, shake off the chains of slavery, enjoy the possession of their delightful lands from the Adriatic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, from the Don to the Moldau.’5 (Agnew 2002: 52; Herder 1800: 482–484; Herder 1966: 433–435) This idea of awakening the sleeping nation was as popular among Czech nationalists as among their Slovak followers. It gained considerably less popularity among the Polish-Lithuanian and the Hungarian nationes. The former did not wish to wake up some dormant ‘Polish-Lithuanian or Polish nation’ but to regain their partitioned state. The Hungarian natio regained their state at the end of the 18th century. Their grievance was that they had to share the

496 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

control of the Hungarian state with the Habsburgs. Already in the first half of the 19th century, the Magyarophone noble patriots espoused the tenets of the ethnolinguistic nationalism stemming from the Italian and German national movements, and as self-conscious Magyars, set out to transform Hungary into the ethnic Magyar nation-state. A similar ethnicization of the national movement of the Polish-Lithuanian natio took off after the failed anti-Russian uprising of 1863–1864, and produced the overwhelmingly ethnic Polish national movement during the 1890s. But neither in the Polish nor in the Magyar case was there any need to legitimize the existence and goals of these movements by using the imagery of ‘national awakening.’ The existence of the Polish-Lithuanian and Hungarian nationes with their respective long-established traditions of statehood sufficed. Nationalists simply re-possessed the non-national past of these nationes and their states, and repackaged it as the ‘millennium-long history’ of the Polish or Magyar ethnic nation. This dominance of the ethnic in Czech nationalism did not manage to obliterate the possibility of civic nationalism as shown by the frequent appearance of the term vlastenectví, or patriotism in Czech national historiography. This concept corresponds directly with the Germanophone one of ‘Landespatriotismus.’ In the case of Czech nationalism, there was ideological ambiguity bred by the fact that vlastenectví could refer to all the lands of the Czech Crown, or to each of them separately. On the other hand, Landespatriotismus was a feeling of patriotism, which attached a person to one of these lands. Until the mid-19th century, the building of the civic nations of the bi-lingual Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians, Moravians and Silesians was a well-established option. There was a chance for non-ethnic German-Slavic reciprocity parallel to Kollár’s call for ethnocentric Slavic reciprocity (Wechselseitigkeit). Sometimes the term ‘Bohemian nation’ was not limited to Bohemia but extended to cover all the lands of the Czech Crown. The first thinker to sketch out this possibility was the famous Bohemian mathematician and student of religions, Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848). He devoted one lecture to this issue in 1810, and three more in 1816. Bolzano spoke about two ‘parts’ or ‘tribes’ (Volkstämme) of the Bohemian nation (böhmische Nation), and consciously employed the French loan word Nation instead of Germanic Volk, because the former emphasized the free union of citizens, while the latter denoted a predetermined ethnolinguistic community. On the ground of common Christian faith and implicitly referring to the civic values of the French revolution, Bolzano appealed for treating Bohemia as a locus of identity more important than language. This line of thought went back to the landespatrotisch motivation of Germanophone Bohemian nobles who had begun to support the cause of the Czech language at the end of the 18th century. At that time, they had not foreseen that it would ever come to choosing between Czech and German as the sole national language for all Bohemia, language understood as the measure of the nation.

The Czech Case

497

In the simplistic logic of ethnic nationalism, victory for one would invariably mean defeat and the downgrading of social and political status for the speakers of the other language. This consequence had been unimaginable for the Bohemian nobility. Bolzano was the first to predict what the future might hold in store. The growing breach between the Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians did not emerge clearly until 1848. Bohemia’s Czechophone intellectuals such as Palacký wrote on the history of the Czech lands in German, while their Germanophone counterparts such as Karl Egon Ebert (1801–1882) or Wilhelm Adolf Gerle (1783–1846) wrote in German on figures and events from Bohemia’s Slavic history. This cooperation and vision of Bohemia, as rightfully belonging to all the inhabitants, was shattered in the course of the revolutionary events. The German National Assembly at Frankfurt urged all Bohemians, Moravians, and Silesians, regardless of the languages they spoke, to participate in the elections to this representative body of the coalescing German nation. In the ethnic-German national perception, all three provinces of the Czech Crown rightfully belonged to the future German nation-state as an integral part of the German Confederation. Palacký disagreed and turned down the invitation to sit in this assembly. With the help of his son-in-law František Rieger (1818–1903) and the father of Czechophone political journalism Karel Havlíˇcek (Borovský) (1821–1856), he organized the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague (May 31–June 14). The participants included 237 representatives of the Czech and Slovaks; 61 Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and Russians; 32 representatives of the South Slavs, and one Sorb. Ironically, in the absence of any common Slav language, and the fact that the Russian language was still relatively unknown outside the Russian Empire, German functioned as the lingua franca of this congress. On the one hand, this event counterbalanced the ideological influence of the Frankfurt assembly and the Magyar revolution in Hungary, especially among the Slavophone inhabitants of the Austrian Empire. On the other, this congress angered German and Magyar nationalists. It also overshadowed the elections to Bohemia’s National Assembly, and Palacký’s earlier appeals that all the lands of the Czech Crown should be represented in some common assembly for Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Palacký emphasized that he was a Böhmer slawische stammes (Bohemian or Czech of Slavic origin), not German. In 1846, Havlíˇcek had stood for loyalty to the multiethnic Austrian Empire and rejected the possibility of overhauling the German Confederation into a German nation-state. In 1848, he demanded the separation of the lands of the Czech crown, that is, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia, from this confederation. Rieger joined in, and all three appealed for boycotting the elections for the German National Assembly in Frankfurt. The political leaders of the Germanophone population took opposing views. Conservatives, such as the Austrians, called for the preservation of the multiethnic

498 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Austrian Empire as a civic nation-state. Liberals chose German ethnic nationalism. They formed the Union of Germans from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia for the Preservation of Their Nationality to ensure election of their representatives to the Frankfurt assembly. They feared that any success of the Czech national movement would isolate them not only from a united Germany formed at Frankfurt, but also from their Germanophone Austrian kin, if Bohemia or all the lands of the Czech Crown were separated from the Austrian Empire. Palacký’s boycott of the elections to the German National Assembly was quite effective in Bohemia where over half of the constituencies did not elect representatives. In Austrian Silesia, over two-thirds of the constituencies sent delegates to Frankfurt, while in Moravia, all but two did so. Symptomatically, during this volatile time, the proponents of the Austrian Empire and Bohemian non-ethnically-specific Landespatriotismus published Bolzano’s lectures in 1849 to promote their cause. The political success of Czech nationalism in Bohemia was undeniable. The leader of the German-speaking Bohemians, Ludwig von Löhner (1812–1852), who established the Union of Germans from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia for the Preservation of Their Nationality in Vienna, soon overhauled this organization into the Verein der Deutsch Österreichs (Society of German-Austria). He disagreed with any program that would make Bohemia or all the lands of the Czech Crown into some prospective Czech national region, or would overhaul the Austrian Empire into a federation consisting of the Slavic and Magyar national units as opposed to the rest, namely Austria. Löhner proposed a different kind of federalization that would closely follow the ethnolinguistic lines of division, not the provincial borders. He foresaw the creation of Polish-Austria, Italian-Austria, Slovenian-Austria, Czech-Austria, and German-Austria. CzechAustria was to comprise the Czechophone sections of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Similarly, German-Austria would embrace the German-speaking areas of these crownlands apart from the Alpine Germanophone provinces. At the end of August 1848, German-speaking intellectuals and aristocrats from Bohemia met at their own national assembly convened in Teplitz (Teplice) in Bohemia. They demanded that Bohemia be included in the future German nation-state, and appealed for consolidation of German national life in this crownland. In agreement with Löhner’s program they also called for the division of the Bohemian administration into the separate German-Bohemian and Czech-Bohemian administrations. In 1848, during the last year of his life, Bolzano gave voice to his disapproval of this blatant ethnicization of Bohemia’s political life, a danger he had already predicted in the 1810s. His voice remained unheard. Leaders of the Czech national movement did not recognize the Bohemian national assembly at Prague to which elections were never held after the forced dispersing of the Pan-Slav Congress. But they actively participated in the deliberations of the Vienna constituent assembly. They formed alliance with all

The Czech Case

499

the political forces that attempted to prepare the ground for a constitutional and federal system. Due to continuing revolutionary fervor in Vienna and the unfolding war with the Magyars, the court and the assembly moved to the safety of Kremsier (Kromˇeˇríž) in Moravia. While Vienna concentrated all the troops against the Magyars, the Kremsier assembly was dispersed in March 1849. Although the war in Hungary continued through August, the revolution was over in the Czech lands. After the abolishing of the last vestiges of constitutionalism in 1851, absolutism was firmly re-instituted. No concessions were granted to any of the aspiring national movements. What remained were the clearly defined political programs (Agnew 2002: 56–57, 62–65; Bolzano 1849; Menzel 1985: 55–63, 101, 104, 107, 117, 144–147; Winter 1956: 85, 1977: 77–90). The Czech national movement led by Palacký stood on the ground of staunch opposition to German ethnic nationalism and unwavering loyalty to the monarchy. He trusted that the Austrian Empire was the best protection for the forming Slavic nations against the encroachment of German nationalism and of the authoritarian Russian Empire. He famously remarked: ‘If there were no Austria, it would be necessary to create one.’ In this context, Palacký preferred to use the term ‘nationality’ (Nationalität, národnost) instead of ‘nation’ (Volk or Nation in German, and národ in Czech). This distinction goes back to the significant Central European correction applied to the French theory of nation. In the French opinion, every nation has the inalienable right to its own nationstate, which in the specific case of France meant that the existing state molded its population into the French nation. At the beginning of the 19th century, German nationalists opined that all the states remaining after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire were too small to comfortably house the postulated German nation, while the Austrian Empire was ethnically too little German in order to fulfill such a role. Unlike in the case of the French nation-state, it remained up to the German nation to carve out a nation-state of its own. This tension between the French model of nationalism and the political realities of Central Europe provided fodder for thought to numerous German thinkers. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), in his Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline [1959]), introduced the seminal distinction between ‘nations with history’ and ‘nations without history.’ Accordingly, to become a nation a Volk had to express strong political will to become a state, and, at best, it should have enjoyed the long-established tradition of its continuous statehood. Thus these Völker were nations with history. On the other hand, these Völker, whose states perished before the period of the ‘occidental Enlightenment’ and which had no hope to attain their separate statehood, Hegel considered as ‘nations without history.’ He actually termed them as Völkerabfäll, or remnants (ruins) of peoples, that would be of no significance for history

500 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of nations. Famously, he maintained that no Slavic Völker, not even the Poles, would have a chance to become a nation; that is, a Volk with its own state. This line of thinking spawned the division between Völker or Nationen, full-fledged nations with their own nation-states or clearly destined to achieve this goal, and Nationalitäten, ethnic or national groups whose existence one could not deny, but which did not have any right to their own separate nation-states. In Vienna’s official documents, Nationalitäten were sometimes referred to as Volksstämme (national tribes). Palacký’s Austroslavism went along this line though he preferred to refer to the Czechs as a nation (národ ), as indicated by his famous history. The Czech národ can also mean ‘a people,’ which left a margin of ambiguity in his usage. However, in the second half of the 19th century, the term národnost was often used interchangeably with národ in the Czech national circles. Palacký’s main exposition of Austro-Slavism (earlier expressed in Havlíˇcek’s 1848 journalism) was his 1865 work Idea státu rakouského (The Idea of the Austrian State, Prague). In this book, he set the program of Czech nationalism for the coming decades until World War I. He called for the unity of all the historical lands of the Czech Crown within Austria. The justification of this program was the legal theory that the entity in the form of the Crown of the Czech Lands, founded by Charles IV, continued to exist. The goal was to gain an autonomous Czech nation-state in the Austrian Empire by legalistic means. This earned the program the sobriquet of státoprávní (state-legal). Czech nationalists pledged to act within the framework of law, and to limit their demands to those that were justified by the historical and juridical tradition of the Czech Crown. Obviously, this stance went against the wishes of German or Austro-German nationalists of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia who continued to subscribe to Löhner’s 1848 program that called for the division of the Czech lands along the ethnolinguistic lines. Interestingly, in 1855, Karl Marx (1818–1883) opined that the Slavic Stämme (tribes) of the Austrian Empire divided among various provinces were slated for extinction as ‘appendages, either to the German or the Hungarian [Magyar] nations.’ Four years later, Friedrich Engels (1820–1859) agreed with this opinion in his remark that Central Europe’s would-be nation-states should follow the example of the French nation-state. Völkerabfälle (ruins of peoples) were to assimilate either with the German, Magyar, or the Italian nation, not unlike the Bretons or the Basques in France. The future was to prove them wrong. But their unflattering view of the Slavic nations in the Austrian Empire made the communist and socialist movements largely blind to the force of nationalism. On the other hand, it spurred activities of Czech and other nationalists so as to forestall the possibility of assimilation of their nations with the Germans, the Magyars or the Italians (Herod 1976: 29–30, 37–38, 43; Reinfeld 1982: 30–45; Seton-Watson 1915: 17; Šolc 1881: 383).

The Czech Case

501

The issue of splitting the lands of the Czech Crown into the nationally differentiated Czech and German sections divided Czechophone and Germanophone politicians especially in Bohemia, though less so in Moravia and Austrian Silesia. In the two latter crownlands, neither Czech nor German nationalism was so pronounced as in Bohemia. The separate national lines of Czech and German politics and culture developed in the Czech lands during the second half of the 19th century. But this event did not obliterate continued identification with Austria as a multiethnic state symbolized by the Habsburg monarchy, and with separate crownlands in the spirit of Landespatriotismus. Actually, it took Czech nationalism considerable time to cross into Moravia from Bohemia. In the 1830s, the first Czech national activists from Bohemia moved to Moravia, but their influence did not amount to much. The Matice moravská (Moravian Cultural Organization) was founded only in 1853, as Moravia’s Czech national counterpart of Bohemia’s Matice cˇeská, which had come into being in 1831. The tradition of Moravian Landespatriotismus shielded this crownland against encroachments by Czech nationalism, which Moravians perceived as an unjustified spread of Bohemian Landespatriotismus. Moravian intellectuals evoked Greater Moravia as the direct antecedent of their separate statehood. At that time, the Slovak claims to this tradition were hardly recognized. It was the Moravians who shared even the name with this Slavic state. Moravian patriots emphasized the difference of their Moravian language vis-à-vis Czech (or Bohemian) and accepted bilingualism of the population in the civic spirit of Bolzano’s appeals. The proverbial staunch Catholicism of Moravia (the stereotype of ‘Catholic Moravia’ was opposed to that of ‘Hussite Bohemia’) added to the ideology of this Landespatriotismus memory of Cyril and Methodius as the apostles of Greater Moravia. These elements constituted the pronounced difference in the Moravian dimension of Czech nationalism when this ideology began to successfully infiltrate this crownland during the 1860s. Only then did the ethnonym ‘Czech’ gradually replace the ethnonyms ‘Moravian’ (Moravan ˇ and the older one of Moravec), ‘Slav’ (Slovan) and ‘Czechoslav’ (Cechoslovan), which until then had predominated in the speech of the Moravians when they referred to themselves. It is mainly true of the Slavophone Moravians, as their Germanophone counterparts usually chose the ethnonyms ‘Moravian’ (Mährer), ‘Austrian’ (Österreicher), or ‘German’ (Deutsch). The question of identity in Moravia was further complicated by Austro-Hungarian censuses, which allotted this crownland’s Slavic-speaking population to the subregional-cum-ethnic categories of the Horaken (Horácí ) in the west, Hannaken (Hanácí ) in the center, Walachen (Valaší ) in the northeast, and Slovaks, or rather Slováckans (Slowaken, Slovácí), in the southeast.6 The tension between Czech and German nationalists never achieved in Moravia such levels as in Bohemia. Due to the national conflict, the latter crownland became virtually ungovernable and its Constitution had to be suspended

502 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in 1913. Meanwhile, in Moravia, Slavophone and Germanophone politicians negotiated the wide-ranging 1905 Ausgleich (compromise) that peacefully regulated the relations between these two national groups in politics, administration and education. Moravia was Austria-Hungary’s first crownland that satisfactorˇ ily and effectively resolved the national question of its territory (Capka 2003: ˇ epa 114; Graus 1980: 113–116; King 2002; Nabert 1994: map; Ráˇcek 1933: 624; R 2001: 205–207; Šmahel 2000: 61–64; Žáˇcek 1995). In Austrian Silesia, the Germanophone population dominated. German remained the sole official language of this crownland, but in 1882, Czech and Polish were accepted for external use in some county courts. In 1908, local languages (meaning Czech and Polish or rather the local Slavic subdialects written in Czech and Polish orthographies) were allowed in local self-governments in communes. Within the German cultural and political preponderance, the Matice opavská (Opava Cultural Organization) was founded in 1877 at Troppau (Opava) and its Polish counterpart – Macierz Szkolna (Educational Organization) in 1885 in Teschen. The word macierz is the direct rendering of Czech matice or Serbian matica into Polish orthography. The Matice opavská did not use the adjective Silesian in its name unlike the Matice cˇeská or Matice moravská, because at that time it was the received opinion that the Czech nation had the ‘cultural right’ only to the western part of Austrian Silesia (Opava/Troppau Silesia). This crownland’s eastern half, or Cieszyn/Teschen Silesia, was believed, culturally speaking, of the Polish nation. The critical moment was in 1848, when a Slavophone delegate from Cieszyn/Teschen Silesia, Paweł Stalmach (1824–1891), did not agree to be seated with the Czech representatives at the Pan-Slav Congress, and became a member of the Polish-Ruthenian delegation. The rise of Czech national life in eastern Austrian Silesia was due to the influence of the Czech national movement flowing from Bohemia and Moravia. Meanwhile Galicia’s Polish national movement championed Polish nationalism in the eastern section of Austrian Silesia. Significantly, the Macierz Polska (Polish Cultural Organization) was founded in the Galician capital of Lwów (Lviv) in 1882. The first Czech-language secondary school in Austrian Silesia was established in 1883, and its first Polonophone counterpart followed 12 years later. During the 1890s, the Czech-Polish national conflict arose in the eastern half of Austrian Silesia. The first sign of this new phenomenon was the founding of the Czech organization Matice osvˇety lidové pro Tˇešínsko (Educational Organization for Tˇešín [Teschen] Silesia) in 1898. This conflict limited the pressure on the crownland’s German-language administration and politics. Additionally, on the basis of Silesian Landespatriotismus, Germanophone politicians supported the development of the political movement of the Slavophone Silesians (Slunzaks) as a counterbalance to the local Polish and Czech national movements. German and Silesian politicians held

The Czech Case

503

sway in Austrian Silesia until 1918, while Czech and Polish national activists did not feel ostracized, being able to use their languages in communal administration, and in elementary and secondary schools as well. Czech and Polish national activists equally castigated the Slavophone Silesian regional/national movement as ‘inauthentic’ and ‘playing into the hands of the Germans.’ (Hannan 1996; Kamusella 2001; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 305; Nowak 1995) The absolutist 1850s was not as painful for the Czechs as it was for the Magyars. In Hungary, German replaced Magyar as the official language, while in the Austrian half of the empire, the official use of German had continued uninterrupted since its inception in 1784. Similarly, education and external administration in local languages proceeded as usual. This contrasted with the quite thorough suppression of all other languages but Magyar in Hungary beginning in the 1840s. Paradoxically, the introduction of the Austrian system in Hungary, with the official German and the toleration of local languages, boosted the rise of the non-Magyar idioms to the level of semi-recognized languages with some official and public uses guaranteed. It was the time when Slovak, Croatian, Romanian, Serbian, and Ruthenian were used more freely. With the liberalization of political life during the 1860s, Magyar gradually regained its pre-1848 status as the dominant language in Hungary. The 1867 Ausgleich overhauled Hungary into the virtual Magyar nation-state with Magyar as the sole official and national language. During the 1850s, Czech national life in Bohemia unfolded in the field of culture as it had done before 1848. Czechophone elementary schools functioned alongside their German-language counterparts while further education was available in German only, with the exception of the theological seminaries. At the same time, Czech scholars-cum-politicians concentrated on research. They ironed out the myths that were to underlie the ideology of Czech nationalism. In 1850–1851, Palacký published the third volume of his Dˇejiny národu ˇceského, which was devoted to the Hussite Wars in the first half of the 15th century. Another volume that came off the press in 1857 and 1860 concentrated on the rise and reign of the ‘people’s king’ Jíˇri z Podˇebrad (George of Podˇebrady, ruled 1458–1471), the first and only Hussite monarch. Ironically, he fought with another ‘people’s king’ of the Magyars, Matthias Corvinus, to whom he lost Moravia and Silesia, so that Jíˇri’s rule was effectively limited to Bohemia only. This event deepened the separateness between Bohemia and Moravia, to a degree annulling the unity of the lands of the Czech Crown forged by Charles IV a century earlier. Palacký spoke about the anti-Hussite military onslaughts as ‘crusades’ (wýprawy kˇrižácké), and Jíˇri z Podˇebrad as the ‘truly national Czech’ king after the brief interlude of 1437–1457 when the Habsburgs ruled the lands of the Czech Crown. Palacký did not consider as ‘foreign’ the House of Luxemburg

504 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

that replaced the local Bohemian dynasty, because its most illustrious member, Emperor Charles IV, actually established the lands of the Czech Crown as a unit, and founded the University of Prague, the very two ideological and political institutions upon which Czech nationalism was based. Palacký being the main historian and politician of Czech nationalism when this ideology was formed, his vision of the Czech past spawned the basic Czech national mythology and imagery that remains to this day. Because Palacký made Hussitism into a founding ideological basis of Czech nationalism, it is necessary to have a brief look at this religious movement, which derives its name from Jan Hus (1369–1415). He championed liturgy in the vernacular and reforms of the Catholic Church, for which he died burned at the stake in Konstanz (despite the promise of safe passage). This event triggered the Hussite Wars. Among the Hussites, there were Slavic- and Germanic-speakers, as the religious division did not follow the ethnolinguistic one. But in Czech national mythology, both these division were made to overlap so that the Germans and German-speaking Austrians could be presented as treacherous conquerors bent on overtaking and Germanizing Czech lands. In this scheme Jan Hus and such Hussite generals as Jan Žižka (1376–1424) were elevated to the rank of Czech national heroes, while the Czechs earned the self-conferred title of ‘the nation of God’s warriors’ (národ božích bojovníku˚). The conflation of medieval Germanic-speakers with Catholic crusaders and the Slavophone population from the lands of the Czech Crown with the Hussite cause also allowed for presenting the Germans as the eternal enemy (dˇediˇcný nepˇrítel) of the Czech nation. This image was projected onto the whole past of Bohemia and its relations with the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Empire perceived as a ‘German nation-state in disguise.’ The fact that drawing on the Hussite tradition the later Reformation broke out and attained success in the north of the Holy Roman Empire did not bother Czech nationalists. Another discourse of Czech nationalism focused on foreignness. As the Czech language was cleansed of foreign (mainly German) words and phrases in search of the lost purity of its Czechness, the same measure was applied to history. It was decided that the pro-Hussite nobility was Czech and those who fought for the Catholic cause were usually Germanophone foreigners. Because nonCatholic noble families, after 1620, had to leave the lands of the Czech Crown or convert to Catholicism, Czech national historians claimed that the remaining nobility and newcomers were (ethnically) non-Czech and, as such, foreign and necessarily inimical to the Czech nation, notwithstanding the fact that it was Bohemia’s and Moravia’s aristocracy who, in the spirit of Landespatriotismus, encouraged and supported interest in the Czech language and history at the end of the 18th century and during the first half of the 19th century. The popular belief still holds that the ‘šlechta byla zrádná a cizácká’ (nobility was treacherous and foreign).

The Czech Case

505

Obviously, Palacký did not write his history meaning to produce such Czech national stereotypes and myths. Until his death, he stood on the ground of close cooperation with the Bohemian aristocracy and Vienna within the existing legal framework. However, the intensification of the Czech-German national tension and radicalization of Czech ethnic nationalism produced these myths and stereotypes during the second half of the 19th century. It was Masaryk who, in the 1880s, promoted the Protestant (Hussite) dimension of Czech nationalism through his influential essays on Palacký’s historical works. Ironically, Masaryk’s father was Czech-speaking, or rather Moravian-speaking, while his mother German-speaking. Czech-German bilingualism was part of everyday social reality for Masaryk as it had been for Palacký. (The question of Masaryk’s and his father’s ‘native speech’ was made even more ambiguous by the fact that it was an eastern Moravian dialect, sometimes classified as a dialect of Slovak.) Additionally, in 1880, he finally converted from Catholicism to Protestantism under the influence of his wife, Charlotte Garrigue (1850–1923), an American of Huguenot background, who, together with Masaryk, had attended the University of Leipzig. (The couple married in 1878.) Both Palacký and Masaryk came from Moravia, the most staunchly and homogenously Catholic of all the Czech lands. The pronounced emphasis on Hussitism, though intelligible to the Czech national elites as the instrument of distancing the emerging Czech nation from the Germans and Austria, alienated the peasantry and the average town dweller. This made Czech nationalism into the concern of the Czechophone intellectuals, who concentrated in Prague and could be defined as free thinkers, often neutral but sometimes hostile to Catholicism. The old-fashioned grievances of the Moravian estates against the dominance of their Bohemian counterparts in the contacts with Vienna so significant during the first half of the 19th century, in the century’s other half were translated into the average Moravian’s perception of Czech nationalism as unjustified dominance of Prague. The average Bohemian shared this sentiment. In consequence, these perceptions persist to this day. The inhabitants of Moravia tend to see their region as more Catholic in opposition to atheistic Bohemia. And together with the average inhabitant of Bohemia they continue complaining of Pragocentrismus, or the centering of the state, economy, and resources on the Czech capital only. When Czechoslovakia existed, the Slovaks agreed with this criticism too (Rak 1994). The process of the standardization of the Czech language was also seen as an element of Pragocentrismus. The Slavophone elites of Moravia or Austrian Silesia were not consulted, which ensured the persistence of the Moravian written language in both these provinces, when standard Czech had already served everyday written uses in Bohemia. Standard Czech is a complicated compromise between the 16th-century literacy of official documents and Protestant writings in chancery Czech, and everyday speech of the Slavophone inhabitants of

506 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Prague, Bohemia, and partly western Moravia. Jungmann and other codifiers of Czech based the standardization of this language on this 16th-century literacy, which resulted in the rise of spisovná ˇceština or ‘written Czech.’ Because no one speaks in this idealized Czech of Hussite times, one has to acquire spisovná ˇceština at school. One uses it in official situations, namely in administration, for writing scholarly books, and in newspapers. Hardly anybody attempts to speak in spisovná ˇceština, because its pronounced written-cum-historical nature, disconnected from the spoken language, effectively limits its use to writing. The standard also rejected numerous words and structures of Germanic origin as well as the Gothic font and the graphemes [w] and [g] (representing the phonemes /v/ and /j/) that persisted in the Moravian written language. Written Moravian was closer to the vernacular, but it did not mean that it would be allowed not to conform with spisovná ˇceština if the latter rose to the rank of an auxiliary or official language in the Czech lands. Havlíˇcek’s 1851 claim that ‘the literary language used in Bohemia is actually pure [spoken] Moravian’ was just an ideological ploy. Nobody spoke 16th-century chancery Czech in Moravia. He also avoided mentioning that not chancery Czech but chancery Moravian had been then employed in Moravia. Through this mythologization of language, Havlíˇcek wanted to forge a Czech linguistic unity that would underlay Czech nationalists’ claim to all the lands of the Czech Crown as their future Czech nation-state. Because the gap of some four centuries separates spisovná ˇceština from the contemporary vernacular, a complicated diglossia arose. The prestige of Prague, its culture and Slavonic speech, lasted continuously since the 10th century. This caused the spread of the Prague (or Central Bohemian) Slavic dialect all over Bohemia. Having replaced the local dialects, the Prague dialect established its dominance in the entire crownland. Due to this fact, linguists term it ‘interdialect,’ a lingua franca of everyday contacts for a region within the Czechophone speech community, today synonymous with the Czech nation and the territory of the Czech Republic – the Czech nation-state. Czech linguists call this interdialect obecná ˇceština, or popular spoken Czech. The many-centuries-long tradition of institutional and administrative division between Bohemia and Moravia persisted until 1918 and even later in Czechoslovakia. This, coupled with the Moravians’ continuing suspicion of Prague’s domination, did not allow spreading of the interdialect either to Moravia or Austrian Silesia, where local dialects survive as the vernacular of everyday communication. In the context of official situations when neither the dialects or obecná ˇceština are acceptable as media of spoken communication, Czech-speakers usually employ a compromise between the interdialect and spisovná ˇceština known as hovorová ˇceština (confusingly, the literal English translation of this term is ‘spoken Czech’). This usage requires the inhabitants of Moravia and Czech Silesia to acquire elements of the interdialect in the form of hovorová ˇceština in addition to spisovná ˇceština. This task is a bit easier for the inhabitants of western Moravia whose dialect used to

The Czech Case

507

be the basis of the written Moravian language, and the numerous features of this dialect are shared with spisovná ˇceština and obecná ˇceština (Auty 1980: 182; Eckert 1993; Short 1996: 41–42; Tornow 2005: 480) With the era of absolutism over in 1860, Palacký and his friends could return to politics. They established the Straná narodní (National Party) as the leading organization of Czech nationalism. Although Palacký stood at the party’s helm, his son-in-law Rieger took over its leadership. In 1862, emulating the example of German Turnvereine (gymnastics associations), established for the national cause at the beginning of the 19th century, Miroslav Tyrs (born Friedrich Emanuel Tirsch, 1832–1884) founded the Sokol (Falcon) gymnastics association. While the Straná narodní worked out the main course of the Czech national movement, the all-inclusive Sokol movement that involved students, workers and women, ensured growing grassroots mass support for the Czech national cause, first, in Bohemia, but soon in Moravia and Austrian Silesia, as well. At the end of the 19th century, the main forms of mass Czech nationalism emerged: Sokol slets (conventions) and tabors (political rallies). In 1861, the Czech-language press also re-emerged with its first dailies. The most important of them was Národní listy (National Newspaper), the mouthpiece of the Straná narodní. In the field of education, by 1861, 14 Czechophone secondary schools had been established in Bohemia. At the same time, there were only ten Germanlanguage secondary schools and seven bilingual Czech-German ones (Bradley 1984: 22–23; Nolte 2002). The camp of the so-called ‘Old Czechs’ headed by Rieger stood for Palacký’s program of overhauling the historical lands of the Czech Crown into a Czech nation-state within the Austrian Empire. This required sustaining alliance with the Bohemian aristocracy who had a decisive say in the Bohemian Landtag (regional diet) and the Reichstag. In 1867, the Magyars obtained a wide-ranging autonomy within the monarchy, duly transformed into dual Austria-Hungary. By 1871, Poles had received a similar status in Galicia. A certain nod toward the Czechs’ cultural and linguistic needs was the opening of the first two monolingual Czech-language secondary schools in the Moravian cities of Brünn (Brno) and Olmütz (Olomouc) in 1867. (Vienna chose Moravia for this experiment, since this crownland, unlike Bohemia, was staunchly Catholic, and the Czech– German conflict was not so pronounced there.) The fitful negotiations between Czech leaders and Vienna collapsed in 1871. The emperor did not wish to overhaul the dual monarchy into a tripartite one, as Czechs insisted, mainly because the Magyars opposed this solution, fearing it would downgrade the newly elevated status of Hungary within the empire. Finally, not even an autonomous status for Bohemia was allowed. Commenting on this event, Palacký remarked, ‘Before Austria was, we [Czechs] were, and when Austria no longer is, we shall be.’ This political defeat of the Old Czechs at the hands of the Viennese central administration caused a rift in the Straná narodní. The opposition, known

508 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

as the ‘Young Czechs,’ wanted dissolution of the traditional alliance with the Bohemian aristocracy, and less emphasis on the unity of the lands of the Czech Crown. For Young Czechs, general improvement in the overall status of the Czech language and standard of living were the goals worth striving for. They stemmed from the growing Czechophone middle class, educated in Czechophone secondary schools, who enjoyed unprecedented economic prosperity, as Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia had grown into the most developed area of Austria-Hungary. Young Czechs chose the purely ethnic dimension of Czech nationalism and set the course of future Czech politics that led to the separation of the Czech and German speech communities of Bohemia and Moravia, now perceived as foreign nations. A modicum of the erstwhile civic commonality afforded by Landespatriotismus was gone. Despite this growing opposition, Rieger retained the leadership of the Straná narodní for two more decades until 1891, when the Old Czechs lost to Young Czechs in the Reichsrat elections. Meanwhile, the cultural and economic domination of the Czechophone middle class became obvious in Bohemia and Moravia during the 1880s, but German-speakers retained their dominant position in Austrian Silesia until 1918. In 1880, the Austrian Minister of Justice and Education, Karl von Stremayr (1823–1904), issued an ordinance that restated the traditional principle of external use of Czech in the courts and public administration in Bohemia and Moravia. Six years later, the Deputy Minister of Justice, Alois Pražák (1820–1901) issued an ordinance, which, for the first time, sanctioned Czech as an official language of internal administration, though only in the processing of Czechophone cases at the supreme courts in Prague and Brünn. In the field of culture, the Czech-language National Theater opened at Prague in 1881. Already in 1869, the Czechs had received their first university-level educational institution when the Technical University of Prague had been divided into the separate Czech and German sections. But the success was complete in 1882, when the oldest Central European university located in Prague split into the German and Czech universities.7 It was a sea change from the times several years earlier when the German-dominated Senate of the University of Prague prohibited Czechophone students from organizing celebrations in memory of Jan Hus (1877) and on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the death of Charles IV (1878). The dissatisfaction of the Young Czechs mounted after 1886 when further spread of the Czech language in secondary education and administration was halted. This led to the provisional separation of the Czech and German boards of education, which was made permanent in 1890. In the same year, the Czechs ˇ obtained their own academy of sciences, the Ceské akademie cisaˇre Františka Josefa pro vˇedy, slovesnost a umˇení (Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art), which emerged by the officially accepted Czechization of the Königliche Böhmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften / Kralovská cˇeská

The Czech Case

509

spoleˇcnost vˇedecká (Academy of Sciences of the Kingdom of Bohemia), founded in the late 18th century. Now they were equal to all other ‘civilized nations,’ a badge of distinction gained when a state or stateless nation founded its own academy of sciences. Also in 1890, the Old Czechs strove to take over the Young Czechs’ ethnolinguistic program. Under the pressure from Vienna, eager to end the German boycott of the Bohemian Landtag, the Old Czechs entered into negotiations with the Bohemian German-speakers over a national agreement (punktace) in Bohemia. Ominously, Löhner’s 1848 idea of dividing Bohemia along the ethnolinguistic borders re-emerged. As a result, this crownland would be divided into the separate Germanophone and Czechophone zones. The Young Czechs were dissatisfied with this arrangement because Czech would be excluded from the former zone, while German would remain the language of internal administration in the latter. After the downfall of the Old Czechs, the Young Czechs were caught in the same dilemma as their predecessors trying to balance linguistic demands with those for territorial autonomy. In 1897, they accepted Austrian Prime Minister Kazimierz Badeni’s (1846–1909) proposal that Czech would become a co-language of internal administration along with German in Bohemia and Moravia. This official bilingualism, to be introduced within 4 years of grace for Germanophone civil servants who did not know Czech (the same stipulation applied to Czechophone civil servants, but almost all of them knew German), outraged German-speakers, who demonstrated in the Bohemian Landtag, the Reichsrat, and on Viennese streets. In the German Empire, demonstrations of solidarity with the Germans of Bohemia and Moravia were organized in Brandenburg. Widespread violence in Prague caused the imposition of the state of emergence on the Bohemian capital. As a result of these events, the emperor dismissed Badeni from office. An interim Prime Minister, Paul Gautsch (1851–1918), tried appeasement by new ordinances. In 1898, the requirement of full bilingualism for civil servants was scrapped. The Badeni ordinances, as reformulated by Gautsch, were implemented in their entirety in Moravia and Bohemia’s nationally mixed zones. In Bohemia’s Czechophone and Germanophone zones, internal administration was carried out in Czech and German, respectively. This solution obviously deepened the ethnolinguistic cleavage inside Bohemia and Moravia. The staunch German opposition to the de facto introduction of Czech as a co-official language of state administration in Bohemia and Moravia led to the obstruction of the Reichsrat. Gautch had to resign from premiership, and in 1899, the legal position of Czech was demoted to that ensured by the 1880 and 1886 ordinances. However, municipalities were allowed to choose Czech as a co-official language of internal bureaucracy, and some did, for instance, the town of Pilsen (Plzen). ˇ On the other hand, the relative lack of ethnolinguistic tension in Moravia allowed for the founding of a Czech-language technical school in Brünn in 1899.

510 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

German-speakers grudgingly accepted the situation, though, in their opinion, apart from Galicia and some Italian-speaking counties, German was and should remain the sole language of administration in the Austrian section of Austria-Hungary. They pointed out that as a national group they were seriously disadvantaged in Bohemia and Moravia. For instance, in 1903, among Bohemia’s 24,700 civil servants there were 19,400 Czechs and only 5700 German-speakers. In accordance with the ethnolinguistic composition of this crownland’s population, the number of the German-speaking civil servants ought to have been at least 10,000. In 1890, there were 293 Czech-language periodicals published in Bohemia against 157 in German. In the eyes of Germanspeakers, who remembered times three decades ago when there had been scarcely any Czechophone periodicals to be had, it seemed as if Czech had pushed German out of this crownland. On the other hand, German-speakers who added up to 37 percent of Bohemia’s population, paid 53 percent of the all collected taxes. Bohemia’s Czech leaders, however, would not settle for anything less than full legal equality of Czech and German. The 1905 achievement of this goal in Moravia on the common ground of Landespatriotismus, was perceived as a hurdle in the path of the development of Czech ethnolinguistic nationalism. The 1907 scrapping of the electoral curiae (which privileged the rich) in the Austrian half of the Dual Empire allowed the Czech parties capture the absolute majority of the mandates in the Bohemian Landtag. Beginning in 1908, they expressed their displeasure at the slightly unequal position of Czech vis-à-vis German in this crownland by instituting a permanent obstruction of this legislative body. The Germans replied in kind the following year, when the Landtag of the Lower Austria (that is, the region with Vienna at its center) banned Czech from education and local self-governments. This move enraged Bohemia’s Czechs, because they saw it as the beginning of the planned Germanization of Czechs, who had moved there in search of education, employment, and career. In 1900, in Vienna alone 300,000 persons resided, who had been born in the Czech-speaking areas of Bohemia and Moravia. In the context of the escalating Czech–German conflict in Bohemia and the continuing obstruction of the Landtag, the emperor was left with no choice, and had to dissolve this body in 1913, subsequently to be replaced by a governing commission nominated by Vienna (Bradley 1984: 22; Havránek 2002: 72–73; Janák et al. 2005: 265–266; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 303, 305–308; Ráˇcek 1933: 623–624; Sayer 1998: 93; Seton-Watson 1915: 17; Tornow 2005: 475; Waldenberg 1992: 42–47).

Toward Czechoslovakia In the 1890s and in the first decade of the 20th century, the Czech national movement lost the leadership of the Czechs to socialists and agrarians. A balanced bilingualism more or less achieved and the dominance of Czechs in

The Czech Case

511

economic and political life of Bohemia and Moravia assured, the issues of standard of living and social security among the rural population and industrial workers proved more pressing. The Austrian Social Democratic Party was the only political force in Austria-Hungary that merged in its program social needs of the workers with those of the national groups. Although it was a Gesamtpartei (party for all the social democrats of Austria-Hungary), there emerged within it the nationally based sub-parties of Czechs, German-speakers, Poles and other national groups. The Czech lands being the most developed part of the Dual Monarchy, and Moravia, the crownland with an exemplary cooperation between the Slavophone and German-speaking sections of its population, the social democrats announced their renowned 1899 program at Brünn. They famously called for federalization of the Austrian half of the empire. Crownlands would determine their national belonging and the nationally determined political entities would constitute this federation. Cultural autonomy would be guaranteed for groups of people and individuals living outside their respective national entities. As a result, Austria-Hungary, transformed into some Socialist Austrian Federation, would be saved as a large sphere of economic activity. At that time, social democrats and socialists believed that only large states could develop viable industrial economies where workers’ rights would be effectively guaranteed. The social democratic thinking on the national issue underlaid the Moravian Ausgleich of 1905 and the 1910 electoral law for Bukovina where no national group formed even a decisive plurality. In 1909–1910 and 1913, these positive developments encouraged repeated rounds of negotiations for a similar compromise in Bohemia. But they failed as similar attempts at a compromise had failed earlier in 1890. The fate of the Austrian Social Democratic Party did not bode well either. In 1911, it disintegrated into a multitude of nationally based socialist parties. The national took precedence over the socialist or the economic. National tension among Bohemia’s Czechs and German-speakers never relaxed after 1890 and repeatedly broke out into cycles of disturbances and even riots. The introduction of popular suffrage in 1907 deepened the conflict as Czech parties gained majority in the Bohemian and Moravian Landtags. The 1905 Ausgleich mellowed the ethnonational edge of this victory in Moravia, whereas in Bohemia the splintering of the mandates among a multitude of various parties blunted the edge of Czech ethnic nationalism in this province. The neo-Hussite and anti-clerical characteristic of the Czech national movement led by Masaryk also alienated Moravia, which remained deeply Catholic. What made Vienna and Budapest nervous was the development of the Czechoslovak movement that commenced in earnest during the 1890s. It concentrated in Prague among Slovak students and intellectuals, who contributed to the Slovak-language monthly Hlas (1898–1906) published in the Bohemian capital. Usually, they were Protestants and closely related with ‘their professor,’

512 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Masaryk. It was not only his ‘free-thinking’ attitude toward Catholicism that attracted them, but also Masaryk’s Moravian background and his ability to speak in the east Moravian dialect, so close to the western Slovak dialect. The latter dialect formed the basis for the early 19th-century codification of the Slovak language, now, known as Bernolaˇctina, as explained in the following chapter. Because standard Slovak as used today was codified in the mid-1840s, Bernolaˇctina appeared to these students as ‘Old Slovak.’ Although of Catholic provenance, the students knew and appreciated it, because the Catholic priest Ján Hollý’s epic poems written in this Old Slovak, were retained in the forming national canon of Slovak literature. According to the national myth, in 1843, the Protestant politician and scholar, L’udovít Štúr, asked Hollý to accept his new codification of Slovak, which the latter is said to have granted, thus paving the way for the rise of standard Slovak as it is today. In 1896, together with their ˇ Czech colleagues the Slovak Protestant students founded the Ceskoslovanska Jednota. After the 1905 revolution, Czech politicians started expressing their sympathy toward Russia on the platform of Pan-Slavism that increasingly less reminded of Palacký’s Austroslavism staunchly loyal to Vienna. From 1908 until the beginning of World War I, Czech and Slovak national leaders held annual meetings in Moravia. In this network of increasingly multidirectional and conflicting political and social forces, Czech nationalism lost its ideological edge. Even as late as 1912, Masaryk agreed that Austria-Hungary should survive but with a stronger parliamentary system that would effectively limit the emperor’s arbitrary decisions. The confused political scene in Bohemia caused Vienna to suspend the Bohemian Constitution in 1914. The incursion of Russian troops into Galicia and Upper Hungary at the beginning of the Great War convinced some Czech and Slovak leaders that an independent Czecho-Slovakia could be created under the rule of the Russian tsars. This view equally frightened Vienna and Budapest, especially after some Czech troops defected to Russia, and led to the systemic persecution of Ruthenians in Upper Hungary, next door to the Slovaks. Masaryk left his family in Prague and escaped from Austria-Hungary on a Serbian passport. First, he stood for a Czech nation-state composed from the lands of the Czech Crown. In 1915, however, the Czech and Slovak organizations in the United States signed the Cleveland Agreement in which they expressed their support for Czecho-Slovakia, a common state of the Czechs and the Slovaks. Masaryk was partial to this idea, as before the war, he had encouraged and supported Slovak intellectuals concentrated in Prague around the journal Hlas. Meanwhile, Milan Rastislav Štefánik (1880–1919), a Slovak astronomer who made a military career during the war as a pilot in the French air force and attained the rank of general, together with Masaryk, established in Paris in 1916 the National Council of the Czech Lands that adopted the program of common

The Czech Case

513

Czecho-Slovak state. Masaryk and American Slovak leaders signed an agreement to this end in Pittsburgh at the end of May 1918. On 30 June, the French government recognized the National Council of the Czech Lands as the de facto Czecho-Slovak government. Other Allies followed suit. On 28 October, independent Czechoslovakia was proclaimed. Without having learned about this proclamation, the Slovak program was announced at Turˇciansky Svätý Martin 2 days later. In line with the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Agreements, the program called for founding Czecho-Slovakia as a federal state with autonomy guaranteed. Prague did not respect the Slovak demand of autonomy and Czechoslovakia was created as a largely unitary and centralized state controlled by the Czech elite. The German-speakers of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia attempted to separate their areas and to attach them to rump German-Austria in agreement with Löhner’s 1848 program. But it was of no avail. Czech forces suppressed their attempt at a separation and Vienna, busy with the social and political turmoil in the nearby provinces, could not and did not wish to intervene. Czechoslovakia’s Constitution defined it as the nation-state of the Czechoslovak nation who spoke in the Czechoslovak language. In reality, it was a multiethnic country not unlike pre-1918 Hungary. In 1918, Czechoslovakia’s population comprised 6.8 million Czechs, 3.1 million German-speakers (who increasingly defined themselves as Germans), 2 million Slovaks, 0.75 million Magyars, 0.46 million Ruthenians, 181,000 (German-, Yiddish-, and Czech-speaking) Jews, and 76,000 Poles (Bradley 1984: 35, 95, 98; Herod 1976: 44–45; Kann and Zdenˇek 1984: 310–312; Kováˇc 2002: 109–110; Mentzel 2002: 84–85; Sayer 1998: 168; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 44, 51–56).

Development of nation equates language development In practice, as of the 1860s, Czech became a more or less official language in Bohemia and Moravia and also a medium of instruction alongside increasingly less dominant German. The ground for this success was prepared by the codification of the Czech language carried out with Dobrovský’s grammar and Jungmann’s dictionary in the first half of the 19th century. At that time, Jungmann had opined, ‘Dvˇe jsou známky neomylné národnosti: dˇejiny a jazyk, ˇcili historie a literatura, plody národního života’ (There are two unmistakable features of the nationality, its past and language, or history and literature, the very fruits of national life). The Old Czechs and the Young Czechs closely followed his advice, conflating history, language, and literature with the political program of Czech nationalism. On this basis, the Slovak Lutheran Šafárik, who published in Czech and signed his name Šafaˇrjk or Šafaˇrik, compiled and published ˇ Cesko-nˇ emecká právnˇe-politická terminologie (Czech-German Legal and Political Terminology, 1850, Prague) and Nˇemecko-ˇceský slovník vˇedeckého názvosloví pro

514 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

gymnasia a reálné školy (German-Czech Dictionary of Scientific Terminology for Secondary Schools, 1853, Prague). The former work provided courts and administration with necessary Czech vocabulary and the latter for schools. This was the foundation for the unprecedented development of Czech-language journalism and book publishing during the 1860s and 1870s, which was followed by the dramatic rise in the volume of Czechophone scholarly and scientific publications during the 1880s. The second half of the 19th century also saw the emergence of the whole milieu of Czech-language fiction writers and poets. The consolidation of Czech as a language of administration, education, politics, law, literature, and scholarship came with the publication of Rieger’s 11-volume Slovník nauˇcný (1860–1874). This was the second encyclopedia published in a Central European language other than German. This work proved to the doubters that Czech was a ‘civilized language’ capable of transmitting all scientific and other information necessary for the functioning of a modern state. This encyclopedia was preceded by a Polish one, and followed shortly by a similar Magyar lexicographic work. In contrast, the Slovaks had to wait until 1932, when the first Slovak-language encyclopedia Slovenský nauˇcný slovník. Priruˇcná encyklopedia vedomostí v troch dieloch (The Slovak Scientific Dictionary: A short universal encyclopedia in three volumes, Bratislava and Prague) was published. The clear connection between scholarship and politics in Czech culture dates back to Palacký, who wrote the authoritative history of the Czech nation and led the Czech national movement. His successor, Rieger, edited Slovník nauˇcný, while Masaryk was the first editor of the second, and so far most extensive and authoritative, Czech encyclopedia, Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (1888–1909) in 28 volumes, which closely followed and even surpassed the model of German-language conversation lexicon. Between 1930 and 1943, the six volumes of the Dodatky (Supplement) to Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný were published in 12 parts. Masaryk was a renowned scholar and the first President of Czechoslovakia. It was only natural that under his patronage Czech and Slovak scholars of his generation compiled and published the seven-volume Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný. Lidová encyklopedie všeobecných vˇedomostí (Masaryk Scientific Dictionary: A people’s encyclopedia of general information, 1925– 1933, Prague). Although concise in comparison to its predecessors, this work considerably updated the information included in Rieger’s Slovník nauˇcný and Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný. And most importantly, in the Czech tradition of conflating scholarship with politics, this encyclopedia, eponymous in its title of President Masaryk, reflected the preoccupations and needs of the new national ideology of Czechoslovakism that underlay Czechoslovakia as the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks. A work equally significant for the consolidation of Czech technical vocabulary was Teyssler-Kotyška’s 17-volume Technicky slovník nauˇcný. Ilustrovaná encyklopedié vˇed technickych (Scientific Dictionary

The Czech Case

515

of Technology: Illustrated encyclopedia of technical sciences, Prague, 1927– 1949). The increasingly intensive use of Czech in all spheres of public, educational, and economic life in Bohemia and Moravia necessitated acceptance of numerous German words and phrases for these phenomena and objects of modern life that were not described in Czech dictionaries. This irked leaders of the Czech national movement and cultural life, who saw language as the main basis of Czech nationalism. It was the Czech language that constituted the difference between the Czech and the German-speakers. In this view, any German linguistic loans in Czech were unwelcome because they downplayed the cleavage and, in the Czech eyes, contaminated the Czech language. The purist reaction against this trend drew on Czech vocabulary worked out in Rieger’s Slovník nauˇcný and Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný. Necessarily, these two works did not function only as encyclopedias but also as dictionaries of the Czech language. In view of the rapid technological development and the elevated status the Czech language achieved in Bohemia and Moravia after the mid-19th century, Jungmann’s Czech-German dictionary was outdated. What is more, it employed the equally outdated orthography. In this respect, the Poles and the Magyars were in a better position, because the second edition of Linde’s dictionary of the Polish language was published in the mid-1850s, and Czuczor and Fogarasi’s authoritative monolingual dictionary of Magyar between 1862 and 1874. Meanwhile, Polish- and Magyar-language encyclopedias came off the press too. On top of that, the publication of the new and purely monolingual dictionary of the Polish language under Karłowicz’s editorship commenced in 1900 (and concluded in 1927). In the case of Czech lexicography, the long-established tradition of bilingualism that paired Czech with German continued. In 1878–1893, the seven ˇ volumes of Štepan František Kott’s (1825–1915) Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (Czech-German Grammatical and Phraseological Dictionary, Prague) was published. In 1911, the Czech Academy of Sciences started work on a monolingual dictionary of the Czech language that would replace Jungmann’s work. But the result, in the form of the nine-volume P˘ríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague), was published only between 1935 and 1957. The first comprehensive, though not allembracing and authoritative, dictionary of the Czech language was that of Pavel Váša (1874–1954) and František Trávníˇcek (1888–1861), Slovník jazyka ˇceského (Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1937, Prague), published in two volumes. This achievement came only at the end of interwar Czechoslovakia. New editions of this truly monolingual Czech dictionary followed in 1941, 1946, and 1952. As of the 1870s and until the end of Austria-Hungary, Czech linguists focused on ‘purifying’ the Czech language of German words and phrases. In

516 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

light of this task, the problem of a monolingual dictionary seemed secondary. In 1877, the Matice cˇeská published the extremely influential Brus jazyka ˇceského (The Whetstone of the Czech Language, Prague). The contributing Czech philologists reinforced the 16th- and 17th-century Bohemia’s chancery Czech and the Czech language of Protestant writers from this period symbolized by Jan Ámos Komenský (Johann Amos Comenius 1592–1670) as the model to be closely followed by the users of spisovná ˇceština. These brusiˇci (as they were known from the title of their work) did castigate not only German linguistic loans in Czech vocabulary but also syntactical constructions modeled on or similar to those employed in the German language. In 1890, Jan Gebauer (1838–1907) published his archaizing and puristic Mluvnice ˇceská pro školy stˇrední a ústavy uˇcitelské (The Czech Grammar for Schools and Teachers’ Colleges, Prague) in which he finally codified the prescriptive model of the Czech language almost a century ago proposed by Dobrovský. Gebauer’s grammar was used at Czech-language schools, which facilitated the spread of this model. New editions first revised by Václav Ertl (1875–1929) and then by František Travníˇcek were published for Czech schools until World War II. Gebauer wrote the preface to Pravidla hledící k ˇceskému pravopisu a tvarosloví (The Rules of Czech Orthography and Morphology, 1902, Prague), which officially rubberstamped the Dobrovský -Gebauer codification of the Czech language. Similar though less extensive works that codified Polish and Magyar, namely Rozprawy i wnioski o ortografii polskiej and Magyar helyesírás és szóragasztás f ˝ obb szabályai had been published much earlier, in 1830 and 1832, respectively. Gebauer did not subscribe to the extreme linguistic purism of the brusiˇci but his prescriptive codification of spisovná ˇceština did encourage purism. This approach to the Czech language became particularly insistent again during World War I when Czech nationalism decisively turned against Austria-Hungary favoring an independent Czech nation-state. In 1913, it was decided to accept foreign words into Czech but not in their original foreign spelling. Czechization of such words meant their phonetic rendering. This phenomenon showed up also in Czechization of surnames. For instance, German ‘Schmidt’ became Czech ‘Šmit.’ In 1917, a group of Czech philologists under the leadership of Josef Zubatý (1855–1931) founded the influential journal Naše ˇreˇc (Our Language), which has been published to this day not unlike its Magyar and Polish counterparts Nyelv˝ or and Je˛zyk Polski. Naše ˇreˇc called for extreme ‘internal and external purification’ in search of the ‘authentic and clean’ (nezkalaný) Czech language. Not surprisingly, this prescriptive and puristic approach remained popular in Czechoslovakia until the 1930s. The change came with the famous Prague Linguistic Circle (Pražský linguistický kroužek), which, among others, grouped Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945), Bohuslav Havránek (1893–1978), and the Russian Roman Jakobson (1896–1982). They opposed

The Czech Case

517

linguistic purism with its principle of ‘historical purity’ and indiscriminate prescriptivism propagated by Naše ˇreˇc. Instead they proposed moderate prescriptivism that also allowed etymological orthography, as summed up in their novel principle of ‘elastic stability’ (pružná stabilita). In 1932 they presented their position in the volume Spisovná ˇceština a jazyková kultura (Written Czech and Language Culture, Prague) edited by Havránek and Miloš Weingart (1880–1939) (Auty 1973: 338–339; Auty 1980: 179–181; Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby 1940: 182–183; Karlík et al. 2002: 423–422; Rous 1979: 18). The race to develop the Czech language so that it would stand its ground with the other ‘civilized languages’ of Europe also took place in other fields. Between 1901 and 1913, with the support of the Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art, the A–N fascicles of Gebauer’s Slovník staroˇceský (Dictionary of Old Czech, Prague) came off the press. This work paralleled Szarvas and Simonyi’s Magyar nyelvtörténeti szótar (Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest) of 1890–1893, while the similar Słownik staropolski (Dictionary of Old Polish, Warsaw) would start publishing only in 1953. Publication of further fascicles of Slovník staroˇceský (now entitled Staroˇceský slovník) resumed in 1968. By 2000, the letters N–Pred had been covered. Czech dialectology commenced in earnest with Alois Vojtˇech Šembera’s (1807–1882) Základové dialektologie ˇceskoslovenské (The Basis of Czechoslovak Dialectology, 1864, Vienna and Olmütz), but to this day no dictionary of the Czech dialects has been published similar to Szinnyei’s (1857–1943) Magyar tájszótár (Dictionary of the Magyar Dialects, 1893–1901) or Karłowicz’s Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of the Polish Dialects, 1900–1911). Significantly, neither for the Czech nor Polish language an etymological dictionary was compiled before World War I, while Magyar-speakers could refer to Gombocz and Melich’s Magyar etymologiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1914). These minute differences aside, Czech linguists also fought for the territory of their nation-state, as did their Polish and Magyar colleagues. In 1920–1921, the Polish scholar Nitsch sketched the ‘correct’ territorial extent of the Polish nation-state using to this end his earlier works on the dialects, which he classified as ‘Polish.’ He lamented that not all of the ‘truly Polish territory’ found its way into the Polish nation-state founded in 1918. Likewise, in 1924, the aspiring Czech philologist Trávníˇcek published his influential book O ˇceském jazyce (On the Czech Language, Prague). In the historical overview that commenced with Greater Moravia, he claimed that it was the Czech language that had been spoken in this area where Magyars would settle. Then he conflated the historical program of the Czech national movement that had called for the unification of the lands of the Czech Crown in a Czech nation-state with the ethnolinguistic definition of the Czech nation. Basically, Trávníˇcek maintained that Czech was or had been spoken in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, which

518 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

made these regions ‘rightfully belonging’ to a Czech nation-state. Then drawing on official Czechoslovakism, he added that Czech had been and still was the language of the Slavophone inhabitants of Slovakia, which ‘justified’ making this region into another part of a Czech nation-state, as embodied by Czechoslovakia. Quite radically, he denied the existence of any Slovak language. According to Trávníˇcek, what some ‘wrongly’ called the Slovak language was either the group of Czech dialects from the territory of Slovakia, or a written dialect of the Czech language. He did not even use the politically correct legal concept of the ‘Czechoslovak language.’ (Trávníˇcek 1924: 87, 106–109)

Czechoslovakism On 28 October 1918, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed as the nation-state of the Czechoslovak nation. Notwithstanding, the law no. 64 of 10 December 1918 decided that Slovak was the official language in Slovakia. Although the 1920 Constitution of Czechoslovakia was done in the name of the Czechoslovaks, the 1920 language law issued in pursuance of this Constitution’s article 129 proclaimed Czechoslovak as the state and official language of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. The Constitution and the language law emphasized the unitary character of the new state and made the Czechoslovaks into the absolute majority (67 percent) of the population vis-à-vis the over three-million-strong German minority (22 percent). Otherwise, the Czechs numbering 7 million would have constituted less than half of Czechoslovakia’s total population of 14.5 million, and the 2.6 million Slovaks would have been only the third largest national group in the republic after Germans. As the latter practice showed, Czechoslovakia was as much ethnically diversified as post-1918 Poland and pre-1918 Hungary. In a way, complete with its bi-national Czech and Slovak character, it was an Austria-Hungary in miniature. Implicitly, legislators construed the Czechoslovak language to comprise two completely equal standards, Czech and Slovak. As a rule, the former was to be employed in the Czech lands and the latter in Slovakia. However, no law clarified this intention, and, on the other hand, Slovak had not been fully standardized yet, and did not enjoy such a rich corpus of writings as Czech. Illiteracy was quite rampant in Slovakia due to the practical liquidation of any meaningful Slovak-language primary educational system after 1905, while as of the mid-19th century, illiteracy was an unknown phenomenon in the Czech lands. As a consequence, in Czechoslovakia, Czech was favored over Slovak in employment, administration, industry and education not only in the Czech lands but also in Slovakia itself. This traumatized the Czecho-Slovak relations. Dissatisfaction with this state of matters could be freely expressed by Slovak émigrés. They pointed out that they wanted a bi-national and bilingual CzechSlovakia, not a mono-national and monolingual unitary Czechoslovakia. They

The Czech Case

519

perceived this state as imposed on the Slovaks by the Czechs. Prague never answered pleas for national autonomy for Slovakia between the two World Wars. This dissatisfaction constituted the ideological basis of the increasingly anti-Czech character of Slovak nationalism, which prevented coalescence of the sought-for Czechoslovak nation and facilitated the creation of independent Slovakia that existed between 1939 and 1945. Staunch opposition to the proposal of developing a common Czechoslovak language played a significant role in interwar Slovak nationalism (Autonomist 1935: 98–114; Kirschbaum 1960: 49; Osuský 1943: 17; Sobota 1931: 75–78, 179–180, 203; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 86, 107–109). The origin of the concept of Czechoslovak language dates back, at least, to the end of the 18th century, though it bases upon the earlier 16th- and 17thcentury Latin usage of the Hungarian chancery that treated the Czechs and the Slavs of Upper Hungary as one group (Bohoemi et Slavi), or even identified the latter as Czechs (Slavis seu Bohoemis). In 1742, Matej Bél (Mátyás, Matthias Bel, 1684–1749) and Pavol (Pavel) Jakobei (1695–1752) published their Orthographia bohemicoslavica (The Orthography of the Bohemoslavic Language, Preßburg). The Lutheran pastor Pavol (Pavel) Doležal (Paullus Doleschalius, 1700–1778) published in Preßburg his Grammatica Slavico-Bohemica (Slavo-Bohemian Grammar) in 1746, and 6 years later, its abbreviation Elementa linguae slavobohemicae (The Elements of the Slavobohemian Language). Nowadays, Doležal’s Latin term Slavico-bohemica is usually translated as ‘Slovak-Czech.’ In 1792, Dobrovský spoke of the Bohemian dialect of the Slavic language as consisting of Bohemian, Moravian, and Slovak (Slowakisch). In 1803, Juraj Palkoviˇc (Georg Palkowitsch, 1769–1850), a Protestant pastor, established and held the Chair of the CzechoSlovak Language and Literature in the Lutheran secondary school in Preßburg. This chair existed until his death in 1850. He published a new edition of the late 16th-century Czech-language Kralice Bible in 1808. At the end of the New Testament, he added the list of ‘old Czecho-Slovak words’ with explanations. Palkoviˇc also believed that written Slovak (Hochslowakisch, feinere Slowakische) is nothing else but Czech (Böhmisch). In 1842, Šafaˇrík opined that the Czech language comprised the Czech dialect and the Slovak (Hungarian-Slovak) dialect. Six years later, he added that both these dialects shared one written language, namely Czech. In 1846, Jan Nepomuk Koneˇcný (1815–1887) published at Vienna his bilingual textbook and selection of texts for learners of the Czechoslovak or Czecho-Slavic language (ˇcechisch-slawisch or ˇceskoslowanský). Between 1858 and 1861, also at the imperial capital, Alois Vojtˇech Šembera published his Dˇejiny ˇreˇci a literatury ˇceskoslovenské (History of the Czechoslovak Language and Literature). Three more editions of this work had been brought out by 1872. In 1864, he published his aforementioned book on ‘Czechoslovak dialectology.’ In the 1880s and 1890s, František Pastrnek (1853–1940) wrote interchangeably about the Czechoslovak and Czech language. In 1887, he stated that Slovak was a group of

520 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Czech dialects. In the same year, the Slovak scholar, Samo Czambel (1856–1910), published in Budapest his overview of the history of the Slovak language. He agreed that until the 16th century, in Upper Hungary, the Czechoslovak language remained in use. Jan Gebauer, the last codifier of the Czech language, also subscribed to Pastrnek’s view on the dialectal status of Slovak within the Czech language. For the first time he employed the term ‘Czech (Czechoslovak) language’ in his famous historical grammar of Czech published in 1894. After 1918, not only Trávníˇcek denied existence of the Slovak language. Václav Vondrák (1859–1925), in his Vergleichende slavische Grammatik (Comparative Slavic Grammar, 1924), defined Slovak as a dialectal variety belonging to the Czech language. In 1926, Miloš Weingart (1880–1939) spoke of Czech as ‘the Slovaks’ own language.’ Some Czech scholars such as Václav Flajšhans (1866–1950) strove to overcome the dilemma of the domination of Czech in the fold of the Czechoslovak language through calling the latter ‘our mother tongue’ or ‘our language’ with no ethno-regional label attached to it. But this did not help either, because this new category once again comprised the Czech language and ‘written Slovak’ of uncertain status. The international acceptance of the concept of the Czechoslovak language grew as evidenced by the Dutch ˇ ˇ scholar Nicolaas van Wijk’s (1880–1941) work, Cechies—Slovaaks— Cechoslovaaks (Czechs—Slovaks—Czechoslovaks, 1928), published in Amsterdam. The dogma of the Czechoslovak language also remained in Czechoslovakia until World War II, so Trávníˇcek could publish his Historická mluvnice ˇceskoslovenská (Historical Grammar of Czechoslovak, Prague) in 1935. Another significant proponent of this trend was Albert Pražák (1880–1956), who was the professor of Czech and Slovak literature (1921–1928) at Komenský University, Bratislava, the first Slovak-language university, established in 1919. In 1925, he published his ˇ Ceskoslovenský národ (The Czechoslovak Nation, Bratislava). After World War II, his Dˇejiny slovenské literatury (History of Slovak Literature, Prague) appeared in 1950. Slovakia had been an independent nation-state from 1939 to 1945, so he espoused the idea of the Slovak language as a separate entity but cloaked it in the Czechoslovak cultural commonality up to 1918. Pražák also reaffirmed the existence of the unitary Czechoslovak language and literature between 1918 and 1939, and added that after 1945 the separate Czech and Slovak languages and literatures were united in the commonality of common Czechoslovak statehood shared by the Czech and the Slovaks. Many Slovak intellectuals disagreed with this opinion, though some, for instance Milan Hodža (1878–1944), decried the progressing breakup of the Czechoslovak language. The post-1918 Magyar propaganda, not unlike the former group of the Slovak intelligentsia, also emphasized that Slovak was not part of the Czech (or Czechoslovak) language, and that there was no Czech culture in ‘Upper Hungary.’ Ironically, after the creation of Czechoslovakia, which the Slovaks joined on the anti-Magyar ticket, it was Budapest, not Prague, that

The Czech Case

521

was more ready to accept the ethnolinguistic separateness of the Slovaks. Obviously, Prague strove for the consolidation of Czechoslovakia as a bulwark against the Germans and the Magyars, while Budapest was interested in undermining the legitimization of Czech or Czechoslovak rule in Upper Hungary (Slovakia), in order to regain at least some of the Hungarian territories lost after 1918. The Slovaks remained a mere pawn in these games. Although after World War II, the concept of the Czechoslovak language disappeared from the political lexicon in Czechoslovakia, in 1967, Slovak linguists felt it necessary to state in their famous ‘Theses on the Slovak Language’ that from the genetic and typological viewpoint Slovak was a separate Slavic language. They also added that the dialects from the territory of Slovakia form the dialectal unity on which standard Slovak is based (Czambel 1887: 1–32; Dobrovský 1936: 5; Flajšhans 1924; Hodža 1920: 54; Koneˇcný 1846; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1926: 322, 1931: 480–481, 960– 961; Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby 1939: 1401; Pražák 1950: 6, 18; Ružiˇcka and Krajˇcoviˇc 1967: 283–284; Siatkowska 1992: 180; Steier 1920: 75–76; Weingart 1923: 56, 1926: 6–9, 15, 1937: 64).

7 The Slovak Case: From Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Populus to Slovak Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation

[A nation] is a quantity of human beings who are bound to each other by the bonds of language, style of thought, customs and habits. (In Maxwell 2007: Chapter 4) Apologie des ungarischen Slawismus (An Apology for Hungary’s Slavdom, 1843, Leipzig) Samuel Hojˇc (1806–1868) [H]ow beautiful, how rich, is our church language [Bibliˇctina], our in truth holy language, in which the most sacred significance for the humanity of Protestant Christians are professed. (In Kollár 1846: 231) Ján Seberini (1780–1867), a hierarch of the Lutheran Church in Upper Hungary Náreˇcja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaˇ nje v tomto náreˇcje (The Slovak Dialect, or the Need to Write in This Dialect, 1846, Preßburg) The significant in itself title of L’udovít Štúr’s book, which opened the era of standard Slovak as the language is to this day. We Slovaks, in our Slovak nationality, also have a Slavic nationality, which is a world nationality, that is, a great and special factor in European humanity; against which Magyar nationality has remained through the ages only a domestic, secondary, petty nationality. (In Maxwell 2007: Chapter 4) Michal Miloslav Hodža Dobrou slovo Slovákom (A Good Word to the Slovaks, 1847, Leutschau [Levoˇca]) 522

The Slovak Case

523

Imagining Slovakia and the Slovaks As a political entity, Slovakia emerged in 1918 within the broader framework of Czechoslovakia. The ethnonym ‘Slovak,’ though known since the mid-15th century, denoted either a Slav in general or a Slavophone inhabitant of Upper Hungary. Only in the course of the 19th century was the usage limited exclusively to the latter case. Although the name ‘Slovakia’ for the region where the Slovaks lived appeared at the end of the 18th century, it did not gain any official recognition until 1918 when Czechoslovakia came into being. Clearly, the nationalism of the Slovaks is much more steeped in ethnicity than that of the Magyars, the Poles, or the Czechs (Flajšhans 1924: 5, 307). For instance, the Magyars have enjoyed the continuous tradition of their own statehood since the 10th century, notwithstanding the partition of their kingdom in the 16th century and the truncation of Hungary after World War I to the ethnically homogenous, rump Magyar nation-state. The submersion of Hungary within the Austrian Empire was never complete, as evidenced by the transformation of this empire into Austria-Hungary in 1867. The Poles can gaze back to the Polanian (Piast) monarchy and Poland-Lithuania, which existed in one form or another since the 10th century, before the third partition wiped Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe in 1795. Poland-Lithuania, however, was re-created as a Polish nation-state in 1918 and claimed the tradition of Polish-Lithuanian statehood as its own. The tradition of Czech statehood is more discontinuous and complicated. Bohemia existed as a state in its own right from the late 9th century until 1348, when it was made into the most important region among the lands of the Czech Crown. The tentativeness of separate Bohemian/Czech statehood was emphasized by the fact that Bohemia had been immersed in the broader political framework of the Holy Roman Empire since the 10th century. The lands of the Czech Crown maintained a special position within this empire until the 1620s, due to the fact that the holder of the Czech Crown had the privilege of being one of the seven electors, who selected the emperor. Later, under the rule of the Habsburgs, the Czech lands were administered as separate administrative entities until 1918. First of all, they constituted part of the Holy Roman Empire (until 1806), then, beginning in 1804, the lands found themselves in the Austrian Empire, and after 1867 in Austria-Hungary. Upper Hungary (Slovakia) was an integral part of the Hungarian Kingdom until 1918. It was never separated from this kingdom, unlike Transylvania or the lands of southern Hungary conquered by the Ottoman Empire. (Only a small section of eastern Upper Hungary was seized by the Ottomans.) Following the Ottoman conquest, Upper Hungary became the very political and cultural center of truncated Royal Hungary, with its capital at Preßburg (Bratislava). By default, most autonomous Magyar cultural life (unfolding then without the previously

524 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

all-Hungarian Latin-language framework) also concentrated there. Slovak nationalism emerged in earnest during the second half of the 19th century, and especially after the creation of Austria-Hungary, when the Magyarophone elites attempted to transform Hungary into a Magyar nation-state. The ethnic nationalism of the Slovaks was a reaction to the growing success of Magyar nationalism. The Slavophone population of Upper Hungary did not have their own elites apart from the clergy, though Slovak scholars claim some Upper Hungarian nobles as ‘Slovaks.’ However, even if they were of Slavic origin and sometimes could speak a local Slavic dialect, they invariably identified themselves as members of the Hungarian natio. Traditionally, burghers spoke German and the predominantly Magyarophone nobility spoke the official Latin along with their Magyar vernacular. If a Slovak gained education, it was mediated via Latin, and later via German and Magyar. Social advancement meant either assimilation to the German-speaking milieu in towns or to the increasingly exclusive ranks of the Magyar-speaking nobility. Only Catholic priests and Lutheran pastors originating from among Upper Hungary’s Slavophone population retained their attachment to their original speech community in order to render effectively pastoral services to their faithful. With time, this feeling spread to a number of middle class town inhabitants of Slavic origin. This was the social ground from which Slovak nationalism would spring up. The example of the Czechs political movement offered the Slovaks a geographically proximate model of Slavic nationalism, easily transmitted to Upper Hungary thanks to the mutual intelligibility of the vernaculars employed in Bohemia and the region, and also due to the tradition of using chancery Bohemian (Czech) among Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Lutherans that dated back to the 16th and 17th centuries. (The post-1620 arrival of Protestant exiles from Bohemia to religiously tolerant Royal Hungary strengthened this tradition.) Encouraged by the clergy, the Slavic-speaking peasantry of Upper Hungary only slowly discarded its traditional loyalty to Hungary. The latter trusted that the old civic concept of natio hungarica would allow the preservation of the multiethnic character of the Kingdom of Hungary when it was made into the nation-state of Hungarian citizens. To their surprise, the uncompromisingly monolingual and ethnocentric nation-state of the Magyars emerged. It was the end of old Hungary and the beginning of the way toward the creation of the ethnically homogenous Mad’arsko (as it is known in Slovak and Czech) in which there would be no place left for speakers of other languages than Magyar. Any predicted concessions to other languages were to be temporary in order to facilitate the spread of Magyar as the sole national and official language of Hungary. The ideological coalition with the Czechs offered an alternative to the suppression of the Slovak cultural and political interests in the name of Magyar nationalism. It also permitted a clear articulation of the ethnolinguistic strain of Slovak nationalism vis-à-vis these Slovak intellectuals, leaders, and clergy,

The Slovak Case

525

who saw Slovaks as ‘Slovak-speaking Hungarians’ and hoped for cultural, rather than political, autonomy within a future Hungarian nation-state. Pro-Hungarian Slovak leaders usually professed Catholicism, and were also afraid that predominantly Protestant Czechophile Slovak activists would spread ‘Czech Hussitism’ among the Slavophone Catholic faithful. Czech nationalists, however, were not interested in overtures of ethnolinguistically-minded Slovak nationalists. Forging any political coalition with Slovaks would undermine the political framework of the Austrian Empire, which Czech leaders pledged to respect in their legalistic struggle for the re-unification of the lands of the Czech Crown, which they construed as a Czech nation-state. Only when this stance failed to bear any fruit, due to the staunch opposition of Vienna and Budapest, did some Czech politicians decide to seek a broader cooperation with their Slovak counterparts in the 1890s. Austria-Hungary posed the main obstacle to the realization of their respective national dreams. Although Czech and Slovak leaders remained loyal to the Habsburgs and the Dual Monarchy until the outbreak of the Great War, in wartime, many Czech and Slovak politicians appealed for the destruction of Austria-Hungary. To the surprise of these politicians who hoped for an end to the Dual Monarchy, their wish came true in 1918. What followed was a nation-state for neither the Czechs nor the Slovaks, but for the constitutionally proclaimed ‘Czechoslovaks.’ Besides these tentative Czechoslovaks (or the Czech and Slovak nations), Czechoslovakia also housed a considerable number of German-speakers, Magyars, and Ruthenians. (The last group was defined as a ‘state nation’ of Czechoslovakia, while the two others as mere minorities.) This state failed to deliver its Czechoslovak nation and Czechoslovak language. Except Czechophiles, Slovaks wanted a federal Czecho-Slovakia, not actual Czechoslovakia, which they perceived as a Czech nation-state in disguise, thus, only a little better than pre-1918 Hungary. Slovak nationalists and the Slovak public opinion resented the influx of Czech intellectuals and civil servants in Slovakia whose number, including family members, rose from 10,000 in 1910 to 120,000 in 1930. This Czech elite replaced the corps of 12,500 Magyar civil servants all of whom but 35 left Slovakia after 1918. Neither the victorious West nor the Soviet Union recognized the short-lived first Slovak nation-state (1939–1945), which Berlin urged into being during World War II.1 Despite initial Czech promises of devolution, after 1945, Czechoslovakia was re-established as a unitary state with no concessions of autonomy let alone federalism for the Slovaks. This prompted many Slovak nationalists, especially émigré ones, to judge the fate of Slovakia during the first half of the 20th century as ‘from Hungarian despotism to atheistic Czech communism with a brief spell of liberty and independence during that interval,’ meaning independent wartime Slovakia (Abrams 1996; Lettrich 1955: 39; Mannová and Holec 2000: 274–276; Nurmi 1999: 78; Palickar 1948).

526 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the context of the well-established traditions of Czech, Hungarian, and Polish statehoods, Slovak nationalism compensated the pronounced absence of its own state with the ideological construction of connecting the Slovaks with the 9th-century glory of Greater Moravia. Some of the political and ecclesiastical centers of this early medieval polity happened to be located in the territory of future Slovakia (others within the borders of the present-day region of Moravia). Even this claim the Slovaks had to share with the Moravians. The latter, however, despite efforts to this end, did not emerge as a separate nation. As a result, the Slovaks have continued to boost their imagined history by attaching the origins of their nation to Greater Moravia. Interestingly, the leading politicians of Czechoslovakia failed to utilize the common Czech and Slovak historical tradition of Greater Moravia for the sake of constructing a Czechoslovak nation. They stressed Hussitism as the historical legitimization of Czechoslovak statehood and nationhood, which actually drew a permanent wedge between the Czechs and Slovaks, for the latter perceived this tradition as exclusively Czech and opposed to Slovakdom, because of the ‘heretic’ and ‘godless character of Hussitism.’ This backward projection of modern Slovak national categories to the times of Greater Moravia also extends to the Slovak language. Unlike their Bulgarian, Macedonian, Croatian, or Slovenian counterparts, Slovak linguists do not often claim their language to have evolved from Church Slavonic, which would make the latter into ‘Old Slovak.’ However, certain ambiguity remains ingrained in Slovak- and Czech-language linguistic terminology. Old Church Slavonic is staroslovienˇcina in Slovak and staroslovˇenština in Czech. Because the Slovak language is slovenˇcina in Slovak and slovenština in Czech, the two former terms for Old Church Slavonic could also mean ‘Old Slovak’ (but for single letter differences). However, even the majority of Slovak linguists, who do not equate Old Slovak with Old Church Slavonic, choose to emphasize that some linguistic features present in the Slavic vernacular of Greater Moravia passed into the speech of the Slavophone inhabitants of Upper Hungary. On the other hand, these linguists speak of ‘Slovak influences’ in Church Slavonic, which was codified as a language by Cyril and Methodius on the dialectal basis of Thessalonicae (Salonika) and its vicinity. Both ‘Apostles of the Slavs’ came from this Byzantine town to Greater Moravia. On this basis, the linguists maintain that Church Slavonic was the ‘first written (literary) language of the Slovaks.’ This anachronistic projection of the relatively recent ethnic category of Slovakness to the distant past allows for claiming the speech of the Pannonian Slavs, who disappeared through assimilation with the Magyars, as the ‘Southern dialect of the Slovak language.’ Obviously, the speech of the ancestors of the present-day Slovaks left some mark on the actual use of Old Church Slavonic and vice versa. Indeed, neither were these ancestors aware that in a millennium their descendants would form a

The Slovak Case

527

Slovak nation, nor did Cyril and Methodius realize that the latter would also claim the Slavic speech of central Greater Moravia as ‘Old Slovak.’ The idea of the separate entity of the Slovak language originated at the turn of the 19th century, and this entity slowly emerged, shaped by grammars, literature, and dictionaries between the mid-19th century and the interwar period. The tradition of the progressive antiquation of the pedigree of the Slovak language dates back to the end of the 19th century, when the official policy of Magyarization clashed with the aspirations of the nascent Slovak national movement. The Russian linguist Timofiei Dmitrevich Florinskii (1854–1919) stressed that Slovak was a separate Slavic language that should not be subsumed either in the Czech or Czechoslovak language. In order to emphasize this separateness of the Slovak language, the Slovak scholar Samo Czambel (1856–1910) proposed in his Slovenská réˇc a jej miesto v rodine slovanských jazykov (The Slovak Language and Its Place in the Family of the Slavic Languages, 1906, Turócszentmárton) that Slovak did not belong to the group of the West Slavic languages (together with Czech and Polish) but to the group of the South Slavic languages (together with Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian).2 The Bulgarian scholar Beno Tsonov (1863– 1926) supported this thesis in the first volume of his monumental three-volume Istoriia na bulgarskii ezik (History of the Bulgarian Language, 1919, Sofia). Also drawing on the presumed South Slavic character of the Slovaks and their language, Buzuk Pavlo in his Narys istorii ukrainskoi movy (Outline of the Ukrainian Language, 1927, Kyiv/Kiev), proposed that the Czechs bordered directly on Kievan Rus before Slovaks arrived from the South in the 9th century and drew a wedge between these two. In 1930, the Polish linguist Zdzisław Stieber (1903– 1980) stated that at least the Central Slovak dialect (if not all the dialects of the Slovak language) was more South Slavic than West Slavic. Significantly, in the early 1840s, this Central dialect was selected as the basis of standard Slovak. Thus the Western and Eastern Slovak dialects, deemed Czechized and Polonized (Ruthenized) respectively, could be brushed aside as insignificant for the development of the Slovak language. In 1929, János Melich, one of the compilers of Magyar etymologiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest), remarked that it was the Slovaks who constituted the core of Greater Moravia’s population. Ergo, Slovak was the everyday vernacular of this early Slavic polity. With the background of this dynamic discourse, which insisted on the separation of Slovak as an entity of its own from any Czechoslovak commonality, the Slovak scholar L’udovít Novák (1908–1992) wrote Jazykovedné glosy k ˇceskoslovenskej otázke (Linguistic Notes on the Czechoslovak Question, 1935, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). He maintained that Slovak was in no way part either of the Czech or the Czechoslovak language. In 1938–1939, when Slovakia gained independence, he wrote K najstarším dejinám slovenskáho jazyka (On the Oldest History of the Slovak Language), which was published only in 1980 (Bratislava). In this work,

528 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Novák claimed the Slavic vernaculars of Samo’s Realm and Greater Moravia for the earliest history of the Slovak language. In his Stanowisko mowy Słowaków (On the Position of the Slovak Language, 1937), Stieber stated that Old Slovak was a transitory dialect between Old Czech and Old Polish during the pre-1000 time of the Slavic linguistic commonality. All these theses gave rise to the widespread belief in the historically and geographically central position of Slovak among the Slavic languages. In 1951, Reginald George Arthur de Bray published his influential Guide to the Slavonic Languages in which he designated for Slovak the role of ‘modern “Common Slav’’ or lingua franca among the Slavs to-day.’3 This antiquation of the imagined history of Slovak culture and language resulted in the myth of the ‘Cyrillo-Methodian dawn’ of the Slovak nation that was written into the Preamble of the 1992 Constitution of independent Slovakia. This document refers to the ‘spiritual heritage of Cyril and Methodius’ and the ‘historical heritage of the Great Moravian Empire’ as inherently ‘Slovak.’ In the 1990s, this led to the coining of the sobriquet ‘starý národ – mladý štát’ (old nation – young state) for denoting the Slovak nation-state which came into being in 1993. This tradition had also flowered in the short-lived first Slovak Republic (1939–1945), where the 5000-crown banknote was adorned with an imaginary portrait of Mojmír (Moimarus, reigned 833–836), who had founded Greater Moravia. Equally significantly, this presumed historical primacy allowed for presenting the Slovak nation as primus inter pares among the Slavs, and after the fall of communism in 1989 linked them to the common European heritage by emphasizing that Cyril and Methodius are also patron saints of entire Europe (Bagin 1987, 1992, 1993; Bray 1951: 513; Brock 2002: 19–45, 131– 132; Constitution of Slovakia 2004; Ferko et al. 1998: 18; Hýsek 1909; Novák 1980: 46–47, 300; Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby 1939: 1401–1402; Pauliny 1971: 5–13). Not surprisingly, Cyril, Methodius, and Greater Moravia reappeared first in works that sought to glorify the history of Hungary when the kingdom found itself at its nadir, partitioned among the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and Transylvania. The history of the mission of Cyril and Methodius to Greater Moravia was described in Annales ecclesiastici regni Hungariae (The Annals of the Kingdom of Hungary, 1646, Rome) and Ungaricae Sanctitatis Indicia (On Sainthood in Hungary, 1692, Tyrnau [Trnava]). The father of modern Hungarian historiography, Samuel Timon (1675–1736) broadened the aforementioned descriptions with an overview of Greater Moravia’s political history in his Imago antiquae Hungariae (The Picture of Old Hungary, 1733, Kaschau [Košice]), which was reprinted several times in the 18th century. The Protestant exile from Bohemia, Daniel Sinapius Horˇciˇcka (1644–1680), who settled in the Polish-Lithuanian town of Leszno, emphasized in the preface to his Neo-forum Latino-Slavonicum (The New Latin-Slavic Fair, 1678) that Cyril and Methodius had insisted on the use of Slavic in the liturgy so as to make it intelligible to the

The Slovak Case

529

inhabitants of Greater Moravia. In his De vetere literature hunno-scythica exercitatio (Exercises in Old Scythian-Hunnic Literature, 1718, Leipzig), Matej Bél4 (1648–1749) mentioned the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts employed for writing in Church Slavonic. Modern textbooks of Slovak history and culture point to Juraj Papánek (1738–1802) and Juraj Fándly (1750–1811) as ‘fathers of Slovak historiography.’ The title of Papánek’s Historia gentis Slavae5 (History of the Slavs, 1780, Fünfkirchen [Pécs]) is often anachronistically translated as ‘The History of the Slovak Nation.’ The same treatment is meted out to Fándly’s abbreviation of Papánek’s work, Compendiata Historia Gentis Slavae (Concise History of the Slavs, 1793, Tyrnau), whose title is popularly given as ‘Concise History of the Slovak Nation.’ Often Juraj Sklenár is added to Papánek and Fándly. He is remembered for his Vetustissimus Magnae Moraviae situs et primus in eam Hungarorum ingressus et incursus (The Oldest Situation of Greater Moravia and the First Arrival of the Magyars, 1784, Preßburg). Sklenár held the unusual opinion that the center of Greater Moravia was located in Bulgaria and that Slovakia was included in this polity by treaty. Perhaps this was the source from which Czambel derived his theory that Slovak belongs to the group of the Southern Slavic languages. Sklenár also said that the Magyars never conquered the territory between the Tatras and the Danube. Later, this allowed Slovak national leaders to claim that, like Croatia, Slovakia was not an integral part of Hungary, which necessitated granting it a special status (similar to of Croatia’s) within the kingdom. Thanks to the Czechoslovak movement, this view spread to the West, and in 1918, helped legitimize the creation of Slovakia as an administrative unit within Czechoslovakia (Bagin 1993: 13–15; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1926: 687; Petro 1995: 44–45, 49; Slovakia 1920: 10–11). Prior to 1781, when Joseph II granted religious tolerance to most Protestants as well as to Greek Catholic and Orthodox Christians, religion had been a much more significant locus of identity than language. Reification of language as the basis of group identity took place in Central Europe at the end of the 18th century due to the popularity of Herder’s ideas and the Europe-wide spread of nationalism emanating from revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The merger of language and nationalism into the ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism specific to Central Europe became the standard ideology of statehood legitimization in the course of the rise of German nationalism in the first decade of the 19th century. This nationalism offered the ethnolinguistic pattern in accordance with which other nationalisms of Central Europe were molded. The re-establishment of the old order after 1815 temporarily subdued nationalism as a political and social force, and the confessional cleavage played a more significant role in Upper Hungary up to the mid-19th century. Only in the latter half of the century, under the pressure of state-ordained Magyarization, did Slovak nationalism emerge as an ideology that decisively crossed the confessional divide. But until

530 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the end of World War I, the majority of the Slovaks remained loyal to the emperor and, rather than for separation, they either strove for autonomy within the Kingdom of Hungary or were satisfied with the obtaining status quo. The everyday speech of Upper Hungary’s Slavic inhabitants was of little political significance until 1784, when German replaced Latin as the official language in the Habsburgs’ lands. Prior to that moment, the established order had prevailed, which provided for the use of Latin in state and ecclesiastical administration and German in cities and commerce. At that time, the written use of Magyar and Upper Hungary’s Slavic was limited to elementary education and a few publications. The employment of these usually unwritten vernaculars at school constituted the necessary intermediate step toward prestigious literacy in Latin and German. Obviously, it does not mean that this process somehow unduly privileged the Germanicphone population in Upper Hungary’s towns. Social advancement necessitated acquisition of prestigious Latin too, and even if burghers limited themselves to German, still this required them to span the gap between chancery German and their local Germanic dialects, sometimes as distant from this standard as, today, Polish is from Czech or Slovak from Ukrainian. Due to the continuing prestige of chancery Bohemian in the 15th and 16th centuries, this language dominated written communication conducted in the Slavophone areas of Central Europe. Not surprisingly, the first written documents and publications in this language appeared in Upper Hungary during the 16th century. Slovak linguists, who wish to establish an old pedigree for their language, tend to search for Slovakisms in these texts. This, in accordance with the Herderian paradigm, allows for including these texts in the history of Slovak literature. In the framework of ethnolinguistic nationalism, it is not enough that a certain corpus of texts was created on a specific territory occupied today by a nation-state. Only the ‘scientifically confirmed’ genetic connection between the language in these texts and a modern standard language does amount to a ‘proof’ of the belonging of these texts to the literature of a given nation that is housed in this nation-state. Necessarily, this more ideological-than-scholarly approach to categorization of languages is easily malleable in line with current political needs. That is why, when Czechoslovakism was on the rise in the second half of the 19th century and eventually became the official national ideology in interwar Czechoslovakia, scholars and politicians tended to refer to the Bohemian chancery language of documents and publications produced in Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia, and Upper Hungary as the ‘Czechoslovak language.’ This tendency was facilitated by the fact that quite a few Protestant noblemen, exiled from Bohemia after 1620, settled in Upper Hungary. After the mid-17th century, chancery Bohemian fell out of popular administrative use in the lands of the Czech Crown and in Upper Hungary. Actually, in the Upper Hungarian Komitats of Saros (Šariš, Sáros) and Zips (Spiš, Szepesz) Slavophone Calvinists even began to apply quite different Magyar orthography for writing chancery

The Slovak Case

531

Bohemian. Five religious books in this orthography were published during the 1750s. (It is the origin of the little known Šariš language, which remained in use for Slavophone Calvinist publications until 1919.) This indicated the growing cultural closeness of Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speakers with the Magyarophone center of the Kingdom of Hungary. Proponents of Slovak and Czechoslovak nationalisms, however, anachronistically interpreted this fact as a sign of the early policy of Magyarization, even though the leading Magyarophone members of the Hungarian natio used solely Latin (and sometimes German) when speaking to peers in public (Dulichenko 1981: 87–90; Flajšhans 1924: 307; Price 1998: 439; Sundhaußen 1973: 102–103). The ethnonym ‘Slovaks’ and the geographical name ‘Slovakia’ began to enter German- and Czech-language literature at the end of the 18th century. It was only the Protestant Slovak teacher and preacher, Michael (Michal) Kuniš (1765– 1835), who, in his Reflexionen über die Begründung der Magyarischen Sprache in Ungarn als Staats- Dikasterial- und Gerichts-, wie auch als allgemeine Volkssprache (Reflections on the Introduction of the Magyar Language as the Sole Official Language in Hungary, 1833, Angram [Zagreb]), for the first time, explicitly defined Slovakia as the Upper Hungarian komitats where Slovaks constituted majority of the population. He also categorized the Slovaks as a nation (Nation) of its own. But until the mid-19th century, it was not unusual to refer to Upper Hungary’s Slavophone population as ‘Slavs’ or ‘Pannonian Slavs’ (Arndt 1818: ˇ 85; Dobrovský 1936: 7; Duroviˇ c 1980: 213; Flajšhans 1924: 307; Ormis 1973: 165; Sundhaußen 1973: 105).

Which Slovak language for which Slovak nation? This tendency showed most clearly in the names employed for the varieties of written Slavic employed by Slovak intelligentsia. Crucially, 15 percent of the Slovaks were Lutherans, and the remaining 85 percent Catholics. (An insignificant number of Slavophone Calvinists overwhelmingly identified with Hungary and assimilated to Magyardom.) During the 15th and 16th centuries, both groups usually employed chancery Bohemian, spiced up with writers’ specific vernacular usages and various orthographic variants. The latter was a function of the peripheral location of Upper Hungary and indicated the rudimentary character of these writers’ education. As of the mid-19th century, the dialectal territory of standard Slovak was customarily divided among the Western, Central, and Eastern Slovak dialects. During the 1970s, this division was anachronistically projected backward in time, and today histories of the Slovak language and literature refer to the language of the early documents and publications in chancery Bohemian produced in Upper Hungary as ‘Cultural6 Western Slovak’ (kulturna zapadoslovenˇcina) and ‘Cultural Central

532 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Slovak’ (kulturna stredoslovenˇcina). Initially, there was no mention of any ‘Cultural Eastern Slovak’ (kulturna vychodoslovenˇcina) because very few Slavophone documents were written or survived in this backward border region, which during the 16th and 17th centuries was ravaged in the course of the protracted warfare of the Habsburgs and the Hungarian natio with the Ottoman Empire. But inescapably drawing on Calvinist Slavophone publications in Magyar orthography, the term ‘Cultural Eastern Slovak’ entered Slovak linguistics in the 1980s. Rudolf Krajˇcoviˇc and Pavol Žigo’s Priruˇcka k dejinám spisovnej slovenˇciny (The Handbook of the History of Written Slovak, 1999, Bratislava) apportions all the Slavophone publications and documents created from the 16th to 18th centuries in the areas coinciding with the territory of modern Slovakia to Cultural Western Slovak, Cultural Central Slovak, and Cultural Eastern Slovak. Local Protestants and Protestant exiles from Bohemia brought along to Upper Hungary the tradition of writing in the 16th-century chancery Bohemian, employed for the translation of the Kralice Bible. In the course of the CounterReformation that followed the 1620 defeat of the Protestant section of the Bohemian natio, Catholic writers tended to use a written language that was closer to the vernacular. Although at that time there was no steadfast barrier dividing the Slavophone literacy in the Czech lands from that in Upper Hungary, the present-day borders are usually written into past so that the language of these Catholic publications and documents is dubbed as ‘Jesuit Czech’ and ‘Jesuit Slovak,’ respectively. (The adjective ‘Jesuit’ is employed to reflect the crucial role, which the Society of Jesus played in the re-Catholicization of Central Europe by establishing a dense network of schools.) Obviously, if the largely administrative border between the Czech lands and Hungary is anything to go by, one would be also tempted to split the concept of ‘Jesuit Czech’ into, at least, ‘Jesuit Bohemian’ and ‘Jesuit Moravian,’ if not also ‘Jesuit Silesian.’ From the end of the 18th century to the mid-19th century, this very intuition led numerous authors (including Pavol Jozef Šafárik [Pavel Josef Šafaˇrík, Paul Josef Schaffarik, 1795– 1861] and Ján ( Jan) Kollár [Johann Kollar, 1793–1852]) to distinguish between Bohemian, Moravian, sometimes Silesian, and Slovak as different dialects of the Czech(oslovak) language or subdialects of the Czech(oslovak) dialect of the Slavic language. During the last three decades of the 18th century, Slavophone literacy revived in the Czech lands and Upper Hungary due to the phasing out of Latin as the official language (replaced with German) in the former region and the rise of Magyar (alongside Latin) in the latter. The rise of vernacular-based standard languages in the role of official or semi-official languages frequently incited speakers of other vernaculars to codify their own written languages. Modernization also required the spread of popular literacy and intensification of communication mediated by the written word. Protestants were at the forefront of these changes as they employed local vernaculars (or written languages close to these vernaculars) in

The Slovak Case

533

liturgy, unlike Catholics who stuck to Latin in this sphere. Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Protestant writers developed an extensive tradition of literacy in Bibliˇctina (the Biblical language) modeled on the Bohemian chancery language of the Kralice Bible. Denoting this written language by the name of Bibliˇctina is standard in the histories of Slovak language and literature, but the actual users of Bibliˇctina called it a variety of names, ‘the Biblical language,’ ‘Czech,’ ‘SlavoBohemian,’ ‘our beautiful, pure Biblical Slovak,’ ‘the Czechoslovak dialect,’ ‘the Biblical or Czechoslovak language,’ ‘our [. . .] Czechoslovak Biblical language [. . .] the true language of our forefathers.’ Whatever names one may choose to refer to it, Bibliˇctina formed the basis for codification of spisovná ˇceština (written Czech), that is, standard Czech, or the official and most prestigious register of the modern Czech language. Bibliˇctina also contributed to the rise of Slovak as a separate language. Some Protestant writers in Bibliˇctina tried to codify it as a special variant for Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speakers, who were perceived as different from the Bohemians or the Moravians. An attempt undertaken by Pavel Doležal (Paullus Doleschalius, 1700–1778) in his Grammatica Slavico-Bohemica (Slavic-Bohemian Grammar, 1746, Preßburg) was most significant. The continuing prestige of Bibliˇctina was such that Catholics also used it. But the confessional cleavage caused the Catholic majority of Upper Hungary to reply with their own codification that would not smack of Protestant Bibliˇctina. The Catholic priest Anton Bernolák prepared the ground for this new codification with his Dissertatio philologico-critica de literis Slavorum [. . .] cum adnexa linguae slavonicae per Regnum Hungariae (The Philologico-Critical Dissertation on Slavic Writing [. . .] with an Appendix on the Slavic Language for the Kingdom of Hungary, 1787, Preßsburg) and Grammatica slavica (The Slavic Grammar, 1790, Preßburg). Earlier, another Catholic priest, Josef Ignác Bajza (1755–1836), had published the two volumes of René mlád’enca príhodi a skúsenosti (The Adventures and Experiences of a Young Man Called René, 1783–1785, Preßburg). Today, it is acclaimed as the ‘first Slovak novel,’ but its influence on the rise of Slovak was minimal because censors suppressed it. Bernolák accused Bajza of introducing a language that was a hodge-podge of ‘Czech-Moravian-PolishCroatian-Ruthenian,’ and criticized his orthography. Bernolák’s codification found the necessary official support, which was not offered to Bajza’s codification. The basis of this support originated in Bernolák’s Societas Excolendae Linguae Slavicae (Society for the Teaching of the Slavic/Slovak Language), which was active when he studied in the Preßburg seminary (1784–1787). This led to Bernolák’s cooperation with another priest, Juraj Fándly. In 1792, they founded the Slovenské uˇcené tovarišstvo (Slovak Scientific Society) in Tyrnau (Trnava). Soon numerous branches of this society sprang up all over Upper Hungary. Bernolák’s older colleague, Fándly, was the tireless promoter of Bernolák’s codification and wrote the first substantial book in this newly standardized language, Dúvˇerná zmluva medzi mníchom a diablom (The Secret Contract

534 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

between the Monk and the Devil, 1789, Tyrnau). Because of its creator, this codification is known today as Bernoláˇctina (Bernolákovˇcina), or Bernolák’s language. Bernolák himself called this new written language, ‘Pannonian Slavic,’ the ‘Slavic language in Hungary,’ or simply ‘the Slavic language.’ He wished to educate Slavophone Catholics of Upper Hungary through a language that would be closer to their speech than antiquated Bibliˇctina. Bernolák was a loyal member of the Hungarian natio and could not foresee that his work would be interpreted in Slovak national terms in future. Bernoláˇctina found another significant protector and promoter in the person of the priest, Juraj Palkoviˇc (1763– 1865),7 a member of the chapter of the cathedral of the Esztergom Archdiocese. He translated some Italian plays and Virgil’s Aeneid (1828) into Bernoláˇctina. Most significantly, after Bernolák’s death, Palkoviˇc published Bernolák’s Slowár ˇ ˇ Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoNemecko-Uherski, seu Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-LatinoGermanico-Ungaricum (The Slovak/Slavic Dictionary: Czech/Bohemian-LatinGerman-Hungarian, 1825–1827, Buda). This work is composed of six volumes, each in excess of 800 pages. In its scope, this work rivaled Linde’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language) and preceded Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary) by a whole decade. Had Bernolák’s dictionary become the basis for codification of the Slovak language, it would have preceded the modern codification of Czech. This did not happen, and the first authoritative dictionary of the Slovak language similar in scope to Bernolák’s work, the six-volume Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Slovak Language, Bratislava) was published only in 1959–1968. Moreover, it is all too easily forgotten that with his dictionary Bernolák did not wish to codify a Slovak language, but compiled it for the sake of spreading the knowledge of Magyar among the Slavophone inhabitants of Upper Hungary. He recognized Slovak as the mother tongue of this population and appealed for its use in books and education. However, Bernolák continued to see Hungary as the patria of all who lived in the country, whatever languages they might happen to speak. He never proposed that there existed some separate ‘natio slovaca,’ let alone a ‘Slovak nation.’ Bernolák’s stance in this regard, was not different from his predecessors, who, in the course of the Josephine reforms, published periodicals in Bibliˇctina during the 1780s to spread the knowledge of German, then freshly made into the official language of the Habsburg lands. Interestingly, though Bernolák calls the language described in his dictionary ‘Slovak’ in Bernoláˇctina and ‘Slavic’ in Latin, it is transformed in the subtitle into ‘Czech’ in Bernoláˇctina and ‘Bohemian’ in Latin. However, all four different names (which one would not use as synonyms nowadays) denoted Bernoláˇctina. Entries in Bernoláˇctina and German were printed in Gothic characters, while Latin and Magyar entries in Antiqua. The pinnacle of the development of Bernoláˇctina was reached with Palkoviˇc’s translation of the Bible (1829–1833, Esztergom) into this language and Ján (Gan) Hollý’s epic poems Swatopluk

The Slovak Case

535

(Svatopluk, 1833, Tyrnau), Cirillo-Metodiada (Cyrilo-Methodiana, 1835, Buda) and The Slav (Slaw, 1839, Buda). Bernoláˇctina persisted among Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Catholics until the mid-19th century. Three hundred and twenty-eight books were published in Bernoláˇctina but 80 percent of them were devoted to religious subjects, which did not allow this language to develop into a medium of communication in other spheres of life. Apart from Latin, German, and Magyar, it was Bibliˇctina that dominated Slavophone newspapers and non-religious publications in Upper Hungary (Bagin 1993: 20; Bernolák ˇ 1825–1827; Brock 2002: 37, 122; Dulichenko 1981: 88–89; Duroviˇ c 1980: 213, 215; Krajˇcoviˇc and Žigo, 1999: 93–101; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1931: 480; Kotvan 1957; Maxwell 2006, 2005; Oravcová 1994: 14; Peciar 1959–1968; Petro 1995: 45–46, 48, 59–60; Price 1998: 116; Sundhaußen 1973: 107; Trylˇcová 1962: 8, 15). Seventy-five percent of the 500 members of the Slovenské uˇcené tovarišstvo were Catholic priests. They formed an influential elite for the use and popularization of Bernoláˇctina. After the introduction of religious freedom in the 1780s, the Protestants, who formed a minority in Upper Hungary, became quite active. They disliked and rejected Bernolák’s codification on several grounds. First, Bernoláˇctina appeared to them to be a Catholic language. Second, it undermined the use of prestigious Bibliˇctina, which had been an established language in the Czech lands and Upper Hungary since the 16th century. Third, Bibliˇctina was derived from the famous 16th-century Kralice Bible, while Bernoláˇctina drew on the Slavic vernacular of the region between Preßburg and Tyrnau. The prestige of the Kralice Bible’s language obviously towered over the oft derided ‘peasant talk.’ In 1793, a year after the establishment of the overwhelmingly Catholic Slovenské uˇcené tovarišstvo, Jur ( Juraj) Ribay (1745–1812), a friend of Ferenc Széchenyi and Josef Dobrovský, proposed that Protestants counter this development with their own Societas Slavobohemica (Slavobohemian Society). Eight years later, the Lutheran superintendent, Martin Hamaliar (1758–1812), founded the Chair of the Slavobohemian Language and Literature in the Preßburg Lutheran secondary school. In 1803, the Protestant preacher Juraj (Giˇri, Georg) Palkoviˇc (Palkowitsch) was nominated to this chair, which he held until his death in 1850. After Palkoviˇc’s death, the chair was dissolved. Obviously, the languages of instruction at the secondary school were Latin and German. Palkoviˇc necessarily taught his classes in Slavobohemian language and literature with the use of both official media of education. Palkoviˇc was a student of Dobrovský and obtained education at the University of Jena, where he belonged to the student organization Societas Slavica (Slavic Society). In his 1792 article, ‘O Slovácich’ (On the Slavs), he wrote that his goal was to educate the ‘Slav nation’ of Upper Hungary. From Ribay, Palkoviˇc took the Herderian conviction that history, languages, and literature of the Slavs were unduly neglected and now should be researched and taught. Dobrovský’s early codification of modern Czech steeped in the 16th-century literacy of chancery Bohemian provided Palkoviˇc with the

536 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

model of language use. In 1804, he gave his title as professor of ‘ˇreˇc a literatura slowenská’ (Slavic/Slovak language and literature), but in 1830 he identified himself as a professor of ‘the Bohemian (Czech)-Slavic language and literature.’ Palkoviˇc aggressively promoted Bibliˇctina as the written language of Upper Hungary’s Slavs. His success was greater among Slavophone Protestants than Catholics, but the prestige, which this language enjoyed not only in Upper Hungary but also in the Czech lands, facilitated Palkoviˇc’s efforts to spread Bibliˇctina among Slavic-speaking Catholics too. Although constituting one-seventh of Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speaking population, Protestants, with usually higher rates of literacy than Catholics, formed a readership of Bibliˇctina publications that rivaled the Slavophone Catholic readership served by Bernoláˇctina writers. What is more, unlike the latter, Bibliˇctina writers did not limit themselves to religious issues only. In 1801, Palkoviˇc translated a fragment of Iliad into Bibliˇctina and 7 years later published a new edition of the Kralice Bible, which he edited together with Štefan Leška (1757–1818). Leška had published the first Slavophone periodical in Upper Hungary, Prešpurské nowiný (Preßburg News, 1783–1787). Palkoviˇc continued this tradition and brought out two Bibliˇctina periodicals, Týdennik aneb cisarsko kralowske narodne nowiny (Weekly, or the Imperial-Royal National News, Preßurg, 1812–1818) and Tatranka (Tatra News, Preßburg, 1832–1847). Palkoviˇc’s most important achievement was compilation and publication of the authoritative two-volume dictionary of Bibliˇctina Böhmisch-deutsch-lateinisches Wörterbuch (Bohemian/Czech-German-Latin Dictionary, 1820–1821), which he financed himself. The dictionary’s first volume came off the press in Prague and the second in Preßburg. Interestingly, it was the printing shop of the Prague Archdiocese that brought out the first volume. A decade later, the same institution would publish Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (1835–1839). Prior to Jungamann’s dictionary, Palkoviˇc’s work served as the sole dictionary of Dobrovský’s codification of modern Czech. But Palkoviˇc wished to reflect differences in usage between Bohemia on one hand, and Upper Hungary and Moravia on the other. Hence, his dictionary’s subtitle announced ‘mit Beyfügung der den Slowaken und Mähren eigenen Ausdrücke und Redensarten’ (with the addendum of expressions and idioms used among the Slovaks and in Moravia). Most importantly, the rest of the subtitle earmarked this dictionary for use in schools. Bernolák’s dictionary of Bernoláˇctina was so large and expensive that very few Catholic schools of Upper Hungary could afford it. Meanwhile, Palkoviˇc’s less extensive work found a ready market not only in Upper Hungary, but also in Bohemia and Moravia. In Bohemia during the 1820s, and later in Moravia, Czech-language publications began to be printed in Antiqua instead of the traditional Gothic type, which earlier they had shared with German-language prints. This nationally minded change appeared to Upper Hungary’s Protestants as the severing of the link with the language of the Kralice Bible. In their eyes, it was as inexcusable

The Slovak Case

537

as Bernolák’s codification, which drew on the vernacular. The belief was that one should not dare to alter the language of this Protestant translation of the Bible, which appeared as holy to Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Protestants as the Latin of the Vulgate to Catholics. This and further attempts at replacing [w] with [v], [g] with [j] and [g] ˙ with [g] Palkoviˇc assessed negatively in his Bestreitung der Neuerungen in der bömischen Ortographie (Against Novelties in Bohemian/Czech Orthography, 1830, Preßburg). His opposition to follow the changes, emanating from Bohemia, introduced a degree of difference between the (standard) Czech of Bohemia and Bibliˇctina. Moravia found itself between these two because the use of Bernoláˇctina was limited to Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Catholics (Agnew 1992: 22; Heidler and Weingart 1922: V; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1931: 480–481; Maxwell 2005; Palkowitsch 1820–1821; Petro 1995: 50; Sundhaußen 1973: 108, 110–111). In the three decades preceding the middle of the 19th century, the traditional, confessionally-based conflict between Protestant Bibliˇctina and Catholic Bernoláˇctina acquired the new dimensions of nationalism, Czechoslovakism, and Pan-Slavism. Pavel Jozef Šafárik8 and Ján Kollár, who were almost of the same age, like Palkoviˇc, received their education at the University of Jena, and became Lutheran pastors. After 1812, Kollár (and Šafárik in 1816) met Palacký at Preßburg, where the future historian of the Czech nation worked as a private teacher until 1823. Besides German, all three wrote in Bohemian/Czech of Dobrovský’s recent codification, which Palkoviˇc merged with Bibliˇctina. Palkoviˇc and Jungmann highly praised Šafárik’s collection of poems, Tatranská Mu˚za s ljrau Slowanskau (The Muse of the Tatras with a Slavic Lyre, 1814, Leutschau [Levoˇca]), while the latter, together with Palacký, complained that now there was no great poet writing in Czech. To their surprise, Ján Hollý embodied in his poems their main ideas regarding how great Czech poetry should look. Although his first collection of poetry came off the press in 1824, Hollý knew nothing about Palacký and Šafárik’s prosodic proposals. Also in 1824, Kollár published his famous Pan-Slavic epic Sláwy dcera (The Daughter of Slava, Ofen [Pest]). These Lutheran writers (Palkoviˇc, Palacký, Šafárik, Kollár, and Hollý) shared the same written language to which they referred in German as ‘Bohemian’ and in Czech as ‘Czech.’ Due to the rise of Czech nationalism complete with its specific language, the language of Palacký’s Slavophone works was labeled as ‘Czech,’ and the German sobriquet of ‘Bohemian’ was gradually ˇ rejected and replaced with that of Cechisch (today, Tschechisch). The emergence of Czechoslovakism in the second half of the 19th century prompted its proponents to speak of the language of Bibliˇctina, embodied in Šafárik’s, Kollár’s, and Hollý’s Slavophone writings as ‘Czechoslovak,’ or ‘CzechoSlovak.’ The codification of the Slovak language as we know it today took place from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. In their attempt

538 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

to provide this relatively new codification with more historical legitimization, 20th-century historians of the Slovak language and literature replaced the label ‘Czechoslovak’ with the new one of ‘Bibliˇctina.’ This allowed for categorizing Czech-language writings from Upper Hungary as different from those written and published in the Czech lands. Thus, Bibliˇctina re-defined as a specifically ‘Slovak’ phenomenon was included in the imagined history of the Slovak language. Obviously, in the heyday of Czechoslovakism in interwar Czechoslovakia, the category of the ‘Czechoslovak language’ was applied to the language of the Czech-language publications from the Czech lands and to the language of the Bibliˇctina publications from Upper Hungary. In 1817, influenced by Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (The Voices of Peoples Expressed in Their Songs, 1778), Šafárik appealed for folk songs of the Slavs to be collected. He pointed to Karadži´c’s collection of Serbian folk songs and Ivan Prach’s9 (1750–1818) of Russian ones as examples to be emulated. The latter collection was published in 1790 and the former in 1814. Šafárik published his collection of Pjsnˇe swˇetské lidu slowenského w Uhˇrjch (The Secular Songs of the Slavic [Slovak] People of Hungary, Ofen [Pest]) in 1823. Kollár continued the work and brought out an enlarged edition of this collection, Národnie zpiewanky, ˇcili pjsnˇe swˇetské Slowáku˚w w Uhrách (National [Folk], or Secular Songs of the Slovaks in Hungary, Buda) in 1834–1835. Neither Šafárik nor Kollár seemed to be bothered by the distance between the vernacular of these songs and the Bibliˇctina they used for writing their learned works. However, much to the consternation of their Czech colleagues, Kollár Slovakized (vernacualrized) his Czech between 1825 and 1838, and Šafárik between 1825 and 1829. Both, Kollár and Šafárik, operated within the larger framework of the Kingdom of Hungary as contained in the Austrian Empire. Between 1819 and 1833, Šafárik worked as a teacher in a Serbian-language secondary school in Neusatz (Novi Sad, Austrian Empire) and then moved to Prague. In 1833, Kollár moved to Pest where he rendered pastoral services to Slovak- and German-language Lutherans. In 1849, he moved to Vienna and became a professor at the university. Both of them wrote in German as well as a Slavic written language, which Slovak scholars tend to label as ‘Bibliˇctina,’ while their Czech colleagues as ‘Czech.’ However, if one chooses Palkoviˇc’s codification as the standard of Bibliˇctina, the language of Šafárik and Kollár appears closer to Czech. In the 1820s, Czechs rejected the Gothic type in favor of writing their language in Antiqua, and Šafárik and Kollár followed this change in their own writings, unlike Palkoviˇc who condemned it and stuck to the Gothic lettering. Both Šafárik and Kollár looked up to Prague as their ‘home.’ The former lived there during the last decades of his life and was buried in the Bohemian capital. Kollár died in Vienna but wished to be buried in Prague as well. His wish was finally granted in 1904, when his grave was moved from the Austrian to Bohemian capital.

The Slovak Case

539

In 1849, escaping the advance of the Magyar army Kollár fled from Pest to Vienna, where he petitioned the court for severing Upper Hungary from the Kingdom of Hungary, so that this region under the novel name of ‘Slovakia’ could be included in the lands of the Czech Crown. Kollár drew from his teacher Palkoviˇc’s 1812 dictum, in which the latter claimed that a nation without its own language could not be a nation. None of them clearly delineated between the Czechs, Czechoslovaks, Slovaks, or Slavs, but the Herderian equation of language with a people (nation) allowed them to exclude Upper Hungary’s Slavophone population from the commonality of natio hungarica, increasingly turned into the Magyar nation. Kollár separated the concepts of natio and patria (which had been still synonymous for Bernolák), and unsuccessfully attempted to change the political reality of Hungary on this basis. After the mid-19th century, however, it became obvious that one did not have to be a Hungarian/Magyar even though one lived in the Kingdom of Hungary. Kollár’s and Šafárik’s vision appealed for cultural unity of all the Slavs and for political cooperation and eventual unity of the Slavic inhabitants of the Austrian Empire. The latter part of their program became the basis of Austroslavism espoused by Palacký as the ideological platform in which Czech nationalism should be anchored. The figure of Kollár easily lends itself to be molded into one of the founding fathers of the Slovak nation, for in 1821, he published an anonymous article ‘Etwas über Magyarisierung der Slawen in Ungarn’ (On the Magyarization of Slavs in Hungary) in the journal, Ueberlieferungen zur Geschichte unserer Zeit, published in the Swiss town of Aarau. Slovak historians usually translate the title’s ‘Slavs’ as ‘Slovaks.’ Translations of this article were published in Serbian and Croatian periodicals printed in the Austrian Empire, in 1827 and 1835, respectively. Kollár’s neologism ‘Magyarization’ became popular not only as part of Slovak nationalism’s ideological package, but also as that of all the Slavic and Romanian nationalisms, which developed in the Kingdom of Hungary. Kollár also drew on the thought of Ján Herkel, who maintained that cultural commonality unites all the Slavs, and coined the term ‘Pan-Slavism’ in 1826. Kollár, however, spoke of the singular Slavic language, unlike Herkel who distinguished several Slavic languages. Kollár presented his views in his 1837 polemic, Über die Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation (On the Reciprocation Among Different Tribes and Dialects of the Slavic Nation, Pest). Within the Slavic language he distinguished the following dialects, Bohemian, Polish, Russian, and Serbian (Illyrian). He contended that every educated Slav should learn all the four dialects of the Slavic language, but stopped short of calling for creation of some all-Slav nation-state. Kollár’s opinions proved to be quite an influence on Šafárik, who experienced ‘Slavic reciprocity’ first hand when he cooperated with Czech intellectuals and working in a Serbian-language secondary school in Vojvodina. Šafárik retreated from

540 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

his tentative statements on the specificity of the Slovak language, which he had made in the 1820s, while compiling the first collection of Slovak folk songs. In his monumental Slowanské strožitnosti (Prague, 1837), he categorized Slovak, Moravian, and Czech (Bohemian) as the subdialects of the Czechoslovak dialect of the Slavic language. In 1842, he published another groundbreaking study, Slowanský národopis (Slavic Ethnography, Prague), in which he identified Slovak as the ‘Ugro [Hungarian]-Slovak’ dialect of the Czech language. Four years later, Kollár agreed with Šafárik in his Hlasowé o potˇrebˇe jednoty spisowného jazyka pro ˇ Cechy, Morawany a Slowáky (Voices on the Need of the Unity of the Written Language for Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks, Prague). In this book, Kollár identified Slovak along with Bohemian, Moravian, Silesian, and Sorbian as parts of the Czech language spoken by the Czech ‘national tribe’ (národní kmen), construed as part of the larger encompassing Slavic nation. Under the category of the ‘Czech language,’ Šafárik and Kollár understood Jungmann’s Czech of Bohemia and Moravia written in Antiqua as well as Palkoviˇc’s Bibliˇctina written in Gothic characters (Brock 2002: 43, 50, 122; Heidler and Weingart 1922: VII; Kollár 1837: 6, 1846: 124; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1929: 30; Ormis 1973: 169; Petro 1995: 54–59; Šafaˇrjk 1837: 483; Sundhaußen 1973: 104, 113). Apart from the legacy of nebulous Pan-Slavic ideas and of the highly politicized coinage of ‘Magyarization,’ Kollár left his potent definition of nation, ‘Ein Vaterland kann man leicht wieder finden, wenn es auch verlorengeht: Nation und Sprache aber nie und nirgends, das Vaterland an sich ist tote Erde, ein fremdartiges Objekt, ein Nicht-Mensch: die Nation ist unser Blut, Leben, Geist, Subjektivität’ (When one’s fatherland has been lost, one can easily find another, but it is impossible to find a replacement nation and language. Fatherland is nothing more but an inanimate stretch of territory, a non-human object; on the other hand, the nation is our blood, life, spirit, and our subjective selves.) Clearly, he did not believe in the Magyar notion of the Hungarian nation that claimed for it the entire population of the Kingdom of Hungary. The famously ambiguous term magyar nemzet can be translated into English as the civic concept of ‘Hungarian nation’ (that is, natio hungarica), or the ethnic one of ‘Magyar nation.’ This ambiguity allowed the Magyar national elite to credibly claim the multi-ethnic population of their kingdom for the ethnic project, which through linguistic Magyarization would turn all the populace into the Magyar nation. Although Kollár settled for the purely ethnic definition of nation, he used the German word Nation that is usually reserved for denoting the concept of civic nation, while the idea of ethnic nation is rendered with the term Volk. He also excluded the concept of territory (fatherland) from his definition, perhaps because he could not come up with some administratively, politically, or historically defined area that could be proposed as exclusively Slavic. The Magyars had at their disposal a much better claim to the entire territory of the Kingdom of Hungary with the exception of Croatia-Slavonia (Kollár 1837: 35).

The Slovak Case

541

Kollár’s definition of nation was quite useful for Slovak nationalism. It allowed for asserting the existence of the Slovaks as a nation when there was still no clear-cut territory that could be claimed as the Slovak national territory. Upper Hungary was divided into komitats that did not add up to any ‘Slovakia.’ These komitats remained an integral part of Hungary. The elevated stature of Kollár as an academic, thinker, and writer in Vienna’s academic and governmental spheres as well as among Czech and Slovak intellectuals in the Czech lands, Upper Hungary, and Pest, lent considerable prestige to Bibliˇctina. In 1849, he chaired a governmental committee that convinced the Austrian government to prescribe the use of ‘Old Slovak’ (staroslovensky) for prints earmarked for Slovaks and in publications produced by Slovaks. This Old Slovak was nothing else but Bibliˇctina (or slightly Slovakized standard Czech) less its Gothic script which had been replaced with Antiqua, thus making Old Slovak even more similar to Czech. After Kollár’s death in 1852, Old Slovak lost its influential protector, but newspapers and books appeared in this language in Upper Hungary, Pest, Buda, and Vienna until the end of the 1850s. The official support for Old Slovak was to counterbalance the political influence of those who promoted the use of the vernacular as the Slovak language. The authorities accused the opponents of Old Slovak of anti-Austrian and anti-Magyar Pan-Slavism. The Hungarian administration continued addressing Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speakers in Old Slovak well into the 1860s. Despite his insistence on the use of Bibliˇctina (so much removed from Upper Hungary’s Slavophone vernacular), at the end of his life, Kollár at least acquiesced to the category of the ‘Slovak language.’ After the mid-19th century, those who questioned the existence of Slovak as a distinctive language in its own right became a minority (Brock 2002: 98–99; Hodža 1920: 325–328; Maxwell 2005; Short 1996: 59). The change from Bibliˇctina to the vernacular-based Slovak language came with the new generation of Slovak intellectuals. The ground for this change was prepared by Martin Hamuljak (1789–1859), a Catholic lawyer and civil servant employed in Buda, who encouraged Slovak cultural life. Thanks to his efforts, in 1834, the Spolek milovníkov reˇci a literatúry slovenskej (Society of Lovers of the Slovak Language and Literature) was founded in Buda. In the 1820s, Hamuljak formulated the clear-cut, linguistic definition of the Slovak nation drawing on Herderian thought. Although as a Catholic he stood for Bernoláˇctina, but (in line with his definition of the Slovak nation) he also supported cooperation with Slovakophone Protestants, who, in the persons of Kollár and Šafárik, wavered between Czechoslovakism and Pan-Slavism. Recognizing the influence of Slovak Protestants and Czech leaders, in 1827, Hamuljak proposed a linguistic compromise. Popular books for Slovaks were to be written and published in Bernoláˇctina, whereas Bibliˇctina was to be reserved for scholarly Slovak publications and ecclesiastical use among Slovak Protestants.

542 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In 1836, Palkoviˇc’s students published their almanac Plody zboru uˇcencu˚ ˇreˇci ˇceskoslowarske prešporského (The Literary Fruit by the Students of the Czechoslovak Language at the Prešpurk [Preßburg] Secondary School, Preßburg). On the advice of one of the students, Michal Miloslav Hodža (1811–1870), this almanac was published in Bibliˇctina. Hodža argued that this would demonstrate their goodwill to the Czechs. These student authors, many of whom would become future leaders of the Slovak national movement, were still not ready to go it alone. This almanac was severely criticized in Prague because it did not conform to the newly standardized Czech language, as used in Bohemia. Jungmann’s Czech and Palkoviˇc’s Bibliˇctina, although equally archaizing, emphasized different elements of chancery Bohemian, from which both codifications developed. Already in the 1830s, the Czech language comprised the formal register and the informal one formed from Prague’s contemporary Slavophone vernacular. Bibliˇctina contained some Slovakism, but its users under Palkoviˇc’s ideological leadership scoffed at the vernacular as a ‘lowly peasant gibberish’ and the dialectal basis of the Bernoláˇctina of the Catholics, which was equally disliked by them. The Bohemian Slavophone elite’s clear rejection of Bibliˇctina presented the forming Slovak national elite (mainly composed of Protestants) with the urgent question: In which language they should write? The urgency was emphasized by the Czechs’ unwillingness to Slovakize their language in reciprocation to Kollár’s and Šafárik’s support for Czechizing Bibliˇctina. The eventual fusion was to spawn an equally Czech and Slovak Czechoslovak language. An answer to the Slovak Protestant intelligentsia’s dilemma would be worked out in the following two decades. It was not an easy matter. First, besides Bibliˇctina, the Protestant elite were also literate in Latin, Magyar, and German, the usual languages of their elementary, secondary, and university education, respectively. Second, there were proposed several radically different solutions to this dilemma, as discussed below. In his 1833 pamphlet, Sollen wir Magyaren werden? (Should We Become Magyars?, Karlstadt [Karlovac]), the Slavic-speaker from eastern Upper Hungary, Samuel Hojˇc (1806–1868), drew on the idea of the civic Hungarian nation composed from all the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Hungary. He predicted that ‘Arpadians [Magyars], Slavs, Germans, Walachians will lose themselves in the completeness of Hungary,’ while maintaining and cultivating their languages. Hojˇc distinguished between the civic all-embracing Hungarian ‘Nation’ (Národ) spelled with the capital ‘N,’ and its constituent ethnic ‘nations’ (národy) spelled with the lower case ‘n.’ He did not distinguish among Hungary’s Slavs treating them instead as a single group. Hojˇc’s attitude gave credence to the elevation of Magyar as the state language and relegated all other languages to secondary functions. In this multicultural and pro-Hungarian Pan-Slavic perspective, it was

The Slovak Case

543

simply not important whether Slovak elites would write in a single language, or continue using Bibliˇctina, Bernoláˇctina, and Czech alongside Magyar. Kollár persisted in his propagation of the unitary Slavic nation with its own language composed from the four literary dialects (Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slavo-Czech). The Slovaks were to write in ‘Slavo-Czech, that is, Czech. The political and intellectual prestige of Kollár and his friend Šafárik who supported this stance, relegated to oblivion Bernolák’s and Herkel’s views that the Slovaks formed a distinctive group vis-à-vis the Czechs and should enjoy their own written language. M M Hodža agreed, and in 1840 stated that “Moravians, Slovaks, and Czechs are a single nation, and we are all Slavs!’’ ’ The third possibility for a distinctive Slovak language emerged in the 1840s. In 1836 and 1844, Magyar was made the sole official language of Hungary. The process of Magyarization, which Kollár had predicted, commenced. The overhauling of Hungary into a nation-state was not to be conducted with a liberal cushion of multiculturalism as Hojˇc had proposed. Hungary’s population was to be made into the Magyar nation through linguistic assimilation. In 1840, the Slavophone students of the Protestant secondary school in the Upper Hungarian town of Leutschau (Levoˇca), encouraged by their teacher Michal Hlavaˇcek (in turn, a student of Palkoviˇc), founded their Societas Slavica (Slavic Society) and published a volume of poems and stories in Bibliˇctina, Gitˇrenka (Morning Star, Luetschau). The contributors described themselves as ‘Czecho-Slovak students’ and found subscribers to this volume in the Czech lands and Upper Hungary. Alarmed by this Czech influence, a teacher at the school, Karl Kramárcsik, denounced the student group in the Magyar-language newspaper Társakodó, ‘Nobody who is bound to this fatherland by true feeling can allow that there should be a teacher in Hungary, in a German city, in a Protestant school, in the year 1840, who is a preacher of Pan-Slavism.’ This news prompted Karl (Károly) Zay (1797–1871), Inspector-General for the Hungarian Lutheran Church, to demand wholesale Magyarization of Hungary’s Slavs as an answer to subversive Pan-Slavism that could play into Russia’s hands. In his 1841 book, Protestantismus, Magyarismus, Slawismus (Protestantism, Magyarism, Slavism, Leipzig), Zay argued that Magyar was the language of Protestant religious freedom. Throughout the 1840s, with the use of his position, Zay strove to implement this program, which strove to supplant Bibliˇctina with Magyar in Lutheran churches located in Slovakophone areas. Successful Slovak opposition to these measures led to the subsequent fortification of the nascent Slovak national movement. M M Hodža’s friend, L’udovít Štúr (Ludwig Stür, 1815–1856), disagreed with Zay’s program and methods. In 1842, he did not succeed in drafting an appeal to the emperor with a request to stop Magyarization. The leaders of Catholics, who constituted a majority of Upper Hungary’s population, did not support him. The following year, Štúr published his Die Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn über die gesetzwidrigen übergriffe der Magyaren (The Complaints and

544 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Accusations of the Slavs in Hungary About the Illegal Attacks of the Magyars, Leipzig). Štúr defended the Slovak language against Magyarization within the broader framework of Pan-Slavism understood as the right of Hungary’s Slavs to speak and write in their own language(s). Štúr fought for the linguistic rights within the borders of all Hungary. Out of the 16 instances of ‘illegal Magyarization’ as directed against Slovak-speakers, which he mentioned in his study, only five took place within modern Slovakia’s boundaries. Štúr’s book caused the authorities to interrogate him on charges of treason in 1843. This cost him a teaching position in the Protestant secondary school at Preßburg, where since 1835 he had taught instead of Palkoviˇc, who was otherwise busy with his publication projects. Afterward, Štúr feared for the survival of Slavic culture within Hungary. This close brush with the power of the official policy of Magyarization convinced Štúr that the Slovaks split between Catholics and Protestants writing in Bernoláˇctina and Bibliˇctina, respectively, must be united through a single Slovak language that would not be confessionally specific. Besides these two Slavophone written languages used in Upper Hungary along with recently standardized Czech, Štúr took into account the vernacular. This added a complication to the overall calculation because extant classifications of Upper Hungary’s Slavophone dialects were equally disparate and did not point to some presupposed Slovak cultural-cum-linguistic unity. In the 1664 study, Neue und Kurze Beschreibung des Koenigreiches Ungarn (The New and Brief Description of the Kingdom of Hungary, Nuremberg), the vernacular of the Slavs in the eastern half of Upper Hungary was labeled ‘Polish’ and in the western ‘Bohemian.’ At the end of the 18th century, Grellman in Statistische Aufklärung über Wichtige Theile und Gegenstände der Österreichischen Monarchie (The Statistical Explanation on Significant Regions and Objects in the Austrian Monarchy, 1795, Göttingen), classified the speech in the same areas as ‘quasi-half Polish’ and ‘Bohemian.’ This Bohemian (Czech)-Polish taxonomy for the analysis of the Slavic speech of Upper Hungary persisted until the mid-19th century, with the addition of the ‘Ruthenians’ in the easternmost section of this region (today, in Ukraine). Neither Catholic nor Protestant Slavic-speakers of Upper Hungary perceived Ruthenians as kindred. What separated them were the different script (Church Slavonic Cyrillic) and the language of liturgy. Ruthenians employed Church Slavonic, while the Slovakophone Protestants Bibliˇctina, and the Slovakophone Catholics Latin, in addition to Bernoláˇctina for non-liturgical pastoral services. In 1823, Šafárik distinguished songs in the German-Slovak, Polish-Slovak, and Moravian-Slovak dialects in his collection Pjsnˇe swˇetské lidu slowenského w Uhˇrjch. Kollár, in 1846, added to this taxonomy his new classification in Hlasowé ˇ o potˇrebˇe jednoty spisowného jazyka pro Cechy, Morawany a Slowáky. He identified seven Slovak dialects, Slovak-Czech (on the border with Moravia), Slovak

The Slovak Case

545

proper (western Slovakia), Polish-Slovak (the Tatras region in northern Slovakia), Russian- or Ruthenian-Slovak (eastern Slovakia), Serbian-Slovak (Lower Hungary or Vojvodina), German-Slovak (old mining towns of northern Slovakia), and Magyar-Slovak (the region around Pest, Vojvodina). A year later, in two works published in Leutschau, M M Hodža came up with another classification of the Slovak dialects, Czechoslovak (Moravia and western Slovakia), Polish-Slovak (the Tatras region in northern Slovakia), Ruthenian-Slovak (eastern Slovakia), and Slovak proper with its centers in the towns, Sankt Martin (Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), Liptau-Sankt-Nikolaus (Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš), and Altsohl (Zvolen). Hodža also mentioned ‘Magyar-Polish-Slavic,’ basically Slavic written down with the use of Magyar orthography, especially [cs] in place of [ˇc], [sz] for [s], and [s] for [š].10 Unlike Kollár and Štúr in his Die Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn über die gesetzwidrigen übergriffe der Magyaren, Hodža did not speak of Slovak dialects in the vicinity of Pest or in Lower Hungary (Vojvodina) (Brock 2002: 52, 83– 84; Heidler and Weingart 1922: VIII-IX; Kollár 1846: 102–104; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1933: 102; Maxwell 2006, 2005; Ormis 1973: 517; Petro 1995: 65–67). In 1843, as a result of discussions with M M Hodža and Jozef Miloslav Hurban (1817–1888), Štúr came to a conclusion that the non-confessionally specific Slovak language should be based on what he called the ‘Central Slovak dialect.’11 His decision was perhaps informed by the example of Vuk Karadži´c. Karadži´c standardized Serbian on the basis of the vernacular, unlike Ljudevit Gaj, who, in line with the ideology of Illyrism, hoped to work out a common language for all the South Slavs. In Karadži´c, Štúr saw himself as the person who stood for a Slovak solution and, in Gaj, his opponents who stood for a Czechoslovak solution. At that time of his decision, Štúr started writing two works that were published in 1846 in Preßburg, namely Náreˇcja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaˇ nje v tomto náreˇcje (The Slovak Dialect, or the Need to Write in This Dialect) and Nauka reˇci slovenskej (Learning to Read and Write the Slovak Language). Štúr dedicated the former work, which legitimized codification of Slovak, to his friends, M M Hodža and Hurban; in the latter he presented his codification. The main aim of both works was to ‘prove’ that Slovak was a separate language and different from Czech. Interestingly, there is a tension in these two works about what status they confer on Slovak. In Náreˇcja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaˇ nje v tomto náreˇcje, Štúr wrote of ‘náreˇcje’ (dialect) and in Nauka reˇci slovenskej, of ‘reˇc’ (language). In the former instance, Štúr went hand in hand with Kollár when he proclaimed, ‘My Slováci sme kmeˇ n a ako kmen máme vlastné náreˇcie, ktoré je od ceského odchodné a rozdielne’ (We Slovaks are a tribe and as a tribe, we have our own dialect, which is different and distinct from the Czech dialect).12 Kollár and Štúr disagreed on the question whether Slovak was a self-standing dialect of the Slavic language, or a sub-dialect of the Czech(oslovak) dialect of this language. But in the second work, Štúr wrote about the ‘Slovak language’ in the title, although he referred to the ‘Slovak dialect’ in the text.

546 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In his two seminal works, Štúr proposed the tripartite division of the Slovak dialectical territory, which differed considerably from Kollár’s, Šafárik’s, and Hodža’s classifications. Štúr’s division equally imperfectly reflected the reality of Upper Hungary’s Slavophone dialects as those of his aforementioned colleagues. However, it was Štúr’s codification of the Slovak language that won the competition with Bernoláˇctina, Bibliˇctina, and standard Czech as the written language of the Slovaks. As a result, Štúr became the ‘father’ of the Slovak language and nation, and his words and opinions embodied the Holy Writ of Slovak nationalism. Since then the tripartite division of the Slovak dialects has remained the dogma of Slovak linguistics. Štúr argued that the dialectal base of western Slovak made Bernoláˇctina too close to Czech. Bibliˇctina was even worse in this respect as it was almost identical with Czech. Štúr settled for the Central Slovak dialect. He considered it the ‘purest’ due to isolation from foreign influences. In his opinion, the Tatras protected it against any Polish influences from the north, while the western and eastern Slovak dialects took the full brunt of the Czech, Magyar, and Ruthenian incursions and insulated Central Slovak. Štúr identified the Turóc Komitat with its administrative center in the town of Sankt Martin as the heartland of Central Slovak. The komitat embraced the largest percentage of Slovaks in its population out of all the Upper Hungarian komitats, and was centrally positioned in the Slovak-speaking area. It was a strategic decision. Štúr and his colleagues resigned themselves to the necessity of giving up Bernoláˇctina for the sake of bridging the confessional divide between Slovak-speaking Protestants and Catholics. The hard part was to convince the latter that they should part with Bernoláˇctina. Štúr, Hodža, and Hurban obtained a head start in their 1843 meeting with the doyen of Bernoláˇctina poetry, Jan Hollý, when the latter apparently blessed their project of codifying the Slovak language on the basis of the Central Slovak dialect. (Today, Hollý’s epic poems belong to the canon of Slovak national literature, but are available exclusively in modern Slovak translations.) What decisively differentiated this new codification from Bernoláˇctina and most publications in Bernoláˇctina was script. The new written language employed Antiqua while the two older ones the Gothic type. But some publications in standard Slovak appeared in Gothic fonts until the end of the 19th century, including the monthly Národní hlásník (National Herald, 1868–1904). In 1844, Hurban published the second volume of the literary almanac Nitra in the newly codified Slovak language (the first volume published 2 years earlier had been in Bibliˇctina). It was called either ‘New Slovak’ or, nowadays, ‘Štúrovˇcina’ as opposed to Bibliˇctina, known then as ‘Old Slovak.’ (The term ‘Štúrowˇcina’ popped up as early as 1847.) Between 1845 and 1848, Štúr published his weekly Slovenskje Národˇ nje Novini (Slovak National News) in New Slovak. The newspaper received generous support from 151 Upper Hungarian ˇ ˇ nobles, including Lajos Kossuth’s uncle, Durko (Dord’, György) Košút (Kossuth).

The Slovak Case

547

Not all the Magyarophone nobility of Hungary agreed with overhauling the kingdom into the Magyar nation-state, especially those who lived in the predominantly non-Magyar-speaking areas and spoke the local languages. Some stuck to traditional Landespatriotismus and lent support to the fledgling Slovak national movement, for example, Bohemia’s German-speaking aristocrats to the Czech national movement at the turn of the 18th century. In 1844, Hurban wrote the first novel in Štúrovˇcina Prítomnost’ a obrazy zo života tatranského (Contemporary Pictures from Life under the Tatra Mountains).13 Andrej Sládkoviˇc (Andrej Braxatoris, 1820–1872) was the first poet of significance who wrote in New Slovak. His famous love poem Marína (Pest) was published in 1846, and his epic Detvan followed 7 years later. In 1846, Hurban began to publish the first scholarly journal in Štúrovˇcina, Slovenskje pohlad’i na vedi, umenia a literatúru (Slovak Views on Science, Arts, and Literature, 1846–1848, 1851–1852). The cultural and political life of the nascent Slovak national movement was organized in the framework of the Tatrín association (1844). Its name was derived from the Tatras, the mountainous region whose dialect Štúr made into ˇ standard Slovak. Štúr established Tatrín in emulation of the Matice Ceská (founded in 1831). Like Slovenskje Národˇ nje Novini, Tatrín survived until 1848. Its 80 members constituted the core of the Slovak national movement. In 1845, Štúr voiced his criticism of Magyarization in a booklet written in German. Two years later, he was the first Slovak to be elected to the Hungarian Diet. In the same year, Štúr managed to attract some Catholic priests to support his antiMagyarization stance along with New Slovak. But the majority of Catholics stood fast by Bernoláˇctina, while Kollár lashed out against Štúrovˇcina in Hlasowé ˇ o potˇrebˇe jednoty spisowného jazyka pro Cechy, Morawany a Slowáky, and mounted support for the continued use of Bibliˇctina. Beginning in 1849, Kollár preferred to speak about it as ‘Old Slovak’ in an effort to avoid turning away those Protestants ready to embrace a written language as similar to Czech as Bibliˇctina as long as it could be ‘Slovak,’ at least in name. Czech national leaders, including Palacký, agreed with Kollár that ‘Štúr’s linguistic secession [from Czech]’ was a tragedy and hoped that it would be short-lived (Brock 2002: 85, 94–95, 147, 150, 167; Hodža 1920: 154–156; Kováˇc and Vongrej 1963: ill 100; Matica slovenská 1963: 22–23; Maxwell 2006; Pauliny 1971: 106–107; Petro 1995: 61, 68–72, 75–76; Short 1996: 43; Štúr 1943: 19, 73, 131–134).

Slovak nationalism and Magyarization The turning point in the development of the Slovak national movement and the Slovak language was the revolutionary events of 1848. The people of Preßburg soon heard news of the Czech national movement’s list of demands, which were drawn in March and forwarded to the emperor. In the same month, the Magyar national movement tabled its own set of demands, and made them into laws in

548 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

April when the first separate Hungarian government was formed. Significantly, drawing on the 1844 decision, the specific role of Magyar as the sole official language in the Kingdom of Hungary was reaffirmed, and all other languages were relegated to the private sphere. In this manner, the Magyars started inching toward full independence for Hungary, which they declared a year later in April 1849. The Czech example encouraged the Slovak national movement to take a decisive step, while the Magyar nationalists’ attempt at transforming Hungary into a Magyar nation-state frightened Slovak leaders because it would mean the quick disappearance of the Slovak nation if they failed to act. On 11 May 1848, at Liptau-Sankt-Nikolaus, the Slovak national gathering led by Štúr, M M Hodža, and Hurban issued Žjadost’i Slowenskjeho Národu (The Demands of the Slovak Nation). This document was written in Bibliˇctina because the Hungarian administration employed this language in official contacts with Upper Hungary’s Slavophone speakers. Obviously, the use of Bibliˇctina entailed printing this text in Gothic characters. Hence, the founding text of Slovak nationalism looked pretty un-Slovak to the modern Slovak. In the document, the Slovaks demanded, among other things, the official recognition of the Slovak nation (slowenski národ ) and the status of official language for Slovak in the overwhelmingly Slovak-speaking komitats. They also wanted equality for all the nations living in Hungary and fair representations for all of them in an all-Hungarian assembly, in addition to a separate national assembly for the Slovaks. Logically, these demands led to further pleas for a full Slovakophone school system complete with its own university and for the formation of a Slovak national guard with Slovak as the language of command. Apart from the usual demand of doing away with the remnants of serfdom, Slovak leaders also requested the same rights, which they demanded, to be granted to other nations in Hungary and especially to the ‘brotherly and kindred Polish’ in Austria’s Crownland of Galicia. Interestingly, the Poles, not the Czechs, were the only other nation than the Slovaks mentioned by name in the document. Perhaps, some Slovak leaders grieved at the failed Polish uprising of 1846 that had cost the Galician Poles the loss of the Free City of Cracow with Polish as the language of administration and the university. Any clear association with the Czechs was as much a benefit as a liability for Slovak nationalists who would like to see their nation as separate rather than part of some Czech or Czechoslovak nation. The Hungarian administration responded to the demands with warrants for the arrest of Štúr, M M Hodža, and Hurban. They fled to revolutionary Prague, where the three friends participated in Palacký’s Slavic Congress. Similarly as in 1848, Kollár, whom the Hungarian government considered to be anti-Magyar, had to leave Pest for Vienna. On 19 September 1848, the Slovak National Council declared the separation of Slovakia from Hungary, and called upon the entire

The Slovak Case

549

Slovak population to take up arms against the Magyars. The Slovak leadership sided with the monarch hoping that in his conflict with the Magyars, he would support the idea of a separate Slovak nation. On 19 March 1849, these leaders sent a petition to the new Emperor Francis Joseph requesting the transfer of Slovakia from Hungary to Austria. Neither the revolutionary Hungarian government nor the monarch wished to side with the Slovak national movement. The movement’s demands would require a wholesale change in the Magyar concept of nation and nation-state, and the movement was too small and not influential enough to decisively swing the odds in favor of the emperor. This relegated the Slovaks to the periphery of politics in Hungary. The 500 Slovak volunteers operating in western Upper Hungary were far fewer in number than Slovaks who were drafted into the Hungarian revolutionary army, and army in which they served loyally to the bitter end in August 1849. The Slovak appeal for granting freedoms to the Poles of Galicia also went unnoticed among the Poles themselves, who came to the aid of the Hungarian revolutionaries (Lettrich 1955: 30–31; Molnár 2001: 186–187; Paška 1968: 13–15; Pichler 1994: 41; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 32–33). The decade of neo-absolutism (monarch’s rule not moderated by a constitution or any popular representation) instituted after the crushing of the Magyars in 1849 actually allowed more space for Slovak culture. None of the Slovak national movement’s demands was met, but the replacement of Magyar with German as the official language in Hungary lessened the previously painfully felt pressure of Magyarization. Germanization did not simply replace Magyarization either because there was not a large enough German-speaking population in Hungary, who could provide a viable basis for such a policy. As they had before 1836 (Magyar replaced Latin in the Hungarian Diet only in 1844), German and Latin continued to function as the elite languages after 1849. Vienna dissolved the union between Hungary and Transylvania, and reaffirmed the separate status of Croatia and Slavonia. Moreover, the Kingdom of Hungary was replaced with five administrative districts in 1854. Vienna directly administered all the eight separate territories as homogenous parts of the Austrian Empire. The juggernaut of the Magyar nation-state disappeared. It did not help the Slovak cause either, for Upper Hungary found itself split between the Preßburg and Kaschau (Košice) districts, and the latter comprised the entire Ruthenianspeaking region. In the poor and underdeveloped region of Upper Hungary (except for its western section around Preßburg), the number of elementary schools with Slovak as the language of instruction grew from 1821 in 1869 to a high of 1971 in 1874. However, Bibliˇctina predominated as the language of instruction in Protestant schools, and Bernoláˇctina in Catholic schools. The Slovak-speaking elite still could not agree if it was Štúrovˇcina that should be made into the Slovak language. Kollár, with his influence in Vienna, exerted

550 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

pressure for the official acceptance of Bibliˇctina in the guise of Old Slovak, but he died in 1852. One would think that Štúr would have jumped through this window of opportunity opened by Kollár’s death. However, disillusioned with politics, he retreated to his family mansion near Preßburg, where he remained under house arrest until his death in 1856, resulting from a hunting accident. (In late 1855, Štúr accidentally shot himself from his own rifle while dismounting or jumping over a stream.) Taking care of the seven orphans, left by his deceased brother Karol, did not leave him with much leisure, either. Unimpressed by the coldshoulder Vienna and the Magyars had given to the Slovak national cause, he was nonetheless unsettled by the unstoppable force of the Russian army that had crushed the Magyar troops in 1849. In his student years, he gave up his early Czechoslovakism, and now he cast off Slovak nationalism too. In 1851, Štúr wrote Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft (Slavdom and the World of the Future). In this study, he proposed the radical Pan-Slavic solution. According to Štúr, all the Slavs should unite as a single nation under the rule of the Russian tsar. He actually said what the Magyars feared and what Herkel, Kollár, and Šafárik had always taken care not to utter. Štúr developed his friend M M Hodža’s 1847 argument that the Slavs were a ‘world-size nation,’ whereas the Magyars a ‘small nation.’ Understandably, Štúr’s work remained in manuscript form until 1867 when its Russian translation was published by a Moscow press. The German original appeared only in 1931 in Bratislava (with an introduction and analytical apparatus in Czech), and no Slovak translation was available until 1993. Štúr wrote his last significant work O národních pisních a povˇestech plemen slovanských (On National Songs and Stories of the Slavic Tribes, 1852) in Czech and published it in Prague (Brock 2002: 150; Johnson 1985: 29; Maxwell 2006; Petro 1995: 69; Viator 1908: 437). Štúr left it to others to carry on the Slovak national cause. The very last effort for a unified Slovak language in which he participated was the 1851 Preßburg meeting of the proponents of Bernoláˇctina, Bibliˇctina, and Štúrovˇcina. Bibliˇctina was out of question, because it was too close to Czech and too much removed from the Slovak vernacular. At the meeting, the young linguist Martin Hattala (1821–1903) dominated the discussion. A year earlier, he had published the theoretical basis for the synthesis of Štúrovˇcina with Bernoláˇctina in his study, Grammatica linguae Slovenicae (The Grammar of the Slavic/Slovak Language), drawing on M M Hodža’s 1847 critique of Štúr’s orthography. Hattala accepted Štúr’s Central Slovak pronunciation, but spelled words in a more etymological fashion that made several concessions to Bernoláˇctina. When Štúr and his followers accepted these suggestions, the Catholic clergy agreed to abandon Bernoláˇctina. After 1851, no new publications in Bernoláˇctina appeared, though a Catechism in this language was reprinted as late as 1867. Similarly, the use of Bibliˇctina was markedly reduced during the 1850s, but it survived in

The Slovak Case

551

Lutheran religious books and liturgy until World War I. In 1852, Hattala’s and M M Hodža’s proposals were presented in the anonymously published Krátka mluvnica slovenská (A Short Slovak Grammar, Preßburg). Three Lutheran and three Catholic leaders signed the preface to this compromise grammar, thus ushering into being the standard Slovak language that remains largely unchanged to this day (that is, except for various ‘language reforms’ that altered this standard from time to time). Confusingly, the participants and later commentators of the discussion on what written tradition should be made into standard Slovak, called Hattala’s compromise codification ‘New Slovak’ in opposition to Kollár’s Old Slovak (Bibliˇctina in Antiqua) and ‘Middle Slovak’ (Štúrovˇcina). Previously, there had been no ‘Middle Slovak,’ because Štúrovˇcina functioned as ‘New Slovak’ ˇ until the acceptance of Hattala’s codification (Duroviˇ c 1980: 218; Hodža 1920: 157; Maxwell 2005). During the 1850s, no grass-roots political activities were allowed in the Austrian Empire. The period of centralization and neo-absolutism was over in 1860, when the six administrative units were abolished, and the Kingdom of Hungary renewed. In the same year, an imperial decree granted the use of Slovak (meaning Bibliˇctina) alongside Magyar and German in 23 komitats. Due to Magyar pressure, this decree was revoked before it could be implemented. In the 1861 elections to the renewed Hungarian Diet, Slovaks pooled their resources with Ruthenians, but only the latter’s candidate, Adolf (Ivanovich) Dobriansky (Dobrians’kyi, Dobrianskii, Dobrzansky) (1817–1901), managed to win a mandate. He closely cooperated with Slovak leaders, and (like Ignác Martinovics in 1794) in 1861, Dobriansky proposed that Hungary should be divided into five national districts, Magyar-German, Serbian, Walachian (Romanian), Ruthenian, and Slovak. Obviously, the Diet neither considered the introduction of Slovak as an administrative language in Upper Hungary, nor agreed to Dobriansky’s proposal. On 7 June 1861, Slovak leaders replied by convening a mass political rally in Sankt Martin attended by 5000 people. They drew up the Memorandum of the Slovak Nation requesting, among other things, recognition for the Slovak nation and its national language, the founding of a Slovak Region (okolie) out of the predominantly Slovak-speaking area in Upper Hungary, the establishment of a Slovak educational system complete with a Chair of the Slovak language and Literature at the University of Pest, and requested similar rights for Ruthenians, Romanians, Serbs, and Croats living in the Kingdom of Hungary. Neither the Hungarian Diet nor the emperor granted any of the requests. The former even branded this document as ‘subversive,’ thus making all Slovak national activities ‘illegal,’ or ‘semi-legal.’ This memorandum remained the Slovak national program until the creation of Czechoslovakia. Significantly, it did what previous Slovak leaders had never attempted. The memorandum defined what Slovakia should be, namely 15 komitats in Upper Hungary. In this

552 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

manner, the concept of the Slovak nation-state acquired a tangible geographical shape. The current borders of Slovakia quite closely follow the territorial extent of this okolie, with the exception of the southern sections of the five southern komitats included in Hungary. Furthermore, the two easternmost komitats incorporated into modern Slovakia were (and still are) more Ruthenian- than Slovak-speaking. With both concepts of the national language and the proposed nation-state, Slovak nationalism gained maturity following the ethnolinguistic ideological pattern of other Central European nationalisms. Vienna did not concede the Czechs their own administrative unit or their national language with the status of an administrative language. Czech leaders replied by further developing their cultural life and institutions. Slovak leaders attempted to emulate this example. In 1862, Lutherans established two Slovak-language secondary schools, including one in Sankt Martin. The following year, the Neusohl (Banská Bystrica) Catholic Bishop, Štefan Moyses (1797–1869), supported the founding of the Matica slovenská (Slovak Cultural Organization) in Sankt Martin.14 This Matica re-established the organized Slovak national movement, which had been largely informal after Vienna dissolved Tatrín in 1848. (Interestingly, the Matica’s 1863 logo was brandished with the Slovak inscription, ‘On the Founding of the Matica slovenská,’ done in two scriptural versions, one in the Latin alphabet, and the other in Cyrillic. Later, no official or semi-official attempts to write Slovak in Cyrillic were recorded.) Moyses was greeted as ‘the father of the people,’ and he became the Matica’s first chairman. In addition, the emperor granted this organization a generous donation. In 1867, Catholics established the third Slovak-language secondary school. The concentration of Slovak cultural institutions transformed Sankt Martin into a center of Slovak national life. Štúr’s 1843 decision to base standard Slovak on the dialect found in the town’s vicinity also contributed to the elevated ideological prestige of Sankt Martin among the Slovaks. In 1865, the leading Slovak-language newspaper Peštbudínske vedomosti (Pest Buda News, 1861–1865) moved its headquarters from the Hungarian capital to Sankt Martin and the title was changed to Národnie15 noviny (National News, 1865–1922). It was the most important Slovak newspaper prior to the founding of Czechoslovakia. In 1871, the emergent mass Slovak political movement coalesced into the Slovenská národná strana (SNS, Slovak National Party), which accepted the 1861 memorandum as its program. Simultaneously, Slovak nationalists left Preßburg for Sankt Martin. At that time, the former city was predominantly Germanspeaking, and after 1867, this language was used side by side with Magyar until 1885. In 1880, Slovaks numbered 13.5 percent of the city’s population, Germans (German-speakers) 13.6 percent, and Magyars 48.5 percent. After the death of Palkoviˇc in 1850, Štúr could not replace him at the Preßburg secondary school and the Chair of the Czecho-Slovak Language and Literature went defunct. During the 1850s, the cultural and political character of this city became increasingly

The Slovak Case

553

Germanic and after 1867, Magyar. There was no room for the active cultivation of the Slovak language and culture. This would have been antithetical to Magyar nationalism, in the scope of which Pozsony (Bratislava) appeared to be one of Hungary’s capitals. The situation of the Czech national movement and culture changed considerably after the 1867 Ausgleich, which made the Austrian Empire into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In 1871, Vienna decided not to grant a similar status to the Czechs, and the Slovaks could not count on a special status within Hungary, which Croatia obtained in the 1868 Nagodba. In the same year, Magyar became the sole official language in the Kingdom of Hungary apart from Croatia-Slavonia. Slovak was relegated to lower-level administrative and judiciary offices and elementary schools. The 1868 Law of Nationalities was designed to protect the remaining few linguistic and cultural rights of the non-Magyar groups in Hungary. But the drafters of this law could not see to its proper implementation. József Eötvös died in 1871, while the aging Ferenc Deák declined all offices in the years prior to his death in 1876. The Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, who governed from 1875 to 1890, instituted the policy of Magyarization in an attempt to transform the Kingdom of Hungary into the Magyar nation-state. Opposition to Magyarization earned Hurban a prison term in 1868. The following year, only three Slovak representatives managed to secure seats in the Hungarian Parliament. In 1872, the Slovenská omladina (Slovak Youth Association, established in 1870) was outlawed. Two years later, the Hungarian authorities closed all three Slovak-language secondary schools, and in 1875, the recently founded Matica slovenská. As a result, the Slovak national movement lost its organizational and institutional base. Viliam Paulíny-Tóth (1826–1877), who headed the Slovak National Party, was also the Vice-Chairman of the Matica slovenská and the sole Slovak deputy in the Hungarian Parliament. After his death, no Slovak politician was able to win his seat. In 1884, the Slovak National Party protested against ‘electoral manipulations,’ and abstained from future elections. At that time, Hurban’s son, Svetozár Hurban-Vajánský (1847–1916), became the main ideologue of the Slovak national movement. In 1881, Hurban’s Slovenskje pohlad’i na vedi, umenia a literature was revived in Turócszentmárton, as Slovenské Pohl’ady under joint Hurban-Vajánský and Jozef Škultety’s (1853– 1948) editorship. (The journal is still published.) Hurban-Vajánský proposed close cooperation among non-Magyar groups in Hungary and expressed this idea in his collection of poems, Tatry a more (The Tatras and the Sea, 1879). In another collection, Zpod jarma (From Under the Yoke, 1884), he criticized the tragic economic situation that prompted the mass emigration of Slovak peasants to North America. As in the case of his father, Hurban-Vajánský’s articles in Národnie noviny cost him a prison sentence in 1892. Between 1895 and

554 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

1904, 16 further sentences were meted out to the newspaper’s contributors. Following Hurban-Vajánský’s appeal, Slovak representatives along with their Romanian and Serbian colleagues attended the Congress of the Nationalities held in Budapest in 1895. This congress, while respecting the territorial integrity of Hungary, opposed the idea of the Magyar nation-state, as contradictory with the political history and character of Hungary. The representatives demanded creation of their own autonomous districts with linguistically defined borders, fair representation in the Hungarian Parliament, full suffrage, freedom of the press, and the establishment of the post of Minister without portfolio for Hungary’s non-Magyar nationalities (similar to that of the Minister for Croatia). The participating Romanian, Serbian, and Slovak politicians formed the League of Nationalities and invited Germans and Ruthenians to join it. In 1890, the abolished Matica slovenská’s Museum and Library were revived as strictly non-political institutions, and 3 years later, the Muzeálna slovenská spoleˇcnost’ (Slovak Museum Association) was founded, also in Turócszentmárton (Turˇcianský Sväty Martin). Czechs obtained their own Czech-language university in Prague and the status of an official language for Czech side by side with German in Bohemia and Moravia during the 1880s. Within this framework, a multitude of Czech organizations, periodicals, and publishers sprang up bolstering the Czech cultural and political life. Having secured this base, Czech leaders embarked on cooperation with their Slovak counterparts on the ideological ticket of Czechoslovakism that had seemed to be defunct since the late 1840s. What legitimized this cooperation was the imagined ‘common Czechoslovak past’ of the Czechs and the Slovaks, and also the parallel ‘threat’ of Germanization in the Czech lands and of Magyarization in Upper Hungary. Obviously, the latter threat was much more real than the former. Beginning in the 1880s, in the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, the cultural and economic parity seemed to be tilted in favor of the Czechs at the cost of the local German-speakers, who started fearing Czechization. The Czecho-Slovak cooperation progressed mainly thanks to the personal links, which (mainly Protestant) Slovak students established while pursuing their university studies at the Czech-language University of Prague. This university’s professor, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, not only got involved in the fields of Czech culture and politics, but also supported the increasing pro-Czech orientation among his Slovak students. This group of Masaryk’s former students established two influential journals that propagated the idea of Czecho-Slovak cooperation, Hlas (The Voice, 1898–1902, Rózsahegy [Ružomberok]) and Prúdy (Currents, 1909–1914, Budapest). In Upper Hungary, the Slovak national movement revived at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1901, for the first time since Paulíny-Tóth’s death in 1877, Slovak deputies were elected to the Hungarian Parliament, four in all. The following year, it was decreed that Slovak denominational elementary schools

The Slovak Case

555

were to teach at least 18 to 20 hours of the Magyar language per week. Meanwhile, the number of Slovak-language elementary school plummeted from 1971 in 1874 to 427 in 1902. The Russian Revolution of 1905 made a huge impression on the Austro-Hungarian government and political life in the Dual Empire. In the same year, the Slovak National Party (SNS) was revived under the leadership of the journalist, Milan Hodža (1877–1944), a grandnephew of Michal Milan Hodža. Simultaneously, the Slovak workers’ movement unfolded with help offered by Czech workers’ organizations. In the SNS’s program, as in the 1861 memorandum, Hodža repeated that the party respected the territorial integrity of Hungary, and even refrained from speaking of the Slovak region (okolie). Having learned from the unstoppable thrust of Magyarization between the 1870s and the 1890s, they limited their national demands to the appeal for universal suffrage and respect for the Slovak language in schools and courts in accordance with the 1868 Nationality Law. In 1907, the Austrian half of the Dual Empire obtained the right of popular vote. Hungary stuck to limited suffrage until 1918. The successes of the Slovak national movement caused the Hungarian administration and Magyar politicians to manipulate the 1905 elections, so only two Slovaks won seats in the Hungarian Parliament. The number of Slovak-language elementary schools was almost halved to 241. In 1907, the Apponyi Law required all teachers either in state or denominational schools to imbue their students with loyalty to Hungary, construed as the Magyar nation-state. They were also expected to display Hungarian national symbols in classrooms, and Magyar-language instruction had to be organized for Magyar students in minority schools, if these students numbered at least 20. This law was passed in response to the growing activity of Transylvania’s Romanian national movement, which Budapest perceived as ‘anti-Magyar irredentism.’ Worried Slovak leaders also carefully observed the vicissitudes of Budapest’s pressure on the Holy See to allow for supplanting of Church Slavonic with Magyar as the language of liturgy in the kingdom’s Greek Catholic Church. (This was reminiscent of the 1840s efforts to replace Bibliˇctina with Magyar in Upper Hungary’s Lutheran churches.) This policy was to accelerate mainly the Magyarization of Ruthenians and Romanians. Sporadically, Magyar had been used as a language of chants in Hungary’s Greek Catholic Church since the 1820s. Between 1879 and 1882, the Church Slavonic liturgy books were translated into Magyar. Consequently, Magyar began to enter preaching and liturgy, as well. In 1896, the year of the millennial celebrations in the kingdom, Budapest officially requested the pope to sanction this linguistic practice. (In the same year, a law was passed that allowed for Magyarization of place-names and personal names.) In reply, the Holy See issued the first ever official prohibition on the use of a vernacular language in liturgy. The fear was that Magyarization would alienate Ruthenian and Romanian Greek Catholics, who could then leave for

556 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Calvinist and Orthodox Churches, respectively, where they could worship in their national languages. Moreover, granting Budapest’s wish could lead to demands of replacing Latin with Magyar as a language of liturgy in Hungary’s Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, Budapest continued to repeat its request arguing that Magyar as a language of liturgy among Greek Catholics would prevent Russian infiltration of eastern Upper Hungary. In 1912, the pope relented, and Church Slavonic was replaced with Greek and Magyar. Because priests knew no Greek, in practice Magyar dominated, though Latin was employed, as well. Not surprisingly, this situation encouraged pro-Orthodox and pro-Russian orientation among Upper Hungary’s Ruthenians, and Romanian nationalism and pro-Orthodox leanings among Transylvania’s Greek Catholics. In 1915, the Greek Catholic Church alienated the Ruthenians even more, when relenting to Budapest’s pressure, the Eperjes (Prešov) bishop replaced Cyrillic with the Magyar-style Latin script for writing Ruthenian. Father Andrej Hlinka (1864–1938) was the first Catholic priest, who took such an explicit and pronounced pro-Slovak stance even if it meant the open defiance of Hungarian authorities. His principled political stance ensured the final entrance of Catholics into Slovak politics, more than half a century after Štúr and his Lutheran collaborators. Hlinka led the emerging Catholic wing in the Slovak National Party. For his pro-Slovak agitation during the 1906 elections, the Szepes (Spiš) Bishop Sándor (Alexander) Parvy (1848–1919) suspended Hlinka and forbade him from officiating at church services. The following year, thanks to the efforts of the Moravian hierarchy, Hlinka was freed from these restrictions. On 27 October, he speeded to his parish in his native village of Csernová ˇ (Cernová) near Rózsahegy (today, the village constitutes a part of the town), to consecrate the new church built under his supervision. He came too late. The parishioners protested and requested a postponement of the celebration not willing to carry it out under the offices of any other priest than Hlinka. Policemen, entrusted by the authorities with the task of seeing to it that the celebration was conducted without the participation of Hlinka, shot dead 15 people in the crowd. ˇ The ‘Cernová massacre,’ as this event is known in Slovak historiography, became the founding moment of Slovak nationalism. To nationalists, the massacre ‘proved’ that Slovaks, like Transylvania’s Romanians, were not afraid to shed blood in the struggle for their national rights. It also shifted the leadership of the Slovak national movement from the hands of Protestants to those of Catholics. It was Hlinka, not Protestant Slovak leaders, who spoke and acted most vociferously against Magyarization. In 1905, together with other Slovak activists, Hlinka left the all-Hungarian Catholic Néppárt (People’s Party), and founded his own Catholic party, the Slovenská l’udova strana (SL’S, Slovak Peasant Party), in 1905. It remained within the Protestant-dominated SNS until 1913. Hlinka’s outspoken criticism of Czechoslovakism led to the eventual separation of the

The Slovak Case

557

SL’S from the SNS, and marked the emergence of Slovak Catholics as a significant ˇ and autonomous force in Slovak national politics. The outcry over the Cernová massacre and the efforts of the Czecho-Slovak organization Jednota (Unity) resulted in an annual meeting of Czech and Slovak leaders, which was held between 1908 and 1914 in Moravia, midway between Prague and Upper Hungary. In 1907, seven Slovaks were elected to the Hungarian Parliament and the government ran out of legal measures to suppress the Slovak national movement. Between 1906 and 1908, 560 Slovaks were sentenced on political charges. Then an uneasy balance between Slovak aspirations and the process of the Magyar nation-state-building was reached. The number of Slovak-language elementary schools increased to 365 in 1914. In the same year, Pavol Mudron ˇ (1835–1914) died. Since 1877, he had been the official chairman of the Slovak National Party. At his funeral Slovak politicians of all creeds gathered. On 26 May 1914, these politicians met in Budapest to establish a non-partisan Slovak National Council, however, the outbreak of the Great War intervened, and no council was founded (Babejová 2003: 38; Biro 1992: 217–218; Brock 2002: 36, 144; Korolevsky 1957: 23–45; Kováˇc 1998: fourth page of the cover; Lettrich 1955: 32–39; 285–286; Matica slovenská 1963: 11; Maxwell 2005; Petro 1995: 94– 95; Pop 2001: 158, 2005b: 249, 261, 271; Seton-Watson 1965: 266–269, 277–279; Short 1996: 57–58; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 36–46; Viator 1908: 437, 463–465, 476–477, 483).

Czechoslovakism When the war of attrition set in, Vienna and Budapest began to have trouble holding the monarchy together. To the constant bickering between the Austrian and Hungarian administrations, the growing force of other national movements was added. The Allies were ready to help the émigré politicians of these national movements as long as it was in favor of the war effort. In 1916, Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, and Milan Rastislav Štefánik founded the Counseil National des pays Tcheques (The National Council of the Czech Lands) in Paris. The definition of the Czech lands was extended to cover Slovakia. The three politicians hoped to win French support for the Czecho-Slovak cause. Beneš succinctly summed up the council’s program in his brochure, Détruisez l’Autriche-Hongrie! (Destroy Austria-Hungary!, 1916, Paris). After the death of Francis Joseph in 1916, it was Emperor Charles who convened the Reichsrat in 1917. Czech deputies invariably referred to the Slovaks as a branch of the Czech or Czecho-Slovak nation. In Russia, France, and Italy, 8000 Slovak volunteers joined the Czechoslovak Legions organized by Masaryk under the auspices of the Counseil National des pays Tcheques. In 1918, events accelerated. On 1 May, Slovak social democrats organized a mass rally in Liptószentmiklós (Liptovský Sväty Mikuláš). In the adopted resolution,

558 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

they demanded the right of self-determination for ‘the Hungarian branch of the Czechoslovak family.’ Leading Slovaks participated in the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the Czech National Theater in Prague, which were held from 15 to 20 May. The Slovak poet, Pavol Országh-Hviezdoslav (1849–1921), delivered a fiery oratory in favor of Czecho-Slovak unity. Ironically, in his youth, first he wrote his poems in German and Magyar before turning to Slovak. Then after 1918, he became the official poet of Czechoslovakia, received a pension from the state, and engaged in pro-Czechoslovak propaganda. In response to the social democrats, the Slovak National Party organized a political meeting in Turócszentmárton on 24 May 1918. Unlike the social democrats, they did not speak of the Slovaks as a branch of the Czechoslovak nation. The party issued a resolution demanding ‘unconditional and complete right of self-determination for the “Slovak Nation,’’ ’ and agreed for its participation in a common state composed from Slovakia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. On 30 May, in Pittsburgh PA, Czech and Slovak organizations in the United States together with the Counseil National des pays Tcheques, presided over by Masaryk, signed the so-called Pittsburgh Agreement. They approved the idea of the union of the Czechs and the Slovaks in a common state constituted from the Czech lands and Slovakia. However, Slovak representatives added as a caveat that Slovakia would enjoy its own administrative system, diet and courts. Furthermore, and significantly, the Slovak language would be the sole official language in Slovakia. Ruthenian leaders in the United States also demanded political, linguistic, and cultural autonomy for eastern Upper Hungary, or Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In March 1919, they negotiated the incorporation of their homeland to Czechoslovakia with Masaryk because the Bolshevik Revolution made the option of unification with Russia untenable, and an independent Ukraine did not appear to be a viable state. The eventual founding of the largely unitary and centralizing Czechoslovak nation-state came as a surprise for the Slovaks and their leaders (and Ruthenians, as well). They had expected a more federal Czecho-Slovakia. In the general disarray that followed the breakup of Austria-Hungary, the Magyar armies strove to keep the territorial integrity of Hungary. Communists started taking over the Hungarian government in autumn 1918. In March the following year, the Soviet Republic of Hungary came into being. Troops of Soviet Hungary advanced into Slovakia and Ruthenia, which under the name of ‘Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia’ declared its union with Czechoslovakia on 8 May 1919. Since April, Czechoslovak and Romanian armies had fought back against Soviet Hungary. The successes of the Soviet Hungarian army in June and the proclamation of the Slovak Soviet Republic on 16 June could not save Soviet Hungary. Romanian armies closed on Budapest. Before its final collapse in August, Soviet Hungary withdrew its soldiers from Slovakia on 4 July. Finally, the borders of Slovakia

The Slovak Case

559

and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia were established in 1920. (Much to the helpless outrage of Ruthenian leaders the westernmost Ruthenian-speaking areas were included in Slovakia.) Meanwhile, the name of the Slovak capital of Pozsony was changed. The Magyar name of Pozsony was out of question as was the German one of Preßburg, customarily spelled in Slovak and Czech as Prešporok. In January 1918, it was renamed Wilsonovo Mesto (that is, Wilson City) in honor of the United States president who made the Allies apply the principle of ethnolinguistic self-determination to Central Europe. But already in February, the Slovak capital was christened with the hypothetical original (but never attested) Slavic name of the city, Bratislava. Officially Czechoslovakia was the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks, who accounted for almost 10 million inhabitants of the total population of 14.5 million. However, the Czechoslovak nation was stillborn. Czechs and Slovaks persisted as separate nations. This meant that in the Czech lands, 7 million Czechs faced over 3 million German-speakers, while in Slovakia 2.6 million Slovaks had to share their country with over 700,000 Magyars. The creation of Czechoslovakia allowed Czechs and Slovaks to exercise the right of selfdetermination, and, simultaneously, denied this right to the German- and Magyar-speaking Czechoslovak citizens, who became national minorities. The former policies of Germanization and Magyarization were, in turn, replaced with Czechization and Slovakization, respectively. The comparison was complete with the unequal status of the Czechs and the Slovaks in their nation-state, similar to the strained relations between the dominating Austrian German-speakers and Magyars in their common dual monarchy. The latter always felt wronged by the former. The same dynamics would be repeated in Czechoslovakia, where Slovaks were never tired about complaining of the Czech dominance and Pragocentrism (especially after the early 1920s, when the idea of the common Czechoslovak nation and nation-state was still popular with quite a few Slovak leaders and intellectuals). Their main grudge was that Czechoslovakia was not federal Czecho-Slovakia (Bratislava 2004; Kochanowski 1997: 58; Lettrich 1955: 48–51, 287–290; Petro 1995: 98; Seton-Watson 1965: 292–293, 298, 324; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 53, 73; Weingart 1923: 131). ∗ ∗ ∗ The fate of the Slovak national movement after the mid-19th century was closely reflected by the stunted development of the Slovak language in its compromise Štúr-Hattala codification. This new standard was effectively consolidated as the Slovak language by the mid-1850s. It was the opportune time, because Vienna did not care much about Slovak and its new guises as long as it did not incite political actions. On the other hand, the heavy-handed Germanization of Hungary kept the policy of Magyarization at bay. The problem was that there

560 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

were few employment opportunities for academic specialists in Upper Hungary. In 1854, the only qualified Slovak linguist, Hattala, left for the Bohemian capital where he was appointed professor of Czech at the University of Prague. Obviously, he lectured there in German because it was the sole official language of this crownland at that time. In 1864–1865, he published his two-volume extensive Mluvnica jazyka slovenského (A Grammar of the Slovak Language, Budapest) that was intended as a follow-up to Krátka mluvnica slovenská of 1852. This new work remained almost unknown, and it did not contribute to the development of Slovak. Beginning in 1854, Hattala lectured in Slavic philology at the University of Prague. At that moment, Czech leaders were not interested in cooperation with the Slovaks, and neither was the Germanophone university. On the other hand, the author himself did not have at his disposal appropriate means to propagate his grammar in Upper Hungary. The Hungarian authorities stuck to Bibliˇctina well into the 1860s, while some Slovak newspapers and publications tended to appear in Kollár’s Old Slovak (Slovakized Bibliˇctina in Antiqua). Interestingly, in 1859, the journal Concordia published articles in Bibliˇctina and Štúr-Hattala Slovak. Eventually, it was the Matica slovenská (1863) that fully espoused the Štúr-Hattala codification, making it into the Slovak language. Unfortunately, during its brief existence, the Matica never enjoyed a linguistic department. After the basic parameters of Slovak were established during the 1850s, in the following decade, the Slovak national movement chose to focus on the development of the Slovaklanguage educational system and on securing political rights for the fledgling Slovak nation. The aggressive reaction of the Hungarian government that followed after 1867, took the Slovak leadership by surprise. This convinced M M Hodža that he was right in his opposition to Štúr’s codification, which did away with the Czecho-Slovak linguistic and cultural commonality. In that difficult time, it was not there to fall back on. The Slovaks seemed too weak to brave it alone as a nation in the face of Magyar opposition to the rise of the Slovak national movement. In 1875, when the Matica slovenská was dissolved, the Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza famously stated ‘there is not any Slovak nation!’ Not surprisingly, in 1876–1877, Hurban went back to publishing Nitra in Czech. In the journal, Hurban accused the Slovak national movement of ‘inventing’ and propagating ‘artificial’ New Slovak. Further, he stated that there was only ‘Czech-Moravian-Silesian-Slovak nation’ with its own ‘Czechoslovak language.’ The 1880s were marked by the successes of the Czech national movement, which brought about the establishment of the Czech-language university in Prague and the elevation of Czech to the status of an official language along with German in Bohemia and Moravia. At the same time, Magyarization did away with Slovak political life and froze Slovak culture almost to a standstill. The first bout of Slovak opposition to this situation brought about the cooperation of Slovak leaders with Hungary’s other non-Magyar national groups, mainly,

The Slovak Case

561

Romanians, Serbs, and Ruthenians. But in the 1890s, due to geographical and cultural closeness, (usually Protestant) Slovak intellectuals established links with their Czech counterparts. They tended to meet and establish personal links and friendships during their university studies in Prague or Vienna. At that time their language and culture safeguarded, Czech leaders were ready to reach out to the Slovaks, especially so because Vienna staunchly denied the Czechs any political concessions that would lead to the administrative merger of the Czech lands into a tentative Czech nation-state. Cooperation with Czechs fortified the Czechoslovakist strain among Slovak intellectuals. In the second half of the 1890s and at the beginning of the next century, Slovak and Czech scholars and leaders intensely questioned the legitimacy of Slovak as a separate language and called for the creation or re-creation of the Czechoslovak language. In the latter case, Bibliˇctina and Czech were imagined as the one and same Czechoslovak language carelessly destroyed by the acceptance of the Štúr-Hattala codification of the Slovak language as separate from Czech. This opinion underpinned the official announcement of Czechoslovak as the sole national and official language of Czechoslovakia. At the scholarly level, it was Milan Hodža who legitimized this official ‘re-establishment’ of the Czechoslovak language in his influential tract ˇ Ceskoslovenský rozkol. Príspevky k dejinám slovenˇciny (The Czechoslovak Schism: Contributions to the history of the Slovak language, 1920, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). Despite its Czechoslovak ideological angle, the book indicated the unprecedented success of New Slovak. In the past, even when codifying and propagating Slovak as a separate language, Štúr, Kollár, Šafarík, Hurban, or Hattala wrote in either Czech, German, or Latin in order to be read and to be able to further their careers outside Upper Hungary. But Milan Hodža wrote his critique of splitting the common Czechoslovak language in Slovak. To be noticed, he did not have to fall back on writing in other languages. Despite the stunted development of the Slovak-language educational and political organizations, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was already a sizeable group of Slovak intellectuals, politicians, and professionals, who formed a viable market for Slovak-language publications. The success evidenced by the rise of such a market was even more astounding if one remembers that before the mid-19th century, the vast majority of the Slovakophone population consisted of peasants and small-town craftsmen. That was the background of more than 80 percent of the members of the Slovak national movement, who, in turn, were almost exclusively Protestant and Catholic clergy. The surprise is that in the second half of the 19th century, this multilingual and docile leadership did not resign from the Slovak national cause under the pressure of Magyarization and with the ready leeway either to the German-speaking or Czechophone world. In a nutshell, Protestants urged into

562 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

being Slovak nationalism and the Slovak language, but it was Catholic priests, who stood fast by the causes striving to cater to their faithful who accounted for the vast majority of the Slovaks. When in the first two decades of the 20th century, the Slovak National Party and its predominantly Protestant leadership were drawn into Czechoslovakism, Slovak Catholics under Hlinka’s leadership developed their own political voice in the form of the Slovak Peasant Party (SL’S). Founded in 1905, it emerged from the common structures of the Slovak National Party (SNS) just a year before the outbreak of World War I. In Czechoslovakia, it was the SL’S and Hlinka’s political circle that stood firm for all things Slovak against the Czech cultural and political dominance in the guise of the rhetoric on the Czechoslovak nation and its Czechoslovak language. In 1920, Hlinka left the Czechoslovak Peasant Party and re-established a separate Slovak Peasant Party, which, by the late 1920s, had become the strongest political party in Slovakia. Obviously, in the political framework of Czechoslovakia, the SL’S did not muster any decisive influence, which later on contributed to bitter accusations by Slovaks that the Czechs dominated this new state in politics and economy in an ˇ undemocratic manner (Dorul’a 1995: 46; Duroviˇ c 1980: 220–221; Hodža 1920: 313, 337–338, 344–346; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1927: 88–89; Maxwell 2005; Neudorfl 1992: 53; Petro 1995: 72; Short 1996: 59; Sundhaußen 1973: 102; Toma and Kováˇc 2001: 88–89, 102–103).

The difficult birth of standard Slovak The Matica slovenská failed to produce any authoritative grammar or even a short dictionary of the Slovak language. But this institution, founded jointly by Catholics and Protestants, lent its unreserved support to the Štúr-Hattala codification of the Slovak language. This, coupled with the concentration of the Slovak cultural and political life in Turócszentmárton, gave rise to the norm of martinský úzus (Martin usage). Slovak as spoken and written in Turócszentmárton set the norm for ‘good usage.’ This usage found its fullest expression in the oldest Slovak cultural-cum-scholarly periodical, Slovenské pohl’ady (Slovak Views), established in 1881, which appears to this day. Josef Škultéty took over the editorship of Národnie noviny in 1880 and of Slovenské pohl’ady a decade later. In recognition of his work for the sake of Slovak language and culture, he was nominated as the administrator of the Matice slovenská, re-established under Masaryk’s patronage in 1919. Two years later, Škultéty took over the first ever chair of Slovak language and literature at Komenský University in Bratislava. The first attempt at compiling a dictionary of the Slovak language was the two pocket-size 400-page volumes of Štefan Janˇcoviˇc’s Noví mad’arsko-slovenskí a slovensko-mad’arskí slovˇ ník (New Magyar-Slovak and Slovak-Magyar Dictionary). The first volume was brought out in 1848 in the small town of Szarvas, located between Pest and Szeged, and the other in 1863 in Preßburg. The dictionary’s

The Slovak Case

563

aim was to help Slovak-speaking students acquire Magyar, Hungary’s ‘diplomatic language’ of inter-group communication. Janˇcoviˇc consciously avoided using Czech words, if an appropriate counterpart for the Magyar term could not be found in Slovak. In Magyar, he referred to the Slovak language with the old-fashioned term tót, which already then functioned as a pejorative nickname for the Slovaks and their language. The use of this term, however, continued in official documents even in interwar Hungary, and survived until the beginning of the 1950s in communist Hungary. Janˇcoviˇc’s work was basically a bilingual school dictionary. Its compilation started in the early 1840s, or perhaps earlier, which is why the corpus could not reflect Štúr’s codification. What is more, this corpus is heavily based on Szarvas’s 25,000-strong Slovak colony in Lower Hungary (or present-day Hungary). In the absence of any dictionary compiled in accordance with the Štúr-Hattala codification, this one had to suffice. Josef Loos (1839–1878), a professor of linguistics at the secondary school in Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica), compiled and published in Pest the three pocket-size 600-page volumes of Slowník slowenskej, mad’arskej a nemeckej reˇci (The [Trilingual] Dictionary of the Slovak, Magyar and German Languages) between 1869 and 1871. Unlike Janˇcoviˇc, Loos added a German part to his dictionary because in Besztercebánya and its vicinity numerous German-speakers resided. The young Slovak linguist Samo Czambel (Samuel Cambel) (1856–1909) criticized this dictionary for merely translating Magyar terms into Slovak and for accepting terms that were too reminiscent of Czech words. He began to publish his works in the Hungarian capital during the second half of the 1880s. Czambel was the first scholar who wrote on the Slovak language exclusively in Slovak. In 1890, he brought out his Slovensky pravopis (The Principles of Slovak Orthography, Budapest), and 12 years later, Czambel’s famous Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (The Guide to the Written Slovak Language, Turócszentmárton) came off the press. The latter work became a generally accepted normative handbook of Slovak. The attached orthographic glossary was used as a means to check whether a word was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ until several popular school Slovak-Czech and monolingual Slovak dictionaries were published in interwar Czechoslovakia. Czambel’s formative and decisive contribution to the shape of the Slovak language made it into the Štúr-Hattala-Czambel codification. He obtained his education in Budapest, which shielded Czambel from becoming enchanted with Czechoslovakism. In 1902, he proposed that the Bibliˇctina, still employed in Upper Hungary’s Lutheran churches frequented by Slovaks, should be replaced with Slovak. (This did not happen until World War I.) A year later, he published Slováci a ich reˇc (The Slovaks and Their Language, Budapest), where he re-classified Slovak as a South Slavic language. Having removed it from the group of the West Slavic languages, in this manner Czambel distanced Slovak from

564 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Czech. Unlike the generation of Štúr and his friends, Czambel was not satisfied with Czech loanwords for specialist terms and abstract ideas. He advised coining them by retaining Magyar, German, and Latin words, or by employing Slovak neologisms coined differently than Czech counterparts. For Czechs, German linguistic loans seemed to be a ‘corruption’ of their language, because the Czech language was standardized against German, just as Czech nationalism arose in opposition to its German counterpart. On the other hand, the Slovak language faced the danger of becoming part or even the same as Czech on the basis of the Czechoslovak commonality. Therefore, German and Magyar linguistic loans were a lifeline that allowed for differentiating the Slovak language vis-à-vis Czech, so that the existence of the former could be assured and legitimized. Not surprisingly, Karel Kálal (1860–1930) and Karel Salva’s two pocket-size 250-page volumes of Slovník slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský (The Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary, 1896, Rózsahegy) became an immediate success. In Slováci a ich reˇc, Czambel decried the acute lack of a monolingual Slovak dictionary, remarking that ‘the current state of the Slovak dictionary is aptly described only by the word “chaos’’.’ Czambel never managed to compile a Slovak dictionary, and Loos’s work was already partially obsolete due to the rise of Štúr-Hattala-Czambel codification and standardizing changes introduced in the Magyar language. In answer to this acutely felt need for a Slovak dictionary, Adolf Pechány (Pechán) ˇ (1859–1942), a secondary school teacher in Budapest, compiled and published his two-volume pocket-size Slovník slovenský a mad’arský dl’a Josefa Loosa (The Dictionary of the Slovak and Magyar Languages Compiled in Accordance with the Principles of Jozef Loos’s Dictionary, 1906, Budapest). The situation did not change much after the founding of Czechoslovakia. On ideological grounds, it was intended as a nation-state for the Czechoslovak nation, so the further standardization of the Slovak language was not a priority. The 1920 constitutional law declared Czechoslovak the state’s national language, which meant that from the legal and political point of view, Slovak disappeared in the Czechoslovak linguistic commonality. By default, Czech ˇ won this competition hands down. With Štepan František Kott’s Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický serving as the model, Miroslav Kálal (1893–1962) reworked his father and Slava’s dictionary and Pechány’s dictionary into the Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci (The Slovak Dictionary With Words Taken From Literary Works and Dialects, 1924, Banská Bystrica). Despite its ambitious title, this pocket-size 1100-page-long work was another SlovakCzech dictionary. It did not record words common for Czech and Slovak, which, according to the author, constituted the majority of Slovak’s vocabulary. M Kálal appended the dictionary with a Czech-Slovak register, and in 1926, he brought out a short comparative Czech-Slovak grammar, which was usually published as a single volume with the dictionary. In the preface, M Kálal expressed his hope that in the course of the work on the authoritative monolingual dictionary of

The Slovak Case

565

Slovak conducted in the Matica slovenská, a Czech-Slovak counterpart to his dictionary would be compiled, as well. None of these hopes was realized. M Kálal’s dictionary rolled into one Václav Ertl’s (1875–1929) Struˇcná mluvnice ˇcesko-slovenská (A Short Czech-Slovak Grammar, 1919, Prague) and Josef Štefan Kubín’s (1864–1965) Slovník slovenskoˇceský (diferenciální) (The SlovakCzech Dictionary [of Words That Are Different in Both Languages], 1920, Prague). The lack of any straightforward bilingual Slovak-Czech and CzechSlovak dictionary indicated that there was no need and no ready market for such a lexical work. The ‘differential’ dictionaries, which show only words that differ in both languages, remain the standard to this day. In Czechoslovakia, Kubín’s 1920 dictionary, Jaroslav Neˇcas’s 90-page pocket-size Slovensko-ˇceský slovníˇcek (Slovak-Czech Glossary, 1960, Prague), and J Neˇcas and Miloslav Kopecký’s 500-page pocket-size Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdílných výrazu˚ (Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary of the Words That Are Different in Both Languages, 1963, 2nd edition 1989, Prague) served as guides for Slovak and Czech students, civil servants, and clerks on how to write and speak so as not to ‘mix up’ the two languages. To know the difference was much more important for the Slovak-speakers because their language remained in flux until the 1960s, and Czech tended to dominate in Slovakia until the eventual breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Today, numerous publications are still imported from the Czech Republic to Slovakia but not the other way round. Therefore, SlovakCzech and Czech-Slovak dictionaries of the words that are different in both languages continue to be published in Slovakia, but not in the Czech Republic, as evidenced by Konštantín Horecký’s 180-page Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdielnych výrazov (Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary of the Words That Are Different in Both Languages, 1997, Žilina). The legally imposed Czechoslovak commonality of the Slovak and Czech languages started unraveling in earnest during and after World War II. In wartime independent Slovakia, Slovak completely replaced Czech as the state’s official language. When Czechoslovakia was re-established in 1945, the concepts of the common Czechoslovak nation and language were gone. Socialist Czechoslovakia was the common state of the two separate nations of the Slovaks and the Czechs with their own distinctive languages. However, it took more than two decades before communist Czechoslovakia’s Czech and Slovak lexicographers managed to produce the first full size, regular Slovak-Czech dictionary. Želmíra Gašparikova and Adolf Kamiš’s Slovensko-ˇceský slovník (Prague) came off the press in 1967 and was reprinted in 1983. Only the tragic events of the Prague Spring and the federalization of Slovakia in 1968 provided the impetus for the compilation of the Czech-Slovak Dictionary. Under Gejza Horák’s general editorship, a team of linguists from the Slovak Academy of Sciences prepared the ˇ extensive Cesko-slovenský slovník that appeared in 1979 (Bratislava). These two significant dictionaries set a definitive lexicographic border between Slovak and

566 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Czech. However, both languages are genetically and lexicographically so close to each other that these dictionaries have not become popular references, and are long out of print. Although the official ideology of Czechoslovakism did not allow for the compilation of any full-fledged bilingual Czech and Slovak dictionaries in interwar Slovakia, the elevation of Slovak to the rank of a de facto official language in Slovakia facilitated the development of specialist terminology in the language. For instance, Anton Polákoviˇc’s Magyar-Slovak and Slovak-Magyar Lekársky slovník (Medical Dictionary) was published in Brno (1920), and Vladimír Fajnor (1875–1952) and Adolf Záturecký’s (1884–1958) two-volume Právnický terminologický slovník (Dictionary of Legal Terminology, 1921–1923), which was also a bilingual Slovak and Magyar reference, in Turˇciansky Svätý Martin and Bratislava. The final achievement of this trend came with Mikuláš Friedman’s full-size Mad’arsko-ˇcesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇcesko-mad’arský technický slovník (Magyar-Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech-Magyar Technical Dictionary, Bratislava) published in 1964. This work indicated that in the field of technology, Slovak vocabulary was as much linked with the Magyar language, as in this respect Czech, Polish, and Magyar with the German language. Official Czechoslovakism did not prevent the compilation of bilingual dictionaries that paired Slovak with languages other than Czech. In 1905, a pair of two-volume English-Slovak and Slovak-English dictionaries appeared in the United States, one in New York and the other in Scranton PA. In 1922–1923, the two-volume German-Slovak and Slovak-German dictionary was published in Bratislava. When independent Slovakia emerged in 1939 following the collapse of Czecho-Slovakia, at least five extensive bilingual Slovak-German and German-Slovak dictionaries appeared in Leipzig, Bratislava, and Berlin. They were the functions of the developing Slovak-German alliance, and indicative of the negative Slovak reaction to things Czech. Ironically, it was German that gradually replaced Czech as the language of technology and scholarship in Slovakia. Michael Schwartz summarized the shift of Slovakia from the Czech to German sphere of influence in his book Die Slowakei. Der jüngste Staat Europas (Slovakia: The Youngest State of Europe, 1939, Leipzig). This Slovak aversion to all things Czech also meant the introduction of the radical policies of linguistic purism directed against Bohemianisms in Slovak in wartime independent Slovakia. Only during World War II, was a Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts (Slovenská akadémia vied a umení) instituted, in 1942. In interwar Czechoslovakia, exclusively the Czechs enjoyed their own Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts (established in 1890), from which they dropped the name of Emperor Francis Joseph in 1918. Prior to 1942, Komenský University in Bratislava and the renewed Matica slovenská jointly functioned as an ersatz Slovak academy of sciences. Despite this wartime reaction against the Czechs and Czechoslovakism, perhaps the emergence of Slovak as a separate language would have

The Slovak Case

567

been impossible in Hungary if it had not been partitioned in 1918. In interwar Czechoslovakia, Slovak was not replaced with Czech or some common Czechoslovak language. In 1919, the third edition of Czambel’s Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej appeared, and prior to 1930, five editions of Ján Damborský’s (1880–1932) two-volume Slovenská mluvnica pre stredné školy a uˇcitelské ústavy (The Slovak Grammar for Secondary Schools and Teachers’ Colleges, Nitra) were published. In 1931, Peter Tvrdý’s (1850–1935) extensive Slovenský frazeologický slovník (The Slovak Phraseological Dictionary, Trnava) came off ˇ the press. Tvrdý drew on Kott’s Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammatickofraseologický and M Kálal’s Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci. Tvrdý’s was the first extensive monolingual dictionary of the Slovak language. Its second enlarged edition of 840 pages was published in 1933 in Prague and Prešov, and the 240-page long Doplnky (Supplement) followed 4 years later. In 1932, the monthly Slovenská reˇc (The Slovak Language) had started publishing. It was modeled on the Czech journal Naše ˇreˇc. Slovenská reˇc is still published. In 1923, the Czech linguist Miloš Weingart stated that ‘the vocabulary of the Slovak language has not been adequately described and developed.’ Although his statement aptly described the situation until the 1960s, when the first authoritative multi-volume monolingual dictionary of the Slovak language was published, interwar Czechoslovakia prepared the indispensable basis for the final codification of Slovak in the second half of the 20th century. Whatever accusations Slovaks may level against Czechoslovakia, without the incorporation of Slovakia into this state, perhaps, there would have been no full-fledged Slovak language today, but a mere uncodified Slavic dialect rapidly withering in Hungary, like Sorbian in Germany. This Czechoslovak achievement, however, should not make one blind to official Czechoslovakism, which substantially slowed the codification of standard Slovak between the two World Wars (Auty ˇ 1973: 340–341; Duroviˇ c 1980: 220–221; Janich and Greule 2002: 277; Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný 1925: 927, 1933: 52–53; Maxwell 2005; Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby 1939: 1404–1405; Stankiewicz 1984: 30; Weingart 1923: 774–776, 781, 788–791, 1937: 69).

This page intentionally left blank

Part II Nationalisms and Language in the Short 20th Century

The triumph of the national From the faith of underdogs in the multiethnic polities of Central Europe during the 19th century, nationalism grew into the sole principle of statehood legitimization in the 20th century. The transition was marked first by the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and the German Empire (1871) as ethnolinguistic nation-states. Meanwhile, Vienna gave a half-hearted nod to nationalism when the Austrian Empire was overhauled into the Dual Monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary (1867). The Magyars obtained their ersatz nation-state with Magyar as the official language. In the aftermath, Budapest also had to recognize the ethnolinguistic distinctiveness of Croatia-Slavonia (1868), while Vienna had to agree to the ethnolinguistic distinctiveness of Poles in Galicia (1869), and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia (1880). After the 1905 Revolution, St Petersburg had to resign from the policy of homogenizing the Russian Empire with the means of Russification, which allowed for the revival of the previously suppressed ethnolinguistic national movements, and the rise of new ones. During the Great War, Berlin and Vienna facilitated the rise of national movements on the western Russian territories occupied by the Central Powers in order to secure a switch of the population’s loyalty away from St Petersburg. The victorious Allies led by United States President Woodrow Wilson stood for national self-determination as the political principle in agreement with which Central and Eastern Europe was to be reorganized. In 1918, nationalism was elevated to the unique position of the sole ideology of statehood legitimization in Europe. The force of nationalism incited during and immediately after the war was such that even Vladimir Ilyich (Ulyanov) Lenin (1870–1924), busy building a par excellence non-national polity of the Soviet Union for the sake of spreading communist revolution worldwide, had to succumb to this argument. He paid lip service to self-determination intent on lending some more legitimacy to his initially pariah Bolshevik state. Unlike Wilson, who genuinely believed in the need of dismantling empires, Lenin only cloaked the self-determination he talked about with an anti-imperial wrap, while at the same time the Bolsheviks

570 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

were doing their utmost to save as much territory as possible from the defunct Russian Empire for their new state. The largely unexpected provisional triumph of nationalism in Central Europe came with the supplanting of the multiethnic empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans with a multitude of ethnolinguistic nation-states from Finland in the north to Turkey in the south. The new national order was hampered by the fixation of the Central European nationalisms on the idea of ethnolinguistic homogeneity. The ideologically-motivated drive to achieving this elusive ideal created numerous ethnolinguistic national minorities. In the new political configuration, by default, they were endowed with an inferior and anomalous political status. The disappearance of multiethnic empires left these minority groups in ‘not their’ nation-states. Obviously, none of these minorities elected this status; it was imposed on them from above. Another source of instability lay in the imperial ambitions of Berlin and Moscow, which wished to re-extend their polities at least to the borders of the German Empire and the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy in the former case, and to the borders of the Russian Empire in the latter. These aspirations led to the outbreak of World War II, and the casus belli was none other but minorities, irrespective of whether they wished to be put to such a job or not. In search of a Great German nation-state, Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) Germany broadened its Lebensraum (national German living space) eastward, and Iosif Stalin’s (1878–1953) Soviet Union spread the planned worldwide communist revolution westward. Both leaders opportunistically used nationalism to further their overall strategic and ideological goals. For instance, Berlin coaxed Slovakia toward independence to utilize the Slovaks’ political displeasure with the Czechs whom the former had seen as unjustly domineering in Czechoslovakia. This lessened the possibility of joint Czech-Slovak resistance after Germany annexed the Czech lands, and thus dismantled Czechoslovakia in 1939. On the other hand, Moscow granted the Polish city of Wilno (Vilnius) as a desired capital to the Lithuanians, preventing any future cooperation between Lithuanian and Polish resistance. During the war, Central Europe became the battleground to German and Soviet totalitarianisms. Expulsions of ‘inferior races’ and ‘enemy nations’ became the order of the day, which flared up in the wholesale genocide of Jews and Roma perpetrated by national socialist Germany. Democracy hardly featured in this calculation already banished from the picture in the 1920s and 1930s, when authoritarian regimes had been established throughout the region one after another with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia. In 1945, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union defeated the Third Reich and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War rivalry descended on the continent dividing it into Western Europe, and Central and Eastern Europe. In the former part democracy was made into the dominating political system, while in the

Nationalisms and Language in the Short 20th Century

571

latter Soviet-style communism. Yet, none of these changes nullified nationalism, which in leaps and bounds grew into the first global ideology when a multitude of new nation-states were founded worldwide in the wake of decolonization. As after the Great War, also at the end of World War II, the Allies decided to make the ethnolinguistic type of nationalism into the principle of political reorganization in Central Europe. Vast border changes and mass ethnic cleansings followed. They produced ‘ethnically clean’ nation-states; most of the national minorities expelled, dispersed, or contained in the redrawn borders of ‘their’ nation-states. The collapse of communism and the Soviet bloc in the hailed annus mirabilis of 1989 heralded the eventual globalization of nationalism. The replacement of communism with democracy, and the planned economy with its free market counterpart did not stop the spread of nationalism freed from the Cold War ‘freezer of history.’ From the breakup of the Soviet Union, fifteen new nationstates emerged; and the world’s only polity which legitimized its statehood with other ideology than nationalism, disappeared. The force of the nationalism was militarily reaffirmed when between 1991 and 2006, Yugoslavia split into (so far) six nation-states. A peaceful variant of this process played out itself in 1993 when the Czech and Slovak nation-states supplanted the bi-national federation of Czecho-Slovakia. The future is unknowable, but it is fair to say that the European Union (EU) presents with itself a new political and ideological quality, which may (but does not have to) alter the unique status of nationalism as the single ideology of statehood legitimization in the contemporary world. With the 2004 ‘big bang’ enlargement when ten new members were accepted into the Union’s fold, followed by the 2007 accession of Bulgaria and Romania, the EU became a truly European organization. The official line holds that the European Union is not a ‘superstate,’ determined to shape the nations of the member nation-states into a ‘super European nation.’ However, in 1953, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972), the founder of the Pan-European movement in the 1920s, published his treatise, Die Europäische Nation (The European Nation). He chose the German term Nation in preference to the usual Volk, which emphasizes the ethnic character of nations, as those in Central Europe. The German concept of Nation is ethnically ‘blind,’ standing for ‘political nation’ or, in other words, the citizenry of a given nation-state. Irrespective of one’s language, religion, or ethnicity, one can become a citizen of such a polity and join its political nation, like in the United States of America. That is why Coudenhove-Kalergie tended to summarize his vision of a united Europe in the phrase ‘the United States of Europe.’ He believed that the ethnolinguistically variegated inhabitants of Europe would become ‘the Europeans,’ a European (civic) nation. Why did Coudenhove-Kalergie stop short of advocating that nationalism should be transcended? Perhaps the national character of the world in which he lived

572 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

made it impossible for him to achieve such an intellectual leap, or it was political pragmatism that dictated the solution of the European nation to him. After all, with what other ideology of statehood legitimization could nationalism be replaced? (Coudenhove-Kalergie 1998) So far, there is no ready-made and popular enough replacement in sight.

8 The Polish Nation: From a Multiethnic to an Ethnically Homogenous Nation-State

From the second half of the 18th century, it is possible to speak of the national [Polish] language, despite the fact that a direct relationship between it and the everyday speech of the peasantry was established decades later, during the 19th century. (Lehr-Spławinski ´ 1953: 61) We [that is, the Polish Communist Party] want to build a homogenous [Polish] nation-state, not a multi-national polity. (1946) (Zawadzki in Linek 1997: 14) General Aleksander Zawadzki (1899–1964), Governor of the Voivodeship [Region] of Silesia [that is, historical Upper Silesia] (1945–1948), member of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party (1948–1954), Chairman of the Polish Council of State (1952–1964) The new situation will remove all the thorny issues of ‘national minorities,’ their autonomy or the accusations of the lack of such autonomy, as well as of justified or unjustified multilateral nationalist aspirations that these issues used to fuel. ‘Poland as a State of One Nation Only’ (Rappaport 1946: 200) In Chapter 4 I focused on the stateless noble natio of partitioned PolandLithuania that sought to transform itself into a Polish nation. The PolishLithuanian noble leaders paid lip service to the French model of the nation-state but, apart from a few lonely dissenting voices, had no intention to broaden the confines of the planned Polish nation to embrace the ‘third estate,’ that is, the peasantry and burghers. The social barrier of serfdom alone kept the nobles from associating with peasants. In the cities, a large and sometimes predominant, segment of the population was made up of German-speakers and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Their idioms disqualified them from participation in the emerging Polish 573

574 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

nation due to the ideological fixation of the Polish national movement on the Polish language, which was imagined to be an invisible ersatz Polish nationstate in lieu of the partitioned Arcadia of Poland-Lithuania. Polish-Lithuanian political thinkers from the period of the Enlightenment could not foresee the vagaries of the nation-making and historical processes, which led to the dissociation of the Polish nation from the Polish-Lithuanian nobility beginning at the turn of 19th century. The two failed anti-Russian uprisings staged by this nobility in 1830–1831 and 1863–1864 brought about repressions that spelled the end of the social and political dominance of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility and its predominantly rural way of life. Industrialization and urbanization undermined the economic basis of the nobility as well. Due to the dearth of land and the poverty of their families, a career in farming was also closed to them. The Polish intelligentsia, initially a home to impoverished nobles, turned into a class increasingly blind to the social backgrounds of its members. It came into being because the relatively backward economies of Russia and Austria/Austria-Hungary could not absorb the growing number of secondary school leavers and university graduates. Underpaid and underemployed intelligentsia took up the self-imposed task of modernization by popularizing the new ideologies of nationalism, positivism, and socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. They helped sow the seeds of social ferment, which, at the end of the Great War, resulted in the creation of numerous ethnic nation-states and socialist revolutions. The ‘glue’ that kept the Polish intelligentsia together was the Polish language, perceived to be the backbone of the Polish nation that was being built (or, in the nationalist imagination, was being reawakened). This, and the examples of the successful founding of Italy and the German Empire as nation-states, pushed the Polish intelligentsia to embrace the ethnolinguistic model of Polish nationalism by the 1890s. In this political vision, all Polish-speakers, regardless of their social status, were to be fashioned into the Polish nation. Members of the Polish intelligentsia arrived at this goal in many different ways due to their varying social and political backgrounds. Józef Piłsudski, for example, hailed as ‘the father of independent Poland,’ famously remarked that he ‘left the train “socialism’’ at the station “independence.’’ ’ His elder brother, Bronisław Piłsudski (1866–1916), accused of involvement with an anti-tsarist revolutionary organization, was exiled to Sakhalin in 1887. He devoted himself to ethnographic work on the Ainu and corresponded with his family in Russian. Bronisław moved to Galicia in 1906, and became involved with the pro-Polish independence forces only in the last years of the Great War. This resignation from research and scholarship (or from socialism) in preference of the wholehearted pursuit of ethnic nationalism was characteristic of the intelligentsia throughout Central Europe. In their Brünn (Brno) program of 1899, Austro-Hungary’s social democrats, led by Otto Bauer (1882–1938) and

The Polish Nation

575

Karl Renner (1870–1950), understood that the force of nationalism had to be reckoned with that the rhetoric of ‘workers of the world unite’ was not enough to suppress the attraction and mobilizing potential of ethnicity. In order to prevent the danger of splitting the Dual Monarchy along the ethnolinguistic lines, they proposed to transform Austria-Hungary into a federation of ‘nationalities.’ On the order of the Russian Bolshevik Party, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) visited Austria-Hungary on a study trip in 1913. Drawing from the ideas of Bauer and Renner, and on the actual experience of Austria-Hungary in dealing with the ‘nationalities question,’ he penned his influential essay, ‘Marxism and the National Question.’ As the Commissar of Nationalities (1917–1924) in Soviet Russia, Stalin implemented his ideas in the form of the ethnolinguistically-based administrative division of the Soviet Union. Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) famously summarized this tactical espousal of nationalism by social democrats, and the climate for fostering nationalism in the Dual Monarchy, by saying that ‘[Austria-Hungary] was [not] a prisonhouse of nations [. . .], it was a kindergarten of nations.’ Eventually, a similar role was played by the intelligentsia, who turned out to be midwives to national movements, nations, and nationstates that were established after 1918. The intelligentsia were also instrumental in crafting national republics within the Soviet Union, complete with their national languages and cultures (Boncza-Tomaszewski ´ 2001: 51–125; Gellner 1994: 78; Hroch 1985; Inoue 1999; Jedlicki 2002: 261–303; Martin 2001: 2–15; O’Boyle 1970; Stalin 1973). Reflecting on the political and military prowess of the multiethnic polities of Austria-Hungary and Russia, one is most surprised that they collapsed and gave way to ethnic nation-states (mainly in Central Europe). Not many predicted such an outcome when the Great War erupted in 1914. With the advantage of hindsight, I infer that this process was generated by multidimensional instability. It was fostered by numerous political changes in the territories occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops, the near collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian economies, the economic and political breakup of Russia, Berlin’s and Vienna’s military overstretch in the East, and the waning attraction and mobilizing force of monarchy as the source of statehood legitimization. Seeking to weaken loyalty to the tsar in the occupied areas of the Russian Empire, Berlin and Vienna encouraged local ethnolinguistic national movements. In the case of Austria-Hungary, it was like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with petrol and the national movements of the Dual Monarchy wasted no time in grasping this message. The vast majority of the ethnically diverse troops of Russia and Austria-Hungary remained loyal until the moment when St Petersburg and Vienna ceased to control their empires in 1917 and 1918, respectively. In the new situation, the soldiers were left to their own devices, gradually attracted to the coalescing nation-states as new loci of loyalty. The dream of establishing new nation-states aspiring to ethnical homogeneity was not often dreamed

576 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

by the average person, usually thirsting for a semblance of prewar stability and prosperity, unless the average person saw such a national dream as the way leading to these goals. A national future was the aim of the leaders of various national movements; instead of two emperors and two prime ministers there would be governments enough for a dozen presidents and a dozen prime ministers. Electorates followed swiftly because there was no choice; Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire simply disappeared. It was an unexpected triumph of ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ who led new nation-states to independence; ethnolinguistically determined intelligentsias turned into the elites of the new nation-states (Bibó 1991: 49–57).

The emergence of Poland and linguistic nationalism In 1916, the Central Powers provisionally agreed to the formation of the Kingdom of Poland. Influenced by his friend and the famous pianist, Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941), United States President Woodrow Wilson explicitly mentioned Poland in his so-called ‘fourteen points’ speech delivered in early 1918. Point XIII called for ‘[a]n independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputable Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant’ (in Andrea and Overfield 1994: 386). Poland was the single non-existent state featured in the speech. As was clear from his formula, Wilson espoused the ethnolinguistic concept of the Polish nation-state popularized by Polish nationalists since the 1890s. On 3 June 1918, the Allies recognized the principle of Polish independence as proposed by Wilson. The territorial shape of Poland was forged from 1918 to 1923. The final result was quite different from pre-partition Poland-Lithuania, which early-19thcentury Polish nationalists had wished to ‘resurrect’ as a Polish nation-state. It was an uneasy compromise between Roman Dmowski’s radically ethnic vision of Poland, composed of all the territories inhabited by Polish-speakers, and Józef Piłsudski’s political project of a Poland federated with Lithuania (with autonomy for Belarus) and linked to Ukraine by a confederation. At the beginning of November 1918, the Austro-Hungarian occupation administration collapsed in the Lublin General-Governorship and the Polishlanguage administration of Galicia ceased following orders from Vienna. At the same time, Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed the independence of Western Ukraine, located in eastern Galicia. In mid-November, Berlin evacuated its occupation forces from the Warsaw General-Governorship. On 11 November, the Council of State of the Kingdom of Poland appointed Piłsudski Commander-inChief of the Polish forces and asked him to form a national government. The anti-German Wielkopolska Uprising (December 1918–February 1919) secured

The Polish Nation

577

most of the Prussian province of Posen (Poznan) ´ for Poland. At the beginning of 1919, Polish troops extinguished the independence of Western Ukraine. Following the successes of the Wielkopolska Uprising (1918–1919), the Treaty of Versailles (1919) granted to Poland most of the Province of Posen, as well as most of West Prussia in keeping with Wilson’s desire to secure access to the Baltic for this state. Polish troops and administration took over the territories not already controlled by Wielkopolska insurrectionists in January and February 1920. In this manner, the entire territory of the Vistula Land, the entire Austrian zone of partition (Galicia), and most of the Prussian partition zone were incorporated into the new Poland. Along with Upper Silesia and its industrial basin, the main bone of contention remained the overwhelmingly German-speaking city of Danzig (Gdansk), ´ which had belonged to Poland-Lithuania. At that time, however, loyalty to the PolishLithuanian monarch, not language, had determined its allegiance. In 1920, in line with the decisions of the Versailles Treaty, the Allies made the city and its vicinity into the Free City of Danzig under control of the League of Nations. Poland received some postal, commercial, and military rights in the territory. Another flashpoint of potential conflict between Poland and Germany was the so-called ‘Polish corridor’ which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. After its astounding victory in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, Warsaw could demand the rest of the Russian partition zone in the Treaty of Riga (March 1921). Supporters of Dmowski, however, wished to limit the intake of territories not inhabited by Polish-speakers. They famously declined Minsk/Mensk and the eastern half of Belarus (which they considered as inherently Orthodox, and thus, un-Polonizeable), offered by a defeated Soviet Russia. Hence, only the western portion of this partition zone was incorporated. The zone’s central and eastern core was split between Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine. Warsaw did not seek the northern part of this zone, incorporated now into Latvia and Lithuania, with the exception of Vilnius and its vicinity. Seized by irregular Polish troops in late 1920, this territory was made into a nominally independent Central Lithuania, which 2 years later was incorporated into Poland. Despite Lithuania’s protests, the Allies accepted this incorporation in 1923, when they recognized the Polish borders in their entirety. Although Piłsudski was reluctant to advance any territorial demands beyond the borders of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania, Dmowski and his supporters thought otherwise. Already in the 1880s and 1890s, they had anachronistically broadened the territorial scope of the Prussian and Austrian partition zones to include the predominantly Slavophone regions of Prussia’s Upper Silesia (or the Oppeln [Opole] Regency1 ) and the eastern half of Austrian Silesia (or Teschen [Cieszyn, Tˇešín] Silesia). These areas had never been part of Poland-Lithuania. The territories were contained within the borders of medieval Poland, but only briefly, whereas they were incorporated in the lands of the Czech Crown for four

578 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

centuries in the case of Upper Silesia and for six centuries in the case of Austrian Silesia. Some nationalists also added East Prussia to the concept of the Prussian partition zone, though this area was overwhelmingly German-speaking, and never belonged to either early Poland or Poland-Lithuania (with the exception of Warmia [Ermland], centered on the city of Lidzbark [Heilsberg]). However, East Prussia had been a Polish-Lithuanian fief between 1525 and 1657, when the German-speaking and Lutheran nobles of East Prussia saw the Polish-Lithuanian monarch as a trustworthy protector against the excesses of the CounterReformation and were lured by the extensive Polish-Lithuanian market. The unresolved issue of sovereignty over two Polish-Hungarian border areas, Szepes (Spisz in Polish, Spiš in Czech and Slovak, Zips in German) and Árva (Orawa in Polish, Orava in Czech and Slovak, Arva in German), provided the basis for Warsaw’s claim to them. The Hungarian king pawned the former territory to the Polish-Lithuanian monarch in the 15th century, and it was never redeemed before the partitions of Poland-Lithuania. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, settlers from Poland-Lithuania arrived in northern Árva. Prior to 1918, both Szepes and Árva were included in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy. Warsaw’s claim to all the aforementioned areas, although they had not been part of Poland-Lithuania, was legitimized by the fact that the majority (or a significant segment) of the population spoke Polish. (The same argument was used for laying claim at least to the rural vicinity of Danzig.) There is no doubt that these populations were Slavophone, or at least bilingual, sharing their usually native Slavic idiom with the official state language, German or Magyar. But to say that their Slavic dialects were ‘Polish’ amounts to ideologizing the still pre-national sociolinguistic reality. The Slavic-speakers of southern East Prussia went by the ethnoregional names, Mazurs (Masuren) and Warmiaks (Ermländer), those in the vicinity of Danzig by the name Kashubs (Kaschuben), those of Upper Silesia by the name (Upper) Silesians (Wasserpolen), and those of Teschen Silesia by the name Silesians (Slonsaken). As indicated by their ethnonym, the Mazurian ethnic group developed from the Slavophone settlers from the region of Mazovia, center of today’s Poland with the capital, Warsaw, in its midst. Mazovia lay south of the monastic polity of the Teutonic Order built on the lands of the heathen ethnic group of Balticspeaking Pruthenians (Prussians), many of whom lost their lives in the course of their forced Christianization by the Teutonic Knights. In their stead, beginning in the 14th century, Slavic-speaking settlers arrived from northern Mazovia. What made the Mazurs into a specific ethnic group different from the inhabitants of Mazovia was confession. In 1525, Ducal Prussia was established as an autonomous Protestant polity under the protection of the Polish-Lithuanian monarch, and remained a Polish fief until 1657. But its population, including Slavophone Mazurs, was Lutheran, unlike the population of Poland’s Mazovia, who professed Catholicism. The south of Prussia, bordering on Mazovia, was

The Polish Nation

579

informally named Mazuria (Masuren in German, Mazury in Polish), especially after the mid-19th century. Although the Mazurs referred to their language as ‘Polish,’ they did not apply the ethnonym ‘Poles’ to themselves. For them, the ethnonym ‘Pole’ was a synonym for Catholic. Hence they called themselves ‘Prussians’ (Prusaki). In 1871, the newly founded German Empire absorbed Prussia, which entailed the imposition of German as the sole official language and the medium of education. This was not to the Mazurs’ liking, which they chose to manifest by referring to themselves as ‘Old Prussians’ (Staroprusaki). Thus, until the beginning of the 20th century, few Mazurs chose to define themselves as ‘Germans.’ Although German remained a foreign language to the Mazurs, they perceived the Polish language of Poland-Lithuania as foreign too. First of all, Polish was written and printed in ‘Catholic’ letters (or Antiqua-type Latin characters) as opposed to ‘Lutheran/German’ (Gothic) letters, which Mazurian prints shared with German publications. Second, the Mazurian idiom was derived from the 15th-century northern Mazovian dialect, much distant from standard Polish (which stems mainly from the dialects of Wielkopolska and Małopolska). Third, when the German and Polish national movements began aggressively to penetrate Mazuria in the last two decades of the 19th century, most of the Mazurs decided to stick to their ethnolinguistic specificity, which they emphasized by calling their language Mazurian (Masurisch). In 1910, there were over 200,000 Mazurs, who constituted around 60 percent of the population in Mazuria. In 1890, less than 20 percent of Mazurs described their language as ‘Mazurian,’ while over two-thirds of them did so in 1910. German statistics also allowed for labeling one’s speech as ‘bilingual,’ for instance, ‘German and Polish,’ or ‘German and Mazurian.’ The former category plummeted from 12,300 in 1890 to 7700 in 1910, whereas the latter grew from 4600 to 8600 (Blanke 2001: 19, 36–37, 41, 87; Sakson 1990: 24–28). The Warmiaks were a group similar to the Mazurs; both stemmed from the Mazovian settlers. What divided these two groups was religion and history. The Warmiaks professed Catholicism, because their region of Warmia was part of Royal Prussia that belonged to Poland-Lithuania from 1466 to 1772; and so the Reformation never took root in this region. In East Prussia, it was the only compact Catholic area. The Warmiaks shared their specific Slavic idiom with the Mazurs, but kept calling it ‘Polish’ (the terms ‘Warmian’ or Ermländisch for referring to their speech never arose) due to the continued influx of Polishlanguage publications in ‘Catholic’ or ‘Polish’ letters, that is, Antiqua characters (as opposed to Mazurian and German books printed with the use of the Gothic type). While some publications were written in the Mazurian language, the Warmiaks’ idiom never made it to the printed page. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Warmiaks numbered 60,000. All of them indicated their language as ‘Polish’ and, unlike the Mazurs, tended to employ standard Polish in their

580 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

publications, although less than half of them considered themselves ‘Poles’; the rest preferred to refer to themselves as ‘Prussians’ or ‘Germans’ (Traba 1994: 40–41). The Kashubs were the native Slavophone population in Royal (later West) Prussia, residing west, north and south of the city of Gdansk ´ (Gdunsk ´ in Kashubian). Their region was separated from Warmia before 1772 by the territorial wedge belonging to (Ducal) Prussia. The ethnonym ‘Kashubs,’ of unclear etymology, rendered in Latin as Cassubi, was recorded for the first time in Pope Gregory IX’s (1227–1241) bull of 1238, in the form Cassubia (Kashubia), which is the name of the Kashubs’ home region. In 1910, their number was estimated at 190,000, though Polish nationalist sources claimed as many as 600,000 Kashubs, viewed as Poles or potential Poles. The majority of Kashubs were Catholic (Protestants amounted to about 20,0002 ) but, like the Mazurs, did not readily identify themselves with the Polish nation. The main source of difference was their separate Slavic language of Kashubian (Kaschubisch in German, or kaszubski in Polish), but known in Kashubian as kašebski or kaszëbski. Although the first text in Kashubian dates from 1402, Kashubian literature developed in the 16th century when Protestants started publishing Lutheran devotional books in Kashubian translations. In Kashubia Polish functioned as the language of sermons in Catholic churches and as the language of liturgy and sermons in Protestant churches. On the other hand, German predominated as the language of administration. Polish stopped serving this function after the first partition of Poland-Lithuania (1772), when Royal Prussia was incorporated into Prussia. Some Kashubs saw their language as separate from Polish, while others saw it as a dialect of Polish. When the Kashubian national movement developed in the second half of the 19th century, most Kashubs perceived their language as separate from Polish (which they called puolski). Polish nationalists, however, defined Kashubian as a dialect of Polish, and thus, by extension, the Kashubians as an ‘ethnoregional group’ of the Polish nation. The overwhelming majority of Kashubians disagreed and declared their language to be Kashubian in German censuses. After the first partition of Poland-Lithuania, Prussian administrators readily noticed the similarity between the Polish language and the idioms of the Kashubs, Mazurs, and Warmiaks. In this pre-national age, language was not part of the ideology of legitimizing statehood. Such terms as ‘Polish Prussians’ or ‘Polish Prussia’ were used to refer to the Kashubs, Mazurs, Warmiaks and their homelands. In the 1820s, the Prussian administration began to introduce the idea of measuring the national (ethnic) composition of a population by asking about one’s original or everyday language in censuses. At the turn of the 19th century, in the wake of the disappearance of Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe, the stereotype of polnische Wirtschaft emerged. This term associated all things Polish with inferiority, poverty, disorganization, and ‘uncivilizedness.’ In this way, the term ‘Pole’

The Polish Nation

581

became a pejorative label, which German neighbors and administrators liked to apply to Slavophone Kashubs, Mazurs, and Warmiaks, while the latter took offence. This deepened the ethnic boundary between these three ethnic groups vis-à-vis the Germans and the Poles, especially at the turn of the 20th century (Belzyt 1998: 21–22; Latoszek 1990: 62; Obracht-Prondzynski ´ 2007a; Orłowski 1998; Price 1998: 49; Synak 1998: 11–12; Szultka 2001: 26, 28, 41; Topolinska ´ 1980: 183–184, 188–189). The Upper Silesians and the Silesians of Teschen Silesia shared a similar aversion to the ethnonym ‘Pole.’ The former associated everything Polish with economically and ‘civilizationally’ ‘inferior Russian Poland’; that is, the Vistula Land which directly bordered on Prussian Silesia. For the (Teschen) Silesians, the ultimate Other was the Galician Pole suffering the proverbial ‘Galician poverty.’ For the sake of clarity, I dub the Upper Silesians the Szlonzoks and the (Teschen) Silesians the Slunzaks, although their self-ethnonyms, ‘Silesians’ are the same and vary only a little in pronunciation. The Szlonzoks and the Slunzaks lived in the historical region of Upper Silesia, which was split between Austria and Prussia in 1740. The southern sliver of this region, which remained with Vienna, was made into the Crownland of Austrian Silesia, while the rest of Upper Silesia, together with Lower Silesia, became Prussia’s Province of Silesia. After 1815, the Oppeln (Opole) Regency was introduced as one of the province’s three subdivisions and coincided with Prussia’s share of Upper Silesia. The Slavophone Szlonzoks numbered 1.4 million in 1910. At the same time, 390,000 Slunzaks lived in the eastern half of Austrian Silesia, that is, in Teschen Silesia. Austria’s Teschen Silesia and Prussian Silesia were alike part of the Breslau (Wrocław) Catholic Diocese. Virtually, all the Szlonzoks were Catholics, whereas one-fifth of the Slunzaks professed Lutheranism. In addition, Upper Silesia was of mixed German-Slavic character as opposed to overwhelmingly Slavophone Teschen Silesia. At the end of the 19th century, the Polish national movement timidly entered Upper Silesia, whereas Teschen Silesia became the scene of a clash between the Czech and Polish national movements. But German nationalists too participated in it. In response to the increasing national tension in Teschen Silesia, a Slunzakian national movement came into being. The German-speaking elite of Austrian Silesia supported it, hoping to lessen the influence of Czech and Polish nationalists. In Upper Silesia the steeping of the official state ideology of the German Empire in Protestantism and the German language isolated the Szlonzoks from the mainstream of German national life. The influence of Polish nationalism was negligible shortly after World War I. Following the war, three anti-German rebellions erupted in Upper Silesia with active military support from Poland (1919, 1920, 1921). Known as the ‘Silesian Uprisings’ in Polish historiography, these rebellions also coaxed the Szlonzoks to organize their own national movement.

582 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Szlonzokian and Slunzakian national movements became the strongest social and political forces after the war in Upper Silesia and Teschen Silesia, respectively. Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw resented the rise of these two new nationalisms as a direct danger to their own national projects; and the Allies with so many new nation-states already bickering about their borders, did not want to get involved, and so dismissed the principle of ethnically-defined national selfdetermination as impractical in this case. The level of internal and international tension was extreme in the conflicts over Upper Silesia and Teschen Silesia, because of the unusually high stakes involved. The Upper Silesian industrial basin was second only to the Ruhr in continental Europe, and its Ostrau-Karwin (Ostrava-Karviná) counterpart in Teschen Silesia was the largest industrial basin of Austria-Hungary. To save the Upper Silesian industrial region from falling into Polish hands, Berlin supported the Szlonzokian idea of turning Upper Silesia into an independent Szlonzokian nation-state with German and Polish as official languages. Slunzakian politicians voiced a similar idea in Teschen Silesia, but with the Dual Monarchy disintegrating, Vienna could not even consider supporting it. Until the 1740 division, Bohemian, along with German and Latin, was used as an official language in Upper Silesia. Immediately after the division of this region, German replaced the other two languages in Prussian Silesia. The same process was repeated in Austrian Silesia after 1784. For the sake of improved education of the Slavophone Szlonzoks in Upper Silesia, Polish was introduced to schools and pastoral services in both Catholic and Protestant areas in 1849. After the founding of the German Empire, German replaced Polish in the schools in 1873, although the latter remained a language of sermons and pastoral services, especially in Catholic churches. In Teschen Silesia, the monopoly of official German lasted until the last two decades of the 19th century, when Czech and Polish were allowed into elementary schools and commune-level self-governmental administration. The speech of the Szlonzoks and the Slunzaks was as distant from Czech and Polish as the Mazurian language from Polish, but proposals for codifying a Szonzokian or Slunzakian language, voiced already in the 1870s, never came to fruition. The functional multilingualism of German in public life, Polish (or Czech) in school and church, and the local dialect at home served the Szlonzoks and the Slunzaks well enough (Bechný et al. 1992: 61; Belzyt 1998: 18; Jerczynski ´ 2006: 53–188; Kamusella 1998, 2003; Tambor 2006: 53–66). The Polish-Czechoslovak conflict over the tiny Upper Hungarian regions of Árva and Szepes was hard to justify in linguistic terms, because their populations included German-speakers and Slavic-speakers. Due to isolation and the specific Carpathian transhumant economy, the Slavic dialects spoken in both regions were as distant from Czech, Polish or Slovak as Kashubian was from Polish. Warsaw’s main claim to Szepes was that it had constituted part

The Polish Nation

583

of Poland-Lithuania until 1769. In the case of Árva, the claim was more dubious, because it hinged on the arrival of settlers from Poland-Lithuania to this region beginning in the 16th century. The Czechoslovak argument was that the two regions in their entirety were part of Upper Hungary, which became Slovakia after 1918. With literacy scant and both regions overwhelmingly rural, there was little use for writing. Latin and German dominated in documents until 1788. German was then placed in the role of the official language until the establishment of Austria-Hungary in 1867 when Magyar replaced German in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy, including Upper Hungary. In the wake of the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the Greek Catholic population of the Galician-Upper Hungarian borderland became a thorny issue too. They referred to themselves (and were referred to) by a plethora of similar ethnonyms, Rusini or Rusnacy in Polish, ruszin, rusznak or rutén in Magyar, Rusíni in Czech, and Rusiny/Rusyny, Ugro-Rusiny/Ugro-Rusyny, or Karpato-Rusiny/KarpatoRusyny in their own language. The ethnonyms were translated into English as ‘Ruthenians,’ ‘Hungarian-Ruthenians’ and ‘Carpatho-Ruthenians.’ This led to confusion with the Ruthenians of Galicia, who turned into part of the Ukrainian nation. Today, these people are known under the unambiguous name of ‘Rusyns’ or ‘Carpatho-Rusyns.’ The use of Church Slavonic in liturgy, their Greek Catholic Church, and a language written in Cyrillic characters distanced them from the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. Initially, many leaders of the Rusyn national movement wanted to unite their nation with Russia, but this proved impractical after the collapse of the Russian Empire. However, the 1914–1915 Russian offensive, which engulfed some Austro-Hungarian territories inhabited by Rusyns, made Vienna and Budapest fearful of their possible support for the invaders. In 1915 and 1916, as many as 6000 Rusyns were sent to the Thalerhof (Talerhof in Rusyn) concentration camp near Graz. The founding of Western Ukraine in November 1918 triggered another wave of political activism among the Rusyns. Budapest offered them autonomy within the Hungarian state, while some Rusyn nationalists advocated union with Ukraine or independence. The independence option became popular among the Rusyns in the Galician section of the Carpathians. There they numbered around 150,000. When the Allies took no notice of Rusyn national aspirations, federation with Czechoslovakia looked like the most promising solution. In January 1919, some Galician Rusyns decided to take this option too. Warsaw rejected the possibility of ceding any part of Galicia to Czechoslovakia, and ‘pacified’ the Rusynpopulated area in 1920. The following year, the Polish court in Nowy Sa˛cz acquitted Rusyn leaders of high treason, because it was decided that, not being Poles, they had acted in good faith aspiring to establish a nation-state for their Rusyn nation. In interwar Poland, Warsaw advocated the ethnonym ‘Lemko’ for Galician Rusyns in order not to allow their merger either with the Ukrainians or the Rusyns of Czechoslovakia’s Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Ukrainian leaders

584 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

saw it as another of Warsaw’s anti-Ukrainian measures, because they considered Lemkos (or Rusyns) an ‘ethnographic group’ of the Ukrainian nation (Guzicki 2004; Magocsi 1978: 87–91, 2004: 30–32; Michna 1995: 39–42, 44, 57). The initial post-1918 enthusiasm for re-organizing Central and Eastern Europe in line with the (ethnolinguistically defined) national principle proved increasingly impractical, divisive, and prone to breeding more instability. In a halfhearted attempt to prevent these side effects, the Allies decreed that the fates of Warmia and Mazuria (the southern section of East Prussia), Upper Silesia, Teschen Silesia, and Árva and Szepes were to be decided by plebiscites. The short Polish-Czechoslovak war over Teschen Silesia in January 1919 and growing violence led to the Council of Allied Ambassadors’ 1920 decision to divide Teschen Silesia, Árva, and Szepes between Czechoslovakia and Poland without holding plebiscites. Paris ensured the transfer of the entire Ostrau-Karwin industrial basin to Czechoslovakia so as not to fortify Poland unduly, since Warsaw stood a fair chance of obtaining the Upper Silesian industrial basin. Despite widespread violence, plebiscites were held in 1920 in East and West Prussia, and the following year in Upper Silesia. The results were most disappointing for Poland, because the votes for remaining with Germany ranged from 97.8 percent in the East Prussian plebiscite area, to 92.4 percent in the West Prussian plebiscite area, and to 59.7 percent in Upper Silesia. While the East and West Prussian plebiscite areas were left with Germany (apart from minor exceptions), after much agonizing, the Allies transferred the eastern section of Upper Silesia, with most of the industrial basin to Poland in 1922 (Bahlcke 1996: 132; Jähnig and Biewer 1991: 145). The territorial transfers from Germany to Poland, and the division of some Austro-Hungarian regions between Czechoslovakia and Poland, sent waves of refugees and expellees, thus amounting to unprecedented ethnic cleansing, complete with concentration, transfer, and refugee camps. This ethnic cleansing is largely forgotten today, overshadowed by the atrocities of World War II (including the Holocaust), which generated almost 50 million refugees and expellees in Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1950. But after 1918, residents of the aforementioned territories were offered the right of ‘option’ (not accorded to their counterparts after 1945). Namely, in the case of border changes, such a resident could choose to move to a different successor state than the one to which his or her hometown happened to be granted; and the resident was entitled to obtain citizenship of the state of his or her choice as well. Obviously, the goal and effect of these population movements was to increase ethnolinguistic homogeneity within the borders of nation-states. For instance, the share of Germans in the population of the corridor (Polish Pomerania) sank from 42.5 percent in 1910 to 18.8 percent in 1921 and 9.6 percent in 1931; for Wielkopolska, the respective numbers were 34.4 percent, 16.7 percent and 9.2 percent. Between 1919 and 1923 alone, about 700,000 Germans abandoned

The Polish Nation

585

their homes in these two regions. In Upper Silesia, it was difficult to decide who was German or Polish, because neither Berlin nor Warsaw wished to recognize the Szlonzoks as a separate nation, and the plebiscite forced them to opt either for Poland or for Germany. Between 1922 and 1939, 190,000 persons left the Polish section of Upper Silesia for Germany, and more than 100,000 persons from the German part of this region moved to Poland. In the same period, about 10,000 persons arrived from the Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia to Poland (Blanke 1993: 244–245; Kamusella 1999: 56; Magocsi 2002: 190, 193; Serafin 1996: 80; Tighe 1990: 92). This massive migration of Germans from the German territories transferred to Poland was caused by several factors. First, Germans perceived Poland as ‘civilizationally inferior’ to Germany. Second, they had lived in a German nation-state since 1871 and had no intention to succumb to the process of Polish ethnolinguistic nation-state-building, which would require them to learn Polish. The territorial changes between Poland and Czechoslovakia were not extensive enough to send significant waves of refugees. In Czech eyes, Poland seemed inferior, but for the Slovaks this difference did not amount to much, because the poor economic and social situation in Slovakia was similar to Poland’s Galicia. The most sweeping territorial and systemic changes were reserved for the regions which had constituted Germany’s semi-colony (or pseudo-polity) of the Land Ober Ost during the war (or, before 1914, Russia’s western gubernias). The Eastern front moved back and forth over hundreds of kilometers, sending refugees fleeing to and fro. For example, half a million inhabitants (including 300,000 Lithuanians) of Russia’s ethnically Lithuanian gubernias fled the advancing German troops. The same phenomenon was repeated after 1918 in the course of the military conflicts between Polish troops and their Ukrainian, Soviet, and Lithuanian counterparts. Due to destruction, war casualties, refugees, and emigration, Belarus (in its contemporary borders) lost over 1.4 million inhabitants. Warsaw treated White Ruthenians / White Russians (Belarusians) and Ruthenians / Little Russians (Ukrainians) as ‘ethnographic mass’ to be divided eventually between the Polish and Russian nations. It was more difficult to deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation, which managed to form two states immediately after the war, and preserved the independence of Dnieper Ukraine until 1921. To curb the consolidation of the Ukrainian nation, Warsaw facilitated the settling of 200,000 ethnic Poles in eastern Galicia during the 1920s. Many of the settlers were Polish soldiers retired from the army, which increased the tension between the newcomers and the local population even more. The period of uneasy toleration of Ukrainians and their political and cultural aspirations was over by the end the 1930s; mainly in the region of Chelm (Kholm in Ukrainian) 200 Orthodox churches were destroyed, another 150 passed into Catholic hands, and the Polish administration forced numerous Orthodox Ukrainians to convert to Catholicism. In 1939, only

586 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

fifty-one Orthodox churches remained in Poland. The use of Ukrainian was restricted and it was dubbed a ‘Bolshevik invention’ (curiously reminiscent of the tsarist label of ‘Polish intrigue,’ which had been applied to Ukrainian in the 1860s). In the autumn of 1938, a wave of anti-Ukrainian pogroms was organized along the border with the Soviet Union to ‘fortify Polishdom’ in this strategic area. Paradoxically, the outbreak of World War II prevented the planned application of these anti-Orthodox and Polonizing measures to the Belarusianpopulated regions of Białystok (Belastok in Belarusian) and Vilnius (Vil’nia in Belarusian). Despite these repressions, Poland still seemed to be ‘civilizationally superior’ to the Soviet Union in the eyes of Ukrainians and Belarusians. In Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine, after a period of encouraging Belarusian and Ukrainian languages and cultures during the 1920s, a wave of purges and ethnically-defined persecutions set in. To speed up the Sovietization of its part of Ukraine, Moscow instigated an artificial famine in 1932 and 1933, which cost 4 to 7 million lives. Any repressions suffered by Belarusians and Ukrainians in interwar Poland paled beside the terror unleashed in the Soviet Union. The Belarusians and Ukrainians did not have nation-states of their own to protect their interests in Poland, nor was it a viable option for them to emigrate to the Soviet Union. In addition, the vast majority of Belarusians and Ukrainians were peasants. In the 1930s, the rate of illiteracy among Belarusians ranged from 40 to 60 percent. The same figure for Ukrainians was between 30 and 50 percent. In comparison, almost all Germans who lived in Poland were literate, most of them worked in factories or in the service sector. Hence they were much more socially and spatially mobile than Belarusians and Ukrainians, however, the phenomenon of illiteracy remained widespread among rural Germans in Volhynia. More significantly, despite Berlin’s official efforts to maintain the German minorities for revisionist purposes, the German nation-state, eager to protect the interests of the German minority in Poland and to act as a safe haven in times of need, offered an enticing option of emigration. A curious situation developed in the relations between Poland and Lithuania. The Lithuanians perceived their social and economic situation as similar to that of ethnic Poles. Most Lithuanians living in interwar Poland were concentrated in the Wilno (Vilnius) region, seized by Poland in 1920. They had no intention to leave for Lithuania, because the Lithuanian government continued to see the city as its rightful capital. (The interwar capital in Kaunas was invariably labeled ‘provisional.’) Poland and Lithuania remained in a state of war until 1927, and Kaunas refused to establish diplomatic relations with Warsaw until 1938, when the Polish government imposed such relations by means of an ultimatum (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 115; Czaplinski ´ and Ładogórski 1993: 48; Hrycak 2000: 184, 188–192; Ogonowski 2000: 84; Sužiedelis ˙ 1997: 319; Szybieka 2002: 264, 283; Wysocka 2006: 16).

The Polish Nation

587

Language politics in interwar Poland Interwar Poland was a composite of numerous territories of varying political statuses, which reflected various administrative and legal traditions of the polities to which they had belonged during and before World War I. For instance, in the territories incorporated from Austria-Hungary, vehicle and train traffic was left-sided; in the areas, which had been part of Russia’s western gubernias, the Julian calendar was still used; and serfdom even survived in the Polish section of Szepes until 1932. In addition, Warsaw signed the Minorities Treaty in 1919, as required by the Allies of all the new nation-states.3 Furthermore, political, economic, and social relations in both the Polish and the German sections of the Upper Silesian Plebiscite Area were governed by the German-Polish treaty signed in Geneva in 1922, which remained in force for 15 years. This resulted in the overlapping of numerous legal systems within a given administrative area. For example, Poland’s only autonomous voivodeship (administrative region), Silesia, was composed of sections of Prussian Upper Silesia and Austrian Silesia. Hence elements of the German, Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, Austrian Silesian, Polish, and now Silesian Voivodeship legal systems were in power along with the regulations introduced by the Minority Treaty and the Polish-German Treaty on Upper Silesia (popularly known as the Geneva Convention) (Ma˛czak et al. 1996: 207; Tomaszewski 1985a: 28). Before integration of these disparate territories and populations within the Polish polity could commence, the basic question about the nature of this state had to be answered. The main ideological difference was between the proponents of Dmowski and Piłsudski. The political tension between these two camps was encapsulated by an ideological choice between panstwo ´ narodowe (nation-state) and panstwo ´ narodowo´sciowe (nationalities or multi-national state). Despite the confusing literal translations of these two terms, both camps wanted to build Poland as a nation-state. But Dmowski’s camp wanted an ethnically homogenous Polish nation-state, whereas Piłsudski’s supporters agreed to the inclusion of ‘nationalities,’ that is, ethnically non-Polish populations, in the Polish nation-state. In December 1922, Gabriel Narutowicz (1865–1922) was elected the first Polish President. Piłsudski opposed him because Narutowicz had spent three decades in Switzerland before returning to Poland in 1920. Dmowski’s supporters accused him of not being a Polish President at all, because his election victory was sealed by the votes of the national minorities, especially Jews. (Also ethnically Polish leftist and centrist parties voted for Narutowicz.) Moreover, they spread the false claim that Narutowicz could not speak Polish well. On 16 December, five days after having been sworn into office, a Dmowski sympathizer assassinated Narutowicz.4 However, it was impossible to deny that

588 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

one-third of Poland’s inhabitants were not Polish from the ethnolinguistic vantage. Piłsudski and his camp, who retained power in interwar Poland between 1926 and 1939, decided to take this reality into account, though at times only grudgingly (Je˛drzejewicz 1982: 165–170; Ogonowski 2000: 122, 130, 141; Struve 2004: 233–234; Tomaszewski 1985a: 50). In view of the territorial and political instability that prevailed during the first years after the Great War, the Polish Constitution of 1921 refrained from dealing with the language question. Article 109 provided that Polish citizens had the right to ‘preserve their nationality’ and ‘cultivate their language.’ Article 110 added that Polish citizens belonging to ‘national, confessional, or linguistic minorities’ had the right to establish their schools and organizations. Meanwhile, Polish became the sole language of administration, courts, and education in Congress Poland and western Galicia (that is, in the voivodeships of Warsaw, Łód´z, Kielce and Cracow). In Congress Poland, Polish had been made the official language during the war already by the German and Austro-Hungarian administrations (in the Warsaw and Lublin General-Governorships, respectively), and Polish had played this role in Galicia since 1869. German was allowed as a minority language in administration, courts, and education in the formerly German areas transferred to Poland (that is, in the voivodeships of Pomerania and Poznan). ´ In these regions, German had functioned as official language since 1772 and 1793 respectively, when Prussia incorporated them following the first and second partitions of Poland-Lithuania. Ukrainian, officially referred to as ‘Ruthenian’ (rusinski) ´ was tolerated in administration, courts, and education in eastern Galicia (that is, in the voivodeships of Lwów [Lviv], Tarnopol [Ternopil] and Stanisławów [Stanislav, Ivano-Frankivsk]). Ukrainian, officially known as ‘Ruthenian’ (Ruthenisch) had functioned as a landesübliche Sprache (local language) in eastern Galicia since 1869. In 1918, Ukrainian was elevated to the rank of official language in short-lived independent Western Ukraine. Polish became the sole language of administration and courts in the Polish areas that had been part of Russia’s western gubernias before 1914. (During the Great War, these areas had been organized as the Land Ober Ost and Vienna’s Rear Administration Area.) However, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian could be used for oral communication with civil servants and in courts, and as media of instruction in schools. Between 1905 and 1914, St Petersburg had guaranteed a similar limited role for these three languages and Polish. At that time, Ukrainian had been known as ‘Little Russian,’ Belarusian as ‘White Russian,’ and Lithuanian as ‘Lithuanian and Samogitian.’ During the war, the German and Austro-Hungarian administrations had allowed the use of Lithuanian, Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian), Polish, White Ruthenian (that is, Belarusian), and Yiddish in administration, courts, and education, whereas German had replaced Russian as official language. In

The Polish Nation

589

some areas of this region, Belarusian, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian had been made official languages when Belarus, Lithuania, and Dnieper Ukraine gained independence in 1918. In 1919, Polish troops entered some of these areas, only to be followed by the Red Army, which meant replacement of Polish by Russian as official language until the Poles returned in mid-1920. The Treaty of Riga (1921), which concluded the Polish-Soviet War, was contracted between Poland, Soviet Russia, and Ukraine. But in interwar Poland, Ukrainian was usually referred to as ‘Ruthenian’ (ruski, rusinski), ´ much to the chagrin of Ukrainian politicians; although Ukrainians from Galicia stuck to this label from Austro-Hungarian times and did not consider it offensive. The Galician Ukrainians changed their position in this respect only in the 1930s. The Polish term for Belarusian was and still is białoruski (literally, ‘White Ruthenian’), but in interwar Poland, one usually understood it as a straightforward translation of the Russian term ‘White Russian’ or the German ‘White Ruthenian.’ Warsaw’s lack of concern for the minority languages of eastern Poland also showed itself in the official terming of Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian as narzecza (that is, vernaculars, dialects, idioms, or peasant talk), reminiscent of Russian narechia for these languages before 1914. It was a far cry from the practice of the German and Austro-Hungarian administrations of Galicia, the Land Ober Ost, and the Rear Administration Area to label Belarusian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish as ‘languages.’ Yiddish tended to be disparagingly dubbed a ‘jargon’ in interwar Poland, but in this usage Warsaw followed the widespread Jewish practice to reserve the term ‘language’ only for Hebrew. Generally speaking, in the myopic view of Polish ethnic nationalism represented in interwar Poland by Dmowski and his supporters, in the territories of former Poland-Lithuania now included in the Polish nation-state, only Polish could be seen as a ‘language,’ because it had been the sole official language of Poland-Lithuania at the end of its existence. Hence, the new ‘usurper’ languages stemming from the heartland of former Poland-Lithuania could not be anything more than the ‘patois’ of ‘cheeky peasants who had forgotten their place,’ as opposed to ‘noble Polish.’ An exception was made for German, which had functioned as an official language in the Polish fief of Prussia. Anyway, it was impossible to deny that German was a language, as its written and official use was of old standing and widespread in neighboring Austria and Prussia (Ogonowski 2000: 32, 53–68, 110, 112, 126–127). Polish was made into the state language of interwar Poland on 1 October 1924 by Article 1 of the Act on the Language of Administration. Earlier, the de facto elevated status of Polish had been recognized by the 1920 Act on Higher Education Institutions, which had reserved the role of medium of education in such schools exclusively for Polish. These regulations, in the view of Poland’s international minority obligations, also required additional legislation on the status of minority languages used in interwar Poland. In 1925, the Act on

590 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Language of Courts in the Voivodeships of Poznan ´ and Pomerania guaranteed German-speaking Polish citizens residing in the two voivodeships the right to communicate with courts in German. The Ukrainians and Belarusians were concentrated in the east of Poland, where they constituted the majority or plurality of the population. The same was true of Jews living in the towns and cities located in this region. In confessional terms, it meant that Greek Catholics predominated in eastern Galicia, Orthodox Christians in the rest of the region, and followers of Judaism in the urban areas throughout this region. When Warsaw decided to regulate the question of language there, the first step was the legal re-defining of Russia’s former western gubernias and eastern Galicia within Polish borders as Kresy (borderland). The Kresy comprised the voivodeships of Lwów, Stanisławów, Tarnopol, Volhynia, Polesia (Polissia), Nowogródek (Naharudak), Vilnius, and the eastern sliver of the Voivodeship of Białystok. Paradoxically, this officially named ‘borderland’ region accounted for 53.3 percent of the Polish territory and 38.8 percent of its population. In economic terms, the Kresy, together with the rest of the Voivodeship of Białystok and the Voivodeship of Lublin, were known as ‘Poland B,’ that is, the backward half of Poland located east of the Vistula River. This Poland B accounted for 61 percent of the Polish territory and 47 percent of Poland’s inhabitants. The 1924 Act on the Language of Administration also singled out the Kresy by legislating specific provisions for this area. It was appended by similar acts on the language of courts and schools. The three acts came into effect on 1 October 1924. Article 2 of the Act on the Language of Administration provided for the use of Ruthenian, Belarusian, or Lithuanian in contacts with state administration in speech and writing. The official use of Ruthenian was limited to the voivodeships of Lwów, Tarnopol, Stanisławów, Volhynia and Polesia; of Belarusian to the voivodeships of Polesia, Nowogródek, Wilno and the eastern part of the Voivodeship of Białystok; and of Lithuanian in the predominantly Lithuanian-speaking areas in the region of Wilno. This legally defined the division of the Kresy into areas where minority languages could be used, proved of decisive importance for the future establishment of the administrative border between Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine when the territories of both republics were extended westward after World War II. The northern Kresy, including the northern section of the Voivodeship of Polesia (except the region of Vilnius granted to Soviet Lithuania), was handed over to Soviet Belarus, and the southern Kresy (along with the southern section of Polesia) to Soviet Ukraine. Polesia, inhabited by impoverished and overwhelmingly illiterate peasants of the Orthodox faith, was a hard nut to crack for Warsaw as well as for the Belarusian and Ukrainian national movements. In censuses, most inhabitants referred to themselves as tutejsi (locals, literally ‘from here’) and to their language as tutejszy (local). The 1930 census recorded 707,400 Tutejsi, who constituted

The Polish Nation

591

62.4 percent of the Polesian population. When pressed for a more specific categorization, they tended to refer to themselves as ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Polesh(ch)uks,’ that is, inhabitants of Polesia. The legal decision to allow for the use of Belarusian and Ukrainian in Polesia, but not some ‘Tutejszy language,’ encouraged the population to embrace either Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Polish national identity. Article 1 of the Act on the Language of Courts reaffirmed the primary status of Polish as state language, but Article 2 provided for the use of the minority languages of Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ruthenian in line with the territorial limitations spelled out in Article 2 of the Act on the Language of Administration. The Act on the Language of Schools followed the same principle. Article 2 obliged the state to organize schools with a minority language as the medium of instruction in communes where Belarusians, Lithuanians, or Ruthenians amounted to at least one-quarter of the population. Article 4 stated that education was to be conducted in a minority language only in elementary school (grades one to seven), and Polish had to be taught as a foreign language. Polish was also to be used as the medium of instruction for teaching Polish history. Articles 5 and 6 required that secondary schools and teachers’ training schools had to be bilingual, with Polish and the minority language as parallel media of education. These regulations on minority schools, which tacitly championed Polonization by making them bilingual, became collectively known as the lex Grabski, because it was the government of Prime Minister Władysław Grabski (1874–1938), which instituted them. Grabski opposed Piłsudski and sided with Dmowski’s project of creating an ethnolinguistically homogenous Polish nation-state. This meant a studied disregard for Poland’s international obligations to protect the rights of minorities, especially in the Kresy. Unlike Germany, the Soviet Union remained a pariah of the interwar international relations, and was not in a position to press Warsaw to observe its obligations vis-à-vis Poland’s Belarusian and Ukrainian minorities. Additionally, in the mid-1930s, Moscow embarked on the course of increasingly stern Russification throughout the Soviet Union (meaning also the further Russification of the Polish minorities in Soviet Belarus and Ukraine), which encouraged Warsaw in its efforts to Polonize Belarusians and Ukrainians in the Kresy (Grenoble 2003: 54; Magocsi 1996: 594, Ogonowski 2000: 30–33, 73, 76, 79, 92– 97; Siemakowicz 1998; Tazbir 2000: 43, 46–47; Tomaszewski 1985: 78, 1985a: 39–40). The language legislation differed in the Silesian Voivodeship, that is, the Polish sections of Upper Silesia and Teschen Silesia (3200 sq km and 1000 sq km, respectively). This was the only autonomous voivodeship in interwar Poland and the smallest one, accounting for 1.1 percent of the Polish territory. On the other hand, it was the most densely populated, with 4.4 percent of Poland’s population. The Silesian Voivodeship provided two-thirds of Poland’s industrial output and generated more than half of Polish GDP. It was the most developed

592 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

region of interwar Poland with only 12.7 percent of the inhabitants employed in agriculture, while farming, gardening, and forestry provided livelihood for 60.7 percent of the Polish population. The vast majority of the Szlonzokian inhabitants had relatives in the German section of Upper Silesia, and compared their economic and social situation not to the rest of Poland but to Germany. When the situation in Germany improved at a fast pace in the mid-1930s, it stagnated in the voivodeship (as elsewhere in Poland), which alienated many Szlonzoks (let alone Germans) from the Polish nation-state, thus preventing their Polonization imposed by Warsaw. The Polish language could not replace German in the Silesian Voivodeship’s administration, courts, and education as fast as it did in the voivodeships of Poznan ´ and Pomerania (Torun) ´ because Polish sovereignty was limited in Poland’s section of Upper Silesia (until 1937) by the Geneva Convention, guaranteed by the League of Nations. The same limitations applied to Berlin’s section of Upper Silesia. One sphere that remained unregulated, however, was place names. Warsaw Polonized all of them immediately in 1922, without asking the opinion of the inhabitants. Numerous names had to be invented from scratch because Upper Silesia had never belonged to Poland-Lithuania (unlike Wielkopolska or Royal [Western] Prussia5 ), Polish had never been used in this region as an official language, and the majority of the industrial towns and cities had been established only in the 19th century and were populated by Germanspeaking workers. Hence, no Slavic counterparts of some place names existed (as in the case of Königshütte, whose name was literally translated into Polish as Królewska Huta, and then changed to Chorzów). The same immediate Polonization was applied to street names. Berlin replied in kind after the national socialists seized power in 1933, by Germanizing place names in Germany’s Province of Upper Silesia that sounded ‘too Slavic’ (for instance, Heydebreck for Kandrzin-Pogorzelletz [today, part of ke˛dzierzyn-ko´zle]). In 1923, in keeping with Poland’s international obligations, the Silesian Sejm (the autonomous voivodeship’s legislature) passed the Act on the Official Language in the Territory of the Silesian Voivodeship. Article 1 made Polish the sole official language and Article 3 required that place and street names had to be Polish. Article 4 allowed for the use of German in speech and writing in contacts between citizens and the administration. Article 6 provided that civil servants who did not know Polish could use German until 1926. German members of the Silesian Sejm protested that this transitional period was too short. They argued that the transitional period when Polish was used in offices along with German in Wielkopolska and Royal Prussia had lasted from the first partition of PolandLithuania (1772) to 1887. German was used in the Silesian Sejm until 1930. In courts of law, citizens could use German in speech and writing, but judges and notaries had to cease using German in official documents by 1926. In 1922, the Silesian Voivode (the governor nominated by Warsaw) issued the decree on the

The Polish Nation

593

language of education in public schools. Article 1 decided that it ‘usually should be Polish,’ with the exception of minority schools. This regulation did not apply to private schools, where the voivode required only that Polish should be taught as a foreign language. The situation changed dramatically in 1926 when Piłsudski staged a coup d’état that seriously limited parliamentarian democracy in Poland. In breach of the international obligations, in the summer of 1926, the voivode annulled over 7000 requests of Szlonzokian parents that their children should attend German-language schools. Afterward, in line with the heavily falsified returns of the 1931 census, the voivode argued that the voivodeship, with 93 percent of the population officially comprised of ethnic Poles, was ‘the most Polish voivodeship in Poland.’ Not surprisingly, after Germany occupied Poland in 1939, a German census in 1940 showed that 95 percent of the population in the Upper Silesian section of the Silesian Voivodeship were German, making it the least Polish region of interwar Poland. This disparity was caused by the continuing non-recognition of the Szlonzoks as an ethnic group in their own right. Usually bilingual (Slavic-German), they could pass themselves off as Poles or Germans as required, though they invariably were treated as secondclass Poles or Germans. The list of arbitrary measures, taken by the authorities of the voivodeship, was completed by administrative pressure on citizens to Polonize their ‘too German-sounding’ names and surnames (Bahlcke 1996: 159; Linek 2000: 31–33; Ogonowski 2000: 173, 179–182, 184, 187–189; Serafin 1996: 18). German retained its role in many Catholic churches of the Silesian Voivodeship. The Catholic hierarchy did not buckle under Warsaw’s pressure to promote Polish in sermons and pastoral services. The interests of the faithful remained more important than those of the nation-state, although Article 114 of the 1921 (so-called March) Constitution reserved a privileged position for the Catholic Church and defined Catholicism as the Polish ‘national faith.’ Because Ukrainians accounted for 88 percent of the Greek Catholics residing in Poland, the Greek Catholic Church understandably became the most important official defender of the Ukrainian language in Galicia. This led to a quaint dispute. Despite the fact that German replaced Latin as the official language in the Habsburg lands in 1784, Catholic and Greek Catholic clergy in Galicia used Latin in certificates of birth, marriage, and death. This tradition was legalized in 1875 and continued in interwar Poland. In 1919, however, the Greek Catholic Church unilaterally decided that these certificates would be issued in Ukrainian. Until 1939, Warsaw did not manage to convince the Church that it should observe the law and use only Latin when issuing these certificates. The burning question was the status of the Orthodox Church, which had been a pillar of tsarist ideology in Russia. The biggest Orthodox church erected in the Polish capital in 1912 was seen as the symbol of Russian domination in Poland. When the Germans occupied Warsaw in 1915, the temple was

594 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

turned into a Catholic church, and in independent Poland it was finally demolished between 1918 and 1926, despite vociferous protests of the Orthodox community. Between 1924 and 1925, the same fate was meted out to a large Orthodox church in Lublin. Between 1918 and 1920, about 400 Orthodox churches were either razed to the ground or seized and turned into Catholic churches. Warsaw demanded autocephaly for the Polish Orthodox Church in order to severe its administrative subjugation to the Patriarch of Moscow. At that time, he was busy defending the Orthodox Church against the Soviet policy of thorough atheization, so he left this painful decision to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who granted the sought-for autocephaly in 1924. This did not stop another wave of attempts to seize more than 200 Orthodox churches (which had originally belonged to the Uniates) for the Catholic Church. Finally, the supreme court put an end to this discriminatory action, which lasted from 1929 to 1934. The overwhelming majority of the Orthodox faithful were Ukrainians (in Volhynia and Polesia), Belarusians and Tutejsi (‘local people’).6 They did not oppose the instituting of the autocephalous Polish Orthodox Church, because they did not feel a strong national or linguistic attachment to Russia; but nevertheless they were afraid that autocephaly was the first step to ‘Latinization’ (that is, some form of union with the Catholic Church and replacement of Cyrillic with the Latin alphabet for writing their languages) and eventual Polonization. Russian, which dominated in the administration of the Orthodox Church, sermons, pastoral services, divinity seminars, and religious instruction, began to be replaced by Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Polish. Of course, the growing role of Polish in this Church, which entailed production of religious books with the use of Latin characters, at least partially substantiated the fears of the faithful. Catholicism became a pillar of Polish nationalism second only to the Polish language. Its politicization harked back at least to the 3 May Constitution (1791), which declared Catholicism to be the ‘Reigning National Religion’ (Religia Narodowa Panuia˛ca) in Poland-Lithuania. In its Preamble, the 1921 Constitution directly referred to its 1791 predecessor. Within the borders of interwar Poland as of 1910, however, Catholics constituted only 55.6 percent of the population. Their share grew to 63.9 percent in 1921 and to 64.8 percent in 1931. Discrimination against adherents of other religions coaxed them to convert to Catholicism, which in the eyes of the authorities equated to Polonization. Those who stuck to their ancestral faiths found it hard to attain a university education and careers in the civil service. That was especially true of Jews. In 1923 (emulating the tsarist decision of 1887), Warsaw wanted to impose limitations on the number of Jewish students in universities (numerus clausus, Latin for ‘closed number’) at 10 percent, which roughly reflected the demographic share of Jews in Poland’s population. The League of Nations did not allow that, but, in 1920, numerus

The Polish Nation

595

clasus was introduced at Hungary’s universities and 6 years later at Romania’s. In the academic year 1936–37, ethnic Polish students grouped in nationalist organizations demonstrated and demanded exclusion of Jewish students from Polish universities (numerus nullus, Latin for ‘nought’), which led to the imposition of numerus clausus in 1937. As a result, Jewish emigration from Poland grew in the 1930s, and the share of Catholic students in Polish universities rose to 70.1 percent in 1928 and to 80.9 percent in 1938. Catholic did almost invariably mean Pole; in 1921, 98.7 percent of Catholics were ethnic Poles (Adamczuk and Zdaniewicz 1991: 38, 40–41; Horak 1961: 175; Łabyncew and Szczawinska 2006; Ogonowski 2000: 181, 201–217; Tomaszewski 1985a: 115–116; Wysocka 2006: 15). The linguistic situation of Jews in interwar Poland was complicated. The overwhelming majority of Jews spoke Yiddish. Most of them resided in eastern Poland, which had been part of the Russian Empire. Beginning in the 1820s, St Petersburg had herded their ancestors into special Russian-language state schools. This compulsory educational system had not converted Jews to Orthodox Christianity (as initially hoped), but had inculcated them with the knowledge of Russian and appreciation of things Russian. Ironically, no similar educational system for Russian-speakers was established until the reforms of 1906–1908 (although a real breakthrough in this sphere came only after 1917); hence, in 1897, one-third of male Jews were literate in Russian, compared with 21 percent literacy in this language for the empire as a whole. The subsequent heavy Jewish participation in the urbanization and industrialization of the Empire made Russian their preferred language of social advance and intra-group communication, with the exception of Warsaw, Łód´z and elsewhere in Congress Poland, where Polish tended to play this role. Similarly, Jews from Wielkopolska, Pomerania, and Upper Silesia preferred German, as their emancipation had taken place in Prussia and entailed compulsory elementary education in German. Polish as well as German were important for the Jews of Galicia because the former language replaced the latter as the medium of the crownland’s educational system in 1869. Hebrew remained the language of Judaism and religious books, but it was prohibited to use Hebrew, Yiddish, and the Hebrew alphabet to write public documents, such as commercial contracts, in Austria (1846), Prussia (1847), and Russia (1862). In Austria-Hungary and Germany, Jews circumvented this prohibition by writing in ‘bad German’ (that is, Yiddish) with the use either of Antiqua- or Gothic-style Latin letters. Warsaw did not scrap the aforementioned prohibitions, despite numerous Jewish protests, until 1931. In spite of the continuation of these prohibitions, Jews tended to conduct their public meetings either in Yiddish or Hebrew, and the authorities usually tolerated the situation. In 1927, the Minister of Domestic Affairs decided that no actions should be taken to limit the use of these two languages during Jewish public meetings.

596 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Apart from the Tutejsi, the Jewish minority in Poland was unique in that there was no Jewish nation-state or a single national movement to which Jews could wholeheartedly express their loyalty. (Jewish nationalism was split between Zionists, who learned, revived, or constructed Modern Hebrew and wanted to build a nation-state in Palestine, and Yiddish-speaking Jews, who continued to see Europe as their ‘fatherland.’) In 1921, this prompted 25.5 percent of Jews to declare themselves to be Poles. The development of Zionism caused 111,000 Jews to emigrate to Palestine between 1921 and 1937, while growing anti-Semitism and various anti-Jewish regulations7 generated 300,000 more Jewish emigrants, who left for other countries in the same period (that is, altogether about 13 percent of Poland’s Jews). The situation also led to the steep decline in the number of Jews who declared themselves to be Poles (a 10 percent in 1931). Simultaneously, the role of Hebrew and Yiddish increased, especially at the cost of Polish and Russian. There was a politicized division between Jewish nationalists who wanted to make either Hebrew or Yiddish the sole Jewish national language. Ideological struggles between these two mutually antagonistic camps even triggered riots (so-called ‘language wars’) in Palestine (Adamczuk and Zdaniewicz 1991: 41; Estraikh 1999: 8–10; Katz 2004: 310–332; ˙ Ogonowski 2000: 133–134, 138, 148; Zbikowski 1997: 209, 213). The measures to regulate the use of various languages in interwar Poland produced a system similar to that which had functioned in the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary. Polish was the state language, not unlike the German Staatsprache in Austria. The difference was that Polish was to be used in all state offices, with the exception of the Silesian Voivodeship where the transitional procedure allowed for employing German in inner administration until 1926. Citizens were allowed to use Belarusian, German, Lithuanian, or Ruthenian (Ukrainian) while contacting state offices in specifically defined regions of interwar Poland. The system was reminiscent of the Austrian concept of Landessprache (regional language), but in Austria-Hungary such a regional language could be the sole language of administration in a crownland (for instance, Polish in Galicia) or a co-language of administration (for example, Czech alongside German in Bohemia and Moravia). Other minority languages, not allowed in contacts with administration but tolerated in public life, were Hebrew, Czechoslovak (Czech),8 Russian9 and Yiddish. They were similar to the landesüblichen Sprachen, or nonofficial languages, used in crownlands. But, in Austria, these languages could be used in communal and municipal self-government (for instance, Czech and Polish in Austrian Silesia), whereas in Poland, the use of ‘tolerated minority languages’ was limited to secular and religious minority organizations, and to the minority press and education. This Polish system of legal toleration for minority languages followed the middle path between the linguistic liberalism in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy and the monopoly of German and Russian in the public life (as well as

The Polish Nation

597

administration and education) of the German and Russian empires. The closest parallel to the Polish case was offered by the situation of minority languages in Russia after the 1905 revolution, when the linguistic monopoly of Russians had been weakened. By comparison, the situation of Ruthenian, which had been a landesübliche Sprache in eastern Galicia, was worse in interwar Poland. The position of Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ruthenian (in Volhynia and Polesia) was similar to that which these languages had enjoyed in Russia’s western gubernias between 1905 and 1914. On the other hand, the situation of these three languages (and Yiddish) worsened after 1918 when compared with the semi-official status they had enjoyed in Berlin’s Land Ober Ost and Vienna’s Rear Administration Area. The only languages whose situation markedly improved in interwar Poland were Hebrew and Yiddish, which Vienna had not let Jews declare as the indicator of their nationality in Austro-Hungarian censuses. The census-takers had interpreted Yiddish as ‘German’ and claimed that Hebrew, like Latin, was a dead language, and thus not used in everyday conversation. Perhaps Warsaw’s lenient stance toward Hebrew and Yiddish was dictated by the fact that Zionism had already taken its definite shape by that time. Jews wanted to establish their nation-state in Palestine, not in Poland, and those opting to remain in Poland or other European states embraced linguistic assimilation. Hence, there was no potential for the kind of direct conflict between Polish and Jewish nationalism that broke out between the Polish nation-state and the nation-states or national movements of the Belarusians, Czechoslovaks (Czechs and Slovaks), Germans, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians (Ogonowski 2000: 168). The fate of Latin and French as sociolects of the Polish-Lithuanian nobles and the Polish intelligentsia is also interesting. The role of Latin, which diminished at the end of the 18th century with the elevation of Polish to the rank of the official language of Poland-Lithuania, was revived beginning in the second decade of 19th century in Prussia (including the Prussian partition zone) in line with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1767–1835) reform of the Prussian educational system. In Gymnasium (9 years of consecutive education between elementary school and university) students had 10 hours of Latin and 6 hours of Greek per week. This model of the so-called ‘classicist Gymnasium’ spread to the Austrian and Russian partition zones, though most Polish-speaking students, fluent in Latin, were educated in Prussia. Although diminishing somewhat, Latin continued to play a significant role in interwar Poland’s classicist and regular secondary schools until the 1932 reform of secondary education, which limited the teaching of this language to between 2 and 4 hours a week. This terminated the tradition of intellectuals and nobles who could converse in Latin, the tradition which prompted Adam Mickiewicz to write Latin-language poems well into the 1850s.10 Beginning in the 1930s, Latin remained the sociolect of only the Catholic clergy, and the renewed Order of Jesus regularly reissued Sarbiewski’s works annotated in Latin ad usum alumnorum, or ‘for the use of graduates of divinity

598 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

seminaries.’ The Catholic faithful were exposed to Latin in liturgy, but without understanding of actual words. This tradition continued until the turn of the 1970s, in wake of the Vatican Council II’s (1962–1965) decisions that replaced Latin as the language of liturgy with the languages of the faithful. French, as a sociolect of Polish nobles, intelligentsia, and scholars, was preserved until the mid-20th century. In communist Poland, this language was stamped out when the prewar middle class was neutered and its higher echelons impoverished and liquidated. In place of a marginalized French, Russian was introduced as the language of international communication in the Soviet bloc. The creation of the Polish nation-state, which paid obeisance to the ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, made knowledge of the national languages of the neighboring nation-states an ideological liability. Hence, by extension, fluency in French became suspect too. Oscar Milosz Vladislas de Lubicz (Oskaras Milašius, 1877–1939) shared the same origin with his younger cousin, the Nobel Prize winner, Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004). Both were of the Polonophone Polish-Lithuanian nobility who claimed the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their patria. Oscar Milosz read and wrote in Polish, French, German, Russian, and English. But he decided to write his literary works exclusively in French, which made him a French poet. During the Great War, he developed a conviction that his family were ‘Polonized Lithuanians’ and supported the Lithuanian national cause, also serving as Lithuania’s first ever ambassador to France. He did not know Lithuanian and corresponded with the Lithuanian government in French, but he could be accepted as a ‘true Lithuanian,’ since he chose not to write in Polish. Ironically, with the rise of the ethnolinguistic nation-states in Central Europe, French as a sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility became a proof of non-Polishness in the case of Oscar Milosz. Obviously, Warsaw considered him a ‘Polish renegade.’ Ideology aside, everyday practice remained multilingual in interwar Poland. For instance, the Szlonzokian leaders of the pro-Polish movement in Upper Silesia corresponded with Warsaw in German because their dialect was not standard Polish. They were appalled to find out in the mid-1920s that, despite their invaluable contribution to the Polish national cause, this linguistic predicament would mean their exclusion from the Silesian Voivodeship’s civil service and administration when the transitional period for the use of German was over in 1926. The event prompted numerous members of the embittered Szlonzokian elite to embrace Germandom or Szlonzokiandom (Mikołajczak 1998: 254–255, 263, 276, 307–308; Miłosz 1993: 147–150, 2001: 162–206; Sarbiewski 1892; Serafin 1996: 72).

Polish: From a minority to hegemonic language Observing the growth of Polish ethnic nationalism, the worsening situation of the minorities, and the blow dealt to Polish democracy by the 1926 coup

The Polish Nation

599

d’état, the famous Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay stated in 1926 that ‘Poland’s biggest misfortune was that from the fires of World War, it emerged as a “great state’’ with centralist, imperialist and nationalist cravings. It would have been much better [for Poland], if it had become a small modest state, or a union of autonomous regions [. . .]. Then the leaders would not have gone bonkers with their lust for power, and would not have oppressed the “national minorities’’ and other social classes.’ (Courtenay 1972: 216) His was a lonely voice because even Dmowski’s supporters, who appealed for an ethnically homogenous Polish nation-state, did not want to limit the Polish state just to the undisputable ethnographic area with a majority of Polish-speakers. This would have produced a ‘shrunken Poland’ centered on the Vistula Land, western Galicia, and the Polish half of Wielkopolska. The Polish-speaking intelligentsia, who became the elite of the Polish national movement and, after 1918, of the Polish nationstate, imagined ‘true Poland’ to be ideally coterminous with the 1772 borders of Poland-Lithuania. (At the turn of the 20th century, it was realized that it might be impossible to Polonize such a vast number of non-Polish-speakers as the ideal would require and hence for practical purposes, Polish leaders tended to limit their territorial claims to the Polish-Lithuanian borders as they were prior to the second partition in 1793.) This ideal of the Polish-Lithuanian noble natio was unreflectively carried over to Polish nationalism, which also preached ethnolinguistic homogeneity. As a result, the ethnically non-Polish, forming a third of interwar Poland’s population, became the target of increasingly aggressive Polonizing measures, despite Warsaw’s constitutional and international obligations to protect Poland’s national, religious, and linguistic minorities, and to enable them to develop their cultural lives (Ciesielski et al. 1992: 22). Despite the constitutional and international obligations to protect the cultures and languages of the minorities, the most exact measure of the growing dominance of the Polish language in interwar Poland was the declining number of schools with minority languages as the medium of instruction. For a point of reference, it is necessary to take the national structure of Poland’s population. The problem is that the results of censuses were often manipulated. For instance, in 1931, Poles constituted 22.1 million (69 percent) out of the total population of 32.1 million, according to the official data. Polish scholars tend to lower this number to 20.77 million (65 percent). As a guideline for this analysis, I take the following corrected estimates. Hence Ruthenians (Ukrainians) accounted for 16 percent of the population, Jews for 10 percent, Belarusians (including Tutejsi) for 6 percent, and Germans for 2 percent. The number which differs most between the official data and the estimate is that of Belarusians. Warsaw claimed that they constituted a mere 3 percent of Poland’s population. More than 700,000 Tutejsi were conveniently hidden away in the rubric ‘Others’ (Tomaszewski 1985a: 50–51).

600 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the school year 1923/1924, there were 21,996 (82.5 percent) state elementary schools with Polish as the medium of instruction, 2996 (11.2 percent) with Ruthenian (Ukrainian), 1102 (4.1 percent) with German, 52 (0.2 percent) with Lithuanian, 39 (0.15 percent) with Czech, 32 (0.1 percent) with Belarusian, and 9 (0.03 percent) with Russian. Poles thus possessed 17.5 percent more elementary schools than they were entitled to by their share of Poland’s population. The greatest disparity existed in the case of Jews (10 percent), who in 1923/1924, did not have a single state elementary school with Yiddish or Hebrew as the medium of instruction, whereas in 1922/1923, 113 Jewish private elementary schools had Hebrew as the language of instruction, 71 Yiddish, and 11 were bilingual with Polish and Yiddish or Hebrew. The second largest divergence between the demographic size of a minority population and the number of its elementary schools was noted in the case of Belarusians, 6 percent versus 0.1 percent. For Ruthenians, the ratio was 16 percent to 11.2 percent, but for Germans surprisingly 2 percent to 4.1 percent. Obviously, this was not dictated by Warsaw’s eagerness to furnish the German minority with more elementary schools per one thousand inhabitants than the Polish majority, but was a legacy of the much better developed network of elementary schools in the German Empire. Immediately after the founding of the Polish nation-state, bilingual elementary schools were introduced to limit the extent of minority-language education and to re-direct minority students to the Polish-language mainstream of education. In 1923/1924, there were 333 Polish-German schools (1.25 percent), 89 Polish-Ruthenian (0.3 percent), 3 Polish-Czech, 1 Polish-Lithuanian, and 1 Polish-Yiddish. The biggest blow was dealt to Belarusian-language education. In 1915, the first ever elementary school with Belarusian as the medium of instruction was established in Vilnius, Land Ober Ost. The number of such schools grew dynamically in the Land Ober Ost to the unprecedented 346 in 1918/1919 in the Belarusian territories within interwar Poland’s borders. The Soviet-Polish War and the subsequent Polish seizure of Central Lithuania against Lithuania’s will contributed to the constant emphasis on the Polish national program in Poland’s section of Belarus. In 1922/1923, there were only around 30 Belarusian-language schools in Poland. Ukrainians of eastern Galicia, who accounted for more than 60 percent of the region’s population, were also appalled at the constant slump in the number of Ruthenian-language state elementary schools in comparison to the situation in Austria-Hungary, where beginning in 1890, they had enjoyed a wide-ranging linguistic, cultural, and educational autonomy. In 1911/1912, the ratio of Polish-language to Ukrainian-language schools was 1590 (39.7 percent) to 2420 (60.3 percent) in the region. In 1924/1925, the number of Polish-language schools there increased to 2568 (54.3 percent) and that of the Ukrainian-language ones declined slightly to 2151 (45.5 percent). In the same

The Polish Nation

601

year, bilingual Polish-Ruthenian schools (nine) also surfaced for the first time. In independent Poland, all the chairs with Ukrainian as the language of instruction were abolished at the University of Lwów. (The same fate met the single Ukrainian chair at the University of Cern˘ au¸ti [Chernivtsi] in Bukovina granted to Romania after 1918.) The Underground Ukrainian University founded in their stead, was suppressed by 1925. Warsaw’s sole concession was the reopening of the 1848 Chair in Ruthenian Language and Literature at the University of Lwów in 1927. The number of Polish-Ruthenian bilingual schools sky-rocketed to 2138 (45.25 percent) by 1934/1935. In the same school year, there were 2100 (44.4 percent) Polish-language schools, and only 487 (10.3 percent) Ruthenianlanguage schools. The situation was even more striking in Volhynia, where ethnic Poles represented only 16.8 percent of the population (1921). In 1929/1930, however, the number of Polish-language schools was 821, of bilingual PolishRuthenian 625, and of Ruthenian-language a mere 7. In the region of Polesia, intervening between the clearly Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Polish core ethnic territories, 22 Ukrainian-language schools operated in 1922/1923. Polesia’s rural population declared themselves as Tutejsi, which Warsaw interpreted as the lack of any national identity. This allowed claiming of the Tutejsi for the Polish nation by stern Polonization. Not surprisingly, non-Polish-language schools disappeared there by the mid-1920s. The Polonizing tendency to replace minority-language schools with bilingual ones, where the minority language was paired with Polish, or to liquidate minority-language schools, is clearly visible in the numbers of state and private elementary schools in 1937/1938. In the country as a whole, there were 24,047 (84 percent) Polish-language elementary schools, 461 (1.6 percent) Ruthenianlanguage, 394 (1.4 percent) German-language, 226 (0.8 percent) Hebrew- or Yiddish-language, 23 Lithuanian-language, 18 Czech-language, and 5 Russianlanguage. The unwillingness of the state to support minority-language education was reflected in the number of private elementary schools. All of the Jewish (Hebrew or Yiddish) elementary schools were private, as were 60 percent of the German-language elementary schools and 9 percent of the Ruthenian-language elementary schools. The bilingual elementary schools were almost exclusively state-run, with the exception of 226 bilingual Jewish (Polish and Hebrew or Yiddish) schools, all of which were private. The separation of Jewish education from the Polish state was thus complete. In 1937/1938, there were 3064 (10.7 percent) state and 4 private Polish-Ruthenian schools, and 206 (0.7 percent) state and 4 private Polish-German schools. Most conspicuous was the absence of Belarusian-language or even Belarusian-Polish elementary schools. Their number declined to 25 Belarusian and 44 bilingual in 1929/1930, 16 mostly bilingual in 1934/1935, to a mere 5 bilingual in 1937/1938, and to nil in 1938/1939. In the last school year, one middle school and one secondary school

602 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

with Belarusian as the medium of instruction survived. Already in the 1920s, the authorities supported the parallel use of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts for writing in Belarusian to draw the line between Poland’s Belarusians and those residing in Soviet Belarus and Lithuania, who stuck exclusively to Cyrillic. In addition, in the mid-1920s, Jesuits established the Neo-Uniate Church in the Belarusianspeaking areas, where St Petersburg liquidated the last vestiges of the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church in 1875. These Jesuits published Belarusian-language periodicals for Belarusian Catholics and (Neo-)Uniates (Greek Catholics) in the Latin characters, and Warsaw termed these groups Białopolaki (White Poles) in a fashion reminiscent of the tsarist use of ‘White Russians’ for Belarusians. This further hindered literacy in Belarusian, since Cyrillic was used in Soviet Belarus, among Lithuania’s Belarusian minority, and among Orthodox Belarusians residing in Poland. Obviously, in line with the 1920 Act on Higher Education Institutions, Polish was the exclusive medium of instruction in the 28 institutions of higher education that existed in Poland in 1937/1938. Warsaw’s Polonizing endeavor also showed in the decline of the number of minority MPs in the Sejm, especially visible after the 1926 coup d’état. The number of Ruthenian MPs decreased slightly, from 21 (4.7 percent) in 1922 to 19 (9.2 percent11 ) in 1938. The decline was steeper for Jewish MPs, from 35 (7.8 percent) to 5 (2.4 percent), whereas German and Belarusian MPs disappeared altogether from the Sejm in 1938, although 17 (3.7 percent) German and 7 (1.5 percent) Belarusian MPs had sat there in 1922. Overall, minority MPs accounted for 18.4 percent of the Sejm deputies in 1922, 19.4 percent in 1928, 7.4 percent in 1930, 11.4 percent in 1935 and 12 percent in 1938. The same process was reflected in the Sejm of the autonomous Silesian Voivodeship. In 1922, there were 14 (30 percent) German MPs in the Silesian Sejm. In 1930, their number fell to 9 (19 percent), and to nil in 1935 (Annuaire statistique de la République Polonaise 1924: 219; Davies 1982: II 409; Drucki-Podbereski 1929; Horak 1961: 110–111, 144; Lastauskas 1924; Magocsi 1980: 13, 1996: 594; Mały rocznik statystyczny 1934: 175, 1939: 319; Serafin 1996: 185–186; Siemakowicz 2001; Szybieka 2002: 188–189; Tomaszewski 1985a: 90, 114; Vakar 1956: 130). When Poland was established in 1918, slightly more than one-third of the Polish-speakers were literate. Most of the illiterate were concentrated in the former Russian partition zone, because compulsory elementary education, although introduced the Russian Empire in 1908, had not been successfully enforced until 1917. In Prussia and Austria, compulsory elementary education was introduced at the end of the 18th century. Yet, enforcement of this provision depended on the overall economic development. By the 1870s, almost all the inhabitants of Prussia/the German Empire were literate. The same was true of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia (that is, Austria-Hungary’s center of industry), but obviously not of Galicia, which remained an impoverished crownland until the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy. Widespread literacy in

The Polish Nation

603

the German territories incorporated by Poland did not mean that Polish-speakers living there could write in Polish. The language in which they had been taught to read and write was German. This was even truer of the Szlonzoks of the Silesian Voivodeship. Those who decided to support the Polish national cause corresponded with Warsaw in German, because it soon turned out that their Slavophone dialect, when committed to paper, was unintelligible to civil servants in the Polish capital. The unified state system of compulsory and free elementary education in Poland took off in 1922. By the school year 1928/1929, 96 percent of children between 7 and 14 were attending school. Illiteracy decreased from 33.1 percent in 1921 to 23.1 percent 10 years later. But the policy of forced Polonization, involving pacifications, destruction of Orthodox churches, persecution of minority activists, closing of minority-language schools, suspension and censorship of the minority-language press, and abolition of minority associations, left Belarusians and Ruthenians with larger illiteracy percentages. While the predominantly urban Germans and Jews could make up for the inadequacy of state education in their languages with private schools, this was not an option for the largely rural and impoverished Belarusians and Ukrainians. Jews could count on the financial and organizational help of their co-religionists (or co-ethnics) from Western Europe, and Germans on the financial and political support of the German nation-state. Both these options were closed to Poland’s Belarusians and Ukrainians. Before the Soviet Union joined the international community of states in 1933 (by becoming a member of the League of Nations), there was little contact between Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and Poland. Afterward, a new policy of Russification commenced throughout the Soviet Union; hence Moscow was not interested in encouraging, let alone supporting ‘bourgeoisnationalist deviation’ among Poland’s Belarusians and Ukrainians. In addition, the Ukrainian and Belarusian national cultures and languages were steeped in Cyrillic, so the ‘Catholic’ or ‘Polish’ (that is, Latin) alphabet of Polish, perceived as part and parcel of the increasingly imposed medium of education, indisposed Belarusian and Ruthenian students to the Polish language. Nonetheless, illiteracy among the Belarusian and Tutejsi of Polesia declined from 71 percent in 1921 to 48.4 percent in 1931, and among the Ruthenians of Volhynia from 68.6 percent to 47.8 percent. The statistics concealed, however, that this little success was mostly achieved by the imposition of literacy in Polish (Davies 1981: II 418; Rothschild 1977: 44; Vakar 1956: 129). Following the founding of the Polish nation-state, a system to control the norm of the Polish language was created, which eventually prevented the possibility of the emergence of different Polishes in the three partition zones, a development most dreaded by the leaders of the Polish national movement before 1918. In 1919, the AU (Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci, Academy of Sciences) based in Cracow was transformed into the Polska Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci (PAU,

604 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Polish Academy of Sciences). It functioned as the national academy of sciences, although that did not mean that regional scientific societies were extinguished; they continued as usual. But in 1931, PAU began to cooperate with them more closely in order to coordinate the development of polska nauka (Polish science and humanities). In this manner, science modified by the national adjective ‘Polish’ was made into an ideological pillar of Polish nationalism. The pillar’s inner core was the Polish language. The 1920 Act on Higher Education Institutions, which guaranteed the monopoly of Polish in higher education prevented the rise of higher education in minority languages. Before 1914, Polish was used as the medium of education only in the universities of Cracow and Lwów. The German occupation administration reestablished the University of Warsaw (closed down in 1869; functioned as the Russianlanguage Imperial University of Warsaw between 1870 and 1915, then, after evacuation, for two years more in Rostov-on-Don) in 1915 with Polish as the language of instruction. In 1919, the University of Wilno (closed down in 1832) was reestablished by the Polish nation-state. In the same year, the University of Poznan ´ was founded; it was the first ever university in the former Prussian zone of partition. The following year, the Polish Catholic Church founded the Catholic University of Lublin to further the Polish-national-cumCatholic dimension of university education. The Free Polish University (Wolna Wszechnica Polska) was founded in Warsaw in 1918/1919. In 1927, it opened a branch in Łód´z, and Warsaw recognized it as a full-fledged university 2 years later. The two final volumes of Jan Karłowicz’s eight-volume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language, Warsaw) appeared in 1919 and 1927. The first six volumes had been published between 1900 and 1915. It was the first multivolume authoritative dictionary of Polish that did not succumb to the prop of translating Polish headwords into German or Russian, as Samuel Bogumił Linde had done in his six-volume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (1807–1814, Warsaw). Despite repeated official requests by Galicia’s Rada Szkolna (School Council) to the AU since the mid-1880s, the AU had not wanted to propose its own internal orthography obligatory for all who wrote and published in Polish. On the other hand, Karłowicz and his collaborator Adam Krynski ´ championed orthographic rules different from those employed by the AU. Their weapon for propagating their own vision of Polish spelling was Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. After the publication of the first volume in 1900, the AU had no choice but to hand the compilers the Linde prize, and Galicia’s Rada Szkolna recommended this dictionary for use in the crownland’s Polish-language schools. The title page of the second volume (1902) informed the reader about these two achievements. In this manner, Warsaw orthography infiltrated Galicia at the cost of the AU’s Cracow orthography. The domination of Warsaw orthography became unstoppable after the founding of the Kingdom of Poland (1916) in the occupied territory

The Polish Nation

605

of Russia’s Vistula Land. The speedily created Polish-language educational system had no choice but to use Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego, since the AU had never managed to produce its own authoritative multivolume dictionary of Polish. In 1918, the Department of Philology at the University of Warsaw, led by Krynski, ´ produced Główne zasady pisowni (The Main Principles of [Polish] Orthography) in collaboration with the AU’s Language Commission. Neither PAU nor any other academic center or publishing house attempted to compile a brand-new, authoritative, multivolume dictionary of Polish in interwar Poland. This was probably due to the more burning political concerns, such as integration of the disparate territories and populations from which interwar Poland had been made. On the other hand, the Polish economy was also in some difficulty, unlike that of Czechoslovakia. The Czech Academy of Sciences, which had been planning a new authoritative dictionary of the Czech language since 1911, managed to produce the first four volumes of nine-volume Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language) between 1935 and 1939. Due to the 1918 orthography reform, and the continuing disagreement with regard to Polish spelling, Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego appeared somewhat dated. In the absence of any new authoritative dictionary of Polish that would reflect the interwar consensus on the shape of the Polish language, other lexicographic works, mainly multivolume universal encyclopedias, became guidelines to Polish usage. In the interwar period, three encyclopedias of this kind were published. Stanisław Franiszek Michalski (1881–1961) edited the ambitious Encyklopedja powszechna Ultima Thule (Ultima Thule Universal Encyclopedia, Warsaw). The first 10 volumes, covering entries from A to T, appeared between 1927 and 1939. This project was terminated due to World War II, sharing the same fate as Wielka encyklopedyja powszechna ilustrowana (Great Universal Encyclopedia with Illustrations), whose publication was also terminated in 1915 by the Great War. In the same year, when the first volume of Encyklopedia powszechna Ultima Thule came off the press, the publication of Ilustrowana encyklopedja Trzaski, Everta i Michalskiego (The Illustrated Encyclopedia of [the Publishing House] of Trzaska, Evert and Michalski, Warsaw) commenced. This work, edited by Stanisław Lam (1891–1965), was completed in 1937 with five volumes of entries and a one-volume supplement. The monopoly of Warsaw on the publication of authoritative dictionaries and encyclopedias was breached in 1929 when Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna (The Great Illustrated Universal Encyclopedia) began to appear in Cracow. By 1938, 18 volumes of entries and four volumes of supplements had been published. Also in Cracow, in 1927, Aleksander Brückner’s Slownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language) came off the press. Not only was it the first etymological dictionary of Polish, but of any western Slavic language. Josef Holub’s Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského (The

606 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Short Etymological Dictionary of the Czechoslovak Language) came off the press in Prague 6 years later. In the last 2 years before World War II, the effort was undertaken to publish a brand-new multivolume dictionary of Polish Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1938–1939) edited by Tadeusz Lehr-Spławinski ´ (1891–1965), but just a few fascicules came off the press; and this work, tainted in the eyes of the communist regime by its association with ‘bourgeois Poland,’ was not continued after 1945, unlike the Czech Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského. Because the capital became the unrivalled center of publishing and culture in interwar Poland, the Warsaw orthography, employed in Karłowicz’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego, won hands down. But disagreements and regional differences persisted. The unification of the Polish language had not yet been completed. Jan Ło´s (1860–1928), one of the collaborators who contributed substantially to Karłowicz’s Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of the Polish Dialects), authored Zasady ortografii polskiej i Słownik ortograficzny według zasad Akademii Umieje˛tno´sci (The Principles of Polish Orthography and the Orthographic Dictionary [compiled] in Agreement with the Principles of the Academy of Sciences) in line with the 1918 compromise presented in Główne zasady pisowni (The Main Principles of [Polish] Orthography, 1918, Cracow). This work, later titled Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek (Polish Orthography: The principles and the dictionary, Cracow), went through eight editions in the 1920s. After Ło´s’s death, PAU entrusted Kazimierz Nitsch with new editions. In 1931, PAU unilaterally introduced a small change in orthography, which Nitsch reflected in the ninth and tenth editions of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek (Cracow, 1932 and 1933). New negative opinions appeared in the press and Witold Doroszewski (1899– 1976) from the University of Warsaw trashed the ‘new orthography’ in a 1933 meeting of the Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie (TWN, Warsaw Scientific Society). The pre-1918 conflict between Cracow and Warsaw orthographies was renewed. The intensity of the intellectual struggle was reflected in the title of Zenon Klemensiewicz’s (1891–1969) article, ‘Walka o ortografie˛’ (The Struggle Over Orthography), published in 1935–1936 in Je˛zyk Polski. Doroszewski formalized his attack in Pisownia polska w ostatnich wydaniach (Polish Spelling in the Latest Editions [of PAU’s Polish Orthography], 1933, Warsaw). Immediately, the question was politicized and the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education withdrew its acceptance of the ninth and tenth editions of Nitsch’s Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek, with advice to use Ło´s’s eighth (1928) edition of this work. This decision pitted the ministry against PAU. Eager to regain some of its lost authority, PAU proposed in 1934 establishing of a common body to work out a compromise orthography. The following year, PAU’s Komitet Ortograficzny (Orthographic Committee) was set up. The committee’s first meeting decided against replacing Polish diagraphs [cz], [sz], or [rz] with Czech-style single letters [ˇc], [š], and [ž]. The argument was that

The Polish Nation

607

Polish orthography had evolved since the 16th century and any dramatic change of this kind would have limited readers’ access to older texts. Likewise, it was decided not to make spelling follow the phonetic, etymological, or semantic principle. A compromise mixture of all these principles was to be employed in agreement with established usage. Members of the Orthographic Committee represented the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education, as well as scientific societies, universities, and organizations of publishers, and teachers and journalist from Cracow, Lwów, Poznan, ´ Warsaw, and Wilno. The committee’s specialized commissions had their seats in Cracow, Lwów, and Warsaw. Already at the beginning of the existence of the committee, a clash of egos took place between Nitsch and Zygmunt Tempka (Nowakowski), who represented the Zwia˛zek Dziennikarzy Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (Union of Journalists of the Republic of Poland). Tempka (Nowakowski) resigned from the committee’s deliberations. Later, this event influenced the owner of most of the Cracow press, Marian Da˛browski, to stick to PAU’s old Cracow orthography despite the Orthographic Committee’s new compromise orthography of 1936. Clashes of various authorities in the committee became the order of the day. Deliberations on compromise principles of Polish orthography would have lasted much longer except that the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education decided to introduce new textbooks for public schools in the academic year 1936/1937. The option presented by the ministry to the committee was to complete working out the new rules by mid-1936 or to delay their introduction until 1945. Rather than wait an entire decade before seeing the results of their work in print, the committee had completed its rules by April 1936. Nitsch presented them in the eleventh edition of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek (1936, Cracow); they were largely uncontested. Thus, the uneasy divide between Cracow and Warsaw orthographies came to an end. At the same time, the codification of Polish technical vocabulary was completed. In 1913, Karol (father) and Karol (son) Stadtmüller’s extensive Technisches Wörterbuch / Słownik techniczny (German-Polish Technical Dictionary) was published in Cracow. The two-volume Polish-German version of this dictionary appeared in 1936 in Poznan. ´ The city was the center of Polish industry and technology, and the knowledge of German remained widespread in interwar Wielkopolska. Hence, it was the most suitable place for producing such a lexicographic work because most of the vocabulary were loan words borrowed directly from German. Besides recording them, Stadtmüllers also proposed new counterparts derived from genetically Polish words, for instance, Stange (‘pole’ or ‘rod’ in German), s´tanga (Polonized German loan word), and dra˛g (genetically Polish word) (Da˛browska 2004: 66; Jodłowski 1979: 66–80). Interwar Poland was largely a rural state with the majority of the population deriving its livelihood from agriculture. Usually, such populations remain largely immobile unless ‘unsaddled’ from their locality (and traditional social

608 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

status) by war or sweeping systemic change. A semblance of such a situation loomed in eastern Poland during the Polish-Soviet War. But Warsaw’s victory prevented the revolution. As a result, most of the so-called ‘Polish-speakers’ continued to speak in their local dialects instead in standard Polish. The same was true of the national minorities, which, despite Warsaw’s Polonizing efforts, preserved their non-Polish languages and dialects. A reversal of the willing selfPolonization of Jews was visible in the drop in the percentage of those who declared their mother tongue as Polish from over 25 percent in the early 1920s to 10 percent a decade later. Hence, the speakers of standard Polish were the intelligentsia, usually identified as graduates of higher education institutions. Between 1923/1924 and 1937/1938, the number of students in Poland’s higher education institutions rose from 39,000 to 48,000. Many of them were not ethnic Poles and quite a few emigrated due to lack of suitable employment opportunities in Poland. It is estimated that the Polish intelligentsia numbered 70,000 in 1939. The passive knowledge of standard Polish was furthered by books and journals. In the interwar period, about 6200 book titles were produced annually. It was a 100 percent increase in comparison to the times before 1918, when about 3000 Polish-language book titles had been published. The principles of the 1936 orthographic reform stood an even better chance of being propagated throughout Poland, as book production in 1938 reached a record 8700 titles with 29 million copies being published. Beginning in 1925, radio broadcasting began to develop in Poland. Before the outbreak of World War II, there were 1 million radios, but their owners lived mainly in cities, which reinforced the homogeneity of standard Polish mainly among the intelligentsia and well-to-do urban dwellers without spreading the knowledge of this standard in the countryside, where the majority of the population resided. Hence, standard Polish remained a minority spoken language of high prestige, with which it was endowed by the state and the intelligentsia. For the overwhelming majority of ethnic Poles, this language functioned as a potent national rallying symbol, but their knowledge of standard Polish was predominantly passive (Bajerowa 2003: 21, 46; Bienkowska ´ and Chamerska 1990: 31; Horak 1961: 114; Karlík et al. 2002: 422). This overview of the interwar intertwining of Polish language and nationalism would not be complete without mentioning the phenomenon of ‘Polonia.’ (‘Polonia’ is the Latin name for Poland.) In the last three decades of the 19th century, and prior to the Great War, about 1.4 million presumably Polonophone (in reality dialect-speaking) peasants left the impoverished and overpopulated countryside of Galicia and western Russia for the Americas and Western Europe. The two anti-Russian uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864, and further anti-Russian plots, resulted in waves of exiles to Siberia. Political refugees, intellectuals, and scholars, usually of noble or intelligentsia background, chose to settle in France or elsewhere in Western Europe. Business and career opportunities attracted many an aspiring Pole to central and eastern Russia and to

The Polish Nation

609

distant regions of Austria-Hungary as well. The Ruhr industrial basin, and western Germany in general, became the magnet for 0.65 million Polonophone (including Kashubian-, Mazurian- and Szlonzokian-speaking) workers from Germany’s eastern provinces, which, especially in the last three decades of the 19th century, sent 0.6 million Slavophone emigrants to Northern America.12 At the beginning of the 20th century, when there was still no Polish state, the Polishlanguage press began to refer to this Polish diaspora as ‘Polonia.’ On the one hand, this label fostered the desired unity of the Polish ethnic nation, while on the other, it functioned as an ersatz Polish nation-state, combining presumed Polish-speakers, and Polish language, culture, and politics into a single ideological entity. Ideological, political, and even military support for the Polish nation-state in statu nascendi streamed from the United States, where it was masterminded by Polonia, then headed by Paderewski. In the interwar period, Polonia remained a significant element of legitimization of Polish national statehood. In the early 1930s, the number of the members of Polonia was estimated between 6 and 10 million. Within Polonia, Polish minorities and Polish emigrant settlers were clearly distinguished. The minorities were perceived as part of the ‘still unredeemed ethnographic territory rightfully belonging to the Polish nation-state,’ much in line with Nitsch’s 1920/1921 article published in Je˛zyk Polski, which equated the ‘true territorial extent of the Polish state’ with interwar Poland plus adjacent areas outside the Polish borders where Polish was believed to be spoken, according to Polish philologists. Hence, Polish minorities were conceived of as residing in all of Poland’s neighboring states as well as in non-contiguous Latvia and Romania. They were estimated to number between 2.6 and 3 million. The highest estimates indicated 1.5 million Poles in the Soviet Union (mainly in Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine), 1.1 million in Germany (mainly in the plebiscite areas and in the Ruhr industrial basin), 0.25 million in Lithuania, 0.25 million in Czechoslovakia (in Tˇešín Silesia, Orava and Spiš), 83,000 in Latvia and 57,000 in Romania (mainly in Bukovina and Bessarabia). Polish emigrant settlers numbered 700,000 to 800,000 elsewhere in Europe (including 37,000 in the Free City of Danzig), between 2.2 million and 5.6 million in Northern America, between 171,000 and 310,000 in Latin and Central America, and 6000 in other continents (Emigracja 2006; Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna 1931: 328–329; Walaszek 2001: 529).

World War II: Polish is a minority language once again In the name of the policy of Polonization, Warsaw used administrative and legalistic measures in the 1920s. The 1930s, and especially the latter half of the decade, saw the use of illegal methods, which blatantly breached Polish law and Warsaw’s international obligations. Poland, like the rest of Central Europe

610 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(with the tentative exception of Czechoslovakia), was sliding into ethnonational authoritarianism. The clear signs were political refugees from Poland, the concentration camp for political oppositionists established in 1934 in Bereza Kartuska (today, Biaroza in Belarus), the state-inspired destruction of Orthodox churches, and the persecution of Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders in the late 1930s. After the expiration of the Polish-German Geneva Convention on Upper Silesia (1937), the use of German between state officials and citizens was prohibited. The political tension in German-Polish relations during the last months preceding the outbreak of World War II translated into the persecutions of the German minority in Poland and its Polish counterpart in Germany, including the firing of Germans from factories and mines and the practical liquidation of German minority schools. Berlin used similar measures on Germany’s Polish minority. After the German Anschluß (annexation) of Austria in March 1938, Paris and London wished to appease Berlin, and (together with Rome) signed the Munich Agreement in September. It required Czechoslovakia to give up all its borderland territories (the so-called Sudetenland) with German majorities. The Annex to this agreement also obliged Czechoslovakia to settle the ‘question of [the] Polish and Magyar minorities.’ Prague resigned itself to the pressure, and Warsaw immediately issued an ultimatum demanding cession of Tˇešín Silesia, Spiš, and Orava. Prague had no choice but to agree. The Poles of Tˇešín Silesia, known as the Zaolzie (that is, the ‘land beyond the Olše/Olza River’) in the Polish political lexicon, welcomed Polish troops as enthusiastically as Austrians had welcomed the German armies entering Austria earlier that year. Because it contained most of the Ostrava-Karviná industrial basin, Tˇešín Silesia was a top priority for Warsaw. It was included in the Silesian Voivodeship; at least 8000 Czech civil servants and workers were sacked and Polish replaced Czech in all aspects of public life. The sheer aggressiveness of these measures sent a wave of 35,000 refugees from Tˇešín Silesia to rump Czecho-Slovakia (Serafin 1996: 196–210). In March 1939, Germany annexed the western half of Czecho-Slovakia and turned it into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Under German pressure, autonomous Slovakia declared its independence; Subcarpathian Ruthenia, having received autonomy, toyed with independence too, but Hungary soon annexed the region. This annexation generated much rejoicing in Budapest and Warsaw, for Hungary and Poland had ‘regained’ a common border, the Kingdom of Hungary and Poland-Lithuania had had prior to the first partition of the latter polity in 1772. Poland’s ‘turn’ came in September 1939, however, when Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned this country. The western half of Poland (up to the Bug River) was occupied by Germany and its eastern half by the Soviet Union. Moscow granted the southern part of its occupation zone (south of the Pripet River) to Soviet Ukraine. The zone’s northern half went to Soviet Belarus, except for the Vilnius region, transferred to Lithuania.

The Polish Nation

611

This dismayed Belarusian leaders, who (as their predecessors in 1918) hoped to establish the capital of united Belarus in Vilnius. The Lithuanians immediately shifted their capital from Kaunas to Vilnius, which the interwar Lithuanian Constitution proclaimed the rightful capital of Lithuania, despite its incorporation into Poland. But the rejoicing did not last long; in July 1940, the Kremlin forced Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to ‘join’ the Soviet Union. In its occupation zone of Poland, Berlin re-incorporated all the areas that had belonged to Germany before 1922, plus some adjacent territories. Wielkopolska gained the new name of ‘Wartheland,’ derived from its main river (Warta, or Warthe in German). The remaining section of Germany’s territorial gains, largely coterminous with western Galicia and the Vistula Land, was turned into the strangely named (in that the name sounds more French than German) ‘Generalgouvernement,’ with its capital in Cracow. In national socialist propaganda literature, the Generalgouvernement was often referred to as the ‘Weichselraum,’ which was the literal translation of the tsarist designation Vistula Land. The name ‘Poland’ was thoroughly erased from maps and administrative usage. As a reward for the participation of Slovak troops in the German onslaught on Poland, Bratislava regained its sections of Spisz (Spiš) and Orawa (Orava), lost to Poland in the previous year, and gained the Polish sections of Spisz and Orawa, as well. Whereupon, Slovak replaced Polish as official language and the medium of education. In the Polish territories directly incorporated into Germany, Polish was banned from all aspects of public life; use of this language even in private was prohibited under the penalty of fine, or a concentration camp. Place and street names were mostly replaced with their German counterparts used before 1918. The previously Polish schools were Germanized, and the University of Poznan ´ (Posen in German) turned into a German Reichsuniversität (in 1941). The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (1939), which provided for the division of Central Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, also entailed the exchange of populations, that is, ethnic Germans from Moscow’s share to the Third Reich and of Belarusians and Ukrainians from Berlin’s share to the Soviet Union. Ethnic Germans, numbering 193,000, from formerly Polish territories and from Lithuania under Soviet control were resettled mainly to the erstwhile Polish territories incorporated into Germany. And 239,000 more followed from all around Europe between 1939 and 1944. Room was made for the new arrivals by expelling ethnic Poles from the incorporated areas to the Generalgouvernement. From the former Voivodeship of Pomerania alone, 750,000 ethnic Poles were expelled and 80,000 from the new German Province of Upper Silesia. For the remaining Slavophone, Polish-speaking, or bilingual population, which had been holders of German citizenship prior to 1918, the Deutsche Volksliste (DVL, German National List) was established. Group 1 of the DVL were defined as ‘indubitable Germans,’ Groups 2 and 3 as a Zwischengruppe (group between

612 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

[Germandom and Polishdom]), and Group 4 as ‘renegades of German roots.’ The requirements of the war effort coaxed Berlin to grant German citizenship to those inscribed in Groups 2 and 3. The largest number, over 1.3 million persons, were inscribed onto the list in Upper Silesia. They were mostly Szlonzoks whom Warsaw had previously attempted to Polonize, which had alienated them vis-à-vis the Polish nation-state. The Zwischengruppe also embraced the more homogenously Slavophone Slunzaks (of the Zaolzie and Cieszyn Silesia). Unlike in the case of the Szlonzoks, the German administration allowed the Slunzaks to declare their own Slunzakian language (Schlonzakisch) in order to distance this group from the Poles and Czechs. The predominantly bilingual, German-Slavic/Polish-speaking, Szlunzkas were seen as ethnolinguistically distant enough from the Polish nation, thus ready for swift Germanization. The top echelons of the Polish intelligentsia were killed, incarcerated in concentration camps, or expelled to the Generalgouvernement. As a result, the percentage of Germans (prewar German citizens and DVL Groups 1, 2 and 3) in Pomerania and Danzig grew to 74 percent in 1944, in the Wartheland (Wielkopolska) to 28 percent, and in the northern section of the prewar Voivodeship of Warsaw to 8 percent. No Belarusians (150,000) or Ukrainians (0.5 million) from Germany’s share of Poland volunteered to be resettled in the Soviet Union. Actually, 20,000 Ukrainian refugees fled from the Soviet-occupied Polish territories to Germany’s Generalgouvernement, where they made Cracow a significant center of Ukrainian national and cultural life. In 1940, Berlin agreed to the reestablishment of the Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, abolished in the Soviet Union. German administration also began to use the ethnonym Ukrainer (Ukrainians) instead of the traditional Ruthenen (Ruthenians), in a clear departure from interwar Polish usage Rusini (Ruthenians). By late 1940, they had organized 910 (mostly state-owned) elementary schools and two secondary schools. Ukrainian secondary school-leavers also enjoyed the right of admission to German universities. At the same time, there were 7210 Polish schools for 11 million Poles in the Generalgouvernement, but not a single Polish secondary school. Belarusian elementary schools, completely suppressed in Poland during the second half of the late 1930s, were revived in the few Belarusian-speaking areas of the Generalgouvernement. One Russian-language elementary school was founded in Warsaw, and a Goralian-language one in Zakopane. In the wake of Berlin’s 1941 attack against the Soviet Union, the Russian-language school was liquidated, and Belarusian-language schools disappeared, because the Belarusian-language educational system was concentrated in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Belarusian schools in the Generalgouvernement would unnecessarily have hindered the Germanization of the Białystok region (previously part of wartime Soviet Belarus) incorporated directly into Germany. Schools for 2 million Jews were exclusively private and financed by Jewish self-governments. Languages of

The Polish Nation

613

education in these schools were German, Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish. The Jews were exterminated beginning in 1942, when the ‘Endlösung (final solution) of the Jewish question’ began to be implemented (Baedeker 1943: XXXV; Bahlcke 1996: 160; Davies 1981: II, 446; Eberhardt 2006: 58–59; Guenther-Swart 1940; Jastrze˛bski 1995; Magocsi 1996: 620, 2002: 190; Prel 1942: 167–185; Schulwesen 1941; Szybieka 2002: 333; Wanatowicz 1994: 181). In the Soviet zone of occupation, Russian replaced Polish as the official language, but Soviet nationalities policy, though increasingly tilted toward Russification since the early 1930s, allowed for the liberal use of minority languages (including Yiddish) in offices, education, and publications. Most Polish-language elementary and secondary schools were retained; for instance, there were 932 such schools and a Polish-language theater in western Belarus incorporated from Poland. Even more significantly, the system of Belarusianlanguage education was revived. From the official point of view, Belarusian and Ukrainian were official languages in Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine, respectively. In Lviv (Lvov in Russian, Lwów in Polish), the Polish University of Lwów was Ukrainized into Ivan-Franko University. However, to dampen Ukrainian national aspirations, a group of Polish professors from Lviv were invited to lecture and do research in Moscow, whereas such treatment was not extended to their Ukrainian counterparts. The Naukove tovarystvo imeny Shevchenka (Shevchenko Society of Sciences), which had functioned as a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Austria’s Galicia, and then interwar Poland, was abolished and incorporated into the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Belarusians were soon displeased as well when, in September 1940, the compulsory teaching of Belarusian in Lithuanian-, Polish-, Russian-, and Yiddish-language schools was replaced by Russian. In addition, the Polish University of Vilnius, which Belarusian leaders hoped would be Belarusified, was actually Lithuanized following the transfer of Vilnius to Lithuania. In all the Polish territories incorporated into the Soviet Union, place and street names were Russified (and simultaneously Belarusified and Ukrainized) or Lithuanizied. Lithuanian-Polish relations had been extremely tense since the end of World War I. Both states established regular diplomatic links only in 1938, following Warsaw’s ultimatum. Despite the fact that Vilnius was incorporated into Lithuania in the following year and elevated to the rank of the Lithuanian capital, the city remained overwhelmingly Polonophone or Yiddish-speaking. Not surprisingly, the concentrated attempt to ‘re-Lithuanize’ Vilnius entailed suppression of Lithuania’s Poles and their language, which was stronger there than in Belarus or Ukraine. The Lithuanian language replaced Polish even in Catholic churches. (However, it took much longer before Lithuanians became the majority of Vilnius’s population in the late 1980s.) The Kremlin also ‘put in order’ class and ethnic relations. Polish civil servants, even if of Belarusian or Ukrainian extraction were persecuted. The Polish

614 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

elite was virtually annihilated when 15,000 Polish officers were murdered in Katyn (near Smolensk, Russia) in March 1940. Between 1939 and 1941, 700,000 Poles (out of 4 million), 217,000 Ukrainians (out of 5 million), 91,000 Belarusians (including Poleshuks; out of 2 million), 83,000 Jews (out of 1.25 million), and 20,000 Lithuanians and prewar Russian emigrants were rounded up from the Soviet zone of occupation and transported to Siberia or Kazakhstan. They included civil servants, intelligentsia, POWs, ‘kulaks’ (rich peasants), and ‘bourgeois’ (middle class). Before Lithuania was turned into a Soviet republic, the agreed exchange of population between Kaunas and Moscow took place. Lithuanians, numbering 170,000, from Belarus left for Lithuania, and 100,000 Belarusians from Lithuania for Belarus (Bajerowa 2003: 14; Davies 1981: II 451; Eberhardt 2006: 59; Hrycak 2000: 218–220; Snyder 2003: 82, 92–93; Szybieka 2002: 325–328, 331, 333; Vakar 1956: 160–161). In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union; German armies seized the Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Ukraine (less eastern Galicia, transferred to the Generalgouvernement) was made into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, and the other territories (less the Białystok region incorporated into Germany) into the Reichskommissariat Ostland, reminiscent of the Land Ober Ost of World War I. The enlarged Generalgouvernement’s territory was 142,000 sq km (including eastern Galicia of 45,500 sq km). Although the eastern half of this German colony was inhabited mainly by Ukrainians, Poles accounted for 62 percent of the 18 million inhabitants. Ukrainians amounted to 37 percent, and the remaining 1 percent was comprised of Germans and Goralians (Goralen). Strangely, the Generalgouvernement was dubbed by national socialist propaganda as the ‘European gate to the East’ or the ‘bridge between West and East.’ In reality, together with the Reichskommissariaten, the Generalgouvernement constituted the buffer zone around the Third Reich. In the coming decades, in line with the Generalplan-Ost, this area between the Vistula and the Dnieper was to be repopulated with German settlers and Germanized Slavs. German was made the official language of the Generalgouvernement, while Polish and Ukrainian became auxiliary languages; the latter mainly in eastern Galicia and the region of Cholm (Chełm). Only the place names of the most significant cities were Germanized, as also street names in the centers of these cities. More German-language place names of smaller towns appeared in Galicia, where they had been used during the Austro-Hungarian times. All the Polishlanguage universities, research centers, and secondary schools were closed down. In 1941, it was proclaimed that a German Copernicus University would be established on the basis of the Polish University of Cracow, but this plan was never realized. Some Polish and German scholars living in Cracow found employment in the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute of German Eastern Research), established in 1940. The entire administration down to the level of counties

The Polish Nation

615

(Kreise, powiaty) was entrusted to German civil servants. At the level of communes, small towns, and villages, local (that is, Polish or Ukrainian) officials were selected, solely responsible to the German administration. The German police also recruited from among prewar Polish policemen. Prior to carrying out the Endlösung (final solution), Jews were allowed self-government in administration and elementary education in their Wohnbezirke (‘residence areas,’ a bureaucratic euphemism for ‘ghettoes’). Apart from a few official German newspapers, most of the rest were published in Polish and Ukrainian, including one Polish-language newspaper for Jews. The administration of the Generalgouvernement encouraged the national and political aspirations of Ukrainians, but suppressed Polish cultural and educational life. The Lemkos, whom Warsaw had deemed a separate ethnic group, were treated as a regional group of the Ukrainian nation. A similar group of mountainous people in the region of Zakopane was encouraged to redefine itself as separate from the Polish nation because of their specific dialect and transhumant economy. Their self-ethnonym is Górale, which became Goralen in German terminology. German sources estimated their number at 360,000 in the early 1940s. About 85,000 (24 percent) of them registered as members of the Goralenvolk, or the Goralian nation. In Zakopane, the German administration provided for them one elementary school and one vocational school with Goralian (construed as a language separate from Polish) as the medium of instruction. Conveniently, a proposal of Goralian orthography had been published in Poland in 1938 (Baedeker 1943: XXXVII, 32, 88–89; Davies 1981: II 453; Guenther-Swart 1941: 110–112; Prel 1942: XVI–XIX, 40–45, 150, 183–185; Schulwesen 1941; Ustalenie ortografii podhalanskiej ´ 1938). The Generalgouvernement’s administration and school system was also implemented in the Reichskommissariaten Ostland and Ukraine. Locals were employed in the police and at the lowest levels of administration. Berlin was appalled, however, by the Ukrainian initiative that led to the proclamation of the independent Ukrainian state in Lemberg (Lviv) on 30 June 1941. The Ukrainian leaders who issued this proclamation were arrested at the beginning of July. Despite this setback, the Ukrainian-language press and education were revived, especially in the eastern half of the Reichskommissariat, where Russification had made significant inroads since the 1930s. Berlin could redirect the hatred of all things Soviet felt by most Ukrainians against the Soviet Union; but first in late 1941 and early 1942, it liquidated more than 700 Ukrainian national activists. The situation was similar in Belarus, where Belarusian leaders and the population at large hoped for a ‘lenient German occupation,’ as had been the case during World War I in the Land Ober Ost. On the one hand, the German administration encouraged Belarusian-language education and culture, while on the other, Polish and Russian were used as auxiliary official languages in western and eastern Belarus respectively. Belarusian-language elementary schools functioned

616 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

only in the 1942/1943 school year in eastern Belarus. In 1942, there were 3500 Belarusian-language elementary schools and thirty secondary schools, mainly in western Belarus. In March 1942, Berlin allowed the establishment of the firstever Autocephalous Belarusian Orthodox Church and the Belarusian Exarchate of the Greek Catholic Church. A German plan to replace Cyrillic with the Latin script was opposed by the population, but the occupation authorities proceeded with the introduction of Latin script-based Belarusian to the educational system. An increase in Belarusian nationalism led to the decision not to admit non-Belarusians to Belarusian-language schools. Later, Germans condoned the replacement of Polish civil servants by Belarusians. In 1943/1944, Germans formed Ukrainian military units and attempted to organize Belarusian ones too, in order to support German armies weakening under Soviet attack. Apart from the German-Soviet struggle, pro-Soviet (usually socialist) Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Polish guerrillas began to operate alongside anti-Soviet (usually nationalist) Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian national units (some, either socialist or national, with significant Jewish participation). Polish guerillas clashed with their Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian counterparts, the former hoping for re-establishment of Poland in its interwar borders while the latter sought an independent Lithuania, Belarus, or Ukraine in their wartime borders. These conflicts led to low-intensity civil war in the Vilnius region and, more tragically, to mutual ethnic cleansing between Poles and Ukrainians in Volhynia during the autumn of 1943. In this region, where Poles constituted just 5 to 7 percent of the population, 60,000 to 100,000 Poles and 15,000 to 30,000 Ukrainians were massacred. In mid-1944, the Red Army advanced into the lands of interwar Poland and the Baltic republics. Swiftly, the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were re-established in their 1940 shape. By early 1945, the entire territory of interwar Poland was under Soviet control. In July 1944, Moscow created a puppet Polish government in Lublin, which was to ensure Soviet dominance in postwar Poland. With the armies of national socialist Germany out of the equation, national guerillas (especially Polish and Ukrainian) continued to fight against one another, and against their communist counterparts supported by Soviet troops. This low-scale warfare continued well into 1948. The remnants of anti-Soviet forces operated underground in Soviet Lithuania until 1949, Soviet Belarus until 1951, and in Soviet Ukraine until the mid-1950s. In Poland, after the 1947 communist takeover, anticommunist forces were completely suppressed by mid-1948, but individual anti-communist guerillas were active until the late 1950s (Gut 2005; Hrycak 2000: 228–231, 255–258, 279; Kiaupa et al. 2002: 182; Losik 1943; Prazmowska ˙ 2004; Szybieka 2002: 340–348, 352–354, 370; Vakar 1956: 172, 180, 189). The sweeping border changes and large-scale population movements induced by fighting and decreed by the victors do not allow one to come up with

The Polish Nation

617

exact figures about losses of human lives. The estimates are 5.5 to 7 million for Ukraine, 2.2 to 2.7 million for Belarus, 2.5 million for Germany, 1.8 million for Russia, 0.7 million for Lithuania. In the past, estimates for Poland spoke about ‘Poles’ who perished during the war, but now the statistics are more nuanced, and those who lost their lives are referred to as ‘citizens of interwar Poland.’ Poland’s population was 35 million in 1939. 7.5 million (21.5 percent) of them perished, that is, 6 million at the hands of the national socialist regime, and 1.5 million at the hands of the Soviet regime. One-third to half of the casualties were Jews. This statistic is complicated because the Third Reich placed the system of the extermination of European Jewry in the occupied territories of interwar Poland, in which the majority of the 4.7 to 5.5 million European Jews, who perished in the Holocaust, were killed. In the same genocidal manner, Berlin emptied the Third Reich, the territories of interwar Poland, and western Czechoslovakia of Roma. The Porajmos or Samudardipen (Roma Holocaust) cost the lives of at least 0.5 million Roma. The unprecedented bloodbath of World War II was followed by accelerated nation-state-building in Central and Eastern Europe under Moscow’s control. The tenets of Soviet nationalities policy merged nicely with the Dmowskian vision of an ethnically homogenous Polish nation-state. Polish communists were never tired of repeating, ‘chcemy budowa´c panstwo ´ narodowe, a nie narodowo´sciowe’ (we want to build an [ethnically homogenous] nation-state, not a nationalities [that is, multi-ethnic] state) (in Linek 1997: 14). This lessened the opposition of anticommunist forces to the new communist order, and indeed provided for cooperation between communists and the numerous supporters of Dmowski. The new wave of ethnic cleansing, condoned by Moscow and the Western Allies, was played out within the new borders forced on Poland at the Potsdam Conference (August 1945). Earlier, the Lublin communists had formally ceded the eastern one-third of interwar Poland (178,000 sq km), together with Vilnius and Lviv, to the Soviet Union. The Allies ‘indemnified’ Poland with the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (deutsche Ostgebiete), except that the northern half of East Prussia was incorporated directly into Soviet Russia. Poland’s gains of 101,000 sq km were quaintly dubbed the ‘Recovered Territories’ (Ziemie Odzyskane). Polish propaganda strove to justify their incorporation, pointing to the fact that until the 13th century, the majority of inhabitants in these areas had been Slavic-speakers. (Baltic-speaking Pruthenians of East Prussia were conveniently forgotten, because mentioning them would have ‘justified’ transfer of this area to Lithuania, and not to Poland or Soviet Russia.) The southern half of East Prussia, granted to Poland, largely overlapped with the 1920 plebiscite area in Warmia and Mazuria. Postwar Poland’s territory shrank from 390,000 sq km to 313,000 sq km. Only 54 percent of the interwar Polish territory passed into new Poland. The incorporated German territories accounted for one-third of the postwar Polish

618 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

territory. Between 1944 and 1946, the Polish-Soviet agreements provided for the exchange of population. 17,000 Lithuanians, 36,000 Belarusians, and 0.52 million Ukrainians left postwar Poland for the Soviet Union. Until 1949, in line with this exchange (quaintly known as ‘repatriation’ in Polish communist propaganda), 177,000 Poles arrived in Poland from Soviet Lithuania, 274,000 from Soviet Belarus, 1.27 million from Soviet Ukraine (33,000 Volhynian Czechs left for Czechoslovakia), and 270,000 from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. In 1947, 150,000 Ukrainians (mainly Lemkos) were rounded up in southeastern Poland and dispersed in the German territories incorporated into Poland. In late 1944 and the first half of 1945, around 3.5 million Germans were evacuated or escaped westward from the deutsche Ostgebiete, and the Red Army rounded up 175,000 Germans and sent them to labor camps in the Soviet Union. In agreement with the decisions of the Potsdam Conference, 4.5 million Germans were expelled from Poland to the four occupation zones of Germany between 1945 and 1948. Three hundred thousand Jews, who were citizens of prewar Poland, survived the Holocaust. Those who found themselves in the Soviet Union were allowed to leave for Poland. By 1948, about 200,000 of them had left for the United States, Israel, or Argentina. Most of the remaining 65,000 to 100,000 moved to the German territories incorporated into Poland. They were followed by 2.2 million Polish settlers from central Poland, and 2.3 million Polish forced laborers, POWs, and concentration camp inmates, who returned to Poland from Germany and Western Europe. They came in the stead of Germans expelled from the deutsche Ostgebiete granted to Poland. But the settlers, repatriates, and Jews, adding up to 4.6 million, were not enough to repopulate areas emptied of over 8 million Germans. It was decided, therefore, to retain the Slavophone and bilingual populations of Mazuria (Mazurs), and of interwar Germany’s section of Upper Silesia (Szlonzoks), who were to undergo a process of ‘national verification’ (weryfikacja narodowo´sciowa). By late 1948, the ‘positively verified’ numbered 88,000 German citizens in the former region and 0.85 million in the latter. The positively verified from other sections of the deutsche Ostgebiete amounted to 79,000. They often spoke only German, but were positively verified thanks to their Slavic-sounding surnames. In the official language, they became known as ‘autochthons’ (autochtoni); that is, the ‘original, native population.’ This fortified Warsaw’s claim to the deutsche Ostgebiete, because the autochthons were the ‘proof’ that ‘Poles lived there before the Germans.’ A parallel process of ‘national rehabilitation’ (rehabilitacja narodowo´sciowa) was applied to interwar Polish citizens inscribed into Groups 2, 3, and 4 of the DVL. The sobriquet of ‘autochthons’ was applied to them as well, but less often. Between mid-1945 and late 1949, the share of ethnic Poles in postwar Poland’s population grew from 82 percent to 97 percent. The official (hence not always reliable) decrease in the number of Germans was from 3.7 million

The Polish Nation

619

to 200,000, of Ukrainians from 0.7 million to 200,000, and of Belarusians from 190,000 to 150,000. The remaining ‘indubitable Germans’ (niewa˛tpliwi Niemcy) were various industrial and agricultural specialists, who, on the orders of Warsaw, were not allowed to leave Poland until 1956. Between 1956 and 1962, most left, thereby plunging the official number of Germans living in Poland to a mere 3500 in 1971. The official policies of ‘de-Germanization’ and ‘re-Polonization’ directed at around 2 million positively verified and rehabilitated citizens left their children without any command of German. Ironically, the success of this Polonizing policy left this population second-class citizens, who appeared as ‘crypto-Germans’ in the eyes of their neighbors. That is why, between 1951 and 1990, 1.34 million positively verified and rehabilitated citizens, together with their descendants, left for West Germany, where they were officially known as ‘resettlers’ (Aussiedler). In this manner, Mazurs disappeared from Mazuria and the share of Szlonzoks in the postwar Voivodeship of Opole (Oppeln) fell from over half of the population to one-third. This continual emigration caused German statisticians to estimate the size of Poland’s German minority as between 0.5 million and 1.5 million. The numbers corresponded to pre-1945 German citizens and persons inscribed onto the DVL, together with their descendants. The overwhelming majority of those who had not attended German school before 1945, did not speak German, however. Between 1955 and 1959, ethnic Poles running to 0.26 million were ‘repatriated’ from the Soviet Union to Poland. It was forbidden to mention the 1.38 million Poles, who remained in the Soviet Union, where they were made to accept Soviet citizenship and were gradually Russified. In addition, Israel’s success in the Six Days’ War (1967) incurred Moscow’s wrath, as the Soviet bloc supported the Arab cause. Warsaw translated this into the ethnic cleansing of Poland’s remaining Jews; between 1968 and 1972, 30,000 left Poland. Poland was thus made into an ethnically homogenous nationstate. This fact was also reflected in the Catholic Church’s statistics, which estimated the share of Catholics in postwar Poland’s population at 93.4 percent in 1971 and 95.7 percent in 1987. The goal of Dmowskian and national communists safely achieved, state-controlled minority associations of Belarusians, Czechs and Slovaks, Jews, Germans, Lithuanians, Roma, and Ukrainians were allowed to be established between 1950 and 1963, and have continued to function to this day (Adamczuk and Zdaniewicz 1991: 50–51; Bahlcke 1996: 188; Bajerowa 2003: 20; Berdychowska 1994: 7–13; Bronsztejn 1993: 13; Davies 1981: II 489; Hrycak 2000: 264; Ka˛cka and Ste˛pka 1994: 8; Kenrick and Puxon 1995: 150; Magocsi 2002: 189, 191; Misztal 1990: 308; Rogall 2000: 7; Šatava 1994: 227, 231; Szybieka 2002: 363, 368; Tazbir 2001: 30, ˙ 35; Tyszka 2004: 128–178; Zaremba 2001: 179; Zayas 1998: 54–55; Zbikowski 1997: 273).

620 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The unprecedented monopoly of Polish in communist Poland The trauma of World War II, when Polish was relegated to the status of an auxiliary language on par with Ukrainian in the Generalgouvernement, was tremendous. German and Soviet occupiers ‘cleansed’ libraries and bookshops of ‘harmful books.’ The national socialist administration liquidated any Polishlanguage publishing industry in the territories incorporated into Germany. The remaining publishing houses were dismantled, leaving just enough of these to bring out Polish-language newspapers and periodicals in the Generalgouvernement. All the official publications were closely controlled by German censorship. German replaced Polish in cinemas and radio broadcasting throughout the territories occupied by Germany. Actually, Poles and other non-Germans were forbidden to listen to the radio, and owning or listening to a radio was a crime. Underground publishers produced 1075 Polish book titles between 1939 and 1945, quite a drop from the 8700 titles in 1938 alone. The situation was ameliorated by émigré presses, which published around 15,000 book and periodical titles, mainly for Polish armed forces in Western Europe and the Soviet Union. Public libraries lost over 60 percent of their holdings (15 million volumes), and the shift of the Polish territory 300 km westward ‘left behind’ numerous centers of Polish culture in the enlarged Soviet Union. In reaction to the national socialist atrocities committed against the Polish nation, language, and culture, Warsaw implemented policies of ‘deGermanization’ and ‘re-Polonization,’ in the course of which German libraries and publishing houses in the German territories incorporated into Poland were liquidated through pulping and burning. Not only public signs but even German inscriptions on graves and household utensils were chiseled out, painted over, or defaced. The Ministry of the Recovered Territories (MZO, Ministerstwo Ziem Odzyskanych, 1945–1948) established a special regime in the Polish section of the deutsche Ostgebiete to accelerate their administrative and ethno-cultural integration with the rest of Poland. Polish philologists (including Nitsch) served diligently in the Commission on Deciding on the Appropriate Form of Place and Geographical Names, which Polonized place names throughout the incorporated German territories. German became a pariah language, like Germans themselves in postwar Poland. In order to ensure ‘re-Polonization’ of the positively verified and rehabilitated Kashubs, Mazurs, and Szlonzoks, it was prohibited to teach German in schools in areas inhabited by them. Like place names, their surnames and first names were duly Polonized, as well. Minority-language schools resurfaced in the school year 1953/1954 (I give the numbers of elementary schools only); 136 German, 67 Belarusian, 33 Slovak, 7 Yiddish, 5 Lithuanian, and 1 Czech. After 1956, 5 Ukrainian elementary schools were established. In 1959/1960, the overall number of such schools had sunk to 5 German, 43 Belarusian, 25 Slovak, and 4 Yiddish. The number of

The Polish Nation

621

Lithuanian elementary schools grew by three to eight, but there was no Czech elementary school any more. Also in 1959/1960, Communist refugees who had arrived to Poland after the civil war in Greece (1946–1948) received six Greekand Macedonian-language elementary schools. The number of students attending minority-language elementary schools dropped from 6712 in 1959/1960 to 3559 in 1964/1965, and to 2321 in 1969/1970. In the latter school year, only Belarusian-, Lithuanian-, Slovak-, and Ukrainian-language schools survived. The most students attended Belarusian schools (1353), and least Ukrainian (177). Subsequent statistical yearbooks of communist Poland no longer recorded data on minority-languages schools and students. War losses and emigration diminished the number of the Polish intelligentsia (university graduates) by one-third, from 60,000 to 40,000. The German destruction of Warsaw in 1944 deprived Poland of its most significant center of culture. However, the communist government of Lublin decided in January 1945 that Warsaw would remain the Polish capital and would be rebuilt. Every fourth Pole had been forced to leave his or her home during the war. The liquidation of Polish Jewry opened careers in small business to ethnic Poles. After the war, the communist government largely shunned prewar elites and encouraged peasants and workers to the positions of power and management. Huge industrial projects attracted villagers to cities. An increasing number of women left homes, seeking gainful employment. Statesponsored literacy programs limited the number of illiterates to 3 percent by 1960. In 1956, finishing elementary school was made compulsory for everybody. These tremendous changes did away with prewar social boundaries, leveled dialectal differences, and blurred the sociolinguistic boundary between the countryside and cities. As a result, for the first time in history, standard Polish became the language of everyday communication for virtually all Poles. The teaching cadres of the Polish universities of Lviv and Vilnius reestablished themselves in new universities in Wrocław (Breslau) and Torun. ´ Already in 1944, a new pro-communist university was founded in Lublin as a counterweight to the Catholic University of Lublin. The Łód´z branch of the Free Polish University was transformed into the University of Łód´z in 1945. Later, universities were established in Katowice (1968) and Szczecin (1984). By the 1980s, there were eleven universities in Poland. This heavy investment in education was clearly visible in 1946 already when there were 46 higher education institutions. The number of university graduates residing in postwar Poland increased from 40,000 in 1945 to 0.415 million in 1970. The liquidation of private industry and the stringent centralization of the state, which followed the Soviet model, hampered freedom of research and cultural production. PAU was not allowed to commence its activities. Its assets

622 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

were transferred to Warsaw and were used for founding the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN, Polska Akademia Nauk) in 1951. Between 1947 and 1951, the autonomy of universities was limited and their research goals brought to in line with the needs of the communist government. Book production grew from a meager 29 titles in 1944, to 1078 in 1945, 4611 in 1950, 6879 in 1960, and 10,038 in 1978. But it surpassed the production level of 1938 only in 1965. At that point, book production, like the rest of the increasingly inefficient, centrally-planned economy, stalled. It climbed to 11,919 titles in 1980, but then vacillated between 9000 and 10,000 titles throughout the 1980s, though gigantic runs of copies, adding to 200 million and more per annum, dwarfed those from the interwar period. Culture and education were ideologized, homogenized, and centralized under the supervision of Warsaw, which had regained its status as Poland’s center of power and culture by 1949. The watershed was 1961, when religious instruction was finally removed from schools. The novel mass media of radio and television homogenized the spoken language of Poland’s population to an unprecedented degree. Radios were scarce after the war. In the 1960s, two-thirds of Polish households had radios. Television broadcasting commenced in Poland in 1956. In the 1970s, half the households enjoyed television sets. In the 1980s, almost each Polish family boasted its own radio and television set (Bajerowa 2003: 20–25, 33, 35–39, 47–48; Bienkowska ´ and Chamerska 1990: 33–35, 38, 47; Rocznik statystyczny 1955 1956: 220; Rocznik statystyczny 1960 1960: 335; Rocznik statystyczny 1965 1965: 404, 1970: 412). The elevated status of Polish as the sole official language in Poland was confirmed by President Bolesław Bierut’s (1892–1956) decree of 30 November 1945 on State Language and the Language of Administration of Governmental and Self-Governmental Administrations. This decree instilled Polish as the ‘state language’ and annulled all interwar language regulations. As a result, the possibility of using minority languages for communication between citizens and state or self-governmental offices ended. The postwar communist Constitution was promulgated in 1952. It replaced the state’s interwar name of the ‘Republic of Poland,’ with the ‘People’s Republic of Poland.’ None of its articles pertained to the state language, minority languages, or minorities. But Article 67.2 prohibited discrimination on grounds of nationality, confession, race, origin, or social class. Article 81.1 ensured equality before law, irrespective of nationality, race, or confession; and Article 81.2 prohibited propagation of nationality-, race-, or confession-inspired hatred. Like many other regulations in communist Poland, these were empty promises, as visible from the virtual suppression of minority-language education. In the framework of the Cold War struggle, minorities were a detail not taken into consideration. What seized the hearts and minds of the population at large were anticommunist demonstrations, which endangered the monopoly of power of the communist party in 1956, 1970,

The Polish Nation

623

1976, and 1980–1981. In the Soviet bloc, the Polish Catholic Church was the only one that was not suppressed. Therefore, after de-stalinization in 1956, it created a sphere of freedom for anticommunist opposition that was not available in other Soviet satellites. The 1978 election of Cracow Archbishop Karol Wojtyła (1920–2005) as Pope John Paul II consolidated the Polish nation and boosted its morale. From then on, Polish was regularly heard in the Vatican. Earlier, during World War II and after, Polish émigré political, cultural, and educational centers had been founded in London and Paris. Their influence on communist Poland was limited until 1952, when the Radio Free Europe began to broadcast to Poland. In the 1980s, one quarter of Poland’s population listened to this radio station, in spite of state-organized jamming. The Pope’s international influence and his pilgrimages to Poland helped open up the country to democratic and anticommunist influences from abroad, so crucial to bringing an end to the communist system in Poland in 1989. Another boost to the anticommunist opposition, and to the role of the Polish language in the world, arrived in the form of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Czesław Miłosz (Bajerowa 2003: 45; Berdychowska 1994: 104). The legally guaranteed monopoly of the Polish language in postwar Poland, the heavy use of this language for the task of de-Germanization of the incorporated German territories and for the ‘re-Polonization’ of the positively verified and rehabilitated, along with the spread of Polish-language literacy in order to ensure that communist propaganda reached each citizen, bred authoritarian views on what course language policy should follow. In 1947, the discussion was all the rage in the most influential periodical devoted to the Polish language, Je˛zyk Polski. The lawyer Jerzy Lande (1886–1954) famously proposed that norms established by linguists and the government should be imposed on all users of the Polish language, under penalties enforced by schools, editors, and even law courts. This was not far removed from the penalties applied to those autochthons who persisted in speaking German; they were fined, lost their houses and apartments, were sacked from factories, or even were thrown into a special forced-labor camp for ‘linguistic offenders’ in Gliwice (Gleiwitz). To Lande’s dictum, Klemensiewicz replied that linguists should teach, not enforce. Klemensiewicz represented the general view of the ‘Cracow school’ of Polish linguists, who leaned toward descriptivism in language use. Perhaps due to this stance, no authoritative dictionary of the Polish language was ever compiled and published in Cracow. The ‘Warsaw school’ of linguists begged to disagree. Their prescriptivist urge led to the publication of Stanislaw Szober’s (1879–1938) Słownik ortoepiczny (The Dictionary of Correct Writing, 1937, Warsaw); the second edition came off the press in 1958, also in Warsaw. Meanwhile, Stanisław Słonski’s ´ (1879–1959) Słownik polskich błe˛dów je˛zykowych (The Dictionary of Polish Linguistic Errors, Warsaw) appeared in 1947. Cracow was perceived as the seat of ‘anticommunist reaction’ and the communist

624 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

authorities did not allow it to regain its prewar status as a Polish cultural center equal to Warsaw. They encouraged Warsaw in this role. Prescriptivism won. The Cracow-based Towarzystwo Miło´sników Je˛zyka Polskiego (Society of the Lovers of the Polish Language, founded in 1921) and Polskie Towarzystwo Je˛zykoznawcze (Polish Society of Linguistics) were sidelined in favor of the capital, because the authorities prohibited the reestablishment of PAU. The Warsaw-based PAN founded its Komisja Kultury Je˛zyka (Commission for Language Politics) in 1954. The influence of the Cracow periodical Je˛zyk Polski faded in confrontation with Doroszewski’s Warsaw-based bimonthly Poradnik Je˛zykowy (Language Guide, established in 1901 in Cracow, and moved to the capital in 1932). The ground for establishing the final prescriptive norm of the Polish language was prepared by the 1951 reprint of Linde’s authoritative dictionary and the 1952–1953 reprint of Karłowicz’s authoritative dictionary. Both reprints were published in Warsaw. PAN’s newly founded Commission for Language Politics was entrusted with the preparation of the twelfth edition of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek. Basically, the book was to repeat the decisions of the 1936 language reform which, paradoxically, had spread among users during the war when the German administration of the Generalgouvernement employed these new rules in its Polish-language publications. However, a simple reprint of the 1936 edition of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek was not possible. First, expressions and examples used in this book had to be cleansed of those deemed ‘anticommunist’ or ‘pro-bourgeois.’ Second, new examples had to be grounded in the approved Polish national tradition. Third, usages introduced in the course of the Polonization of place and geographic names in Poland’s share of the deutsche Ostgebiete (by the Commission on Deciding on the Appropriate Form of Place and Geographical Names and formally published in the Governmental Gazette in 1946 and 1947) had to be followed, as the commission’s head, Witold Taszycki (1898–1979), insisted. In 1956, PAN’s Committee of Linguistics officially approved the changes proposed by the Commission for Language Politics. Although in 1956, there was not much public discussion, as in the cases of the 1918 and 1936 language reforms, a modicum of compromise was necessary for preserving the unity of language use, even in the context of communist totalitarianism. Klemensiewicz, a representative of the Cracow school, was entrusted with editing the 1956 edition of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek. Quite symbolically, the book was published in Wrocław, that is, in one of the most important cities in the ‘Recovered Territories.’ This fact emphasized not only the political but also the cultural and national incorporation of the deutsche Ostgebiete into postwar Poland; in line with the official propaganda, which termed this incorporation the ‘return [of the lands] to the Motherland’ (powrót do Macierzy). Equally significant was the publishing of Pisownia polska.

The Polish Nation

625

Przepisy – słowniczek by the Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolinskich ´ (National Library and Publishing House of the Family Ossolinski). ´ The Zakład (also known as the Ossolineum) had published the second edition of Linde’s dictionary in the mid-19th century. It was located in Lviv (Lwów), which became part of Soviet Ukraine. In 1947, the Kremlin agreed to the ‘repatriation’ of the Zakład’s library holdings and assets to Wrocław. Six years later, PAN took control over it. These overtures aside, beginning in 1967 the popular mass editions of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek, now titled Słownik ortograficzny i prawidła pisowni polskiej (The Orthographic Dictionary and the Principles of Polish Orthography), passed into the editorship of Taszycki, a representative of the Warsaw school. The Cracow school was represented by a second editor, Stanisław Jodłowski (1902–1979). But he was more of an outsider (originally from Lwów), who had contributed to the 1936 language reform. The master stroke, sealing the domination of the Warsaw school, was delivered by Doroszewski. Between 1958 and 1969, he edited the ten volumes and one supplement volume of the brand-new, authoritative Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, Warsaw). It covered words used between the mid-18th and the mid-20th centuries, that is, the period when the standard Polish language was worked out. Almost at the same time, the postwar authoritative dictionaries of Czech, Magyar, and Slovak were published; namely, Bovuslav Havránek’s fourvolume Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (The Dictionary of the Written Czech Language, 1957–1971, Prague), Géza Bárczi and László Országh’s seven-volume A Magyar nylev értelmez˝ o szótára (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1959–1962, Budapest), and Štefan Peciar’s six-volume Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1959–1968, Bratislava). Peciar’s dictionary was unique in this respect that it was the first-ever authoritative, multivolume dictionary of Slovak. Interestingly, in the two other member states of the Soviet bloc, namely, Bulgaria and Romania, authoritative dictionaries of Bulgarian and Romanian appeared as well; the three-volume Rechnik na svaremenen balgarski ezik (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Bulgarian Language, 1955– 1959, Sofia), and the four-volume Dict‚ ionarul limbii române literare contemporane (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Romanian Language, 1955–1957, Bucharest). The fact that the publication of all these dictionaries commenced between 1955 and 1959 may mean that the Kremlin coordinated these lexicographic efforts in order to imprint the ‘correct meaning’ on the words included in the works. This, along with the expunging of ‘bourgeois words,’ was of crucial importance for the needs of Soviet propaganda and the ideology of communism. Doroszewski’s dictionary was too extensive for the average user. So there followed a one-volume Mały słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Small Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1968, Warsaw), edited by Stanisław Skorupka (1906–1988) and others, and the tellingly titled Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (The Dictionary

626 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Correct Polish, 1973, Warsaw), edited by Doroszewski and Halina Kurkowska (1922–1983). But with the rapid growth of the number of persons with university education, the one-volume dictionaries did not satisfy them, while the multivolume one was too extensive. Between 1978 and 1981, Mieczysław Szymczak’s (1927–1985) three-volume Słownika je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, Warsaw) was published and remained the standard reference for the general educated user until the beginning of the 21st century. Interestingly, in 1977, the first serious attempt at codifying pronunciation of standard Polish came with Słownik wymowy polskiej (The Dictionary of Polish Pronunciation, Warsaw), edited by Mieczysław Kara´s (1924–1977) and Maria Madejowa. The 1986 reprint of the 1861 Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego (so-called Vilnius Dictionary) did not contribute to a new codification of Polish, but importantly defied the previously observed informal ban on public mentioning and promotion of significant Polish cultural achievements, which had originated on the eastern territories, incorporated to the Soviet Union after 1945. For instance, although the project of Nitsch and Kara´s’s Mały atlas gwar polskich (The Small Atlas of the Polish Dialects, 13 fascicles, 1959–1970, Wrocław) was conceived in 1939, the atlas’s geographical scope was limited to postwar Poland’s borders. The Polish minorities in the western republics of the Soviet Union remained a public taboo in Poland until 1989. A covert breach of this taboo came in 1977, when the publication of Jerzy Reichan (1929–), Kara´s and Urbanczyk’s ´ Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of the Polish Dialects, Wrocław and Cracow) commenced. The work (intended to improve on Karłowicz’s monumental Słownik gwar polskich [Dictionary of the Polish Dialects, 1900–1911, Cracow]) was designed to gather all dialectal words seen as ‘Polish,’ which were used during the 19th and 20th centuries in the broad area delineated by Poland’s current western border and the eastern frontier of former Poland-Lithuania. Understandably, the communist authorities did not lavish this politically incorrect dictionary with necessary resources. Hence, a mere 3 volumes (out of the planned 30) were published before the fall of communism. Until 2006, four further volumes came off the press, which is not a significant improvement either. Apparently, in today’s Poland, there is no political need for ‘proving the Polishness’ of the eastern lands of interwar Poland, which now constitute part of postcommunist Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Hence, it came as no surprise that Karol Dejna’s (1911–2004) Atlas gwar polskich (Atlas of the Polish Dialects, 1998–2002, Warsaw) limited itself to the territory of postwar Poland, despite the fact that it was published well after the fall of communism (Cienkowski 1983: 347; Gajda 2001: 58–59; Janich and Greule 2002: 30, 230; Jodłowski 1979: 139, 142–143; Linek 2001: 98). The effort to replace Brückner’s old-fashioned etymological dictionary of 1927 faltered. Between 1952 and 1982, Franciszek Sławski (1916–2001) edited twenty-five fascicles (adding up to five volumes) of Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka

The Polish Nation

627

polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, Cracow), but it had covered only half the selected words through the letter Ł. Parallely, Václav Machek’s one-volume Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Languages, Prague) was published in 1957, and Benk˝ o Loránd’s modern four-volume A Magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára (The Historical-Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest), with the introduction conveniently in Magyar and German, between 1967 and 1976. No historical dictionary of the Polish language was attempted before 1945, while Gabor Szarvas and Zsigmond Simonyi’s three-volume Magyar nyelv történeti szótar (The Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest) was published between 1890 and 1893 and Jan Gebauer’s incomplete Slovník staroˇceský (The Old Czech Dictionary, Prague) between 1903 and 1913. The situation changed after World War II. In 1953, Stanisław Urbanczyk ´ (1909–2001) commenced the publication of the multivolume Słownik staropolski (The Old Polish Dictionary, Warsaw), which covers Polish vocabulary until 1500; and in 1966, Maria Renata Mayenowa (1910–1988) saw through the publication of the first volume of Słownik je˛zyka polskiego XVI wieku (The Dictionary of the 16th-Century Polish Language, Wrocław). The former dictionary was completed in 2002, and the latter reached the letter P in 2005. During almost half a century of communist rule in Poland, only a single universal encyclopedia was published, the thirteen-volume Wielka encyklopedia powszechna (The Great Universal Encyclopedia, 1962–1970). This stood in stark contrast to the interwar period, when in the span of two decades, three encyclopedias of this kind appeared. However, in communist states, where censorship required ideological unity and correctness, and where there were no private publishers, no more than one universal encyclopedia was allowed, or expected. Similarly, in the communist period, only singular universal encyclopedias were published in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, namely, the six-volume Mala ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie (The Small Czechoslovak Encyclopedia, 1984–1987, Prague), and the seven-volume Új Magyar lexicon (The New Magyar Lexicon, 1961–1989, Budapest). In Poland, Wielka encyklopedia powszechna became the basis for the compilation of the four-volume Encyklopedia powszechna (The Universal Encyclopedia, 1973–1977, Warsaw) and the one-volume Encyklopedia popularna (The Popular Encyclopedia, 1982, Warsaw), which were reissued in slightly updated editions until the end of communism. The ideologization of language and the centralized control of information was so heavy in the communist period that the unexpected 1961 proposal of another language reform sent ripples of intense controversy through the academic community and among the communist party’s top echelons. Arguments for further changes were reasonable enough so that PAN accepted them and the new 13th edition of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek was prepared for

628 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

publication in 1963. Doroszewski opposed the change because the first half of his pet project, Słownik je˛zyka polskiego, would be in the 1956 spelling and the latter in a 1963 orthography. The same argument was forwarded by the editorial committee of Wielka encyklopedia powszechna. The new language reform would require producing new textbooks as well. Eventually, the Ministry of Education decided not to introduce any changes in Polish orthography and the entire run of the thirteenth edition of Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek was pulped. An opposition, similar to that to any drastic change in the stabilized form and functions of the Polish language, stalled in their tracks the 1974 and 1977 governmental attempts at further Polonization of ‘too un-Polish sounding’ place names in the region of Lublin and in southeastern Poland, respectively. In the former area, many place names were perceived as Ukrainian and in the latter as Lemkian. Most of the changes that were introduced in southeastern Poland anyway, were revoked in the early 1980s. The few post-1974 changes in the region of Lublin and the earlier ones in southeastern Poland, however, have not been overturned to this day. But it seems that the sternest form of the Polonization of place names was reserved for Belarusian ones in the region of Białystok. Such Polonizing changes were implemented gradually (despite the pronounced opposition of Poland’s Belarusian minority) at least until 2004. The idea of the never-ending ethnic homogenization of the Polish nation-state remained alive in the 1970s and 1980s, but it became increasingly impractical. First, national minorities accounted for a mere 2.6 percent of Poland’s population. Second, practically all the members of these minorities spoke Polish, while a drastically increasing number of them lost (or did not acquire command of) their own national languages. This is not surprising since minority-language education for all practical reasons ceased functioning at the end of the 1960s. Because the languages of Belarusian and Ukrainian are genetically close to Polish, this phenomenon of language loss became most pronounced among Poland’s Germans. The vast majority of those who were born during and after World War II did not speak or understand German. On the other hand, a bit of ‘dialectal coloring’ may make the Polish of Poland’s Belarusians and Ukrainians without an in-depth command of their national languages appear ‘Belarusian’ or ‘Ukrainian’ at least to Poles (Bajerowa 2003: 27; Janowicz 2004; Jodłowski 1979: 144–149).

The national communist monolith cracks: From the end of communism to Poland’s accession to the European Union The force of anticommunist feeling became apparent to the communist party in 1980–1981, when 10 million adults (from a Polish population of 35 million) joined the independent trade union Solidarity (Solidarno´sc´ ). It was the first-ever

The Polish Nation

629

non-communist and grassroots legal worker organization in communist Poland. The imposition of martial law in late 1981 and the simultaneous suppression of Solidarity were followed by a deepening economic crisis. It was caused by the inefficient, centrally-planned economy geared to the needs of heavy industry, which catered to the military, not the average consumer. The population at large, steeled in its opposition to the communist system, turned for uncensored information and literature to the samizdat book market. In Poland, this market was much larger than its counterparts in other Soviet satellites. For instance, in 1983, 600 Polish samizdat titles were published, and the number increased throughout the 1980s, especially just prior to the collapse of communism, when the authorities largely stopped deterring the illegal import of Polish-language émigré publications. The production of samizdat publishers reached almost 10 percent of the output of the state publishing houses. Obviously, runs of samizdat publications of several hundred to a thousand copies paled against the runs of 50,000 to 100,000 copies turned out by the state publishing industry, however. Paradoxically, the production bottleneck, which both state and samizdat publishers suffered, was limited access to paper. In communist states, paper was, first, a ‘strategic’ good, and tight control over it allowed the authorities to further propaganda and censor ‘inappropriate’ views. Second, the chronic inefficiency of communist economy also entailed systemic inability to produce enough paper, even for officially approved publications. In the latter half of the 1980s, videos and satellite television dishes and tuners began to be smuggled into Poland from Western Europe – at quite a cost, as the average monthly Polish salary exchanged on the black market did not amount to more than seven to ten US dollars. (Banks posted much more favorable official exchange rates, but did not exchange Polish zloties into any convertible currency.) Another obstacle was the SECAM system of broadcasting used in the Soviet bloc; satellite television was broadcast in the PAL system, which necessitated purchasing PAL television sets from the West. However, the drab realities of life in communist Poland and the ritualized mendacity of official propaganda were incentive enough to acquire access to Western satellite television, video films, and musical programs smuggled from the West. Another factor was the fact that the passport valid for travel to Western Europe was an extremely restricted good. One was not allowed to keep even regular passports for other Soviet bloc states at home. After returning from abroad, one had to immediately return them to a militia station. Satellite television and videos let one travel to the better world beyond the Iron Curtain. At the same time, the operation of samizdat publishers was greatly facilitated by the arrival of photocopiers and personal computers. These products were imported to Poland with help of one’s family members living in the West, or of Western organizations that supported the anticommunist underground (Bajerowa 2003: 43).

630 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The fall of communism, the breakup of the Soviet bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union were unexpected by most. Majority foresaw that these happy events would not take place in their lifetimes. In Poland, changes followed at a fast pace. In mid-1989, the first partially free parliamentary elections took place. In January 1990, the free-market economy supplanted its centrally-planned counterpart. Passports were issued to everybody who wanted this document and one was allowed to keep it at home. Disgust with the communist system and with one’s position as a second-class citizen was so tremendous that between 1988 and 1992, 582,000 Aussiedlers (mostly Szlonozks) streamed from Poland to Germany. They were joined by tens of thousands of ethnic Poles who emigrated to the West as well, not sure if communism would not return to Poland; and wary that the postcommunist changes might not bring them a better life any time soon. The tremendous dimension of changes is best indicated by the fact that by 1993, all three of Poland’s previous neighboring states (Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union) had disappeared and were replaced with seven new ones: Belarus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Slovakia, Russia, and Ukraine. Most surprising was the fact that this outcome did not entail a single war, a political feat unthinkable after World War I. In 1991, the Warsaw Pact and the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), the institutions through which Moscow controlled the Soviet bloc, were dissolved. The success of democratization and the privatization of the economy was rewarded in 1993 with Poland’s membership in the Council of Europe. In 1999, Poland also joined NATO, along with the Czech Republic and Hungary. Six years later, Poland, as one of ten states, acceded the European Union. This marked the end of the transition period from communism to democracy for the Central European nation-states of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, for the post-Soviet nationstates of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and for the post-Yugoslav nation-state of Slovenia (Rogall 2000: 7). In 1989, around 15 percent of eighteen-year-olds entered institutions of higher education. The number of people with university education, 2.66 million, surpassed the mark of 7 percent in the Polish population. In 1966, half of Poland’s inhabitants lived in cities and the share increased to 60 percent in 1989. Industrialization entailed lowering the share of the workforce employed in agriculture to one-quarter. Between 1989 and 2004, new state universities were founded in Zielona Góra, Opole, Olsztyn, and Rzeszów; and more than 100 private higher education institutions were established. More than half of the eighteen-year-olds now undertake university-level education, which brings Poland closer to the Western standard of one-quarter to one-third graduates of higher education institutions in society. In 2002, 10.2 percent of Polish citizens had graduated from universities. Between 1988 and 2002, the share of the population that had finished only elementary school dropped from 38.8 percent to

The Polish Nation

631

28.2 percent. The two decades after the fall of communism was also the period during which almost each Polish citizen became a member of the classic ‘intelligentsia.’ Hence, this 19th-century sobriquet no longer means much and did not stop the growing stratification of society along income lines (Gajda 2001: 37, 39; Struktura społeczna ludno´sci 2005). Despite this stratification, high economic growth made videos and DVD players, satellite and cable television, personal computers and access to the internet widespread especially in urban households. In 1997, the number of published book titles climbed to 16,000, and today it is close to 20,000. Each Polish citizen is constantly ‘immersed’ in standard Polish, which all the time reaches him or her via the numerous mass media. This has leveled the remaining dialectal differences and (paradoxically) triggered interest in dialectal and regional cultures. Poland was opened to the world; and its system of political, economic, and militarily alliances voluntarily switched from East to West. The compulsory teaching of Russian, enforced during communist times from elementary school to university, brought hardly any widespread knowledge of this language to the population at large because they were not allowed to visit the Soviet Union, which deprived the learners of this language of the crucial factor of motivation. In addition, Polish anticommunism was strongly bound up with opposition to all things Russian (and Soviet). On the other hand, because Polish censors allowed publication of translations of books by Western authors who were scoffed at by Soviet censors, numerous Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian intellectuals taught themselves Polish in order to access Western culture through these Polish translations. During the communist period, Western languages, mainly English, German, and French, were offered almost exclusively in secondary schools. In elementary schools, Russian was the only ‘choice.’ Today, the foreign language most widely taught and learned in Poland is English. A distant second in the rankings is German, although the anti-German feeling cultivated by propaganda in communist Poland (before 1989, this language was not permitted to be taught in the areas inhabited by the autochthons) long made the average Pole as averse to acquiring German as Russian. Lavishly supported by Paris and encouraged by some intellectuals brought up in the myth of French as the ‘world language,’ French remains a minority pursuit, almost on par with Spanish and Italian. The supremacy of English in Central Europe has been fortified by the fact that Czechs, Magyars, Poles, and Slovaks do not generally learn the languages of their neighbors and usually do not understand them (with the exception the Czechs and Slovaks whose languages are virtually mutually comprehensible). After the 2004 accession of the Central European states to the European Union, this tendency came as a surprise to the delegates of the EU’s old 15 in Brussels. Prior to 1945, German dominated in this region as the language of international communication; now, Central European officers in the EU’s structures contribute

632 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

to the dominance of English in the Union. On the other hand, there is the EU rule that says that the official languages of member states are the EU’s official languages as well. This means that, after the 2004 enlargement of the EU, Polish, Czech, Magyar, and Slovak all officially became languages of international communication. This change did not translate into a growing number of learners of these Central European languages across the Union, but the presence of these languages is felt throughout the EU’s structures (Bajerowa 2003: 44; Riabczuk 2002: 191). Since English is the lingua franca of global commerce and technology, Anglicisms have streamed into Polish (and also into Czech, Magyar, and Slovak), much to the dismay of purists and ethnic nationalists. The backlash came in 1999 when the Sejm passed the Act on the Polish Language, emulating the French example of a similar act adopted in 1994, aimed against ‘Anglicization’ of the French language. The Polish act introduces the monopoly of Polish as the language of commerce, law, and any public activity on the territory of Poland. This regulation applies to labels on goods, advertisements, commercials, instructions, warranties, bills, contracts, shop names, and the like. However, the sweeping range of this act in the context of the dynamic economic, political, cultural and social development of postcommunist Poland made it a dead letter. Its restrictive provisions are observed in the breach and the courts do not enforce it. The act elevated the Rada Je˛zyka Polskiego (Council of the Polish Language), established in 1997 by PAN, to the position of the watchdog of the correctness and purity of the Polish language. Obviously, the Council has at its disposal no means of enforcing its normative views, or the act’s other provisions, on users of Polish. The Council and philologists make their views on the ‘state and needs’ of the Polish language known at the biannual congresses of the culture (that is, language politics) of the Polish language. Yet, foreign companies do not Polonize their foreign logos and do not switch the language of their international administration to Polish. Polish companies know that a foreign-sounding name on the label makes it easier to market a product. Neither Polish nor foreign companies shy away from using foreign words, sentences, and texts in commercials and advertisements. The multilingual reality is a fact that cannot be reversed without succumbing to authoritarian methods that are not available in a democracy. The problem is that, during communist times, many Polish philologists were educated in the ethos of Polish being a beleaguered language. The fate of this language was presented as identical to that of the Polish nation. This gave rise to a popular simile, in the framework of which the Polish language is personified. Hence there is nothing strange in Polish about the proposition that this language had to ‘fight’ for survival in the partition period and during World War II. Paradoxically, these philologists believe that the opening of postcommunist Poland to the world ‘endangers’ Polish. Such an opinion is widely communicated by Jan Miodek (1946–), a professor of the University of Wrocław, and the

The Polish Nation

633

author of a popular TV program, Ojczyzna–polszczyzna (Fatherland—the Polish Language). He edited the tellingly titled O zagrozeniach ˙ i bogactwie polszczyzny (On What Endangers Polish, and the Language’s Riches, 1996, Wrocław). However, Polish-speakers at large decided otherwise. Between 2004 and 2006, more than 1 million Polish workers and their families streamed to the United Kingdom and about 150,000 to Ireland.13 Because they travel regularly to Poland, they are bound to deepen Anglicization of the Polish language with their rapidly acquired command of English (Gajda 2001: 61). The post-communist Polish Constitution of 1997 is the first-ever Polish Constitution where the status of the Polish language is explicitly spelled out. Article 27 states that Polish is the official language of the Republic of Poland, but a corollary follows that this regulation shall not breach the rights of Poland’s national minorities; especially those rights that were acquired thanks to various international agreements ratified by Poland. Even more significantly, the Preamble provides a new definition of the Polish nation, stating that it consists of all Polish citizens, irrespective of ethnicity, language, nationality, or religion (Articles 32 and 51). Hence, from the legal point of view, Polish nationalism is now civic, although in reality, this nationalism remains largely ethnic (as evidenced by the 1999 Act on the Polish Language). Quite a surprise to the average Pole was the ‘reappearance’ of Germans, who had been thought to be ‘non-existent’ in postwar Poland. In 1989, in Upper Silesia, close to 300,000 persons signed lists announcing that they were Germans and these lists were deposited in the West German Embassy. In the view of communist propaganda, the ‘autochthons’ (that is, the nationally verified and rehabilitated, together with their descendants) were ethnic Poles. The success of ‘re-Polonization’ was apparent, as hardly any of them younger than 60 still spoke German. On the other hand, their relatives had time and again chosen Germandom in preference to Polishdom, leaving en masse to West Germany, where they gained the status of Aussiedlers, which automatically entitled them to West German citizenship. In 1990, Warsaw registered organizations of Upper Silesian Germans (who account for the overwhelming majority of Poland’s German minority). In the same year, the German-Polish border treaty was signed. In the light of international law, Bonn finally, and in a binding manner, gave up its sovereign rights in the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line incorporated into postwar Poland. But the Bundestag ratified this treaty only in 1992, which, paradoxically, prompted Warsaw to request Moscow not to withdraw Soviet/Russian troops from Poland. They were the only guarantor of the inviolability of the new Polish-German border after 1945, and this had prevented anticommunist forces from questioning the presence of this de facto occupation force in postwar Poland too vociferously. Eventually, these troops left in 1993, 2 years after they had moved away from Czechoslovakia.

634 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In 1991, Bonn and Warsaw signed the groundbreaking Treaty on Good Neighborliness and Cooperation. It was the first postwar international agreement addressing the rights of a minority. Warsaw undertook the obligation to protect Poland’s German minority. Postcommunist Poland signed similar treaties with minority protection clauses with all its neighbors. This kind of a bilateral treaty on cooperation became a standard one, contracted by all the postcommunist states of Central Europe. The German-Polish treaty was ratified in 1992. It was a clear indication of goodwill and Warsaw’s eagerness to stem the tremendous outflow of population from Upper Silesia to reunited Germany. Hence, Warsaw tacitly agreed that the German embassy and consulates would issue certificates of German citizenship and German passports to members of the German minority in Poland. Applicants were not required to renounce their Polish citizenship (which breached German and Polish law that forbade dual citizenship). In 2002, there were 280,000 holders of these German documents in Poland. Obviously, they retained their Polish citizenship and passports as well. The vast majority of them reside in the Voivodeship of Opole, where they account for one-fifth of the population. Because the German passport allows them to work legally throughout the EU, this substantially lowered the unemployment rate in this predominantly agricultural region. The number of German passports issued to Polish citizens also reduced the claim of German minority leaders that there are between 0.5 million and 1 million Germans living in contemporary Poland, for most of the remaining verified and rehabilitated citizens and their descendants, who could apply for German passports, did not do so (Kamusella 2003: 705, 707; Struktura społeczna ludno´sci 2005). Members of the German minority have not reacquired command of the German language, of which they had been deprived by the forced policy of ‘re-Polonization’ after World War II. Only two bilingual German-Polish elementary schools were opened for the minority. This contrasts starkly with the situation of Lithuania’s Polish minority, numbering around 300,000. In the mid1990s, they enjoyed 150 Polish-language elementary and secondary schools. A similar network of Polish-language schools serves 400,000 ethnic Poles in Belarus and 200,000 in Ukraine. National minorities were included in the Polish statistical yearbook only in 1995, in the form of a list of minority organizations with the numbers of these organizations’ members. Beginning in 2000, the yearbook also registered minority-language schools. Surprisingly, it shows a growth of German-language elementary schools from 111 in 1995/1996 to 256 in 2001/2002, and of German-language lower secondary schools (gimnazja, or middle schools) from 53 in 2000/2001 to 62 in 2001/2002. In both school years, according to the data, there were two German-language higher secondary schools (licea). This statistic seriously falsifies the reality, however. The elementary schools labeled as ‘German-language’ in the yearbook indicate where German is offered

The Polish Nation

635

as the so-called ‘mother tongue.’ This designation translates into three hours of German classes per week. By the same token, almost every Polish elementary school could be described as ‘English-language,’ because this language is customarily taught three or more hours per week. On the other hand, the German-language lower and regular secondary schools are usually nothing more than regular Polish-language secondary schools, with some groups following bilingual Polish-German education. None of these secondary schools is specifically earmarked for children of the German minority, and the overwhelming majority of students are ethnic Poles. In general, between 1990/1991 and 2001/2002, the number of minoritylanguage elementary schools in Poland grew from 120 to 430 (or rather 176 if one recalls that German-language schools are not really German-language). Hence, in 2001/2002, there were 124 (or rather 62) minority-language lower secondary schools and 11 (or rather 9) minority-language secondary schools. The statistics for other minorities than Germans is more reliable: in 2001/2002, the numbers of the three types of minorities-language schools for Belarusians were 26, 11, and 2; for Lemkos 12, 6, and nil; for Lithuanians 13, 2, and 1; for Slovaks 7, 3, and 9; and for Ukrainians 74, 34, and 4. Descendants of Greek communist refugees retained 1 Greek-language elementary school, and Jews reestablished their educational presence in Poland with a single Hebrew-language elementary school. The most surprising phenomenon of the mid-1990s was the establishment of schools with Kashubian as the language of instruction. Well into the 1990s, Polish linguists and politicians were never tired of repeating that ‘Kashubian is a dialect of Polish,’ although already in the communist period about 400 books had been published in Kashubian, or partially in this language. In 2001/2002, Kashubian was taught as a subject in 40 elementary schools, six lower secondary schools, and one secondary school. Warsaw’s support for schools with Kashubian in the curriculum is reluctant and wavering, but continues, mainly because Kashubian leaders consistently maintain that the Kashubs, numbering 200,000 to 400,000, are an ethnic group of the Polish nation, not a nation in its own right. Out of all recognized national minorities living in Poland, the level of minority language maintenance is the highest among the Roma. Being a language belonging to the Indic branch of the Indo-European languages, it is much more distinctive than Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Kashubian (if compared to Polish). Other similarly distinctive minority languages used in Poland are German and Lithuanian; but both are spoken by relatively few people, whereas the Roma minority numbers 30,000 to 50,000. There is still not a single Roma-language school in Poland. In the 1990s, it was widespread practice not to enforce the rule of compulsory elementary education in the case of Roma children, who were segregated in special classes within ‘Polish schools,’ or sent them to schools for the mentally retarded; their sole mental deficiency being a poor command of

636 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Polish (Obracht-Prondzynski ´ 2007b: 19–21, 28; Rocznik statystyczny 1995: 71, 2002: 239; The Limits of Solidarity 2002: 15, 149–165; Vaitiekus 1995: 17; Zieniukowa 2001). Estimates of the size of the various minorities in Poland vary considerably, whether produced by Warsaw or minority leaders. The numbers are 260,000 to 1 million for Germans, 70,000 to 400,000 for Ukrainians, 70,000 to 300,000 for Belarusians, 50,000 to 60,000 for Lemkos, 15,000 to 25,000 for Lithuanians, 5000 to 20,000 for Slovaks, and 3000 to 15,000 for Jews. (The numbers for Roma and Kashubs are cited above.) The question that remains is: what could be the numbers for Silesians (Szlonzoks)? Contrary to Kashubian leaders, beginning in the mid-1990s, their Silesian counterparts maintained that the Silesians were a nation separate from the Poles and that Silesians speak their own language, Silesian. Potentially, around 300,000 Germans from Upper Silesia could credibly claim Silesian nationality, as well as at least 1 million Poles from the same region. Taking into consideration the lowest estimates of the recognized national minorities (that is, less the Kashubs and the Silesians), minorities account for 1.2 percent of the Polish population today, while the highest estimates yield 4.6 percent. Should one add to the highest estimates 400,000 Kashubs and 0.5 million Szlonzoks, the share of minorities would be 6.9 percent. In either case, the share of minorities is historically small. And the number of persons who belong to these minorities, and speak languages completely non-intelligible to the Polish-speaker (that is, German, Lithuanian and Romani) cannot be higher than 100,000. With the exception of the Roma, all speakers of minority languages are bilingual; and most of them speak Polish much better than their native language. In post-communist Poland, only the German minority managed to elect representatives to the parliament, namely, seven MPs and one senator in 1991. Prior to the 1993 parliamentarian elections, the 5-percent election threshold was introduced to limit the number of parties represented in the parliament. Minorities, however, were exempted from meeting this requirement. Despite this preferential treatment, the number of German deputies plunged to four MPs and one senator in 1993 and to a mere two MPs in 1997. Two German MPs were also elected in 2001 and 2005, but just one in 2007. Deputies of some other non-Polish ethnic backgrounds also sit in the Sejm and the Senate, but they were elected as members of mainstream political parties, not as representatives of national minorities. With the introduction of genuine self-government at the local level, members of national minorities were elected to communal authorities in their regions. In 1999, self-government was introduced at the level of counties and voivodeships (regions) as well. Members of national minorities were elected to county councils, but only in the Voivodeship of Opole did they participate as a distinctive political group in regional self-government (Łodzinski ´ 1998: 101–102; Magocsi 2002: 200; Rajkiewicz 1997: 33).

The Polish Nation

637

The first post-communist census was conducted in Poland in 2002. For the first time since 1946, a question about one’s nationality was included. In addition, census-takers inquired about the language used at home. The results turned out to be quite surprising. First, the Silesians at 173,000 are now the largest national minority in Poland. Second, the numbers of people belonging to other national minorities are much smaller than even Warsaw’s conservative estimates. The numbers are: 153,000 Germans, 49,000 Belarusians, 31,000 Ukrainians, 13,000 Roma, 6000 Russians (that is, mainly Old Believers), 6000 Lemkos, 5800 Lithuanians, 5000 Kashubs, 2000 Slovaks, 1000 Jews, and 500 Czechs. The overall number of people who declared a nationality other than Polish amounts to 471,000, a mere 1.23 percent of Poland’s population. (Interestingly, 775,000 people did not declare their nationality, or census-takers were not able to establish it.) Warsaw does not recognize the Silesians and the Kashubs as national minorities. In the official statistics published after the census, the latter are referred to as an ‘ethnic group’ and the former even more quaintly as a ‘social group.’ Should one deduct them from the overall number of national minorities living in Poland, the share of the non-Polish population in Poland plunges to an amazing 0.75 percent. Minority leaders criticized this census on two accounts. First, census-takers, in blatant breach of law, did not record numerous declarations of Silesian nationality, or changed such declarations to ‘Polish.’ Second, numerous members of stigmatized minorities (especially Roma, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lemkos) feared that the census might entail some retributive actions against them, so they preferred to declare themselves as Poles. The census results may also reflect the success of the Polonization that was enforced in communist Poland and which continues after the fall of communism in a ‘natural’ manner. Polish is so ubiquitous that no minority language can hope to withstand its penetration, with the partial exception of Romani, due to the sociocultural and even racist isolation of the Roma. The number of people speaking exclusively in a language other than Polish in their families is minuscule: 52,500 (0.14 percent), though 511,000 (1.34 percent) declared using a minority language alongside Polish with family members. Interestingly, German (with 204,600 declarations14 ) is followed by English, spoken by 90,000 persons at home. Obviously, this number does not register the rise of some Anglophone minority in Poland, but the penetration of English as the Central European lingua franca. The third largest language other than Polish spoken in Poland is Silesian with over 57,000 declarations, and the fourth is Kashubian with 53,000 declarations. The official post-census publications interpret Silesian as a ‘dialect of Polish,’ though this contradicts the clear intention of the Silesians to be treated as a separate nation with their own language. A linguistic phenomenon that failed to surface in the census is the Goralian language. The Goralians are treated as (and feel themselves to be part of) the

638 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Polish nation, but their idiom is so different from standard Polish that it has necessitated the translation of the New Testament into Goralian, published in two parts between 2002 and 2004. Two translations of the New Testament into Kashubian were also completed in the 1990s, but the Goralians overwhelmingly see their language as a dialect of Polish. Paradoxically, there is no translation of the New Testament into Silesian due to the low status of this language among Poland’s population at large, which discourages support for its standardization. However, there are some Silesian retellings of biblical stories. After the victory of the populist-cum-nationalist forces in the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Rada Je˛zyka Polskiego appealed to the Episcopate of the Polish Catholic Church to forbid the liturgical and other official use of the Goralian, Kashubian, and Silesian translations of the Holy Scriptures. In December 2005, much to the Goralians’ displeasure, the Cracow Archbishop forbade the use of the Goralian translation of the New Testament, and even of Goralian-language songs in his archdiocese (Dziwisz prosi 2005; Eberhardt 2006: 69–71; Ewangelie w przekładzie Marii Matejowej Torbiarz na gware˛ Górali Skalnopodhalanskich ´ z Zakopanego 2002; Struktura społeczna ludno´sci 2005; Szołtysek 2000; Treder 2006; Wi´sniewska 2005). The Polish Constitution of 1997 granted various rights to national and ethnic minorities in ten of its articles. But no specific acts followed to implement these rights in practice. Moreover, there was no legal definition of ‘ethnic minority’ in Polish law until 2005. This made it impossible for Poland’s ethnic minorities to use these privileges. Curiously, before 2005 Warsaw usually treated Lemkos and Romas as ‘national minorities,’ though they do not enjoy their own nationstates, as Poland’s other national minorities do. On the other hand, the Polish government aggressively refused and still refuses to extend the same kind of preferential treatment to the Kashubs, let alone the Silesians. This astounding duplicity stems from mainstream Polish ethnic nationalism. Neither Lemkos nor Roma have ever been perceived to belong to the Polish nation (like Jews before 1945), so Warsaw does not question (and sometimes even encourages) these groups’ assertion of their ethnic or national separateness vis-à-vis the Polish nation. On the other hand, the voices of Kashubian and Silesian leaders appealing for the recognition of their groups as ethnic or national minorities have been disregarded. Warsaw continues to see the Kashubs and the Silesians as regional, or at most ethnoregional, groups of the Polish nation. After 1945, no minority language was allowed to be used in contacts with the administration. The legal basis of this decision was the 1945 Decree on State Language, and the Language of Administration of Governmental and SelfGovernmental Administrations. Non-Polish versions of place and geographical names were not tolerated, in line with the 1934 Decree on Determining Names of Localities and on the Numbering of Real Estate Properties. This state of affairs continued after 1989, despites efforts undertaken from 1993 to change it by

The Polish Nation

639

adoption of an Act on Minorities. At long last, the Parliament passed such an Act on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Language in late 2004, and it came into force early the following year.15 Tellingly, its clauses draw on the results of the 2002 census. Nationally-minded MPs even proposed that only communes with 50 percent of inhabitants belonging to a minority would have the right to use a minority language while contacting state administration, or use the name of their locality in the minority-language version. As seen in the census, there is not a single commune where more than half of the population declared a nationality other than Polish. Sensibly, the threshold was then lowered to 20 percent. The minorities to be protected by this act’s provisions are enumerated and divided into national and ethnic ones. For the first time, a legal definition of the distinction between these two types of minorities was introduced. To wit, national minorities enjoy their own independent nation-states, whereas ethnic minorities do not. Paradoxically, should this definition be applied to the period before 1991, it would appear that the Armenians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians were ethnic groups because they did not have their own independent nation-states. The same status had to be accorded to the Czechs and Slovaks, whose separate nation-states emerged only in 1993. Looking back to the time before 1918, the Poles were no nation either. The act extends the status of ethnic minorities to Karaims (Caraims, Karaites), Lemkos, Roma, and Tatars.16 This status is still denied to the Kashubs, popularly defined as a ‘regional group of the Polish nation.’ The only concession made was in recognizing the Kashubian language as ‘regional.’ This leeway allowed for granting the same language rights to the Kashubs as to Poland’s recognized national and ethnic minorities. This list of recognized minorities obviously does not include Poland’s largest national minority, the Silesians, and neither is their Silesian language mentioned. But the Polish branch of the EU’s European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL) does recognize Silesian ´ as one of the minority languages spoken in Poland17 (Czesak 2006; Łodzinski 1998: 36, 72). The discussion on the status of minorities concerns just 1 to 4 percent of Poland’s population, but reflects the ongoing tension between the ethnic and civic visions of the Polish nation-state. Ethnic nationalists (that is, national communists too) created an unprecedented, ethnically homogenous Poland in the second half of the 20th century, whereas the 1997 Constitution introduced the new civic definition of the Polish nation. Ethnic nationalists strive to maintain the holy grail of ‘ethnic purity,’ but the legal bases are in place to create a Polish immigration policy, which would eventually make Poland’s population more multiethnic, as it always was prior to 1945. After 1989, the prescriptive ‘ownership’ of the Polish language slipped from the hands of the communist party and its propaganda machine, as it had done

640 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

after 1945 from the hands of the intelligentsia (or bourgeoisie, in communist terminology). Censorship was abolished, and the official, samizdat and émigré publishing markets merged into the single Polish book market, governed by the strict rules of supply and demand. PAN’s monopoly on deciding which usage is correct or incorrect was immediately breached, even more utterly than the negotiated monopoly of PAU, the University of Warsaw, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education during the interwar period. Before World War II, the cultural-cum-scholarly centers of Warsaw and Cracow had struggled for ideological ownership of the Polish language, supported by various associations and scholarly societies from other Polish cities. Since the end of communism, no cultural or academic center has been capable of controlling Polish, because its conscious users with university and secondary education account for over 70 percent of Poland’s population; it is their preoccupations, tastes, and decisions on how to speak and write that decide what the Polish language is at the beginning of the 21st century. The impoverished structures of PAN did not even circulate ideas for another language reform. This time, the prescriptivist impulse emerged from among the nationally-minded MPs who passed the 1999 Act on the Polish Language. Users took little notice, however, and there is no mechanism for enforcing this act. During the communist period, it was the Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe (PWN, Polish Scientific Publishing House) which monopolized the publication of works, which standardized the Polish language. It published Doroszewski’s authoritative Słownik je˛zyka polskiego and Wielka encyklopedia powszechna. The PWN also brought out other dictionaries stemming from Doroszewski’s work, namely, his and Kurkowska’s Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny, Skorupka’s Mały Słownik je˛zyka polskiego, and Szymczak’s three-volume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. After 1989, a virtual avalanche of various dictionaries compiled by different authors and published by numerous publishing houses flooded the market. The same process repeated itself in the case of encyclopedias. Readers starved for half a century on the diet of one authoritative dictionary and one authoritative encyclopedia, compiled in line with the ideological tenets of the communist party, demanded more in a variety of formats. Publishers swiftly obliged. The eruption took state-owned publishing houses by surprise. Significantly, Linde’s dictionary was reprinted in 1995, and in the second half of the 1990s, the Poznan ´ publishing company, Kurpisz, published a reprint of the interwar Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna with the twelve-volume supplement on the events after 1939. Between 1994 and 1998, the Cracow-based Fogra publisher brought out the twenty volumes of Popularna encyklopedia powszechna (The Popular Universal Encyclopedia). The PWN replied timidly, first, with a paper and CD reprint of Doroszewski’s multivolume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (1996–1997) and with the seven volumes of Nowa encyklopedia powszechna (The New Universal Encyclopedia, 1995–1996,

The Polish Nation

641

Warsaw). The real offensive came with the first post-communist authoritative encyclopedia, Wielka encyklopedia powszechna (The Great Universal Encyclopedia, 2001–2005, Warsaw), consisting of 31 volumes. Its publication coincided with the launching of Polish Wikipedia (founded in 2001), which at 66.2 million words in late 2006, amounted to 132 conventional volumes, making it the largest Polish-language encyclopedia ever. Between 1997 and 2005, Kurpisz replied in kind, providing the Polish reader with a 49-volume translation of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with the 15 percent of the text composed from original articles on matters Polish. Fogra took up the challenge too, and in 2000, began to publish the new edition of Popularna encyklopedia powszechna, planned to be comprised of twelve volumes. The Catholic University of Lublin persists with its unique endeavor of Encyklopedia katolicka (The Catholic Encyclopedia), which began to be published in 1973; and so far, with volume ten has reached the half-way mark.18 Not to be outdone by competitors, the PWN entered into cooperation with the biggest Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, and in 2005, they published the 21 volumes of the modestly priced Encyklopedia Gazety Wyborczej (Encyclopedia of Gazeta Wyborcza, Warsaw). Between 2004 and 2005, the PWN also issued the eight volumes of the second edition of Nowa encyklopedia powszechna. To improve on Szymczak’s three-volume dictionary, the PWN brought out Stanisław Dubisz’s (1949–) four-volume Uniwersalny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Universal Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2003, Warsaw), which records the cornucopia of new vocabulary related to entire spheres of life that had not existed before 1989; that is, the free market, computer sciences, the free press, or consumerism. The real earthquake came with the arrival of Andrzej Markowski’s (1948–) Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (The Dictionary of Correct Polish, 1998, Warsaw). It is not merely a new edition of Doroszewski’s Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny, but a lexicographic work, which espouses an entirely novel approach to standard Polish, in accordance with the signum temporis of the postcommunist period. Earlier, the myth of total unity of standard Polish had been maintained. One had been expected to write and speak in standard Polish, as set in dictionaries. Only the intelligentsia had been up to the task, and only barely, because their various social and regional origins tended to surface in their everyday speech and writing. The colloquial speech of urbanites and village dwellers’ dialects had been beyond the pale of this standard. The destruction of the interwar intelligentsia in the fires of World War II and at the hands of the postwar communist authorities had dented the inviolability of standard Polish. The vast postwar ethnic cleansings and relocation of the Polish ethnic population from the territories seized by the Soviet Union to the deutsche Ostgebiete granted to Poland had leveled the most striking regional and dialect differences. Afterward, the liquidation of illiteracy and the opening of secondary and university education to most of the population freed standard Polish

642 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

from the control of the narrow class of prewar intelligentsia. Paradoxically, in totalitarian communist Poland, the use of the Polish language had been democratized and homogenized. The interwar trend-setters of linguistic correctness opposed this process, dubbing it ‘vulgarization’ of the Polish language. Communist authorities, who had so much invested in the monolithic ethnolinguistic homogeneity of the postwar Polish nation-state, clung uneasily to this view. The unity of language reinforced the ethnic and linguistic homogeneity of the Polish nation and its nation-state. Markowski, in his dictionary, was the first one to acknowledge that in speech and writing there are two equally acceptable varieties of standard Polish, official and colloquial. They constitute two different systems within which rules of correctness differ. This solution is a kind of truce to the 20th-century struggle between the Warsaw school of linguists, which had opted for hard prescriptivism, and its Cracow counterpart, which leaned toward a middle ground between prescriptivism and descriptivism. So far, no dictionaries of this type have been published for Czech, Magyar, or Slovak. Prescriptivism dominates in the codification of the standard forms of these languages. This is especially striking in the case of Czech, which consists in reality of two sharply distinctive forms, spisovná cˇeština (written Czech) and obecná cˇeština (colloquial Czech). The former, codified in the 1830s on the basis of the 16th-century Bohemian, one acquires at school and uses for writing and sometimes in speech in formal situations. Obecná cˇeština is the spoken dialect of Prague, which spread all over Bohemia and is used in everyday speech also in Moravia and Czech Silesia, where one has to acquire it along with spisovná cˇeština. In Poland, colloquial Polish is the spoken variety of formal (written) Polish, whereas in the Czech Republic, obecná cˇeština and spisovná cˇeština are two different language forms of different sociolinguistic and historic origins. Despite this fact, dictionaries of the Czech language tend to record spisovná cˇeština only, because it is identified as standard Czech. In the cases of Magyar and Slovak, the situation is similar to Polish. However, the distance between the formal and colloquial variants of these two languages is narrower than in Polish, because Magyar was standardized in the 1860s and Slovak in the 1960s on the basis of spoken language. In 1996, the PWN published Nowy słownik ortograficzny PWN wraz z zasadami pisowni i interpunkcji (The PWN’s New Orthographic Dictionary with the Principles of Spelling, Writing and Punctuation, Warsaw) edited by Edward Polanski. ´ The dictionary incorporated some new suggestions on ‘correct usage’ as worked put by PAN’s Commission for Language Politics, and in its prescriptivist urge it drew on the tradition of interwar Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek, and postwar Słownik ortograficzny i prawidla pisowni polskiej. But unlike Pisownia polska. Przepisy – słowniczek and Słownik ortograficzny i prawidla pisowni polskiej, Polanski’s ´ dictionary is one of many on offer, and it is not even the

The Polish Nation

643

most popular one, as this sobriquet belongs to Markowski’s novel lexicographic that champions the formal and colloquial varieties of standard Polish as equally correct and acceptable, obviously depending on specific communication situations. Hence, PAN’s voice on what ‘correct Polish’ may be is one of many, and by no way the most significant one. Markowski’s nod of acceptance to colloquial Polish amply indicates that users themselves decisively shape the language. The progressing informalization of Polish usage reflects the same much more widespread trend in English, which after 1989 has functioned as the lingua franca of Central Europe. The Act on the Polish Language was mainly devised to curb ‘Anglicization of Polish,’ but cannot hope to stop this process, unless users of Polish themselves decide to do so; which is unlikely, given the practical and symbolic attraction of the English language nowadays (Markowski and Podracki 1999: 67–59). Significantly, the first postcommunist authoritative dictionary of the Polish language was brought out, not in Warsaw or Cracow but in Poznan; ´ and not by the PWN. It was Kurpisz, which, between 1994 and 2005, brought out the 50 volumes of Praktyczny Słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (The Practical Dictionary of Contemporary Polish, Poznan), ´ edited by Halina Zgółkowa. The volumes are much smaller than those of Doroszewski’s 11-volume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego, and Zgółkowa’s dictionary is only slightly more extensive than Doroszewski’s. The importance of Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny cannot be overestimated. First, since the end of communism, no authoritative multivolume dictionary has yet been compiled for Czech, Magyar, or Slovak. (In the case of Slovak the first volume of Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka came off the press only in late 2006.) Second, this is the first authoritative dictionary of Polish ever to be edited by a woman, which shows that linguistics, as other spheres of public life (especially statecraft), has ceased to be a male preserve. In 2000, the PWN published the first two volumes of Andrzej Bankowski’s ´ three-volume Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego. (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, Warsaw). There appeared a chance that Polish would receive a modern extensive etymological dictionary, comparable to A Magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára. No dictionary of this kind has yet been compiled for any of the West Slavic languages (that is, Czech, Kashubian, Polish, Slovak, or Sorbian). But like Sławski’s etymological dictionary (terminated at letter Ł), Bankowski’s ´ work is bound to remain incomplete at letter P; due to mental illness, the author is unable to produce the final (that is, third) volume. Thus, Wiesław Bory´s’s much shorter, one-volume Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2005, Cracow) must suffice as a stopgap, when one wishes to enquire about etymologies of ´ words starting with letters from R to Z. In 2000, in emulation of Germany’s Goethe-Institut and the United Kingdom’s British Council, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage founded

644 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Instytut Adama Mickiewicza) in order to promote Polish language and culture abroad. There is some hope among the planners of Polish language politics that this institute will help preserve Polish among the Polish minorities in the neighboring and post-Soviet states, and to popularize the learning of this language in Western Europe and North America. The situation is most opportune, as beginning in 2004, Polish is one of the official languages of the European Union. Hence, by law, it is used for publishing legislation and communication in the EU’s bodies (located in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg). The same chance offered by EU enlargement was extended to Czech, Magyar, and Slovak. Taking into account the number of speakers, Polish is the sixth biggest language in the European Union, after Spanish, English, German, French, and Italian, and around the 40th biggest in the world. What bars Polish from the league of ‘big languages’ is not only the number of speakers but the lack of the ultimate dictionary that would gather together all the information about the Polish language from its inception to this day, comparable to The Oxford English Dictionary or the brothers Grimms’ Deutsche Wörterbuch. For instance, The Oxford English Dictionary gathers all the words defined as English that appeared in extant texts from the 14th century until today. It also records pronunciations of these words, etymology and their diverse meanings (homophones), and illustrates these meanings with fragments of texts where they were used for the first time. Various Polish dictionaries record most Polish words used in writing since the 14th century, with the exception of the 17th-century (no dictionary of 17th-century Polish has been compiled yet). What is missing is a comprehensive dictionary of Polish etymology and pronunciation, and a dictionary illustrating and recording words with passages from texts where they were used for the first time. Apparently, there is no hope that such an ultimate dictionary of the Polish language will be compiled anytime soon. (To this day, practically no other languages but English and German have enjoyed such dictionaries.) But in an age of intensified globalization, this will necessarily mean that new spheres of technology, economy, science, and culture will not be available through the medium of Polish. This may be so in the best interest of Polish-speakers, though. First, they will have to acquire foreign languages, as they used to do before 1945, in order to ensure their full participation in the global economy and culture. Second, it will open Poland to multilingualism and multiculturalism; that is, to what Poland was prior to the vast ethnic cleansings after World War II. It seems that Poland’s way to the future, without forgetting about its past, leads through the transcending of the post-1945 enforced ethnolinguistic homogenization.

9 The Hungarian Nation: From Hungary to Magyarország

[O]ur language is the planet’s most developed, most cultured language, a so-called highly declined language, and a comparatively highly cultured language is not spoken by any other nation, which shows that it must have taken an incredibly long time for this high degree of culture to develop. And if we take the Magyar language’s characteristics into account, [it is clear that] we are the planet’s oldest, most talented people. (in Lowenthal 1998: 173) József Torgyán (1932–), President of the Independent Smallholders’ Party (FKgP, Független Kisgazda-, Földmunkás- és Polgári Párt), deputy to the Hungarian Parliament between 1990 and 2002 If we can connect the Magyars over the border with the Magyars in Hungary – the economic Lebensraum of Magyars across the borders with Hungary’s economic Lebensraum – then Hungary should be able to achieve much more economically than it can now. (2002) (in Weaver 2006: 144) Viktor Orbán (1963–), Prime Minister of Hungary between 1998 and 2002 This chapter’s title is a linguistic pun that needs explanation. Magyarország means ‘Hungary’ in Magyar. But scholars writing in languages that used to be minority ones in the Hungarian section of Austria-Hungary are careful to distinguish between multiethnic historical Hungary and the ethnically Magyar nation-state that emerged after World War I. Obviously, this distinction originated due to the 19th-century insistence on the part of Magyar politicians that the Magyar language should be spoken by all the inhabitants of the multiethnic and multilingual Kingdom of Hungary. But one can find the first recorded instance of conscious distinguishing between Hungaris and Magyaris in the 1778 Latin-language letter of polymath Daniel Cornides (1732–1787) born in Upper Hungary and educated in Preßburg (Csáky 1982: 80). 645

646 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The ethnonym ‘Magyar,’ for the first time attested in writing (done in Greek letters) in 810, was the name of one of the Magyar tribes or clans, the Megyers. Those who claim it as a Finno-Ugric word, propose that magy is an ethnic name of unclear etymology, and the Finno-Ugric particle –eri means ‘men,’ or more generally ‘people.’ Recently, it became accepted that ‘Magyar’ and Megyer is related to the self-ethnonym of Siberia’s Finno-Ugric ethnic group, the Mansis (Voguls). Following the breakup of the hypothetic Ugric linguistic community in 1000 BCE, the ancestors of the Megyers and the Mansis entered into a longlasting contact with the Iranian-speaking population in the areas north of the Aral and Caspian Seas. In the case of the Megyers, the contact lasted until 600 CE. Hence, it is probable that both ethnonyms stem from an Iranian linguistic loan meaning ‘human.’ The term ‘Hungary’ began to appear in the 8th-century Frankish documents done in Latin. It is derived from the Turkic term onogur, in which on means ‘ten,’ and ogur ‘arrows.’ This was the name of the coalition of seven Finno-Ugric (Magyar) and three Turkic clans (tribes) that entered the Danubian basin in the late 9th century. With time, the smaller Turkic element was assimilated with the Finno-Ugric-speakers, hence from the early times, the Magyars’ self-ethnonym was Magyar. However, the name of the Onogur coalition recorded time and again in Latin documents (Ungari, Ungri, and Hungari), remained the name under which the Magyars and their state was known to other peoples in Europe. (Abondolo 1998: 387–390, 453; Benk˝ o, 1970: 816, 1976: 1025; Középiskolai történelmi atlasz 1996: 18; Melnychuk et al. 1989: 357). In Slovak, the Kingdom of Hungary is known as Uhorsko and post-World War I Hungary as Mad’arsko. The same distinction is also current in Czech, Uhersko vs Mad’arsko. The straightforward usage is complicated with the older form Uhry popular among Czech and Slovak writers until the beginning of the 20th century. Nowadays, especially Czech historians employ this a bit old-fashioned term as a synonym of Uhersko. The tendency, however, is to use Uhry in order to refer to ‘old Hungary’ before it was partitioned in the 16th century due to the Ottoman onslaught. Both Uhry and Uhersko share the same adjective derived from them, uherskí. Czech writers prefer to speak of Uhersko when talking of Hungary in the 18th and 19th centuries, because the official name of Austria-Hungary in Czech was Rakousko-Uhersko (in Slovak, Rakúsko-Uhorsko). But the term Uhry is preserved to this day in the Czech term for Upper Hungary (Slovakia), which is invariably Horní Uhry (but in Slovak, Horné Uhorsko). Upper Hungary is the translation of the Magyar term Felvidék, or ‘the uplands,’ which aptly describes Slovakia, because the country consists mainly of mountainous and hilly areas. But Felvidék itself appeared only in the late 19th-century Magyar usage, as a reflection of the growing insistence of the Slovak national leaders to make L’udovít Štúr’s proposal of the autonomous Slovak region of Okolie into a separate Slovak nation-state. Earlier, this northern and mountainous section of the Kingdom of Hungary was known in Magyar as Felföld

The Hungarian Nation

647

(Upland), or Fels˝ omagyarország (literally, Upper Hungary). Neither of these two terms did display any ethnolingusitic connotations, which Felvidék acquired, especially after the breakup of historical Hungary. Anyway, Slovakia also contains a small section of historical Hungary’s Kisalföld, or ‘Small Lowland,’ now covered by the term Felvidék as well. The Czech and Slovak distinction between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Magyar nation-state is unknown in Polish. Polish-speakers refer to both states with the single name, We˛gry, derived from the same root as Uhersko. Quite simply, the transformation of historical Hungary into the almost ethnically homogenous Magyar nation-state was of no direct concern to Polish statehood and nationalism, unlike to their Czechoslovak (Czech and Slovak) counterparts. Józef Piłsudski hoped to recover most, if not all, of the lands of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania for the Polish nation-state established in 1918. In this urge, he shared a similar vision as that espoused by Magyar politicians, who hoped that in the wake of the breakup of Austria-Hungary the entire historical Kingdom of Hungary would emerge as the Magyar nation-state. Not surprisingly, in Polish one rarely distinguishes between Poland-Lithuania and post-1918 Polish nation-state, referring to both states as Polska, or Poland. Obviously, the former minorities on which Warsaw’s homogenizing policies encroached in the interwar period disagree. The Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians perceive Poland-Lithuania as part of their national histories, but, in their eyes, the post-1918 Polish nation-state was a dangerous neighbor and sometimes oppressor of their nations. Hence Belarusian and Ukrainian scholars speak of Rech Paspalitaia and Rich Pospolita respectively, while their Lithuanian colleagues of Žeˇcpospolita, when referring to Poland-Lithuania. (The Russian term for this polity is Rech Pospolita.) These are almost phonetic renderings of Polish Rzeczpospolita (commonwealth), which the Polish-Lithuanian nobility popularly used to refer to their state. This sobriquet is derived from the full name of Poland-Lithuania, the Rzeczpospolita Królestwa Polskiego i Wielkiego Ksie˛stwa Litewskiego (Commonwealth of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). In contrast, the Polish nation-state is Lenkija in Lithuanian, Polshcha in Belarusian and Ukrainian, and Polsha in Russian. But the noun, Rzeczpospolita, functioning as a synonym for ‘republic,’ remains in the full name of the Polish nation-state, the Rzeczpospolita Polska (Republic of Poland), though the usual word for ‘republic’ in Polish is republika. Republika is obviously directly derived from Latin respublica, while rzeczpospolita is the Polish translation of the Latin term. Res and rzecz, which mean ‘thing,’ and publica and pospolity ‘popular’ and ‘common.’ The term ‘republic’ is sometimes translated as ‘commonwealth’ into English. Hence in English-language works, Poland-Lithuania is often referred to as the ‘Commonwealth.’ When a need arises to distinguish between historical Hungary and the Magyar nation-state in the Magyar language, the former is usually referred to as the

648 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Magyar Királyság (Kingdom of Hungary), and the latter as Magyarország. This usage, however, is not without its problems. Although without any king at its helm, post-1918 Hungary remained a kingdom until 1945, hence its official name was the Kingdom of Hungary. Technically speaking, Magyarország refers only to post-1945 Hungary, and the intended distinction between historical Hungary and the Magyar nation-state is lost again. In addition, Magyarország was popularly employed to speak about historical Hungary within the borders of Austria-Hungary. But without splitting the hair further, in this chapter’s title I contrast with historical and multiethnic Hungary Magyarország, meaning the post-1918 ethnically homogenous Magyar nation-state.

The Magyar and Polish cases compared Magyar politicians desired this transition to the ethnically homogenous nationstate since the 1820s, as I pointed in Chapter 5. In that period, the standardization of the Magyar language commenced, and it was gradually entered into official use in various komitats, at the expense of Latin, which had served the administrative needs of the Kingdom of Hungary since its inception in the 10th century. This step was taken in reply to the Josephine reforms, which in the 1780s replaced Latin with German as the official language of the Holy Roman Empire and Hungary. The opposition of the Hungarian estates to this measure was so strong that German never successfully replaced Latin in the Kingdom of Hungary, and the decree had to be eventually revoked at the beginning of the 1790s. In this manner, during the last two decades of the 18th century, the language of administration was made into an instrument of politics. The subsequent rapid politicization of most written languages official or not, spawned the phenomenon popularly known as the ‘language question.’ Of course, it was not the largely amicable disagreement between the proponents of Latin and vernaculars, or questione della lingua, which dates back to the times of Dante Alghieri. The rise of nationalism and the idea that nation-states should be ethnolinguistically homogenous, made language into the instrument of politics and nation-building. This spawned Sprachfrage (German for ‘language question’) that has underlaid and justified the founding of nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe since the mid-19th century. Like in Hungary, similar developments in the scope of official language took place in Poland-Lithuania. In the early 1770s, Polish replaced Latin as the medium of instruction in schools. This change reinforced the domination of Polish in administration and politics of Poland-Lithuania, as Latin had continued to feature prominently in both spheres until the mid-18th century. Eventually, as of the 1780s, even the most significant laws and documents of Poland-Lithuania were made exclusively in Polish. After the final partition of this dual commonwealth in 1795, the suddenly stateless Polish-Lithuanian natio made the Polish

The Hungarian Nation

649

language into their ersatz homeland. Initially, this was of special significance in the Prussian and Austrian partition zones, where previously official Polish was replaced with German, and German and Latin, respectively. Until the early 1830s, the domination of Polish in administration and education was retained in Russia’s partition zone, but then Russian decisively replaced Polish in the eastern section of this zone, and after the mid-1860s, in Congress Poland. The Hungarian natio made the Magyar language into the instrument of reaffirming the political separateness of the Kingdom of Hungary in the face of the Habsburgs’ centralizing and homogenizing endeavors. Similarly, the PolishLithuanian natio sought political unity in the cultural commonality of the Polish language. The difference was that the status of official language was lost for Polish after the final partition of Poland-Lithuania, while the Hungarian natio worked to gain the same status for Magyar in the Kingdom of Hungary until the mid-1840s. This short-lived elevated position of Magyar was terminated in the wake of the disastrous 1848–1849 War of Independence. The victorious Habsburg administration swiftly replaced Magyar with German with some regional concessions for Latin, Croatian, Walachian (Romanian), and Slovak. These sudden changes in official language combined with the spread of popular education and literacy decisively did away with Latin in the role of language of administration and politics. The rivalry for political-cum-linguistic dominance in Hungary was played out between Magyar vying with official German on the one hand, and with the languages of the coalescing minority national movements, on the other. Magyar got the upper hand on both ‘fronts’ in the early 1860s thanks to the political liberalization carried out in the Austrian Empire in reply to its weakened international position. The victory for the Magyar language came in 1867 when the empire was transformed into the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, with the two official languages of German and Magyar contained to the respective Austrian and Hungarian sections of this state. This zenith of Magyar nationalism coincided with the nadir of Polish nationalism, as at that time Polish was not used as official language anywhere until 1869 when it was introduced in this scope to the Crownland of Galicia. The crucial difference between these two nationalisms was that peasants were included within the ideological borders of the Magyar nation beginning during the War of Independence (1848–1849). A similar transformation of the limited estate nationalism of the Polish-Lithuanian natio into the inclusive nationalism that embraced all Polish-speakers, including peasants, took place in the 1890s, half a century later than in the Magyar case. In addition, Magyarophone peasantry participated in the War of Independence, which not in theory but in practice made them into conscious and full members of the Magyar nation. The attraction and openness of ethnic Magyar nationhood was so strong that German-speaking burghers and Yiddish-speaking Jews learned Magyar and re-defined themselves as Magyars, though of Saxon/German-language origin

650 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and the Mosaic religion, respectively. This merger of the Hungarian natio, Magyarophone peasants, Germanophone burghers and Jews into the Magyar nation was made permanent by the rise of the autonomous Kingdom of Hungary within Austria-Hungary. For all practical reasons, with the partial exception of Croatia-Slavonia, this kingdom functioned as the Magyar nation-state. Even the letter of the legal concessions for minority languages in administration and education was breached, especially blatantly beginning at the end of the 19th century. There was no language left in Hungary to compete with the elevated status of Magyar. Members of ethnolinguistic minorities could count on social advancement and any meaningful career in state administration only when they mastered Magyar and, at best, declared themselves to be Magyars as well. In the Polish case, the road from the ideological acceptance of Polish-speaking peasants within the limits of the Polish nation to the actualization of this idea was long. In the second half of the 19th century, the intelligentsia mediated it. Initially, of noble origin, membership in this class was open to all Polish-speakers who finished secondary and university education. Even earlier, a similar way for peasant sons to the Polish-Lithuanian natio led through becoming priests. But the nature of Catholic priesthood steeped in celibacy, unlike members of the intelligentsia they could not sire children and pass their elevated social status to their descendants. Polish-speaking peasants were not appealed to, or allowed to take part in the two Polish uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864. They were not freed from serfdom by their Polish-Lithuanian noble owners but by the rulers of the partition powers (during the first half of the 19th century in Austria and Prussia, and after 1864 in Russia), with whom the Polish-Lithuanian natio vied for reestablishment of Polish-Lithuanian statehood in the form of Polish nationstate. The defeat of the aforementioned uprisings and the inclusion of peasants in other Central Europe’s ethnic nations of the Germans, Italians, Magyars, or Czechs necessitated the acceptance of the idea that a ‘dirty Ham’ has the same right to membership in the Polish nation as a Polish-Lithuanian nobleman, provided they speak Polish. But in the absence of a Polish state and with the administrative use of Polish limited to Galicia, there was no instrument to make the coalescing of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility and the Polish-speaking intelligentsia with the Polonophone peasants come true before the 1918 founding of the Polish nation-state. In the case of the Magyar nation, this process commenced in the late 1840s, and was completed between 1867 and the end of the 19th century. This idea surfaced among the Polish political leaders in the 1890s, and its implementation took place in interwar Poland between 1918 and 1939. In addition, the lack of continuity in Polish statehood and the administrative use of Polish, as well as ideological vacillations in the very definition of the Polish nation put Polishness at a disadvantage. German-speaking burghers, peasants and workers living in the Polish-speaking areas rarely learned Polish and

The Hungarian Nation

651

assimilated into Polishdom, and preferred to declare themselves to be Germans. The same was true, but to a lesser degree, of Jews, who more often reinvented themselves as Russian-speakers/Russians or Germans/German-speakers than as Poles/Polish-speakers. What is more, stateless Polishdom was less of an option for social advancement and career to Russiandom or Germandom for Belarusian-, Lithuanian-, or Ukrainian-speakers. The Great War made it possible to establish the Polish nation-state, but it proved the unmaking of historical Hungary, which Magyar politicians hoped to Magyarize into the ethnically homogenous Magyar nation-state. Following the unprecedented border changes, the Allies limited multiethnic historic Hungary to a rump new Hungary, though indubitably ethnically Magyar, that is, Magyarország. Another World War repeated this process in the Polish case. Having succumbed to the dual German and Soviet onslaught, multiethnic Poland was dismantled in 1939. After 1945, the victorious Allies did not seriously curtail the overall size of its territory, but uniquely shifted it westward and northward at the expense of Germany. Ethnolinguistic homogeneity accepted as the font of statehood legitimization, ethnically non-Polish populations were expelled from this new Poland, and Polish ethnic minorities left away by Poland on move, were transported to this transformed Polish nation-state. In this manner, the post-1945 Polish nation-state was made even more ethnically homogenous than Magyarország. But there is one significant difference that separates the ethnolinguistic experience of Magyar and Polish nationalisms in the 20th century, namely the 6-year-long wartime occupation suffered by Poland. Notwithstanding the yearlong German occupation (between March 1944 and April 1945), the Magyar government of Hungary was not dismantled and German did not replace Magyar as the official language of this state. Hence, Magyar has continuously enjoyed the status of official language on the territory of Magyarország since 1867 to this day. In contrast, the official status, which Polish gained in Galicia in 1869 was extended to the entire new Polish nation-state in 1918, before the language was replaced by German and Russian between 1939 and 1945. The continuity of the use of Polish as the official language was reestablished in 1945 in what used to be western and central Poland before 1939 and today is referred to as central and eastern Poland. In interwar Poland’s eastern section, Russian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian permanently replaced Polish as official languages after 1945. In the wake of World War II, a parallel process occurred in the west and the north of post-1945 Poland where Polish supplanted German as the official language. The vagaries of the official use of the Polish language and of Polish statehood were quite extreme. The sole area of present-day Poland, which has seen the continuous use of Polish as the official language (with the obvious interlude of World War II) since 1869, is coterminous with Małopolska (western Galicia). It is a small region in Poland’s southeastern corner, which extends between Cracow,

652 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Rzeszów, and Przemy´sl. Małopolska accounts for 32,000 sq km, or less than 10 percent of Poland’s territory. Hence, the area is almost three times smaller from the area of Magyarország (93,000 sq km), in which Magyar has been in continuous official use since 1867.

The shock of Trianon In the last census before the Great War (1910), Hungary (without CroatiaSlavonia) had 18.25 million inhabitants, of whom 54.5 percent declared Magyar as their mother tongue. But if one included Croatia-Slavonia (HorvátSzlavónország) and the port of Fiume (Rijeka) into the statistics, 9.94 million Magyars accounted for the 47.3 percent of the kingdom’s 21 million inhabitants. Should one exclude 0.6 million Magyarophone Jews, the percentage would sink to 45.5 percent. During the times of the Dual Monarchy, the holy grail of Magyar nationalism was to pass the mark of 50 percent as the share of Magyars in Hungary’s population. To this end, first, Croatia-Slavonia was conveniently excluded from official statistics after the 1868 Nagodba. Second, Magyarization was extremely successful, hence the share of Magyars in the population of the kingdom (less Croatia-Slavonia) increased from 46.6 percent in 1880 to 54.5 percent three decades later. Simultaneously, similar shares for Germans/Germanspeakers, Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians, and Croats (residing outside CroatiaSlovenia), plummeted from 13.6 to 10.4 percent, 13.5 to 10.6 percent, 17.5 to 16.2 percent, 2.6 to 2.5 percent, and 1.2 to 1.0 percent, respectively. The decrease for the entire non-Magyar-speaking section of the population was from 53.4 to 45.5 percent. In absolute numbers, there were 6.41 million Magyars in 1880 and 9.94 million in 1910. This increase of 3.53 million, or 55.1 percent could not have been achieved by even a high birth rate among the Magyars. Despite these obvious advances of Magyarization, the creation of an ethnically homogenous nation-state out of historical Hungary remained a chimera, even if Croatia-Slavonia was not to be included. Perhaps, if Budapest had had 50 years more of prosperity and stability within the Dual Monarchy, and could have pursued its policy of Magyarization not checked by law and democratic institutions, the mark of 65 percent of Magyars in Hungary would have been achieved. But the exigencies of history intervened at the end of World War I. In reply to the unilateral declarations of independence issued by Czechs, Slovaks, and Southern Slavs, Emperor Charles I (ruled 1914–1918) declared the transformation of the Austrian section of Austria-Hungary into a federation on 16 October 1918. This move was belated, taken merely two weeks before the Padua armistice (4 November) concluded on the Italian front between Austria-Hungary and the Entente. The Allies had no intention to help the emperor with his project of preserving the Dual Monarchy. The United States President, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), pressed hard for the implementation of the principle of

The Hungarian Nation

653

national self-determination based on ethnolinguistic standards as the basis for the new political order in postwar Central Europe. This required the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. Moreover, Charles I knew the stringent attachment of the Magyar politicians to the entirety of the lands of the Crown of St Stephen, so he did not attempt to extend this federalization to the Kingdom of Hungary. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and the severe economic shortages suffered by the population, democratic, socialist, and nationalist agitation was rife throughout Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the lands in the East under the control of Berlin and Vienna. When the front collapsed and troops went into disarray, revolutions broke out in all the major cities in Central Europe. Faced with the danger of the dismantling not only of the Dual Monarchy but also the Kingdom of Hungary itself, the three opposition parties, the (Bourgeois) Radicals, the Social Democrats, and Count Mihály Károlyi’s (1875–1955) Independence Party, created on 25 October 1918 a National Council. On 30 October, crowds of soldiers and civilians swept this council into power. The following day, the King of Hungary, Charles IV (that is, Emperor Charles I of Austria) bowed to the demonstrations and appointed Károlyi as Prime Minister of Hungary. When Charles abdicated on 16 November, Károlyi proclaimed Hungary a republic before an enthusiastic crowd. The Magyars also welcomed this change because popular suffrage was introduced. Between 1848 and 1912, a mere 6 to 7 percent of the population enjoyed the right to vote. In 1907, popular male suffrage was introduced in the Austrian section of Austria-Hungary, but in 1913, after 6 years of deliberations, Budapest decided to extend suffrage to just 8.7 percent of the population. The fear was that non-Magyar minorities could decisively influence Hungarian politics, thus all the Hungarian electoral laws extant in Austria-Hungary were constructed in such a manner so as to ensure the political supremacy of the Magyars. The challenges facing the new republic were daunting, namely to prevent the collapse of the state and to retain the territorial integrity of historical Hungary (excluding Croatia-Slavonia). Károlyi entrusted the latter task to Oszkár Jászi (also Oskar or Oscar, 1875–1957), the nominated Minister of Nationalities. Contrary to the doctrinaires of the left, like Austro-Marxists, he recognized the force and the durability of nationalism, which was not to disappear when confronted with the growing significance of the social democratic movement. Jászi arrived at this realization after 1904, and in this line of thinking, he followed the conclusions of the 1899 Brünn (Brno) program of the Austrian Social Democrats, who demanded national autonomy based on territory for Austria’s ‘nationalities,’ and rejected the South Slav delegation’s proposal that a program demanding a non-territorial autonomy be adopted instead. In Hungary, Jászi attained a similar stature of scholar-cum-politician as Otto Bauer (1881–1934) in Austria. The latter was a prominent leader of the All-Austrian Social Democratic Party (Gesamtpartei) and a notable theorist of Austro-Marxism. Bauer’s

654 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

ideas on the nation were highly regarded in the party, but he favored the idea of non-territorial national-cultural autonomy in a multinational state. In 1907, he expressed his views on nationalism in detail in Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie (The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, Vienna). Likewise, Jászi was acutely aware that forced Magyarization would not deliver any Magyar nation-state, and that interests and aspirations of various nonMagyar national movements must be taken into consideration if the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary was to be preserved. He studied the problem on the ground traveling around Hungary; and especially his field trip to Transylvania is known. As a result, in 1912, he published a work equal to that authored by Bauer, namely, A nemzeti államok kialakulása és a nemzetiségi kérdés (The Evolution of Nation-States and the Nationality Question, Budapest). Unlike Bauer, Jászi stood for territorial autonomy. In October 1918, he published, A Monarchia jöv˝ oje és a Dunai Egyesült Államok (The Future of the Monarchy and the United States of Danubia, Budapest), which was a version of Lajos Kossuth’s 1850 proposal of a Danubian federation. The problem was that Kossuth’s and Jászi’s proposals were a bit opportunistic. Both were tabled after Hungary had passed the point of no return. In the former case, it happened after the suppression of the Magyar independence of 1848–1849, and in the latter, when Hungary’s national minorities were not prepared to trade the prospects of their full independence, unambiguously supported by the Allies, to some vague promises of autonomy within Hungary. They harbored fresh memories of the extralegal excesses of forced Magyarization, and the actual impotence of József Eötvös and Ferenc Deák’s famously liberal 1868 Nationality Law. Jászi stuck to the mid-19th-century distinction between ‘historic nations’ and ‘non-historic nationalities’ current in the political lexicon of Italy and Germany. According to him, historic nations ‘had to meet the criteria of historical-political individualism.’ In a nutshell, it meant that such a nation was expected to possess the undisputed tradition of its separate statehood, even if currently defunct. In Central Europe, Jászi recognized the following nations of Bohemia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Serbo-Croatia. He reasoned that Germany had to go its own way (but without Austria), and hoped for the creation of a United States of Danubia comprising Hungary (less Croatia-Slavonia), Austria, Bohemia, newly united Poland, and Illyria. Under the name of Illyria, he meant all the South Slavic lands united under the Croatian leadership. He also foresaw the possibility of Romania joining the union, but obviously did not consider any transfer of Transylvania from Hungary to Romania even within the union’s boundaries. Unlike Bauer, Jászi was not ready to accept the political aspirations of ‘non-historic nationalities,’ even if they had already been part of Central European politics and hardly could be disregarded. Hence his vision of the union, by no means, could be attractive to Hungary’s non-Magyar ‘nationalities’

The Hungarian Nation

655

busy establishing themselves as independent nations complete with their own nation-states. Jászi was a representative of the so-called ‘Second Reform Generation,’ which commenced in 1868, its name reminiscent of the 1820s (first) Reform Movement that spawned the ideological, political, and economic bases of the transformation of historical Hungary into the Magyar nation-state. A significant part of the latter reform movement was language politics, as between the 1820s and 1840s Magyar replaced Latin as the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Second Reform Movement did not have to preoccupy itself with the question of language, because Magyar had been already successfully standardized and its elevated official position guaranteed throughout the kingdom. Most of the members of the Second Reform Generation were Jews, which was a consequence of emancipation. In 1890, they established the Hungarian Social Democratic Party along the lines of Austria’s All-Austrian Social Democratic Party. The mainstream Magyar politicians and the Magyar public opinion, however, expected Jews to stay out of politics, so their political demands were largely ignored before 1918. Moreover, Austria-Hungary’s biggest industrial centers were located in the Czech lands and in Austria proper. Hungary remained a largely rural economy with 56 percent population employed in agriculture. Workers constituted 21 percent of Hungary’s inhabitants. Although concentrated in Budapest and its vicinity, their voice was hardly heard until the introduction of popular suffrage in 1918. Another irony of Jászi’s proposal of the United States of Danubia was that although he was born into a family of assimilated Jews, he took so much care of retaining Roman Catholicism as an integral part of Magyardom and Magyar national politics. An indication of this stance was his insistence that the homogenously Catholic Croatians lead the largely Orthodox South Slavs in Illyria. Interestingly, between 1880 and 1910, the shares of the Catholic faithful and the worshippers of Judaism in Hungary grew from 47.3 to 49.3 percent, and from 4.54 to 4.99 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the shares of the faithful of Hungary’s other main religions decreased, from 14 to 12.8 percent for the Orthodox, from 14.7 to 14.25 percent for Calvinists, and from 8 to 7.1 percent for Lutherans. Another exception to this trend was the share of Greek Catholics, which grew slightly from 10.8 to 11 percent. The Greek Catholic Church in union with the Roman Catholic Church, Budapest perceived it favorably, especially as the traditional alternative to Orthodox Christianity seen as, by nature, non-, or even anti-Magyar. The politically and culturally Catholic character of Austria-Hungary and the Habsburgs spurned the developing ideological coupling of Magyardom with Catholicism. The share of Magyars among Hungary’s Catholics grew from 55.1 to 65 percent between 1880 and 1910, and the share of Magyars among the kingdom’s atheists and persons declining to declare their religion decreased from 60.2 to 56.1 percent. The assimilation of Romanians

656 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and Ruthenians to the Magyar nation was reflected by the increase in the share of Magyars among the kingdom’s Greek Catholics from 9.4 to 15.2 percent. The increase in the share of Magyars among Hungary’s Orthodox Christians from 0.95 to 1.74 percent mainly reflected the progressing Magyarization of Romanians. The share of Magyars among Hungary’s worshippers of Judaism and Lutherans increased from 58.5 to 76.9, and from 23.4 to 31.9 percent. The former pair of percentages reflected successful Magyarization of Hungarian Jews, and the latter pair was indicative of progressing Magyarization among Hungary’s German-speakers and Slovaks. The ideological link between Magyardom and Catholicism was strong, but not quite so strong as between Polishdom and this religion. The difference was that the number of non-Catholics among ethnic Poles was much lower than among Magyars. (Calvinism gained the status of the second Magyar national religion, while no other faith rivaled the elevated position of Catholicism among the Poles.) Another interesting parallel is between Jászi’s proposal of the United States of Danubia and Józef Piłsudski’s idea of making a federation/confederation out of the lands of former Poland-Lithuania. Jászi hoped to preserve the territorial integrity of Hungary (less Croatia-Slavonia) in the overlay of the United States of Danubia, which was to unite entire Central Europe. Piłsudski limited his vision to the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian lands with actual provisions of autonomy for the ‘non-historical nationalities’ of Belarusians and Lithuanians, and the offer of confederation to the equally ‘non-historical nationality’ of Ukrainians. This even led to his military cooperation with Ukrainian troops when fighting against Bolsheviks. No similar example of cooperation between the Magyars and a national minority from the Kingdom of Hungary was recorded (Eberhardt 1996: 208, 212; Deák 1987: 41–43; Gyáni et al. 2004: 162, 191, 199, 201–202, 271; Litván 1999: 227, 230–231; Major 1974: 17; Molnár 2001: xv, 246, 250–251). But the Ruthenians found themselves in political vacuum. Their national leaders did not declare independence, and Magyar troops and administration continued to control Ruthenia. The rise of newly independent Ukraine, which temporarily incorporated Ruthenia, was a surprise to the Ruthenians who thought that they might be an offshoot of the (Great) Russian nation. But this nation-state was too short-lived to attract numerous Ruthenians to Ukrainiandom. Budapest seized this opportunity and, on 21 December 1918, established for them autonomous Ruthenia (Rus’ka Kraina in Rusyn, Ruszka Krajna in Magyar) with the capital in Munkács (Mukachevo). In February 1919, the authorities of Ruthenia coalesced, and at the beginning of March, the elections to the Ruthenian Assembly were conducted. The communist coup in Budapest entailed abolishing autonomy of Ruthenia in April. At the same time Ruthenian leaders from the United States agreed that Ruthenia should become part of Czechoslovakia, provided it retained its autonomy. In June,

The Hungarian Nation

657

Czechoslovak troops entered Ruthenia and joined their Romanian counterparts fighting Hungarian soldiers. Within the scope of the Treaty of Saint-Germain concluded by the Allies with Austria on 10 September, the minorities agreement was signed with Czechoslovakia guaranteeing incorporation of Ruthenia with the capital in Užhorod (Ungvár in Magyar, Ungwar in German, and today Uzhhorod in Ukraine), then for the first time officially termed ‘Subcarpathian Ruthenia,’ to Czechoslovakia, and autonomy for this region. Romanians soldiers left Ruthenia in fall 1920 (Pop 2005: 106–112). On 29 October 1918, 2 days before Károlyi took office as Prime Minister of Hungary, the National Council formed in Zagreb declared the independence of all South Slavic lands in Austria-Hungary. Budapest resigned itself to this political act, striving for maintaining the territorial integrity of historical Hungary less Croatia-Slavonia. Serbia, an ally of the Entente, regained control of its territory in November. On 24 November, a pro-Serbian Montenegrin assembly deposed the Montenegrin king who opposed the union. On the following day, in Újvidék (Novi Sad), the Skupština of the Serbs living in Vojvodina (Vajdaság, that is, Baˇcka [Bácska] and eastern Banat [Bánát or Bánság]) declared the secession of their region. On 1 December, Serbia, Montenegro and AustriaHungary’s South Slavic lands (Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Slovenian-speaking Kraina, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) were made into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. On 28 October, the founding of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Prague. Two days later, Slovak politicians gathered in Túrócszentmárton (Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), having no knowledge of what happened in Prague, unanimously proclaimed the independence of the Slovak nation, and unanimously agreed to the incorporation of Slovakia into a future Czecho-Slovakia. Budapest playing on ethnolinguistic differences between Western Slovaks (Slováky) and Eastern Slovaks (Slovjaky) brought about the declaration of the independence of the Slovjak (East Slovak) Republic in Kassa (Košice) on 11 December. But the onslaught of Czechoslovak troops terminated the existence of this republic in late 1918, and on 1 January 1919, Magyar troops were removed from Pozsony (Bratislava). On 7 December 1918, Prague established the Minister for Slovakia who, first, resided in Szakolca (Skalica) close to Moravia, then in Zsolna (Žilina) in northwestern Slovakia, and finally moved his office to Bratislava on 4 February 1919. In April, the forces of the Soviet Republic of Hungary attacked Slovakia, and seized its southern regions (less Bratislava), which were made into the Slovak Soviet Republic on 18 June. It existed until 5 July when Romanian soldiers defeated the Hungarian communist troops. Romania succumbed to the Central Powers in late 1916. Berlin and Vienna dictated to the Romanian government the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest (5 May 1918). First, Romania was to cede all of its Carpathian passes to Austria-Hungary. This provided Hungary with a new frontier along a 500-kilometer stretch, two

658 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

to five kilometers from the original line, which took away about 5000 sq km from Romania. Second, Bucharest was required to transfer southern Dobrogea (Dobrudja) to Bulgaria, and all the three mouths of the Danube, which became a German-Austrian-Bulgarian mandate. In return for these concessions, the Central Powers authorized Bucharest to incorporate Russia’s Bessarabia (historic eastern Moldavia), which had become a Soviet republic in December 1917, and then an independent Moldavian Republic in March 1918. Romanian troops entered Bessarabia in April 1918, and in Chis‚in˘ au, the local Romanian National Council declared the region’s union with Romania on 10 December. On 1 December, a huge Romanian rally in Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia) declared the secession of the Romanian-speaking areas of Hungary, that is, most of Transylvania and Banat. The German-speaking Saxons supported this declaration hoping for retaining some element of their autonomy in postwar Romania. Meanwhile, at the Paris Peace Conference in early 1919, Bucharest demanded the return of Dobrudja and the mouths of the Danube, from Austria all of Bukovina, and from Hungary Banat, Transylvania and a strip of Hungarian Plain running from Szeged northward past Debrecen. In the treaties of Saint-Germain (10 September 1919) and Trianon (4 June 1920), Romania was granted all the demands except western Banat, which went to Yugoslavia, and the narrow strip east of the SzegedDebrecen line, which remained in Hungary (Harna and Fišer 1998: 139; Kósa 1999: 187–188; Kováˇc 1998: 181–182; Magocsi 2002: 149, 153–154). Faced with the irrevocable collapse of Austria-Hungary, Károlyi sought to distance Hungary from the doomed Dual Monarchy, and on 16 November 1918 he proclaimed the ‘independent People’s Republic of Hungary,’ of which he became President on 11 January 1919. His use of the novel adjective ‘people’s’ was a bow toward the growing influence of revolutionized workers, communists, and peasants who had established the Hungarian Communist Party on 24 November 1918, and appealed, ‘Let’s go the way of the Russians.’ Despite this and other concessions, Hungarian communists distrusted him, while the traditional elite came to consider him a traitor. His failed attempts at keeping Ruthenia, Slovakia, Vojvodina, and Transylvania within Hungary’s borders earned him the nickname of the ‘gravedigger’ of historical Hungary. He was also dubbed the ‘red count,’ and the ‘Hungarian Kerenski,’ who facilitated the coming of communists to power. In the context of the international and domestic situation he could hardly manage any better, but this did not stop Miklós Horthy’s (1868–1967) regime from condemning Károlyi, in absentia, for high treason in 1923. The Belgrade military convention (13 November 1918) signed by Károlyi and the Entente required the demobilization of all Hungarian forces except eight divisions. It also provided for the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from Vojvodina, Banat, and eastern and southern Transylvania. To Budapest’s surprise Serbian and Romanian soldiers, instead of Allied troops, occupied these regions. The advance of Czechoslovak soldiers in Slovakia was reaffirmed by the

The Hungarian Nation

659

Entente demarcation lines of 6 and 23 December. The first left southern Slovakia and Ruthenia with Hungary, while the latter only southernmost Slovakia and eastern Ruthenia. These demarcation lines mostly coincided with the extent of the territories inhabited by Magyars with the exception of Vojvodina and the Szekler county in eastern Transylvania that found themselves controlled by Belgrade and Bucharest, respectively. On 20 March 1919, the Entente issued Károlyi with the ultimatum demanding evacuation of western Transylvania and further lands almost west to the line of the Tisza River, all homogenously Magyar. This ultimatum, also foresaw making the new demarcation line into Hungary’s future border. The Károlyi’s government preferred to step down instead of reacting to this ultimatum. On 21 March, the Soviet Republic of Hungary was proclaimed, headed by the coalition of social democrats and communists. The domination of the communists was ensured by Béla Kun (1886–1939), who had personal contacts with the Soviet Russian government. The hope was that what was in the terms of territory denied to Hungary by the West, the revolutionary East would provide. Promptly, Kun rejected the Entente’s ultimatum. In line with the idea of spreading revolution communist worldwide and, ironically, striving to regain lost Hungarian territories, Hungary’s Red Army was enlarged in breach of the Belgrade convention. Hungarian communists noted well Jászi’s conclusion that nationalism had not been a spent force and had to be reckoned with, like their counterparts in Bolshevik Russia. The latter followed Joseph Stalin’s 1913 essay ‘Marxism and the National Question,’ written during his study trip to Cracow and Vienna. Stalin learned there and tested Austro-Marxist insights into the problem of nationalism, which, later, as Commissar of Nationalities, implemented overhauling Soviet Russia into a union of ethnolinguistically defined republics and autonomous entities. With revolutionary governments established in Hungary and Bavaria ( 4 April– 1 May 1919), the Allies were afraid that the Bolshevik Revolution would spill over to Western Europe, as hoped by Lenin. With the view of significant territorial concessions to Romania promised at Hungary’s expense, in mid-April 1919, the Entente encouraged Bucharest to intervene. Romanian troops reached the Tisza River at the beginning of May, and at the same time the Czechoslovak army attacked from the north occupying most of Upper Hungary and western Ruthenia. The regrouped Red Army replied, pushed back Czechoslovak troops, and established Soviet Slovakia in the south of Upper Hungary. However, its troops engaged in warfare against independent Ukraine and Poland; Soviet Russia was unable to offer any military support to Soviet Hungary. On 14 June, Red Budapest had no choice but to accept the terms of the ultimatum it had rejected in March. Simultaneously, the Entente suggested that Romanian soldiers should leave the area between the Tisza and Transylvania, but Bucharest continued the attack until its troops reached Budapest on 4 August. Kun’s revolutionary government resigned on 1 August.

660 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The increasing chaos of fast-changing cabinets tipped the advantage to the counter-revolutionary forces that concentrated in western Hungary, an area not occupied by the Romanian army. The Entente lent support to the AustroHungarian Vice-Admiral, Miklós Horthy’s (1868–1957) regime with its seat in Szeged. His government entered Budapest on 16 November 1919 when the Romanian army left with a greater part of Hungary’s rolling stock and treasury. Horthy regarded Kun’s regime illegal, and restored the institution of monarchy in order to establish unambiguous continuity between the historical Kingdom of Hungary and post-1918 Magyarország. To reaffirm his power, Horthy adopted the title of Supreme Commander. On 1 March 1920, his officers coaxed the National Assembly to proclaim him Regent (kormányzó). His titles and position were quite similar to those held by Poland’s Piłsudski officially titled as Supreme Leader (Naczelnik). Both Horthy and Piłsudski preferred to rule Hungary and Poland, respectively, from behind the scenes. For the first time in Hungary’s history, popular male and female suffrage was put to work in the 25–26 January 1920 elections. Obviously, the communist party was not permitted to participate, and the social democrats boycotted the elections appalled by the excesses of the white terror. The conservatives, who supported Horthy, emerged victorious. At first, it appeared strange that the renewed Kingdom of Hungary remained without its king as proclaimed by Horthy on 23 March. But neither politicians nor the population at large wished to see any Habsburg in this role. In April and October 1921, from his Swiss exile, Charles IV staged two unsuccessful coups to regain the throne in Hungary. This convinced the Hungarian public opinion that Hungary would be better served by the Regent than any king. This unique system of monarchy without a monarch was stabilized during the long 1921–1931 premiership of István Bethlen (1874–1946). The political elite and the average Magyar, exhausted by the Great War, economic collapse, postwar fighting, and political chaos and violence, equally needed stabilization. The biggest loss, which dominated interwar Hungarian politics, was the loss of historical Hungary cut down to Magyarország. Károlyi, Kun, and Horthy hoped to prevent or limit the extent of the impending loss, but to no avail. Budapest’s protestations were not taken into account by the Allies, like the earlier protestations of Berlin and Vienna when the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) and the Treaty of Saint-Germain (19 September 1919) were imposed on Germany and Austria, respectively. The Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920) was a logical conclusion of ‘punishing’ the defeated Central Powers. Historical Hungary’s territory of 280,000 sq km (or 322,000 sq km if CroatiaSlavonia and Rijeka were included) was reduced to 93,000 sq km, and its population from 18.25 million (or 21 million, if Croatia-Slavonia and Rijeka were taken into account) to 7.6 million. Between 1918 and 1924, 350,000 registered (or 426,000 actual) Magyarophone refugees from the territories, of

The Hungarian Nation

661

which Budapest lost control and then ceded, beefed up Magyarország’s population to over 8 million. 222,000 refugees arrived from Romania, 147,000 from Czechoslovakia, 55,000 from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and 2000 from Austria. Romania gained 103,000 sq km of Hungarian territory with 5.3 million inhabitants, Czechoslovakia 62,000 sq km with 3.5 million inhabitants, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes 20,500 sq km with 1.5 million inhabitants (not counting Croatia-Slavonia), and Austria 4000 sq km with 1 million inhabitants. Croatia-Slavonia amounted to 42,500 sq km with 2.4 million inhabitants. Hungary’s exclave seaport of Fiume of 21 sq km with 50,000 inhabitants was transferred to Italy. After the signing of the treaty, Belgrade withdrew its troops from the Pécs area on 20 August 1921. Between August 1920 and August 1921, Belgrade had supported the existence of the little known socialist Baranya Republic, which it hoped to incorporate as an autonomous Magyar republic into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. But Baranya (except for the southern sliver) remained with Magyarország. Another boost to the Magyar national morale was the victorious 14 December 1921 plebiscite, which allowed Budapest to retain the city of Ödenburg (Sopron), initially slated for transfer to Austria. The victory was possible due to numerous German-speakers who voted in favor of Hungary. Although the Allies claimed to follow the principle of national selfdetermination, with the privilege of hindsight, one may credibly propose that the territorial cessions required of Budapest were too extensive (but Hungary’s neighbors might not agree). The truncation of historic Hungary left considerable Magyarophone minorities in Magyarország’s neighboring states, 1.7 million in Romania, 1.06 million in Czechoslovakia (that is, mainly in Slovakia), 0.54 million in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (that is, 0.45 million in Vojvodina and 90,000 in Croatia-Slovenia), and 26,000 in Austria. The transfer of Fiume to Italy also involved 6500 Magyar-speakers. In the case of Czechoslovak and Romanian gains, the rationale of granting both states almost homogenously Magyar-speaking swaths of the Hungarian Plain (Alföld) was to secure the railway connections between western and eastern Slovakia, and the north (Transylvania) of enlarged postwar Romania and the southern prewar core of the country. On the other hand, the cession of Vojvodina with a Magyarspeaking plurality alongside overwhelmingly Croatian-speaking Slavonia to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was dictated by the military concerns, namely to push the postwar Hungarian border northward of the new kingdom’s capital of Belgrade (Középiskolai történelmi atlasz 1996: 70; Mócsy 1982: 494; Deák 1987: 43–48, 51; Eberhardt 1996: 208, 212, 214; Kósa 1999: 188–190; Magocsi 2002: 91; Major 1974: 20–22; Molnár 2001: 251, 263; Rothschild 1977: 155; Tihany 1982). Rump Hungary, or Magyarország, became a uniquely homogenous nationstate with Magyar-speakers accounting for almost 90 percent of the population

662 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

according to the 1920 census. The number of 7.15 million Magyar-speakers included 451,000 Jews. 19,000 Jews declared German as their mother tongue, 700 Slovak, and 3000 other languages. Notwithstanding the declarations, it seems that as many as 250,000 of Hungary’s Jews spoke Yiddish at home. Interwar Hungary was quite xenophobic like Poland. Both states shared the same anti-Semitic policy of numerus clausus, which limited Jewish access to university education. Linguistic assimilation of Jews was much more successful in Hungary than in Poland, Horthy’s regime did not allow for making them into straightforward Magyars. This justifies singling them out as a separate national category. On linguistic basis, however, Hungarian statistics lumped Jews with Magyars and speakers of other languages, as had been the practice in Austro-Hungarian censuses before 1918. With this correction kept in mind, predominantly Magyarophone Jews amounted to 6 percent (473,000) of interwar Hungary’s population and Magyars to 84 percent (6.7 million). Significant national minorities included German-speakers (6.6 percent, or 531,000), Slovaks (1.8 percent, or 141,000), Croats (0.7 percent, or 59,000), Romanians (0.3 percent, or 24,000), Bunjevci and Šokci (0.3 percent, or 23,000), Serbs (0.2 percent, or 17,000), and other (0.5 percent, or 39,000) (Eberhardt 1996: 225–226; Hutterer 1990: 350; Molnár 2001: 264; Rothschild 1977: 192). The ethnic groups of Bunjevci and Šokci, known as Bunyevác and Sokác in Magyar, were registered in Hungarian censuses and statistics from 1880 to 1947. They are similar to Poland’s Lemkos or Tutejsi (Local People). In the interwar period, Warsaw encouraged this former identification and registered the latter in order to weaken Ukrainian and Belarusian national identifications, respectively. Budapest reaffirmed the separate existence of the Bunjevci and Šokci to hinder the spread of Croatian national identity to Vojvodina that bordered on eastern Slavonia. The coalescence of the Croatian nation was a protracted process similar to Czech nation-building. The idea of the Czech nation, though quite readily embraced by Slavic-speakers of Bohemia in the mid-19th century, spread at a slower pace to Moravia and Austrian Silesia across ethnoregional divisions. In the Croatian case, ethnoregional identifications persisted even longer, Croatia and Slavonia located in Hungary and Dalmatia in Austria. Until the 1870s, one had variously referred to Catholic Slavs and their language as ‘Slavonian,’ ‘Slavic,’ and ‘Dalmatian’ among others. For even a longer time, similar ‘terminological fragmentation’ persisted in the case of the Slovenes. Gradually, these potential ethnic groups turned (ethno-)regional groups agreed to assimilate in one nation or another instead of reasserting their separateness as ethnic groups or aspiring nations. The process was hindered in the borderlands between already recognized nations defined in the ethnolinguistic manner. These nations wishing to assimilate such border groups cancelled out each other’s opposed ennationalizing efforts, which, in turn, encouraged the groups’ further separate existence.

The Hungarian Nation

663

The Bunjevci and Šokci are descendants of 17th-century refugees from Ottoman-held western Herzegovina and Dalmatia to Vojvodina. The latter are a smaller though distinct group that still resides today in southwestern Vojvodina and eastern Slavonia. From the linguistic point of view, they speak a dialect that is similar to Serbian and some Croatian dialects of Dalmatia. Members of both groups are usually Catholic, which links them with the Croatian nation. Magyar officials intent on furthering Magyarization as the instrument of transforming the Kingdom of Hungary into the Magyar nation-state, tended to play off Croats and Serbs against each other in Croatia-Slavonia. In 1900, the former accounted for 62 percent of the province’s population (1.49 million), and the latter for 25 percent (0.61 million). The same pattern was followed in Vojvodina, where, to Croatian politicians’ horror, the Bunjevci and Šokci were referred to as ‘Catholic Serbs.’ In 1899, this led to the conversion of 1200 Šokci Catholics to Orthodox Christianity. In Yugoslavia, Vojvodina was in the sphere of the domination of Serbian culture and language, before it became Serbia’s autonomous province in 1974. This led to the gradual mergence of the Šokci with the Serbian nation. The Bunjevci persisted in Serbia’s Vojvodina because they were Catholic unlike Serbs, while the administrative border prevented the Croats from successfully claiming them for their nation. The same process unfolded in regard to post1918 Hungary’s Bunjevci, shielded from the influence of Croatian nationalism by the political border, and from Magyardom by their Slavic language. Magyar politicians and Bunjevci national leaders interested in emphasizing the separateness of the Bunjevci, at times, propagated the view that they were of Norman, Walachian (Romanian), Roman, Illyrian, or ur-Slavic origin. In 1880, the Bunjevaˇcka stranka (Bunjevac Party) was founded. Fifteen years later, Croatian organizations began to send their emissaries to Vojvodina in order to spread the Croatian national message among the Bunjevci. In 1913, the first Bunjevac school association was founded in Szabadka (Subotica). It was still active during the 1930s in Yugoslavia. To this day, the Bunjevci and Šokci survive in Serbia’s Vojvodina numbering 20,000 and 1800 according to the 2002 census. In 2005, Belgrade recognized the Bunjevci and Šokci as nations and their right to have education in their languages much to the ire of Zagreb, which considers them part of the Croatian minority living in Serbia (Eberhardt 1996: 212; Ethnic Groups of Vojvodina 2005; Miroljub 2005; Todosijevi´c 2002).

Interwar Hungary The ironies of interwar Hungarian politics were aptly summed up in the saying that ‘Hungary was [then] a kingdom without a king, and Horthy an admiral without a navy.’ Following the territorial losses prescribed by Trianon, Hungary, for the first time in its history, became a landlocked state. The long-lasting premiership of Bethlen stabilized the internal situation in a shrunk, revolutionized,

664 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and impoverished Hungary. In line with Horthy’s counter-revolution, Bethlen abolished the communist party. ‘Red Pécs’ was suppressed and the ‘sinful city’ of Budapest subdued. New national borders that crisscrossed the pre-1918 vast free trade area composed of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, hampered production and commercial exchange. Hungary’s industrial output reached its prewar level in the mid-1920s, which was surpassed by 12 percent in 1929. The newly found prosperity, though not shared by smallholders in the countryside dominated by large landowners, allowed for abolishing of censorship and toning down the discriminatory edge of the anti-Semitic measure of numerus clausus. The stability was challenged by the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Hungary, like Germany, felt isolated and wronged by the postwar political arrangements. The aim of Berlin’s interwar politics was to overturn the ‘Versailles dictate.’ Likewise, Budapest hoped for revision of Trianon. The popular sentiment was encapsulated in such slogans as, ‘Mindent vissza!’ (Everything back!), ‘Nem, nem, soha!’ (No, no, never!), or ‘Úgy volt, úgy lesz!’ (So it was, so it will be!). The isolation of Hungary was deepened by France’s wholehearted support for the Little Entente formed in 1920 and 1921 by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to prevent Hungary from regaining its territories lost to these states in Trianon. The other significant strand of foreign policy, which Budapest shared with Germany, was anti-Bolshevism. When Horthy rose to power, the ideological justification of his regime was offered by the Catholic Bishop of Székesfehérvár, Ottokár Prohászka (1858–1927), who spoke of moral renewal, and appealed for struggle against ‘Jewish liberal cultural and moral influences,’ which he considered as responsible for the lost war and Trianon territorial losses. The fortification of the ideological link between the governing elite and the Catholic Church was similar to that in Poland. As in this country, this unholy alliance bolstered anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism in Hungary. In the 1930s, Horthy failed to find a strongman, who, like Bethlen, would stabilize the economic and political situation with a decade-long premiership. The gradual shift from democracy to authoritarianism became pronounced across Central Europe beginning in the mid-1920s. The process was crowned with Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) seizure of power in Germany (1933). This tipped the scales in favor of politicians who sought to revise the post-Great War political order in Europe. In the second half of the 1920s, Horthy solidified the hold of his supporters on the parliament, the judiciary, and the government. Arbitrary use of force and extralegal measures became popular. This combined with the spread of worker unrest at the beginning of the 1930s put power in 1932 into the hands of the radical Prime Minister, Gyula Gömbös (1886–1936). His great vision was a Central Europe divided between Germany, Italy, and Hungary. To this end, he made overtures to Hitler’s Germany. Horthy agreed

The Hungarian Nation

665

to this alliance motivated by his desire for territorial revision, and his personal anti-Semitism. Gömbös oversaw the rise of the full-fledged authoritarian system practically hinged on the single dominant government party. The close relations with Germany encouraged emulation of fascism in Hungary. The most successful leader of this movement was Ferenc Szálasi (1897–1946). (Following the deposition of Horthy, he became the sole leader of Hungary in 1944–1945, as the self-styled Nemzetvezet˝ o, or Leader of the Nation, at the helm of the fascist Arrow Cross government fully controlled by the Germans.) After the Anschluß of Austria (1938), Germany bordered with Hungary. Budapest decided and strengthened links with Berlin hoping to revise the Treaty of Trianon. In September, the Hungarian government sought the support of Britain to recover the Magyarophone section of Slovakia, but Budapest’s wish was not granted in the Munich Agreement (29 September 1938), which transferred the so-called Sudentenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany. Neither Berlin nor Budapest wanted to lose Hungary as a potential ally in the redrawing of the Central European borders, so on 2 November, they decided in Vienna to pass to Hungary southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Ruthenia. These two territories of 10,400 sq km and 1500 sq km were populated by 690,000 and 170,000 inhabitants, respectively. 590,000, or 86 percent of them were Magyars. Budapest emulated the anti-Semitic policy of Berlin, and, in 1938, issued two laws that drastically limited the possibility of Jewish employment in the liberal professions and white-collar occupations. Close cooperation between Hungary and Germany became the course of the day. On 14 March 1939, Hitler pressured Josef Tiso (1887–1947) to proclaim the independence of Slovakia. On the following day, Germany annexed rump Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, and transformed them into the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. That was the end of the Second Republic of Czecho-Slovakia. Meanwhile, between 14 and 18 March, Budapest seized the rest of Subcarpathian Ruthenia taking no heed of the 15 March declaration of the independence of the province, and renamed it as ‘Carpathian Ukraine.’ Germany was not interested in the offer of extending its protection over Carpathian Ukraine. The territory of 12,000 sq km with the population of 670,000 was inhabited by 63,000 Magyars (9.5 percent). Hungary gained a common border with Poland, which was duly celebrated by Budapest and Warsaw, as Poland also took part in seizing parts of the Czech and Slovak territory in 1938 and 1939. On 23 March, Bratislava and Berlin signed the treaty, which extended German protection over Slovakia. On the same day, Hungarian troops attacked Slovakia from Ruthenia seeking a ‘protective strip of territory’ extending 15 to 20 km. Berlin did not react, a clear sign that Hitler valued his alliance with Budapest more highly than with Bratislava. Slovakia lost an area of 1900 sq km and a population of 40,000 with hardly any Magyars.

666 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The outbreak of World War II with the German attack on Poland on 1 September 1939 was viewed by Budapest as a German-Polish affair. It remained out of the conflict, though offered a safe haven to Polish refugees. Now Hungary’s desires were directed to Transylvania. On 2 August, the Soviet Union seized Bessarabia from Romania, which encouraged Budapest. On 30 August, the socalled Second Vienna Arbitration awarded Hungary with northern Transylvania, an area of 43,500 sq km with the population of 2.57 million. According to Hungarian statistics Magyars accounted for 52 percent of the population, but Bucharest disagreed and came up with the estimate of 38 percent. The same disagreement applied to the section of Transylvania that remained with Romania. According to Budapest, Magyars made up 17.5 percent of the area’s population of 3.3 million, yet the Romanian estimate was 10 percent. On 2 November 1940, Hungary paid for this award of northern Transylvania by signing the Tripartite Pact of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Hungary’s enemies, Romania and Slovakia also joined this pact, which obliged the three states to unwilling cooperation. Yet, Prime Minister Pál Teleki (1879–1941), wishing to reassert Hungarian diplomatic independence, contracted a Pact of Eternal Friendship with Yugoslavia on 12 December. He reasoned that Belgrade would soon join the Tripartite Pact, which did take place on 25 March 1941. However, 2 days later a part of the Yugoslav army overthrew the government. Hitler intervened, and having moved across Hungary, German troops attacked Yugoslavia on 2 April. Teleki was shattered and committed suicide in protest on 3 April. Hungarian soldiers did not participate in this onslaught, but they marched into Baˇcka (Bácska), or western and central Vojvodina, on 11 April. Budapest gained a territory of 11,400 sq km with 1.03 million inhabitants, 36.6 percent of whom were counted as Magyars. Between 1938 and 1941, Hungary’s territory grew by 79,000 sq km from 93,000 sq km to 172,000 sq km. This enlarged Hungary comprised 52.9 percent of the lands of the Crown of St Stephen. The population of Hungary increased accordingly by 5.4 million from 9.3 million to 14.7 million. According to Hungarian statistics, Magyars accounted for 80.9 percent of the population, a significant decrease from 92.1 percent recorded in the 1930 census. On 22 June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Budapest had to make good on its ideological anti-Bolshevism and alliance with Germany. Two days later, Hungary broke off diplomatic ties with Moscow. On 26 June, unidentified planes, purported to be Soviet, bombed Kassa (Košice) in Upper Hungary. This event constituted a perfect casus belli. Hungary attacked the Soviet Union, and the state entered World War II as a belligerent. The defining moment for the Magyars was the destruction of the Hungarian troops ill-prepared for warfare during winter. Budapest’s increasingly unwilling dependence on the Third Reich was set to grow until its logical conclusion, when German troops occupied Hungary on

The Hungarian Nation

667

19 March 1944. The first sign visible to everybody that a territory belonged to the German sphere of influence was road traffic. In Austria-Hungary, vehicles moved on the left side of the road, while on the right in the German Empire. In the wake of the 1918 breakup of the Dual Empire, right-handed traffic was introduced in the empire’s territories ceded to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Poland, and Romania. Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary stuck to the left-handed organization of traffic. In 1938–1939, this changed in Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia annexed by Germany, and in the Czechoslovak territories seized by Poland. At that time, the change from left-handed to right-handed traffic was perceived as a sign of modernity and progress as epitomized by the Third Reich among its Central European allies. This was also necessitated by the need to make the armies and transportation systems of Germany’s allies compatible with those of their German protector. Tellingly, on the very day, when Budapest joined the German onslaught on the Soviet Union, it was decreed to change left-handed traffic to right-handed in wartime Hungary. The change was implemented in July 1941 with the exception of Budapest, where it was delayed until November. At the same time Slovakia followed the suit (Deák 1987: 49, 54, 57–59; Deák 1996: 12, 129–133; Hoensch 1991: 80, 83, 86; Kósa 1999: 192–195; Molnár 2001: 266, 280–283; Pop 2005: 140, 144; Rothschild 1977: 161, 183–184, 192, 195).

Magyar: From the imperial to national language In Austria-Hungary, Magyar was the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary, which dominated in all the spheres of public life with the exception of Croatia-Slavonia. The 1868 Nagodba provided for the official use of the Serbo-Croatian language written in the Latin script (the use of the Cyrillic variant of this language was confined to minority schools and publications of Serbs in Vojvodina). In this respect, the situation was similar to the official use of Polish in Austria’s Crownland of Galicia. But in Croatia-Slavonia, Budapest strove to and did broaden the use of Magyar at the expense of Serbo-Croatian until the moment when the region was separated from historical Hungary and incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Vienna’s gradually more liberal approach to permitting official use of languages other than German in Austria’s crownland was not emulated in Hungary. Beginning in the 1880s, official German-Czech bilingualism developed in Bohemia’s and Moravia’s administration, politics and educational systems. German remained the sole official language of the Crownland of Austrian Silesia until 1918, but at the beginning of the 20th century communes were allowed to decide on their own languages of administration, and on languages, which should be used in elementary and secondary schools. Hence, there were communes, especially in the eastern half of this crownland, whose administration operated in Czech,

668 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

German, or Polish, as well as in Czech and German, German and Polish, and in all the three languages. Hungary’s Nationality Law of 1868 was a highlight of the Austro-Hungarian political system, and the world’s first ever extensive regulation on official language use. It provided for education in minority languages, and allowed use of these languages between citizens and state offices in communes and komitats whose minority-language-speaking inhabitants made up at least 20 percent of the population. However, most of these liberal provisions remained a dead letter. Public schools did not provide education in minority languages, which led to the overlapping of linguistic and religious divisions, because mostly confessional schools offered education in non-Magyar languages. This led to the rise of coalitions between Romanian national activists with the Orthodox Church, Saxon (German-speaking) national activists with the Lutheran Church, Slovak national activists with the Catholic Church, and Ruthenian national activists with the Greek Catholic Church. Magyarization gradually pushed back minority languages from the public sphere. This was not such a pronounced phenomenon in the case of German. As the official language of the entire Austrian Empire before 1867 and the official language of the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, it retained high prestige and was the most popular second language acquired in the Kingdom of Hungary. German-speakers and Yiddish-speaking Jews eagerly learned Magyar, also having no hope of carving out any autonomous regions or ethnolinguistically-defined nation-states in Hungary. Budapest saw them as supporters of Magyar nationalism. Except the Croats, national aspirations of Romanians, Serbs and Slovaks appeared to endanger the prospect of turning Hungary into the ethnolinguistically homogenous Magyar nation-state. The popular Magyar view also held that Romanians, Serbs, and Slovaks were ‘civlizationally inferior’ to Magyars. But thanks to their sheer number and the existence of the Romanian nation-state, neither the use of Romanian in administration nor in schools was successfully suppressed in Transylvania. The same, though to a lesser degree, was true about Serbs. The situation of the Slovaks was different. Almost as numerous as Hungary’s 2.8 million Romanians and twice as many as 1.05 million Serbs living in Hungary and Croatia-Slavonia, the Slovaks, numbering 2 million, did not have any nation-state that could support their aspirations (the numbers are of 1900). In addition, the Czech support for the creation of a common Czechoslovak state had not developed before the end of the Great War, and the codification of the Slovak language was a work in progress. Hence, the suppression of the use of Slovak in offices and schools was much swifter and thorough. In the case of Hungary’s 0.44 million Ruthenians, the situation was similar. In the absence of public schools with non-Magyar languages of instruction, the apt index of the official policy of Magyarization was the national makeup of Hungary’s corpus of 64,338 public servants in 1910 (Croatia-Slovenia

The Hungarian Nation

669

is not included). A 91.1 percent of them were Magyars, 3.1 percent Germanspeakers, 2.1 percent Romanians, 1.2 percent Serbs, 0.5 percent Slovaks, and 0.01 percent Ruthenians. In 1910, the shares of these ethnolinguisticallydefined national groups (Jews partitioned among these groups in accordance with languages spoken by them) in Hungary’s population (Croatia-Slavonia not included) amounted to 54.46 percent for Magyar-speakers, 16.14 percent for Romanians, 10.66 percent for Slovaks, 10.42 percent for German-speakers, 2.54 percent for Ruthenians, 2.53 percent for Serbs, and 1.07 percent for Croats. Budapest’s approach to the use of minority languages in administration and education was not different from the policies pursued by Hungary’s neighbors during the second half of the 19th century when the idea of creating ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-states became the political standard and priority in Central Europe. It was Austria that was a complete liberal exception in this regard. The removal of minority languages from offices and public schools in the German Empire commenced upon the founding of this polity in 1871, and was largely completed by the end of the 1870s. In the second half of the 1860s, St Petersburg removed Polish from administration, and limited its use in schools in the Vistula Land (that is, former Congress Poland). In the 1860s and 1870s, the use of White Russian (Belarusian) and Little Russian (Ukrainian) akin to (Great) Russian was prohibited, and the very existence of these two languages officially denied. Beginning in the 1880s, the same policy of replacing minority languages with Russian was extended to other regions of the Russian Empire with the exception of the Grand Duchy of Finland, where Swedish and Finnish were retained as languages used in offices and schools. In Russia’s Bessarabia (today’s Moldova), St Petersburg abolished Moldovan (Romanian) as a language of instruction in all public schools in 1867, and did not allow its use in Orthodox churches either. In 1897, there were 0.92 million Moldovan-speakers, who constituted 48 percent of Bessarabia’s population. The 90,000 Romanians living in Serbia were not permitted to use their language in offices, schools, or churches either. Prior to the post-Trianon enlargement, 5.49 million Romanians accounted for 92.2 percent of Romania’s population in 1899. From the legal point of view, non-Romanians were considered to be ‘foreigners,’ or ‘non-citizens,’ which freed the state from providing education in minority languages in public schools, let alone provide for auxiliary use of minority languages in state offices (Eberhardt 1996: 215, 219; Gyáni et al. 2004: 202; Magocsi 2002: 97–98; Pâclis‚anu 1985: 95; Pascu 1982: 239–242, 252). After the truncation of Hungary to Magyarország at Trianon, the official use of Magyar was limited to 93,000 sq km of the latter. The former ‘imperial’ (dominant) language of historical Hungary was transformed into a language of Central Europe’s next small nation-state, and at the same time reduced to a minority language outside Magyarország. Magyars shared this change of fate in the case of their language and nation with German-speakers/Germans left outside interwar

670 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Austria and Germany in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The novel situation did not mean, however, that Magyar minorities, who found themselves transferred with fragments of historical Hungary to neighboring states, were exposed to similar forced assimilation as non-Magyars had been in the Kingdom of Hungary. To this end, the Allies coaxed Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes to sign appropriate minorities treaties in 1919. Similar standards of minority protection were required of Austria and interwar Hungary in the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon, respectively. The League of Nations stood on the guard of these obligations usually, though grudgingly, respected until the system of international control did not begin to unravel after Germany left the League of Nations in 1933. The least problematic was the situation of the Magyar minority in Austria’s Burgenland, though Vienna’s pre-1918 liberal approach to official language use gave way to the constitutional decision that made German the state language of Austria in 1919. Most of Burgerland’s schools were confessional, which left the decision on the language of instruction to the local priest. This system was discontinued in 1922, but minority languages were used as the medium of teaching until the Anschluß of Austria in 1938. Magyars perceived German as a high status language, and the Austrian authorities tolerated the continuing use of Magyar at municipal and communal meetings. Full bilingualism soon made Magyars indistinguishable from German-speakers/Austrians, and the former preferred to emphasize their regional or local identity rather than their Magyarness. Not surprisingly, the number of Burgenland’s Magyars had decreased by 77 percent to 5673 by 1971. The number of Croatians, who were twice as many in this region in 1920 (44,700), decreased by 45 percent to 24,500 in the same period. Attraction of Austria’s German-speaking culture proved less enticing to them, and the Austrians did not welcome them to Austriandom as eagerly as they did Magyars. Even though buttressed with international guarantees of their minority rights, the situation of Magyars was less tolerable in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. German-speakers/Austrians had at least been their political partners and equals in the Dual Monarchy. On the other hand, those whom Magyars had earlier perceived as inferior, that is, Serbs, Slovaks, and Romanians, became the dominant political and social force in the areas inhabited by Magyar minorities. An insult added to injury, Czechoslovak (Slovak), Romanian, and Cyrillic-based Serbo-Croatian replaced Magyar in the function of official language. This change was less felt in Croatia-Slavonia, where the dominance of Latin-based Serbo-Croatian had been condoned since the 1868 Nagodba, and in Czechoslovakia’s Subcarpathian Ruthenia, because the dominance of the Ruthenian language was never fully established, so

The Hungarian Nation

671

the Ruthenians shared the local Magyar minority’s grudge against the dominance of Czechoslovak language in this region. Many Czech administrators, teachers, and doctors sent to Subcarpathian Ruthenia saw their fate as ‘exile,’ and perceived this region as ‘Asia that starts east of Košice.’ (Chaszar 1982: 484– 487; Moritsch 1994: 252–253; Pop 2005: 117, 129; Sozan 1982: 574, 576, 588, 593). Prior to 1918, Romania was an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state, as post-Trianon Hungary was destined to become. In 1899, Orthodox Romanians accounted for 92.2 percent of the population of 5.96 million. Significant minorities included Jews (4.5 percent) and Magyars (1.7 percent). After Trianon Romania, from a land of 130,000 sq km and 7.16 million people in 1912, more than doubled to Greater Romania, with 295,000 sq km and 15.5 million inhabitants in 1920. This came at the cost of losing the holy grail of ethnic homogeneity. In 1930, 13 million Romanians made up 72 percent of the population. Like Magyars in historical Hungary, Romanians barely made a majority of Transylvania’s inhabitants at 57.6 percent. Romania’s Magyars (7.9 percent) and Germans (4.1 percent) concentrated in this region, and Jews constituted 4 percent of the state’s inhabitants. International guarantees prevented open discrimination of Magyars, but these documents were often observed in their tacit breach. Magyar-language schools, political associations, publications, and cultural organization preserved Magyardom in Transylvania, but could not hinder the Romanianization of the civil service, which was concentrated in cities. Thus, the Magyarophone character of the urban areas began to change slowly. Initially, Romanianization settled the balance between Romanians. The latter being a majority of Transylvania’s inhabitants had less elementary schools (44.7 percent) than Magyars (48.4 percent) who constituted 31.4 percent of the population. But redressing the Romanian grievance eventually disadvantaged the Magyars. For instance, the number of confessional Magyar-medium elementary schools decreased from 1100 in 1920 to 500 in 1937. The agrarian reform thinned the Magyar peasantry in the countryside. Bucharest’s discrimination was specifically directed against the economic and political basis of the Magyar elite. These measures taken in the early 1920s deprived Transylvania’s Magyars of their preeminence in the region. The situation stabilized in the next decade, and Bucharest chose not to react to Budapest’s attempts to use Magyar minorities as justification for attempted revision of the Trianon decisions. Economic and internal difficulties (that led to the actual dismantling of democracy in the early 1930s) entailed by the huge territorial expansion of Romania prevented Bucharest from antagonizing its neighbors. After the wave of refugees between 1918 and 1920, the number of Magyars in Transylvania stabilized at 1.3 million in 1920 and actually grew to 1.35 million in 1930; for entire Romania, the numbers were 1.36 million and 1.55 million, respectively.

672 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Striving for a working modus vivendi with the Romanians, Transylvania’s Magyars pleaded for autonomy for Transylvania. Saxons and many local Romanians fearful of ‘corrupt politicking’ of Bucharest supported their stance. Their hopes were frustrated by the 1923 Constitution, which, in emulation of the French model, defined Romania as a unitary and indivisible nation-state. Later, the political movement of so-called ‘Transylvanianism’ evolved on the plane of culture, until terminated by Budapest’s policy of revisionism, which led to the 1940 re-incorporation of northern Transylvania, and emphasized the ethnolinguistic lines of national cleavages (Biro 1992: 507, 517; Eberhardt 1996: 215, 231–232; Fischer-Galati 1994: 135–136; Ludanyi 1982: 600; Rothschild 1977: 281, 284; Török 2003). Talking about the Magyars of Transylvania, it is necessary to mention that those concentrated in the south-east of the region refer to themselves as ‘Szeklers’ (Székely in Magyar, and Secui in Romanian). Their origin is disputed. In the past, Szeklers often saw themselves as descendents of Huns, while others proposed that they were of Turkic stock. However, with their dialect so close to mainstream Magyar (steeped in the dialects of the Calvinist Magyars of Partium), there is a strong probability that they were a group of Magyar pastoralists and peasants who, for the privilege of being freed from serfdom and the usual feudal obligations, agreed to become guardians of Hungary’s eastern border, exposed in the Middle Ages to periodic onslaughts of various nomadic Turkic peoples. The ethnonym for the first time was attested in 1092, but its etymology remains uncertain. One of numerous theories on their origin claims that the Latin name Siculus, employed to refer to Szeklers, also means ‘Sicilian,’ or is related to the Siculi, who were one of the earliest ethnic groups inhabiting Sicily. This could be a reflection of the false Byzantine myth that Szeklers were descendants of mercenaries recruited from Sicily. Their ethnoregional distinctiveness was deepened by the fact that they received their own separate autonomous region (Székelyföld), consisting of two separate territories in eastern and central Transylvania. This region was preserved in Hungary until 1874–1876. Also, their Catholicism separated the Szeklers from the rest of Transylvania’s Magyar population concentrated in Partium, who professed Calvinism. (Walachians confessed Orthodoxy and German-speakers Lutheranism.) In 1567, at the battle of Csíksomlyó (¸Sumuleu Ciuc), they defeated the Hungarian King and hereditary ruler of Transylvania, John Sigismund Zápolya (ruled 1540–1570), who wanted to impose Calvinism on the Szeklers. In memory of this event, the statute of the Holy Virgin Mary in the locality became the aim of the Szeklers’ main annual pilgrimage. Similar autonomous regions, Great Cumania (Nagykunság) and Small Cumania (Kiskunság) (both terminated in 1876) were also granted to Turkic Cumans (Kunok in Magyar), and Yazygia (Jászság) to Yazygs (Jászok in Magyar) in return for their service along Szeklers as border guards against incursions

The Hungarian Nation

673

of Turkic and Mongol intruders. But, for obvious strategic reasons, the Cuman and Yazyg autonomous regions were located in central Hungary, far away from their coethnics. Cumans and Yazygs in Hungarian service became Magyarized, but memory about the ethnic origin of their descendants survives in surnames, for instance, Kun. (Béla Kun, however, was born as Ábel Kohn to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother. He Magyarized his surname to Kun in 1906.) German-speaking Saxons also obtained their autonomous region (Szászföld, abolished in 1876), consisting of four separate territories in northern and southern Transylvania, but rather to encourage them to settle in these distant areas in order to develop them economically and to establish cities. Hence, the German name of Transylvania, Siebenbürgen, or the ‘land of seven cities,’ which were the effect of the Saxons’ and other German-speaking settlers’ work. Tellingly, Erdély in Magyar (hence, Ardeal in Romanian) means a [presumably empty of population] ‘land beyond the forest’ (*erd˝ o elü), like the English name ‘Transylvania,’ derived from Latin. The German-speaking Swabians arrived in Banat in the 18th century, but did not receive any autonomous region of their own. Their Lutheranism distinguished both Saxons and Swabians from Catholic and Calvinist Magyars. Like Transylvania’s Saxons, Banat’s Swabians retained their specific Germanic dialect and ethnoregional identity that were not easily reduced to Germanness. The same was true of Szeklers, who, though they spoke Magyar, prided themselves of their Szekler background. These ethnoregional identities of Szeklers, Saxons, and Swabians helped them preserve their languages and customs when Transylvania and Banat became part of Romania after Trianon. Presumably, it was politically advantageous for Bucharest that they did not declare themselves as ‘straightforward’ Magyars, or Germans leaving a room for maneuver when the question of Romanianization of minorities in enlarged Romania was discussed at an international forum. Actually, in the 1992 Romanian census, there was official encouragement for Magyars to register as Szeklers and Csángós, and for Germans as Saxons and Swabians. But Magyar-speaking population resided in Romania, or more exactly, in Moldavia, prior to Trianon. They are usually referred to as ‘Csángós.’ This ethnonym is perhaps derived from the Magyar word csáng, which means ‘to wander, stroll, ramble, or stray.’ This aptly describes the initial character of the population as the ‘Strayers.’ Csángós were Magyar-speakers (mostly Szeklers) who settled across the Carpathians in Moldavia in the early 16th century. After the Ottoman conquest of Hungary, numerous Szeklers joined them. Not only language but also the Catholic religion separated both Csángós and Szeklers from their Romance-speaking Orthodox Walachian neighbors. The Csángós also shared with the Szeklers the annual pilgrimage to Csíksomlyó, located on the Carpathian border, within Transylvania. When the ethnonational conflict between Romanians and Magyars flared up after Trianon, and once again after World War II, Csángós tended to distance themselves from

674 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

this ideological strife, saying that they are neither Magyars nor Romanians, but Csángós. (In the interwar period, Budapest did not claim their land for Hungary, but strove to preserve the quickly disappearing knowledge of Magyar among the Csángós.) The Magyar minority in Austria’s Burgenland chose a similar strategy of de-emphasizing their Magyar ethnic origin. They prefer to say that they are ‘neither real Germans nor real Magyars,’ and announce their identity by stating ˝ ˝ that they are ‘from Orség.’ Orség is the Magyar name of Burgenland (literally the ‘land of castles,’ in German), derived from the word ˝ or for ‘guard.’ This name preserves the memory of this borderland region between the Frankish Kingdom and Hungary, which Hungarian rulers populated with military communities of Magyar border guards in the 10th and 11th centuries (Balázs 2000: 19; Benk˝ o 1976: 701; Damm and Mikusinska, ´ 2000: 194; Kopy´s 2001: 147–148; Középiskolai történelmi atlasz 1996: 28; Magocsi 2002: 104–106, 150; Sozan 1982: 573, 588–589; Táncos 1988; Weaver 2006: 160–162). Czechoslovakia was established as the nation-state of Czechoslovaks with Czechoslovak as the official language that came in the two varieties of Czech and Slovak. This was a political ploy to provide the new state with its own ethnolinguistically defined nation that constituted a majority of the population. Otherwise, when such a majority was required in agreement with the Wilsonian national principle, Czechoslovak statehood would have appeared as illegitimate. Contemporaries interpreted this ploy as a necessary political doctrine, and the half-hearted steps to create a common Czechoslovak nation failed. In the case of language, actually Czech was used in administration and schools in the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia), and Slovak in Slovakia. Due to the unfinished process of the codification of the latter language, Czech dominated in the central institutions, invariably located in Prague. Czech functioned as the official language of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, because the codification of Ruthenian (also known as Carpatho-Ruthenian, and the local language) had not yet begun and Prague reneged on its promise to grant Subcarpathian Ruthenia autonomy until 1938. But Ruthenian was employed as a medium of instruction in schools, though it actually meant the use of various variants of this language sometimes closer to the vernacular, Russian, Church Slavonic, or even Ukrainian. What united this language was its script, invariably Cyrillic. In 1921, 6.76 million Czechs and 2 million Slovaks lived in Czechoslovakia. Officially they were registered as 8.76 million Czechoslovaks, and statistics did not distinguish between Czechs and Slovaks. Otherwise, it would have been apparent that German-speakers (Germans) numbering 3.12 million were the second largest ethnonational group after the Czechs. German-speakers constituted one-third of the population in the Czech lands, and 0.75 million Magyars one-third of Slovakia’s inhabitants. A similar situation was in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, where 0.37 million Ruthenians added up to 62 percent of the region’s population. But unlike in the Czech lands or Slovakia, there was no

The Hungarian Nation

675

single minority that would challenge the Ruthenian character of this province. Magyars at 103,000 and Jews at 80,000 roughly constituted each one-sixth of the population. Since the founding of Czechoslovakia, voters of various ethnonational backgrounds tended to elect deputies from the ranks of nationally-defined parties. The democratic character of the political system reflected these preferences in the parliament, one-third of mandates went to German deputies in the Czech lands, and one-third to Magyar ones in Slovakia. Consolidation of splinter German and Magyar parties in Czechoslovakia commenced at the beginning of the 1930s with aid flowing from Berlin and Budapest, respectively. The decade was marked by the rise of revanchist demands directed against Czechoslovakia by Germany and Hungary that led to cooperation between both states at this platform. In 1932, Konrad Henlein (1898–1945), and the following year, János Esterházy (Eszterházy) (1901–1957) entered politics and became leaders of the German and Magyar minorities, respectively. From the 1935 elections, Henlein’s party emerged as the second strongest in Czechoslovakia, and Esterházy sought alliance with Slovak politicians demanding autonomy for Slovakia. In the latter half of the 1930s, Henlein appealed, first, for decentralization of Czechoslovakia, and, next, for granting autonomy to the overwhelmingly German Sudetenland (that is, ‘pohraniˇcí,’ or the borderland, as this area is known in Czech historiography). Magyars were similarly concentrated in southern Slovakia, but, unlike Henlein, Esterházy saw a solution for the Magyar minority in Slovak autonomy, not in transforming southern Slovakia into a ‘Magyar Sudetenland.’ Between 1921 and 1930, the number of Czechoslovakia’s Germans slightly grew from 3.12 million to 3.23 million despite emigration to Germany in search of employment, especially during the Great Depression. During the same period, the number of Magyars decreased from 0.74 million to 0.69 million. That was not so much due to discrimination, but to attraction of nearby Budapest, and the lack of career opportunities in the civil service and education for Magyars who did not master Czech or Slovak. Obviously, the number of Magyar schools decreased in Slovakia from 3777 in 1918 to 730 in 1936, but it did not happen because of the policy of forced assimilation. In 1918, there were only 429 Slovak schools, their number grew to 3212 in 1936, and reflected the share of Slovaks in Slovakia’s population. Ironically, this was achieved through the huge inflow of Czech teachers and administrators to Slovakia, which bred discontent among the Slovaks who felt marginalized in their own country. In 1938, Magyar-language elementary schools constituted 5.3 percent of all the elementary schools in Czechoslovakia, which reflected well the 5.4 percent share of Magyars in Czechoslovakia’s population. The numbers for Germans were 21.5 percent and 20 percent, respectively, mainly due to more generous aid flowing from Germany, which Budapest could not match. (Eberhardt 1996: 118–119;

676 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Kerner 1940: 175, 184; Kováˇc 1998: 187–188; Magocsi 2005; Pop 2005: 112; Rothschild 1977: 89, 126, 130). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes came into being as a state of three nations enumerated in its name. Soon the idea of making it the nation-state of the South Slavs was reflected in the 1921 Constitution. For political reasons of creating an ethnonational majority, like in Czechoslovakia, the Serbocroatoslovenian language was proclaimed. As in the case of the Czechoslovak language, this declaration never delivered on its promise and Slovenian continued to function as a separate language vis-à-vis Serbo-Croatian rendered in Latin characters by Croats and in Cyrillic ones by Serbs. The Constitution remained unchanged, but statisticians distinguished Slovenes as a separate category. But even without them, the official Serbocroatian nation constituted 74.3 percent of the kingdom’s 12-million-strong population in 1921. Ten years later, the percentage grew to 77, when the inhabitants numbered 14 million. Serbs and Croats did not refer to themselves as ‘Serbocroats,’ like Czechs and Slovaks did not call themselves ‘Czechoslovaks.’ What is more, Macedonians were not recognized as a separate nation, and an official wishing to emphasize them as a different group, at best, spoke of them as ‘southern Serbs.’ The 1920s vacillation between centralization and federalization was cut short by the 1929 coup. The former option won the day. King Alexander I (reigned 1921–1934) renamed the state Yugoslavia, preferred to call Serbo-Croatian the ‘Yugoslav language,’ and did not permit creation of ethnolinguistically-defined provinces. Centralization and doing away with democracy left less space for the use of minority languages, especially of the non-Slavic minorities, such as Magyars. Magyars, mostly concentrated in Vojvodina, despised the imposition of Cyrillic-based Serbo-Croatian, because its association with the Serbs was even more antithetical to Magyardom than the Croats’ Serbo-Croatian, which, at least, shared the alphabet with the Magyar language. In addition, already in Austria-Hungary the Magyars perceived Croatia-Slavonia as the Croatian nation-state, whereas they thought as unthinkable the separation of Vojvodina from the Kingdom of Hungary as that of Upper Hungary. In economic terms Yugoslavia did worse than Hungary, so Vojvodina’s Magyars tended to leave for Magyarország, an option more difficult for Transylvania’s Magyars. The former’s region bordered directly on interwar Hungary while the latter’s homeland was located 250 km away from Trianon Hungary. Between 1921 and 1931, the actual number of Yugoslavia’s Magyars slightly increased from 467,000 to 468,000, but their share in the overall population dropped from 3.9 percent to 3.63 percent. The Slavicization (Serbization) of Vojvodina entailed the state-sponsored arrival of 100,000 settlers from Yugoslavia’s other regions. In 1914, there were 477 Magyar-language elementary schools and only 99 Serbian-language ones. Like in Romania, the imbalance was swiftly redressed and turned over. The overall number of Magyar elementary and secondary schools sank to 450, which

The Hungarian Nation

677

forced almost 50 percent of Magyar students to attend Serbian-language schools. What is more, most of the schools were actually Magyar-language sections in Serbian-language schools, or bilingual Magyar-Serbian ones (Mócsy 1983: Ch 7; Mønnesland 1997: 222–226; Pribilla 2001; Rothschild 1977: 203). The transformation of Hungary into Magyarország, not only generated Magyar minorities and refugees, but also triggered the transfer of entire Magyar institutions from areas ceded at Trianon. A similar phenomenon was experienced by post-1945 Poland when the Polish-language universities of Wilno (Vilnius) and Lwów (Lviv) were moved to Torun ´ and Wrocław, respectively. In 1872, the Magyars received their second university in Kolozsvár (Cluj). In 1912, two more were established in Debrecen and Pozsony. After the incorporation of Kolozsvár (Hungary’s second largest city) into Romania, and Pozsony (erstwhile Hungarian capital) to Czechoslovakia, the Magyar universities were moved from these cities to Szeged and Pécs, respectively. In 1866, there were 5000 students in Hungary, by 1913 the number grew to 11,000. Despite the truncation of the state, the number of students swelled to 19,000 in 1919, and stabilized at the level of 17,000 in the 1920s. This lack of any influence of the Trianon-ordained huge territorial cessions on the number of students reflected the fact that university education in Hungary (except Croatia-Slavonia) was available only in Magyar. After the Great War, Magyar and Magyarophone students could continue their education in this language only in Magyarország, hence they flocked to this state from all over historical Hungary. The numerus clausus limited the share of Jewish students from 30 percent in 1918 to 16 percent in the early 1940s. In the latter half of the 1920s, this caused a drop in the number of students to 15,000, but the territorial aggrandizement of Hungary boosted the number to 20,000 in 1942. The share of university graduates in interwar Hungary’s population grew from 80,000 in 1918 to 95,000 in 1941. Hence, the numerical size of Magyar intelligentsia was slightly bigger than that of Poland (a country with 35 million inhabitants) estimated at 70,000 in 1939. The number of Hungary’s civil servants and professionals increased from 372,000 in 1920 to 473,000 in 1941, that is, from 4 percent to 5.1 percent of the population. This combined with the high degree of ethnolinguistic homogenization of Hungary, allowed for better penetration of standard Magyar among the population than in the case of Polish or Slovak. Moreover, in 1930, 510,000 out of 687,000 non-Magyarspeakers living in Hungary could communicate in Magyar. Hence, 98 percent of interwar Hungary’s population spoke this language, a feat unequalled either in Czechoslovakia, or Poland. Illiteracy at the level of 4 percent in the late 1930s was close to that of 1.5 percent in the Czech lands, a far cry from Poland, where in some regions almost half of the population was illiterate, or from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, where illiterates constituted 31 percent of the inhabitants in 1931. Paradoxically, Hungary’s achievement in this field was thanks to Trianon. In 1869, 65 percent of adults were illiterate in the Kingdom of Hungary. This

678 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

percentage dropped slightly to 42 percent in 1910, and then suddenly to 15.2 percent in 1920. Simply, the non-Magyar populations who more often than their Magyar counterparts failed to acquire literacy in almost exclusively Magyar-language schools, were ceded together with historical Hungary’s outlying territories to neighboring states. Historical Hungary’s heartland, which was made into Magyarország, was overwhelmingly populated by Magyars, who achieved higher levels of literacy than non-Magyars thanks to the advantage of receiving education in Magyar. By comparison, the level of illiteracy was quite high in interwar Poland (23.1 percent in 1931), because in its ethnolinguistic heterogeneity and policy of Polonization the state was similar to Hungary in the Dual Monarchy. There were more literates among the ethnic Poles than among Poland’s Belarusians or Ukrainians, who in Polish schools had to cross not only the linguistic barrier but also that between the Cyrillic and Latin script, like Serbs and Ruthenians attending Magyar-medium schools in historical Hungary. In 1960, illiteracy dropped to 3 percent in Poland, also due to the thorough ethnolinguistic homogenization of this state after 1945. Still, it was quite an achievement that in interwar Hungary, illiteracy was almost eradicated. In 1931, 61 percent of Poland’s population was employed in agriculture, while the percentage was 49 for Hungary in 1941. This indicator placed Hungary with 35 percent of the workforce employed in agriculture between Poland and Czechoslovakia. In 1930, 42.5 percent of Hungary’s inhabitants lived in towns and cities, and the threshold of 50 percent was crossed a decade later. In Poland, this feat was repeated only in 1966, while the Czech lands being the economic engine of the Habsburg lands became predominantly urban during the second half of the 19th century. Book production was not impressive in historical Hungary; in 1913, 2377 book titles appeared, many in other languages than Magyar. This compared unfavorably with the production of Polish-language books prior to 1918 when there was no Polish nation-state to foster it. In wartime 1918, 3000 book titles of this kind appeared. In interwar Hungary, on average 3000 to 3500 book titles were published annually, which per capita was more than in Poland, where 6200 book titles were produced per year in the same period. The Hungarian average rose dramatically to 5000 between 1941 and 1943. But the destruction wreaked by World War II brought about the collapse of the book industry, which turned out a mere 644 book titles in 1945. Radio broadcasting commenced in Hungary and Poland at the same time, in the second half of the 1920s. Likewise, ownership of radio sets was limited to well-to-do urban dwellers. As Hungary was more urbanized than Poland, the penetration of radio broadcasting was better in the former state. At the end of the 1930s, there were 46 radio sets per 1000 inhabitants in Hungary, and 35 per 1000 inhabitants in Poland (Brief 2005; Gyáni 2004: 291, 365–367; Kókay 1990: 113, 127, 129; Rothschild 1977: 39, 44, 91–92, 166, 192; Várdy 1969: 414).

The Hungarian Nation

679

The Trianon-ordained limiting of Hungary to Magyarország had a paradoxical influence on language politics. This territorial curtailing of Hungary was said to have been carried in agreement with United States President Woodrow Wilson’s ethnolinguistically-defined national principle, which was elevated to the sole basis of legitimate statehood and new political order in Central Europe. But the principle was often observed in the breach in regard to the successor states of the Central Powers, namely, Austria, Germany, and Hungary. Understandably, Magyar politicians, taking into consideration extensive Magyar minorities left out of Magyarország, used the Magyar language as an argument to indicate that the new borders imposed by the Allies are faulty. The sudden shrinking of the territory, where Magyar was employed as the official language, to post-Trianon Hungary was a traumatic experience for the Magyar elite and intelligentsia. It meant for many either loss of status and power if they remained in the territories ceded to the neighboring states, or the need to move to shrunken Magyarország, where they had to start their careers in the civil service or in the educational system from scratch. From the viewpoint of publishers, the new borders seriously limited the geographic extent of the area where they could sell their publications. The limiting of the Magyar-language educational system to Magyarország also did away with the need of producing a greater number of textbooks in Magyar, which before 1918 had to be used by all students attending public schools in Hungary, regardless of their ethnolingusitic background. After Trianon, the demand for textbooks in Magyar was limited to these children of Magyar minorities, who despite assimilating pressure decided to pursue their education in minority schools with Magyar as the medium of instruction. German-speakers left behind in non-German-speaking nation-states by the receding borders of Austria and Germany felt similar setbacks and fears. Recently, Russian-speakers experienced a similar phenomenon especially in non-Slavophone nation-states, which were founded in the wake of the defunct Soviet Union. What distinguishes the case of the Magyars is the scale of the phenomenon. One-third of all Magyars, or 3.21 million, were left beyond the borders of Magyarország. Comparatively speaking, they added up to half of the Magyarophone population living in post-Trianon Hungary. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia’s 3-million-strong minority of Sudeten Germans constituted less than 5 percent of Germany’s population of 65 million. Hence, after the Great War, the vast majority of German-speakers continued to live in the officially Germanophone nation-states of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Bearing the situation and these comparisons in mind, it is not surprising that Magyar politicians and the public at large feared that this territorial and demographic partition of the Magyar nation soon would be followed by the division of standard Magyar at least into four different varieties if not separate languages in their own right to be used in Magyarország, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. (Different varieties of written Magyar had been actually used in

680 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the 16th and 17th century in Royal Hungary, autonomous Transylvania, and Ottoman Hungary.) A similar fear was expressed by Polish national activists in the second half of the 19th century, when the Polish-speaking area was divided between Russia, Prussia/Germany, and Austria/Austria-Hungary. This was connected to the change in the political concept of the Polish nation from the estate-based Polish-Lithuanian natio to the ethnolinguistically-defined nation of all Polish-speakers. An emergence of three different Polish languages would have nullified the ethnolinguistic justification for the establishment of a single Polish-nation state. Furthermore, it would have necessitated acknowledgment that three different though closely related Polish nations came into being. A similar ethnolinguistically-based division of the single Magyar nation into four would have been a terrible blow to Magyar nationalism, bolstered only in 1867 by the creation of autonomous Hungary with Magyar as its official language. The language question raged in Hungary between the 1820s and 1870s. First, endeavors were undertaken to replace official Latin and German with Magyar. The introduction of this language as official in 1844 was a short-lived success nullified in 1849 by the defeat of Magyars in the Independence War. They had to wait for the definite change in this respect until 1867. Meanwhile, the internal Magyar struggle unfolded on what the actual shape of standard Magyar should be. It was settled with the publication of Gergely István Czuczor and János Fogarasi’s authoritative multivolume A magyar nyelv szótára (The Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1862–1874). The old controversy between orthologists and neologists continued until 1895, that is, until the death of Gábor Szarvas (1832–1895), the first editor of the influential periodical Magyar Nyelv˝ or (The Guardian of the Magyar Language, established in 1872). The new editor, Zsigmond Simonyi (Steiner) (1853–1919), closed the journal to the never-ending discussion, and fostered more linguistically-based cultivation of the Magyar language. Less space was devoted to discussion on the ‘ridiculousness’ of neologist and orthologist lexical and grammatical proposals, but the efforts to ‘cleanse’ Magyar of foreign elements continued unabated. In his 1905 article published in Magyar Nyelv˝ or, Mózes Rubinyi (1881–1965) proposed establishing a central office that would guard the purity of the Magyar language. Simonyi and Rubinyi were of German and Jewish background, but their identification with the cause of Magyar nationalism and language was wholehearted. The same level of identification of Jews and German-speakers with other nationalisms and languages was not achieved anywhere else in Central Europe. The last major change in the codification of standard Magyar was the 1913 replacement of [cs] with [c], when the phoneme /ts/ was meant. The exigencies of war and the trauma of Trianon, which emphasized the political significance of the Magyar language, and its propaganda portrayal as a beleaguered fastness, did not result in important lexicographic works. The dissolution of AustriaHungary ended the continuing dominance of German in scholarship. But the

The Hungarian Nation

681

need to reorganize the shrunk entire state and its economy, to absorb Magyar refugees, and to cater to the newly established Magyar minorities abroad, limited resources available for research and scholarship. The financial basis of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences deteriorated, and much fewer publications were produced than could have been expected. For instance, in 1913, 826 scholarly book titles were published, but in 1921, a mere 539. Unlike in the case of Czech or Polish, no attempt was made to replace Czuczor and Fogarasi’s A magyar nyelv szótára with a new authoritative multivolume dictionary of the Magyar language. Zoltán Gombocz and János Melich, who began to publish fascicles of their Magyar etymológiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest)1 in 1914, continued their work. But their ambition to include numerous personal and place names, and dialectal words as well, stalled the progress, and the publication of this work stopped at the letter G in 1944. In the face of this plight, in 1941, Géza Bárczi (1894– 1975) published his one-volume Magyar szófejt˝ o szótár (Magyar Etymological Dictionary, Budapest). Endeavoring to place standard Magyar in the historical context of this language’s development Emil Jakubovich and Dezs˝ o Pais edited Ó-magyar olvasókönyv (Old Magyar Reader, 1929, Budapest). In 1922, József Pápay published his study, A finnugor népek és nyelvek ismertetése (Description of the Finno-Ugric Peoples and Languages, Budapest), which conveniently gathered the findings on the Finno-Ugric nations and ethnic groups and on their languages as well, at the time when similar studies on Slavic and Germanic peoples and languages were made into political arguments for proposals of border changes. A similar political edge was also visible in Bálint Cs˝ ury’s Szamosháti szótár (Dictionary of the Szamosháti Dialect, 1935–1936, Budapest), which recorded the lexicon of a Magyar dialect, located just across the new (‘bleeding’) border around the city of Satu Mare (Szatmárnémeti) in Romania. After Trianon, the politically-motivated purist movement became even more pronounced. The prewar ambitions of purists were mainly directed against German influences, as the German language tended to dominate in the politics and culture of Austria-Hungary, despite the official equality of both languages legislated by the Ausgleich. Following the truncation of historical Hungary, Magyar linguists paid more attention to ‘weed out’ Slavicisms and Romanianisms from Magyar. To this end, Jen˝ o Pintér (1881–1940), a historian of literature and the leader of the purists, published his irregularly appearing book-cumperiodical, Magyar nyelvvéd˝ o könyv (Purification Book of the Magyar Language, 1938–1939, Budapest). The Linguistic Section of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences established the Commission for Language Culture in Everyday Life in 1931. The following year, it began to publish a journal, Magyarosan (In Proper Magyar [literally, In a Magyar Way], 1932–1943). This periodical’s editor, B J Nagy (1881–1967), encouraged a less ideological approach to the Magyar language than that of Pintér.

682 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The prescriptivist preoccupation with ‘correctness,’ Magyar linguists shared with the Warsaw school of their Polish colleagues. One of the latter, a Stanisław Szober, published his influential Słownik ortoepiczny (The Dictionary of Correct Writing [in Polish], Warsaw) in 1937. However, unlike their Polish colleagues, the Commission sought to replace international words with purely Magyar neologisms, for instance, rádió (radio) with közhang (literally, ‘voice which is coming from all around’). Beginning in 1931, the sports journal, Nemzeti Sport (National Sport), announced annual competitions for Magyar replacements of international terms and 12,000 proposals of new words had been received by 1943. After 1936, Magyarosan backed the efforts of Nemzeti Sport to Magyarize sport vocabulary. Eventually, a mere 150 new Magyarized terms came into popular use. The lack of new, updated authoritative multivolume dictionary was acute. As a stopgap measure, in 1940, József Balassa (1864–1945) published his onevolume A magyar nyelv szótára (Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest). Fortunately, between 1911 and 1935, the 21 volumes of Révai Nagy Lexikona. Az ismeretek enciklopédiája (Révai Great Lexicon: A universal encyclopedia, Budapest) were published. Although nowadays quite outdated, it remains the most comprehensive Magyar-language encyclopedia to this day, and is regularly reprinted after 1989. The situation is similar in the case of the Czech language, because the best encyclopedia a Czech-speaker can refer to is still the 28-volume Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (Otto Scientific Dictionary) published between 1888 and 1909. Two more Magyarophone universal encyclopedias followed in the wake of Révai Nagy Lexikona’s success. Between 1931 and 1933, the short, four-volume Katolikus lexikon (The Catholic Lexicon) appeared in Budapest. In 1936, the eight-volume Új lexikon (The New Lexicon, Budapest) was published. Significantly, a parallel edition was published for Romania’s Magyars. Between 1936 and 1942, the 24 volumes of Új id˝ ok lexikona (The Lexicon of New Times, Budapest) appeared rivaling the achievement of Révai Nagy Lexikona. A new phase in the political role of linguistics commenced with the territorial expansion of interwar Hungary between 1938 and 1941. The Magyar University of Kolozsvár, moved to Szeged after Trianon, was ‘returned’ in 1941 to the Romanian city of Cluj that became Magyar Kolozsvár again. Obviously, such a place to place shunting of a university every second decade was a costly exercise, and it did not leave much time and resources for research. But from the point of view of politicians, it had to be done in order to emphasize the Magyars’ ‘right to the second largest city of Hungary.’ In agreement with this national line of propaganda, when in Szeged, the university published its tellingly titled periodical Népünk és Nyelvünk (Our People and Our Language, 1930–1939). Later, it was revived in Koloszvár as Nép és Nyelv (People and Language, 1941–1943). This choice of a less ideologically-tinted title was, perhaps, conditioned by the necessity of stabilizing incendiary relations between Magyars and Romanians

The Hungarian Nation

683

(Benk˝ o 1972: 285, 361–365; Fodor 1983: 63–64; Forgács 1998: 107–108; Kókay 1990: 127; Okuka and Kren 2002: 747; Rothschild 1977: 155). The question of the Magyar language in post-Trianon Hungary was as inexorably connected to the national minorities living in this state as it was to the Magyar minorities residing in the neighboring states. The usual tactic used by nation-states in interwar Central Europe was to reciprocate. A state extended such treatment to its national minorities, as the neighboring states were prepared to grant the former state’s coethnics. In this manner, national minorities were turned into the instruments of politics. This put them between the anvil and the hammer. On the one hand, the very existence of ethnolinguistically defined minorities was an anathema to the legitimacy of national statehood, which dwelt on the myth of ethnolinguistic homogeneity. On the other, with this goal of ‘ethnolinguistic purity’ hardly attainable under democratic conditions, minorities allowed states to forward ‘justified’ territorial claims against one another. When the Western Allies and the League of Nations resigned themselves to these claims and allowed for numerous breaches of the international system of minority rights protection in the late 1930s, this opened the way for the growth of authoritarianism in Central Europe, which, among others, precipitated the outbreak of World War II. Meanwhile, minorities were pressured in host countries to assimilate, while their nation-states strove to avert this process, extending material and legal aid and by appealing to the League of Nations as well. Unlike in Poland or Czechoslovakia, national minorities living in Hungary were of little concern to Budapest. First of all, constituting 10.5 percent of Hungary’s population in 1920 and 7.9 percent a decade later, these minorities were negligible in the context of Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Romania whose populaces contained one-third of minorities each. The question of the Magyar minorities was rather of more concern to the Allies and the League of Nations than Hungary’s minorities. Hungary’s pressure to revise the decisions of Trianon was as strong as that of Germany’s directed against the ‘dictate of Versailles.’ Budapest’s and Berlin’s claims dangerously reinforced each other in the 1930s. Germans were the largest minority in Hungary, numbering 0.55 million (6.9 percent) in 1920, and followed by 142,000 (1.8 percent) Slovaks. Budapest could not use the German minority for its political ends, because it did not seek any revision of the border with Austria. The Hungarian government rather wanted to obtain the support of this state and Germany (both increasingly gravitating toward each other) for its project of revising the Trianon settlement. On the other hand, the Slovak minority was too insignificant, in the face of over 1 million Magyars in Czechoslovakia, to coax Prague successfully. The Romanian minority of 24,000 (0.3 percent) could hardly be used for negotiating better conditions for the 1.7-million-strong Magyar minority in Romania either. The situation allowed Budapest to pursue a rather unabated Magyarizing course.

684 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The politically espoused concept of legal continuity between historical Hungary and Magyarország was underlined by the decision not to introduce a formal Constitution, a course shunned by all the neighboring states, which promulgated their own constitutions after World War I. Like in the United Kingdom, the totality of Hungarian law and legislation added up to the unwritten Constitution of interwar Hungary. Not surprisingly, the 1868 Nationality Law became the basis for protecting the rights of the national minorities in Magyarország. Obviously, it had to be slightly modified to reflect Hungary’s obligations in this field, as contained in the Treaty of Trianon. On 22 June 1923, Decree No 4800 was issued to this end. It almost repeated verbatim the main clauses of the Nationality Law. In communes with 20 percent of inhabitants belonging to a minority, the minority language was to be used as auxiliary in offices and courts. Civil servants obtained 2 years of grace to learn an appropriate minority language. Parallel classes in a minority language were to be organized for minority students in an elementary school if there were 40 of them speaking the same mother tongue. On 25 December 1935, Ordinance No 11,000 of the Council of Ministers provided that such classes were to be organized when there were 20 minority students sharing the same language in an elementary school. In addition, their parents were to be asked if they might wish to have a separate minority school set up for their children. Once again, as before 1918, these regulations were more often observed in the breach than otherwise. For instance, in 1931, there were 49 German-medium elementary schools. In 98 further schools earmarked for German students, teaching was bilingual, in German and Magyar. But most German minority schools (316) were purely Magyarophone with German taught as a subject for two hours per week beginning in the third grade. Interwar Hungary’s system of limiting minority-language education to bilingual schools and schools with a minority language taught as a subject is similar to that earmarked for minorities in postcommunist Poland. German associations protested and appealed for help to Berlin and Vienna. Budapest pretended to listen and even undertook efforts to this end, which had to fail because no care was taken to educate more teachers who knew German. For example, in 1935, out of 1323 teachers employed in the communes where Germans lived, only 58 had full command of German. Berlin and Vienna were not prepared to press this matter too much looking forward to closer alliance with Hungary for the sake of changing the postwar order in Central Europe. Not surprisingly, in 1933, as many as 70 percent of German students could not read and write in German. It was quite a shock to the minority, which was used to the preferential treatment it had received in Austria-Hungary, where German had continued to hold the primus inter pares status vis-à-vis Magyar. For instance, in 1918, on the territory of future Magyarország, they enjoyed 281 German-language elementary schools. The first wave of post-Trianon Magyarization reduced their number to four in

The Hungarian Nation

685

1924, before the number stabilized at the level of 47 to 49 schools between 1925 and 1938. Even if the Hungarian government had been more decisive in its promises to improve the state of German-language education, it would not have amounted to much. The regulations on minority education applied only to public schools, which accounted for a mere 18.5 percent of 6874 elementary schools in 1936. Churches ran the rest. The majority (41.3 percent) of the elementary schools belonged to the Catholic Church. In confessional schools, Church authorities decided on which language of instruction to use. The ideological connection between the Catholic Church and Magyar nationalism being so strong, Catholic schools almost invariably settled for Magyar as the medium of education. Another incentive to attend Magyar-medium schools was the fact that there were no minority-language secondary school, let alone universities. But even with the command of Magyar it was difficult for minority applicants to enter Hungary’s universities. Jews were barred by the numerus clausus. (It never degenerated into clausus nulus as in the late 1930s in Poland, where, at that time, no Jews were accepted at universities.) At the beginning of the 1930s, the Gömbös administration made Magyarization into the backbone of its policy of seeking revision of Trianon and fortifying homogeneity of Magyardom at home. Budapest followed the example of Poland and Hitler’s Germany when it commenced the action of Magyarizing surnames in the army in 1931. Soon it became a requirement that a minority applicant had to Magyarize his or her surname prior to be accepted into the ranks of students at a Hungarian university. In 1934 alone, 100,000 surnames were Magyarized, many more than in Poland or Germany. The number of Germans decreased to 0.48 million (5.5 percent) in 1930. The same phenomenon was observed in the case of all other minorities, for example, there were 105,000 Slovaks (1.2 percent) recorded at the same time (Pâclis‚anu 1985: 137–151; Spira 1977: Appendix IV-2; Spira 1990: 7–8; Rothschild 1977: 192–193; Seewann 1995: 223; Zeidler 2002: 12). Ironically, Jews were singled out from this process of forced Magyarization, despite their general willingness to become Magyars, not shared by other minorities. On one hand, Budapest respected the wish of the Hungarian Jews to become Magyars by not registering them in censuses as a national minority, but they were tacitly singled out in statistics as confessors of Judaism. They attended regular Magyar-language schools, and were not indicated as a minority in education statistics. But the only sure way to erase one’s Jewish presence from statistics was to convert to Catholicism or some branch of Protestantism. Mainly due to conversion and emigration, the number of Jews decreased in interwar Hungary from 0.47 million (5.9 percent) to 0.44 million (5.1 percent) in 1930. Strangely, two Jewish secondary schools were opened in Budapest and Debrecen in 1919 and 1921, respectively, when no other minorities could count on such a generous concession. On the other hand, the numerus clausus singled

686 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

out Jews as a national minority and, against their wishes, did not allow them to merge with the Magyar nation. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism seeped into politics and drew the border between Magyarophone Jews and Magyars ever more clearly. The disregard for political and national aspiration of Hungary’s minorities and the neighbor nation-states was also visible in the construction of categories employed for statistical purposes, and in the use of actual ethnonyms. Budapest chose to count the Bunjevci and Šokci as separate national entities despite Belgrade’s protestations that they are South Slavs, who should be classified as Serbocroats. Neither did Hungary take a note of Yugoslavia’s proclamation of the Serbocroatian nation, and continued to count Croats and Serbs as separate national minorities. Likewise, Hungarian censuses did not register Czechoslovaks, but only Czechs and Slovaks. Budapest used the old-fashioned ethnonyms, tót and oláh (Walachian) for the Slovaks and Romanians, though the more appropriate alternatives, szlovák and román, had been used by Magyar-speakers since 1828 and 1705, respectively, before they became widespread words during the second half of the 19th century. To add offense to injury, Slovaks tended to perceive the Magyar term ‘tót,’ officially employed to refer to them, as offensive. These practices reminded of Warsaw’s official approach to Ukrainians and Belarusians. The categories of ‘Lemkos’ and ‘Tutejsi’ (Local People) were employed in Polish statistics to lower the overall number of Poland’s Ukrainians and Belarusians, respectively. The parallel with the politicized use of the Hungarian categories of the Bunjevci and Šokci is obvious. Next, the Polish administration denied the ethnonym ‘Ukrainian’ to Ukrainians and kept referring to them ‘Ruthenians,’ not unlike Budapest, which called Slovaks ‘tóts.’ Although the term ‘Czechoslovak’ language popped in Polish minority legislation, it was only on rare occasions. Polish censuses distinguished between Czechs and Slovaks like their Hungarian counterparts. A certain change came with the territorial enlargement of Hungary between 1938 and 1941. Besides land, this event also brought in populations of Slovaks, Ruthenians, Romanians, and Serbs, who had enjoyed official use of their national languages and education in them for the two interwar decades. Magyar immediately replaced Slovak, Czech (in Subcarpathian Ruthenia), Romanian, and Serbo-Croatian as official language in the territories incorporated to Hungary from Czecho-Slovakia, Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. A certain exception to this policy of official Magyar monolingualism was Subcarpathian Ruthenia. For several days in 1939, it existed as independent Carpathian Ukraine with Ukrainian as its official language. At 9.5 percent, Magyars were a clear minority in this region, unlike in any other newly re-incorporated areas, as in Vojvodina, where they formed a rather sizeable minority of 36.6 percent. The Hungarian propaganda referred to the Ruthenians as ‘Natio Fidelissima,’ or the ‘most faithful [of historical Hungary’s nationes].’ Obviously, it was an

The Hungarian Nation

687

effective slogan, but the Ruthenians had never been recognized in historical Hungary as a natio, a status, which was granted to Saxons, Magyars, and Szeklers in Transylvania. At the end of the Great War, unlike Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, or Croats, Ruthenians did not distinctly and immediately demand separation of their region from Hungary, and did not oppose the founding of the autonomous province of Ruthenia controlled by Budapest (1918–1919). That had to do with the weakness of the Ruthenian national movement. This weakness continued in the interwar period. Due to the above-presented considerations, Budapest granted autonomy to Subcarpathian Ruthenia, renamed, Kárpátaljai terület (‘Land of Carpathia’), usually shortened to Kárpátalja (Carpathia). Not to give any arguments to Moscow for demanding incorporation of the short-lived independent Subcarpathian Ruthenia, named as Carpathian Ukraine, to Soviet Ukraine, the word ‘Ukraine’ had to be dropped from the name of autonomous Carpathia. Neither was Ukrainian introduced as official language. This distinction was shared by Magyar and Ruthenian, then known as the ‘Uhro-Rusyn (Hungarian-Ruthenian) language.’ In 1941, national minorities constituted 19.1 percent of the population, or even more according to the statistics of Hungary’s neighboring states. The sudden wave of Magyarization that took place after re-incorporation of various territories between 1938 and 1941, meant replacement of Czech, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovak civil servants and teachers with their Magyar counterparts, complete with the transfer of the entire university from Szeged to Kolozsvár. This has brought resentment, and inevitably was interpreted as discrimination. The prime minister’s decree of 1941 alleviated this situation allowing for limited reestablishment of non-Magyar schools as minority schools. Symptomatically, a year earlier, Budapest decided to help Polish refugees, for whom a secondary school was organized in Balatonboglár. Minorities were a problem with which one had to deal with, but the establishment of a common Hungarian-Polish border in 1938 in the course of the partition of Czechoslovakia was an event to be remembered even after the carving of interwar Poland between Hitler’s Germany and Joseph Stalin’s (1879–1953) Soviet Union. Another slight concession to the minorities included the replacement of the term ‘Walachian’ with ‘Romanian,’ and ‘tót’ with ‘Slovak (tót)’ in statistics. But Bunjevci and Šokci persisted as separate national categories. The practice continued throughout the 1940s. The exclusion of Jews from the mainstream of society continued in the incorporated territories where four secondary schools were established for them. Unlike in interwar Hungary, teaching was done in these schools in Yiddish and Hebrew. In emulation of Germany’s infamous Nuremberg Laws (1935) in 1941, Law XV on the Protection of Race was issued. Of course, this law did not ‘protect’ Aryans from Jews, but the Finno-Ugric ‘race’ of Magyars. Budapest distinguished between the ‘Magyar Jews’ of interwar Hungary and ‘non-Magyar

688 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Jews’ in the incorporated territories. In 1941 and 1942, many of the latter were defined as of ‘doubtful’ (that is, non-Hungarian) citizenship and given up to the Germans who transported them to extermination camps in occupied Poland. Undoubtedly, the Holocaust commenced in Hungary with Budapest’s complicity, though its fury was unleashed after the German occupation of this state in March 1944. Of the 0.72 million persons of ‘Israelite faith’ residing in enlarged Hungary of 1941, only 260,500 survived, mainly in Budapest (144,000). In addition, 100,000 Christian Magyars too perished in the Holocaust, because under the anti-Semitic legislation of 1939–1941, they were reclassified as ‘racial Jews’ (Benk˝ o 1976: 436, 772; Jelinek 1982: 447; Magocsi 2005; Magyar statisztikai évkönyv 1927: 236, 1942: 165, 1948: 257; Mészáros 1999: 129; Molnár 2001: 293; Pop 2005: 144, 146, Rothschild 1977: 195–199).

Communist Hungary: Magyar is a small language again When writing about the Polish language in the 20th century, I found it necessary to distinguish the period of World War II in a separate section, because the territory and population of interwar Poland changed so tremendously during that time. Most significantly, Polish disappeared as official language, and it was also banned from universities and secondary schools. A modicum of Polish-language elementary education, press and administration at the level of communes was preserved in the Generalgouvernement, or ‘inner German reserve for subhuman Slavs,’ earmarked for manual work and eventual extinction. Neither the Magyars nor the Magyar language did suffer such a fate. Quite on the contrary, shortly before and during World War II, the territory where Magyar functioned in its official capacity substantially expanded. The brief German occupation of Hungary in 1944–1945 did not replace Magyar with German as official language, and there was no intention to do so. The war, which lasted for the Magyars between 1941 and 1945, was an extremely painful and destructive experience, but it did not sever or even endanger the continuity of Magyar as Hungary’s official language, or Magyar-language education and culture. Between 1938 and 1941, Budapest gained the revision of Trianon it sought, hence it was reluctant to enter the war by attacking the Soviet Union along the German invading armies. Hungary, however, had no choice. That was the price to be paid for Berlin’s sympathy and help for Budapest in attaining its territorial revision, which ‘brought back home’ 3.5 million Magyars who, after Trianon, had been left beyond the borders of Magyarország. The only sizeable Magyar minority remaining outside enlarged Hungary resided in Romania’s section of Transylvania. According to Romanian sources, they numbered 0.36 million, but Budapest disagreed, and estimated the demographic size of this minority at 0.53 million persons.

The Hungarian Nation

689

In 1942, 200,000 Magyar troops were deployed in Ukraine and on the Don. Ironically, 50,000 Magyar Jews followed them in the capacity of unarmed ‘auxiliaries,’ which often turned these Jewish troops into cannon fodder. In 1943, 20,000 of Magyar soldiers perished in the Battle of Stalingrad. Despite this heavy military involvement, Budapest hoped to continue its independent foreign politics. The point was made of keeping Hungary ‘neutral’ vis-à-vis the United Kingdom and the United States, whereas Budapest’s participation in Germany’s military operations against the Soviet Union was justified in terms of the ideological struggle against anti-democratic and anti-European bolshevism. Prime Minister Miklós Kállay (1887–1967) sought to establish the neutral bloc under the leadership of Hungary and Turkey that would extend from Central Europe to Anatolia. But the Soviet advance into this area in 1943 made his plan irrelevant. His stance, however, prolonged British and US neutrality to Hungary. On the other hand, the 1943 German occupation of Italy was a clear warning that the same might happen in Hungary if Budapest did not cooperate with Hitler. Eventually, Germans occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. The first British bombardments of Budapest followed shortly in April. Kállay tried to organize resistance but without success; mostly the administration cooperated with Germans. On 6 June 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy. On 23 August, Bucharest asked the Kremlin for an armistice and turned against the Germans. Two days later, General Charles De Gaulle’s (1890–1970) troops liberated Paris. In late September, a secret Hungarian armistice delegation arrived in Moscow and signed a preliminary document on 11 October. It stipulated that Hungary was to lose all of the reincorporated territories, and to declare war on Germany. Four days later, Horthy announced this news on the radio. Germans preempted the introduction of this armistice and seized the effective control of the state. The pro-German Arrow Cross regime of Hungarian fascists was established. The Soviet siege of German-held Budapest lasted from December 1944 to February 1945. By 4 April, entire Magyarország was under Soviet control. Meanwhile, the Soviet-controlled Hungarian government was founded on 22 December 1944 in Debrecen, like its Polish counterpart on 22 July in Lublin. A similar pro-Soviet Czechoslovak government was formed on 5 April 1945 in Košice. The Kremlin’s grasp on Central Europe tightened in line with the Soviet doctrine that the communist system would follow as far westward as the Red Army manages to push. On 20 January 1945, the Debrecen government signed the Armistice Treaty in Moscow, which made it into the leading center of political power in Hungary. Hungary was reestablished in its pre-1938 borders. All the incorporated territories returned to these states from which they had been seized (which also meant the substantial shrinking of the area where Magyar was used as the official language.) The only exception was autonomous Carpathia (that is, prewar

690 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Subcarpathian Ruthenia). Between 18 and 28 October 1944, Soviet troops overran Carpathia, and at that time, Stalin decided not to return this region to postwar Czechoslovakia, but to ‘return’ it to ‘its Soviet Ukrainian motherland.’ The Czechoslovak President, Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), easily resigned himself to Stalin’s dictum, perhaps, because Subcarpathian Ruthenia was so much different from the Czech lands and Slovakia in economic and cultural terms. Hence, it had never been fully integrated with the rest of interwar Czechoslovakia. In the Košice Program of 5 April 1945, it was promised that the question of ‘Transcarpathian Ukraine’ would be decided shortly in consultation with the region’s population. The telling sign of what the future held in store was the official change of the province’s name in agreement with Soviet usage. Obviously, the inhabitants were not consulted, and on 29 June, the Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement was signed on the transfer of Transcarpathian Ukraine to the Soviet Union. In August, Beneš’s decree No 60 stripped Ruthenians of Czechoslovak citizenship. In the meantime, Russian and Ukrainian replaced Magyar and Ruthenian as official languages of this region (Deák 1987: 63–65; Kósa 1999: 200; Magocsi 2005; Molnár 2001: 283, 286–291; Pop 2005: 157, 164; Rothschild 1977: 184, 192, 195). During the latter half of the 1940s, the nation-states of Central Europe were re-founded on the basis of the ethnolinguistically-defined national principle. Under Soviet insistence, the Western Allies agreed to the mass ‘transfer,’ that is, expulsion of Germans to make these states more homogenous. The precedence for this step were vast expulsions of ethnolinguistically defined populations carried out by Berlin and Moscow during the war, and the tragedy of the Holocaust which emptied Central Europe of Jews. The same policy of forced expulsions was extended to multi-national border areas in the Soviet bloc and Josip Broz Tito’s (1892–1980) Yugoslavia. This was of special significance to the Magyars, because after 1945 one-third of them found themselves outside Hungary again. Both communist and non-communist Hungarian leaders raised the issue of the Hungarian minorities (especially in Czechoslovakia) with the Soviets, but to no avail. The non-communist leaders even hoped (vainly) that Stalin might consider revising Hungary’s borders after the war. The shrinking of Hungary to its pre-1938 size and the German extermination of two-thirds of Hungarian Jews boosted the state’s ethnolinguistic homogeneity. Between 1944 and 1947, 213,000 Hungarian Germans either fled or were expelled, and 60,000 more were hauled by the Red Army to the Soviet Union in 1945, together with 20,000 Magyars. At the end of the war, 20,000 Magyar refugees from Hungarian-held Slovakia and 25,000 from Carpathia arrived in Hungary. In accordance with the Hungarian-Czechoslovak agreement, between 1945 and 1948, 90,000 Magyars left Slovakia for Hungary, and 72,000 Slovaks Hungary for Czechoslovakia. In the course of the ‘re-Slovakization’ campaign 411,000 Magyars were forced to declare their nationality as ‘Slovak.’

The Hungarian Nation

691

(A similar instrument of ‘re-Polonization’ was used to justify the retaining of over 1 million Germans/German citizens in postwar Poland, who in this manner were made into Poles.) 125,000 Magyar refugees fled to Hungary before northern Transylvania was handed back to Romania, and 40,000 more followed them from other regions of Romania. Immediately after the war, 50,000 Magyar refugees and exiles returned from Western Europe. In 1945, 20,000 Germans and 20,000 Magyars were hauled from formerly Hungarian Vojvodina to the Soviet Union. According to Hungarian sources, Tito’s communist forces executed 20,000 to 30,000 Magyars as a ‘collective punishment’ for the wartime excesses of the Hungarian administration. In 1946, in line with the HungarianYugoslav agreement, 40,000 Magyars left Vojvodina for Hungary, and 40,000 Croats and Serbs Hungary for Yugoslavia. As a result, Hungary became even more ethnolinguistically homogenous than it was before 1938. In 1949, Magyars, numbering 9.08 million, constituted 98.6 percent of postwar Hungary’s population. Like in earlier censuses, overwhelmingly Magyarophone Jews were counted together with Magyars. These Jews amounted to 134,000 persons (1.5 percent), which only slightly lowered the share of Magyars in the population to 97.1 percent. Other minorities became pretty insignificant in numerical terms. Slovaks accounted for 26,000 persons (0.3 percent), Germans for 22,500 (0.2 percent), Croats for 20,000 (0.2 percent), Romanians for 14,700 (0.17 percent), Serbs for 5000 (0.1 percent), and Slovenes for 4500 (0.1 percent) (Gyarmati 1999: 219; Eberhardt 1996: 242; Magocsi 2002: 53; Mønnesland 1997: 254; Šutaj 1999: 212; Várdy 1969: 348, 351–352). Like Czechoslovakia and Poland, Moscow corralled Hungary into the Soviet bloc. The difference was that Hungary was perceived as a perpetrator of World War II, though somewhat unwilling, while it was clear that the two other states dismantled and occupied by Germans (and the Soviets in the case of Poland) were victims. However, the short-lived German occupation and the separatist armistice signed by Budapest with Moscow, allowed the elite to reinvent Hungary as a victim of Hitler’s Germany too. The same path of justifying its statehood was followed by Austria, albeit the 1938 Anschluß was more than welcome by the Austrian elite, and rank and file. Anyway, in a fashion similar to Hungary, Romania also switched sides from Germany to the Soviet Union and the Western Allies in 1944. For the sake of forcing the new political system of Soviet communism on the states of the coalescing Soviet bloc, such ‘details’ were swept under the carpet, though Hungary was obliged to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Erstwhile functionaries of the pro-German Cross Arrow regime were not tried for war crimes, if they joined the communist party, Magyar Dolgozók Pártja (MDP, Hungarian Workers’ Party), or the pillar of the new order. In 1946, under the communist pressure the millennium-old Kingdom of Hungary was renamed as the Republic of Hungary. The following

692 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

year, the communists rigged the last multiparty elections, and 3 years later the Soviet-ordained ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ became reality, complete with the adoption of Hungary’s first formal Constitution, an adaptation of the 1936 Soviet one. The Constitution changed the name of the republic to the People’s Republic of Hungary. Similar changes in the names of Poland and Czechoslovakia were legislated later in 1952 and 1960, respectively. By the beginning of the 1950s, the old elite, the nobility (almost one out of six Magyars claimed to belong to it in the interwar period), and the classes of large and medium landowners were destroyed. Nationalization of the economy and collectivization of the countryside followed. As in Poland and Czechoslovakia, persecution of the Catholic Church was widespread in Hungary. Its traditional independence from temporal power automatically made it into the prime enemy of the communists. In addition, Primate József Mindszenty (1892–1975), besides fiercely opposing ‘ungodly’ communism, was the interrex, or the last surviving institutional link to the abolished Kingdom of Hungary. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the Kremlin’s commencement of de-Stalinization triggered open opposition to the communist system and Soviet rule in 1956. Coincidentally, demonstrations commenced in Budapest on 27 June and a day later in the Polish city of Poznan. ´ The danger of military suppression of the uprising-in-making was prevented by the negotiated replacement of the Stalinist communists in the government and the communist party with a national communist regime, which began to ‘build the national (Polish) path to communism.’ Similar negotiations failed in Hungary and the national uprising ensued, which numerous Hungarian communists called ‘revolution.’ Moscow differed in opinion and the MDPs called on the night of 23–24 October 1956 for ‘fraternal’ assistance of Soviet units stationed in Hungary. Four days later, on the government’s request, the Soviet units pulled back to the barracks. But on 1 November, Prime Minister Imre Nagy (1896–1958) announced the neutrality of Hungary and its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Having secured Tito’s support on 2 November, the Soviet Secretary General, Nikita Khrushchev (1894– 1971), ordered the Soviet attack on Budapest 2 days later. Fierce fighting raged for 10 days.2 In the wake of the suppression of the uprising, 200,000 refugees left the country using the rare opportunity that the borders were open. The fighting left 2652 Magyars and 669 Soviets dead. Repressions followed. The MDP was dissolved and replaced with the Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt (MSzMP, Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party). The MDP’s membership of 0.9 million in 1956 sank to 37,000 members of the MSzMP in December this year. The new party achieved the notch of half a million members a decade later, in 1966. The general amnesty of 1963 commenced the period of consolidation, similar to so-called ‘normalization’ that, in the 1970s, followed the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. In emulation of the Polish example, the national ‘path to communism’ was instituted in Hungary. Its

The Hungarian Nation

693

specificity was reflected in the új gazdasági mechanizmus (new economic mechanism), which during the 1960s generated more pro-market-oriented economy (so-called ‘salami economy’) than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. The elite hoped that the economic mechanism, with time, could be translated into a ‘new political mechanism,’ but Moscow did not permit breaching the orthodoxy of the political basis of the communist system. The ossification of the new mechanism of economic system produced much bigger disparities in income and well-being than elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. East–West détente and the Helsinki Final Act urged the coalescence of the opposition and the rise of samizdat publishers like in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Beginning in 1978, Hungary’s salami economy ceased to generate growth. Thanks to its ‘salami economy,’ Hungary was the only Soviet bloc country to become a member of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Despite this achievement, the Hungarian economy generated huge indebtedness and a slump in the standard of living. At the same time, Poland began to face similar problems, but the economic collapse, not buttressed by any comparable ‘new economic mechanism,’ was much faster and triggered the severe economic crisis that lasted during the 1980s. At that time, Czechoslovakia and, especially, Hungary appeared as the anteroom of Western opulence. The collapse of the Soviet bloc began when the Polish opposition and the government negotiated the systemic change in 1988 and 1989. Partially free elections were held in June 1989 in Poland and Moscow did not protest. On 21 May, Budapest took the decision to dismantle the barbed wire fences on the border with Austria. In the emulation of the Polish example, negotiations between the Hungarian opposition and the government commenced on 13 June. Three days later, Imre Nagy, the leader of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, executed in 1958, was publicly rehabilitated, and the belated funeral ceremonies in his honor gathered a crowd of 250,000 people.3 The legacy of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 was made into the ideological basis of postcommunist Hungary. The MSzMP was dissolved and the Republic of Hungary was proclaimed on 23 October 1989, and the free elections were held in March and April the following year. The communist period was over (Deák 2007: 49; Hoensch 1991: 91, 103, 107, 165; Kósa 1999: 203–207, 211–212; Molnár 2001: 301, 304, 309, 325, 335; Schöpflin 1987: 91–92, 98–101; Tomaszewski 1997: 205). The question of the Magyar minorities in the neighboring states was not raised by Budapest immediately after the war. First, Moscow did not allow it, and, second, the social, economic, and political changes entailed by forced Sovietization fully preoccupied the elite and society striving to eke out a living and preserve a modicum of national independence. Despite Budapest’s wartime persecution of the Romanians in the incorporated northern Transylvania, and Bucharest’s repressions of the Magyars in southern part of the region that remained with Romania, initially, the situation

694 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of the Magyar minority was the best in postwar Romania. While introducing the communist system in Romania, Moscow imposed on Bucharest the Sovietstyle nationality policy. This undermined the Romanian doctrine of unitary and centralized statehood, and made Bucharest dependent on the Kremlin as the ultimate arbiter when it came to conflict with Transylvania’s Magyars. In the 1947 treaty signed by Bucharest and the Soviet government in Paris, Romania formally confirmed the cessation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, and of southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Moscow agreed to support Bucharest’s wish for the re-incorporation of northern Transylvania on the condition that a Magyar Autonomous Region (Regiunea Autonoma Maghiar˘ a in Romanian, and Magyar Autonóm Tartomány in Magyar) had to be set up. It was established in 1952 with its capital in Tîrgu Mures‚ (Marosvásárhely). Meanwhile, unlike after Trianon, the Magyar University of Kolozsvár was not evacuated to Magyarország after 1945. When northern Transylvania was transferred to Hungary in 1940, the Romanian University of Cluj was moved to Sibiu (Nagyszeben) and Timis‚oara (Temesvár). The situation complicated after 1945, when this university returned to Cluj. The two universities became the rallying centers for Magyar and Romanian nationalists. The Soviet military administration prevented open clashes. The Magyar Autonomous Region remained the sole territory outside postwar Hungary where Magyar was used as official language (obviously side by side with Romanian). The Magyar University of Cluj was also the sole Magyarlanguage university surviving beyond the Hungarian borders. Transylvania’s Magyar minority had not enjoyed such a special status in the interwar period. Bucharest was never satisfied with this imposed solution. The 1956 uprising was pretext enough to merge the Magyar and Romanian universities of Cluj into a bilingual one, and to begin dismantling the autonomous status of the Magyars in Transylvania. The fear was that the uprising might spill over to the areas with substantial Magyar minorities in Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, which could be followed by the demand of the revision of the postwar borders. Actually, numerous Magyars from Slovakia crossed the border illegally to join the uprising. In reply, Romanian and Soviet troops closed the autonomous region and policed it. Young Magyar graduates were often given jobs and apartments in other regions of Romania in an effort to disperse the Magyar community. In 1958, Bucharest even seriously proposed deportation of 50,000 Magyars from Romania to the Soviet Union in order to pacify the minority more thoroughly. The following year, the autonomous region’s borders were redrawn to increase the share of Romanians in its population. Simultaneously, the Romanian and Magyar universities of Cluj were merged despite the protests of the Magyar faculty. Hungary suppressed after the 1956 uprising, Budapest was in no position to intervene. Repressions aimed at Magyars unfolded in Romania too, and did not abate until the end of the

The Hungarian Nation

695

1960s. Meanwhile, the very fact of speaking Magyar in public was considered ‘counter-revolutionary.’ In 1965, Nicolae Ceaus‚escu (1918–1989) became First Secretary of the Romanian communist party. Shortly afterward, he ordered the liquidation of this autonomous region, transformed into a regular Romanian province. Selfstyled as the ‘Genius of the Carpathians,’ Ceaus‚escu was a maverick. He ended Romania’s active participation in the Warsaw Pact in 1967, did not sever diplomatic links with Israel, and in the following year refused to participate in the Moscow-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. The Kremlin tolerated his erratic behavior, because it proved to the ‘West’ that the Soviet bloc was a union of ‘free states.’ In addition, Romania was a proxy via which Moscow could maintain tacit links with countries officially maligned by communist propaganda. For these services, the Kremlin allowed him free rein in Romania, which Ceaus‚escu hoped to transform into an ethnolinguistically homogenous and communist nation-state. In the 1980s, Hungary’s position was much stronger in the Soviet bloc and the world than before. Beginning in 1982, Budapest openly pressured Bucharest to change the treatment of Romania’s Magyars. Ceaus‚escu’s concession was his permit for setting up a Hungarian Consulate General in Cluj in 1980. An uneasy modus vivendi set in. Meanwhile, Ceaus‚escu disagreed with the position of agricultural producer earmarked for Romania in the Council of Mutual Economic Cooperation, the instrument of economic integration within the Soviet bloc. He decided to industrialize and modernize Romania fast. That meant wholesale destruction of 13,000 villages (including 7000 Magyar and German ones in Transylvania), whose inhabitants were to be relocated into makeshift concrete blocks of apartments with shared kitchens and no toilets in 558 ‘agro-industrial complexes.’ The carrying out of this plan began in 1988 in the Magyar region of Tîrgu Mures‚, and impelled 17,000 Magyars to illegally cross the border to Hungary. Besides modernization, this action’s obvious goal was ethnic homogenization of Transylvania. Mass protests ensued in Budapest. In reply, the Romanian government brought about the closing of the Consulate General of Hungary in Cluj and the Center of Hungarian Culture in Bucharest. Thirty thousand more Magyar refugees fled to Hungary in 1989. Repressions suffered by Romania’s minorities, the huge social cost of Ceaus‚escu’s megalomaniac projects, and the collapse of the communist system across the Soviet bloc precipitated the outbreak of demonstrations in the Banat city of Timis‚oara (Temesvár), inhabited by numerous Magyars. They were bloodily suppressed and triggered popular outcry, which brought down Ceaus‚escu’s dictatorship by the end of December. The policy of Romanianization (helped by a lower birth rate among Magyars and voluntary assimilation in mixed Magyar-Romanian families) showed clearly in statistics. In 1956, Magyars amounted to 1.6 million (9.1 percent), but 120,000

696 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

persons (0.4 percent), whose mother tongue was Magyar, preferred to declare different nationalities. In 1977, the number of Magyars grew to 1.7 million, but their share in Romania’s population decreased to 7.9 percent. In 1992 also, the absolute number of Magyars declined to 1.6 million (7.1 percent). Not surprisingly, the share of elementary school students pursuing Magyar-language education fell from 9.5 percent (152,000) in 1956 to 5.4 percent (171,000). This slump was due to the progressive introduction of laws that effectively limited the number of Magyar-language schools and sections in Romanian-medium ones (Bogdan 1989: 372–373; Eberhardt 1996: 246–250; Fischer-Galati 1994: 136; Hoensch 1991: 177, 189, 207; Ludanyi 1982: 606, 612; Magocsi 2002: 188; Várdy 1969: 340–343). Initially, the situation was even worse in postwar Czechoslovakia. Prague’s aim was not only to empty the country of Germans, but also of Magyars. This collective punishment was meted out for the incorporation of southern Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Hungary, and for participating in the war on the side of Germany. Between 1944 and 1947, 180,000 Magyars were deported to the Soviet Union, expelled to Hungary, or fled to Hungary on their own. In 1945, the presidential decree stripped them of Czechoslovak citizenship. Two further ones confiscated Magyar real estate and property, and condemned tens of thousands of Magyars to forced labor. In 1946, 411,000 Magyars were forced to declare themselves Slovaks. The premise of the re-Slovakization campaign was that these Magyars were ‘Magyarized Slovaks.’ Obviously, the opinion of those concerned was not taken into consideration. In 1944 and 1945, the Slovak authorities abolished Magyar-language schools and educational institutions. Magyar students of school age were not allowed any education at all. The persecution of Magyars lessened after the 1947 Peace Conference in Paris, after which the erstwhile enemies of the Soviet Union and the Allies, Hungary and Romania, were accepted as full members of the ‘socialist fraternity of brotherly nations’ in the Soviet bloc. Like in Poland, in the case of Germans and other minorities, the existence of Magyars in Slovakia was accepted at the beginning of the 1950s. These were the heydays of ‘communist internationalism’ and the struggle against the ‘national-bourgeois deviation’ in the Soviet bloc. The system of Magyar-language education was reestablished. In 1955, there were 565 Magyar elementary schools in Slovakia. Predictably, the number sank to 490 in 1970, 295 in 1980, and remains at the level with 257 schools operating in 1990. The number of Magyar students attending Magyarophone elementary schools stabilized at 80 percent, which, as easily predicted, left 20 percent Magyars without any meaningful command of their language. At the same time, the number of Magyars living in Slovakia grew from 0.51 million in 1961 to 0.56 million in 1980, and 0.567 million 10 years later. They numbered only 16,000 in the Czech lands in 1961, and 10,000 in 1991. In 1988, Magyars amounted to 10.9 percent of the population in Slovakia, 0.2 percent in the Czech lands,

The Hungarian Nation

697

and 3.8 percent in entire Czechoslovakia. The mistrust of Magyars continued, because of the 1956 uprising in Hungary, which the Czechoslovak propaganda presented as ‘counter-revolution.’ In addition, Magyars from Slovakia crossed the border illegally to join it. During the Prague Spring of 1968, some Magyars appealed for re-incorporation of southern Slovakia to Hungary. It was a minority view but did not help Slovak-Magyar relations. A day later, after changing unitary Czechoslovakia into a federation, the Constitutional Act No 144 of 28 October 1968 unambiguously provided for full political equality and of nonCzech and non-Slovak populations of Czechoslovakia, namely for ‘Magyars, Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians (Ruthenians),’ and for minority-language education for them (Augustín 1995: tables; From Minority 2005; Prochácka 1995: ˇ 139; Šatava 1994: 54; Statistická roˇcenka Ceské a Slovenské republiky 1990: 100; Várdy 1969: 348–350). After World War II, Yugoslavia was reestablished as a federation of ethnolinguistically and ethnoreligiously defined national republics in the emulation of the Soviet model. Within the Republic of Serbia the two autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo were founded. However, genuine decentralization of Yugoslavia along the national lines was carried out at the beginning of the 1970s and confirmed in the 1974 Constitution. The persecution and expulsion of Magyars after World War II quickly gave way to negotiated coexistence and Magyar was recognized as one of the six official languages of Vojvodina, along with Serbo-Croatian (in its Croatian and Serbian varieties), Slovak, Romanian, and Ruthenian. The situation deteriorated rapidly in 1956 when Tito supported the Soviet intervention in Hungary. Magyar institutions were abolished and bilingualism with Serbian was introduced in Magyar schools. Magyar-language cultural and institutional life was reestablished in the 1960s and 1970s. In line with the 1974 Constitution, and beginning at the turn of the 1980s, Magyar was used in the Yugoslav parliament in Belgrade alongside Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Macedonian, and Slovenian. Actually, the best and the most objective Magyar-language press and radio were to be found in Vojvodina, not in Hungary. (This Magyar model of how to develop vibrant national life was followed by the Albanians of Kosovo, when Belgrade suppressed the autonomy of this province in 1990.) In 1988, the situation began to deteriorate when Serbian nationalists led by Slobodan Miloševi´c set on the course to seize power in Yugoslavia, which, among others, precipitated its breakup. Miloševi´c made himself a hero calling for annexation of Vojvodina and Kosovo and incorporating them directly into Serbia. In 1991, 0.34 million Magyars accounted for 16.9 percent of Vojvodina’s population of 2 million. Serbs, at 1.2 million (57.3 percent) constituted the majority. 8500 Magyars lived in Slovenia’s Prekmurje (Muravidék or Murántúl in Magyar), and a further 22,000 concentrated in Croatia’s Slavonia, along the border with Hungary. In total, Magyars added up to 1.6 percent of Yugoslavia’s inhabitants. Their number, which hovered around

698 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

half a million after 1945, sank rapidly to 0.48 million in 1971, 0.43 million in 1981, and 0.38 million in 1991 (Bogdan 1989: 378; Jaroszewicz 2004: 149; Klemenˇciˇc and Zupanˇciˇc 2004: 860–861; Mønnesland 1997: 358, 492–493; Rusinow 1994: 72; Várdy 1969: 351–352). In Transcarpathian Ukraine, the Magyar-language educational and cultural life continued in line with the official Soviet nationality policy, though the content had to comply with the requirements of Soviet propaganda. Initially, Magyarophone education was limited to elementary schools. And Magyarlanguage secondary schools opened in 1953. The Department of Hungarian Philology, founded at the University of Uzhhorod, supplied teachers for the Magyar-language educational system. The number of Magyar-language schools, stagnant for years, grew in the 1980s and since then has reflected the share of Magyars in Transcarpathia’s population. The highly policed Soviet border and the complete subjection of the Soviet mass media to centralized propaganda and censorship isolated the Magyar community from information on the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, which unfolded in the states on which Transcarpathia bordered. In 1991, 160,000 Magyars accounted for 12.4 percent of the region’s population of 1.28 million. Rusyns amounted to 80 percent of the population, but officially were classified as Ukrainians (Culture 2005; Pop 2005: 180; Várdy 1969: 354–355). Postwar Hungary being almost ethnolinguistically homogenous with Magyars and Magyarophone Jews accounting for 98 percent of the population, there was little interest in establishing minority-language schools. As in Czechoslovakia and Poland, some schools of this kind opened in the 1950s. Few minority students chose to attend them due to the discrimination they would suffer afterward. In 1960, monolingual minority schools were replaced with bilingual ones, in which the minority language and Magyar were employed as the medium of instruction. In 1966, there were 24 such elementary schools. In addition, 225 minority elementary schools operated where all subjects except the minority language were taught in Magyar. This Magyarophone-bilingual minority educational system closely emulated solutions employed in interwar Hungary. The 1963 census registered 51,000 Germans, 31,000 Slovaks, 25,000 Croatians, 16,000 Romanians, 4500 Serbs, and 8000 Bunjevci and Šokci. Article 49 of the 1949 Constitution prohibited any discrimination on the basis of nationality. After the barren years spent on recreating a modicum of stability in the wake of the 1956 uprising, an interest in Magyar minorities residing in Hungary’s neighboring states was rekindled, especially after the flareup of freedom in Slovakia and among its Magyars during the Prague Spring. Law No I of 1972 amended the Constitution with Article 61.3, which guaranteed Hungary’s minorities the right of education in their national languages. The step allowed Budapest to appeal for reciprocation, though the question of Hungary’s minorities was negligible, whereas that of Magyar minorities quite

The Hungarian Nation

699

outstanding. Neither Bucharest, nor Prague, nor Belgrade did find this change in Hungarian law to be selfless, and solely in the interest of the concerned minorities. This became obvious when in the 1980s the diplomatic altercation ensued between Budapest and Bucharest at Romania’s discrimination of its Magyar minority. In addition, Budapest could not fail to notice the social and economic plight of the Roma living in Hungary, who numbered between 400,000 and 800,000 (4 to 8 percent of the population) in the 1980s, according to various estimates. As in the case of Jews, censuses did not distinguish them as a separate national category. In 1980, it was estimated that 28,000 Roma spoke only Romani, while many others had limited command of Magyar. Like in Czechoslovakia, no minority Romani-language education was provided in Hungary before 1989. Roma themselves preferred to conceal their identity in order not to face discrimination. In 1980, the number of minority schools in Hungary grew to 302, and to 322 in 1990. Magyarophone schools with the minority language as a separate subject prevailed. This did not give much credibility to Budapest’s appeals for stopping the replacement of Magyar-language schools with bilingual ones in Romania, Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia. The logic of ethnolinguistic homogeneity as the very principle of statehood legitimization held fast. In a way, policies of ethnic homogenization pursued by Belgrade, Bucharest, and Prague were the reflection of forced Magyarization, which Budapest had imposed on non-Magyar populations in the Kingdom of Hungary after 1867. However, these policies were not so effective and thorough as that of Magyarization. They rather followed the mixture of minority rights protection and semi- to fully-forced assimilation also characteristic of interwar and postwar Hungary. The only exception, encouraged and condoned by the Soviet Union and the Allies, took place in the latter half of the 1940s when Magyars were summarily executed, expelled, deported, and made to renounce their nationality. The very same measures but on a much larger scale were applied to German and German-speakers, who found themselves in Central Europe outside post-1945 Germany and Austria (Magyar statisztikai évkönyv 1994: 311; Šatava 1994: 180; Volgyes 1981: 139–142). The communist takeover of Hungary brought about a sudden increase in literacy and education, as elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. Full literacy was the prerequisite of the efficiency of communist propaganda and indoctrination. Otherwise, illiterate groups would have been isolated from this influence. Hence, it was another instrument of instilling the Soviet-style political and economic regime. The form was Magyar, but the content communist. After the end of the Stalinist course of internationalism (1956), which was to homogenize Moscow’s Central European satellites in agreement with the Soviet model, this approach to language was transferred to ideology too. In their forced pursuit of communism, the countries of the Soviet bloc were allowed to follow their own national paths.

700 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In this manner, national communism was born, quite similar to the Titoist communism of Yugoslavia, which had precipitated the split between Belgrade and Moscow in 1947. Soviet-style modernization necessitated the transfer of resources from agriculture to heavy industry. To this end, agriculture was collectivized and urbanization progressed rapidly. The processes were faster in Hungary (or in Czechoslovakia) than in Poland, because the collectivization of the countryside in the latter country ground to a halt in 1956. Hence, in Poland, quite uniquely, two-thirds of this sector remained in private hands, which required one-third of the total workforce to be employed on usually small private farms in the 1980s. In Hungary, the share of industrial workers grew from 38.3 percent in 1949 to 56.5 percent in 1970. In the latter year, collective farm workers amounted to 17.6 percent of the labor. Not surprisingly, the urbanization level reached the mark of 60 percent in the mid-1980s. The dominant position of Budapest, among Hungary’s other cities, continued. This erstwhile capital of vast historical Hungary was (and still is) the largest Central European city with 2 million inhabitants in 1970. More than one-fifth of the Hungarian population resided in it, and together with its conurbation was home to one-third of the country’s inhabitants. Unlike any other communist country, in the 1980s, Hungary entered the period of postindustrial economy characterized by the growing dominance of the service sector. Similar processes had unfolded in Western Europe since the 1970s, and their emulation in Hungary was possible thanks to the country’s ‘salami economy.’ In 1949, white-collar workers and the service sector accounted for 8.3 percent of the workforce, but the number grew to 26.3 percent in 1984. This sector attracted the growing number of university graduates. In 1937, 78.8 percent of school-age children attended elementary schools. The number grew rapidly to 96.1 percent in 1949, and 98.6 percent a decade later. The phenomenon of illiteracy virtually disappeared in the 1960s. The number of universities and institutions of tertiary education grew from 16 in 1937 to 32 in 1955, and stabilized at the level of almost 60 in the 1970s. The absolute number of university and post-secondary school students more than doubled between 1937 and 1950 from 11,700 to 32,500. The number grew to 110,000 in 1976, and stabilized at 100,000 in the 1980s. Taking into account only university graduates, they numbered 18,200 in 1970 and 24,000 in 1988. The tiny group of intelligentsia with secondary and university education as it was in the interwar period, grew to almost one-third of the population in the latter half of the 1980s. Publishing industry catering to the fully literate and socially mobile population observed the rapid growth from 644 book titles in 1945 to the wartime level of 5000 in the early 1950s. The peak of 12,000 book titles was reached in 1956 because of the sudden flare-up in civic freedoms and political activity during the 1956 uprising. The ensuing repressions and stringent censorship brought the

The Hungarian Nation

701

number of book titles published to the low of 3500 in 1957, before the new economic mechanism allowed for a sudden boost to 6000 in 1960. The turnout stabilized at 5000 in the 1960s, and steadily grew in the 1970s before stabilizing at the level of 8000 to 10,000 in the 1980s. In the latter decade, Hungary produced three times more book titles per capita than Poland with its similar annual production of 9000 to 10,000 titles. On the other hand, the volume of samizdat production never reached the levels observed in Poland during the 1980s. Hungary experienced much freedom in economy after 1956, but not in politics. In Poland, it was the other way round, especially following the upsurge in civic freedoms in 1980 and 1981. The repressions that followed were never so stringent or thorough as those after the 1956 uprising in Hungary, or the Prague Spring of 1968. Better performance of the Hungarian economy after 1956, translated into the improved penetration of the population with such means of mass media communication as radios and television sets. Practically, each Hungarian family owned a radio in the latter half of the 1960s, while the same indicator was reached in Poland a decade later. Television broadcasting began in Hungary in 1955, a year earlier than in Poland. In the late 1970s, two-thirds of households enjoyed their own television sets, and almost all of them in the next decade. The situation was similar in Hungary and Poland but for the only difference that families in Hungary possessed more color television sets than those in Poland. The steady rise in book production, the unprecedented spread of universitylevel education and of the novel mass media of radio and television leveled the remaining dialectal differences and ensured the dominance of standard Magyar, that is, the dialect of Budapest. Considerable and still diverging variety in spoken and written Magyar was contained to the Magyar minorities in the neighboring states. This phenomenon was especially pronounced in the areas lying far away from Hungary’s borders, where no Magyar-language radio or TV programs could be received (Gyáni 2004: 666; Grothusen 1987: 437, 479, 514; Hungary 2005; Kósa 1999: 72; Lakatos et al. 2005: 7; Molnár 2001: 331; Várdy 1969: 411, 414). Moscow’s domination in the Soviet bloc translated into the imposition of Russian as the prescribed language of international communication. In Poland, it mostly replaced French in this function, whereas it was German in Hungary. In the 19th century, French was the sociolect of the Polonophone intelligentsia and the Polish-Lithuanian natio. Its influence continued throughout the interwar period. In Hungary, closely bound with Austria in the Dual Monarchy, German played a similar function. Because German-speaking and Magyarophone civil servants, merchants, and intellectuals were in constant contact with one another and often lived in the same localities, the penetration of the command of German among rank-and-file Magyars was much deeper than that of French in Poland. In Hungary French became the sociolect of the narrow stratum of aristocracy. Between the two World Wars, due to Hungary’s strong political

702 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

and economic links with the United Kingdom and the United States, the role of English as the language of science and commerce grew. The postwar ethnic cleansing and the unprecedented shift of the Polish borders westward rendered an ethnically homogenous Poland. The concomitant imposition of Russian, unwelcome by the population at large, did away with the knowledge of French, but this phenomenon was not accompanied by the actual rise in the command of Russian. Poles became virtually monolingual. In Hungary, the socially ingrained knowledge of German continued. Most scholars and intellectuals retained and acquired command of this language. Magyar being a Finno-Ugric language with no close cognates unlike Slavic or Germanic languages, Hungarian scholars, willing to participate in the international discourse, willy-nilly, had to publish their articles in German, French, Russian, and English. In an endeavor to bridge the linguistic gap, Hungarian publishers also brought books on numerous aspects of the state and its population in foreign languages. No similar pressure to emulate this example was felt in Czechoslovakia or Poland. As elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, the communist takeover and the imposition of Russian showed up in the purge of vocabulary perceived as ideologically associated with the previous regime and economic system, for instance, t˝ ozsde (stock exchange), úriember (gentleman), or asszony (‘madame,’ a form of address). The new institutions and needs of the Soviet-style political and economic system also introduced brand-new vocabulary, for example, osztályellenes (class enemy), szovhoz (sovkhoz), or kulákföld (kulak-owned land). The curtailing of Hungary to its pre-1938 territory and the Allies-inspired expulsion of Germans resulted in a renewed wave of purism, especially directed against ‘ugly Germanisms.’ Language being of such importance to Soviet-style indoctrination and the actual construction of the Soviet system, special measures were directed at standard Hungarian in order to bring about its compliance with the ideological assumptions. The thinking behind this project was that what cannot be named, does not, will not, or will soon cease to exist, purged from human minds, especially those of new generations formed by the communist educational system. This system of close control over language, developed in the 1920s Soviet Union, was wholesale applied in the countries of the Soviet bloc. The difficulty was that in Poland the tacitly anticommunist center of linguistic research and publishing located in Cracow undermined the position of political and cultural center earmarked for Warsaw. Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, Prague as the state’s sole political center had to share its position of cultural center with Bratislava, where Slovak-language publishers and cultural institutions concentrated. The division deepened in the wake of the Prague Spring (1968), when Bratislava was grudgingly granted the status of the nominally equal power center of Czechoslovakia. In Poland, the dominance of Warsaw over Cracow and other centers of culture deepened with time. There were

The Hungarian Nation

703

not such dilemmas in communist Hungary, as Budapest had been before, and remained the center of political and cultural power. Its hold over the rest of the country even fortified, and no publishers were allowed to operate outside the capital.4 This made censorship in Hungary more efficient than in Poland or Czechoslovakia. In 1950, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences founded the Commission for Language Politics. At the same time, a Polish counterpart was established by the Polish Academy of Sciences. Lajos L˝ orincze (1915–1993) headed this Hungarian Commission. He perceived the shape of the pre-communist standard Magyar as ‘Germano-centric.’ He hoped to change this and cleanse Magyar of ‘foreign words.’ Obviously, to be effective, this purism could not target Russian linguistic loans. This blunted the edge of the puristic tendencies. The heated discussion on what should be the shape of standard Magyar unfolded in Magyar Nyelv˝ or. L˝ orincze posed the most burning issues in Nyelvm˝ uvelésünk f˝ obb kérdései (The Most Significant Questions of Our Language Politics, 1953, Budapest). The following year, most of them were addressed in the tenth edition of A magyar helyesírás szabályai (The Principles of Magyar Orthography and Grammar, 1954, Budapest). At a more scholarly level, L˝ orincze’s colleagues, László Deme and Béla Kövés, summed up the discussion in Magyar nyelvhelyesség (How to Write and Speak Correctly in Magyar, 1957, Budapest). L˝ orincze translated their scholarly findings into a school textbook titled, Iskolai nyelvm˝ uvel˝ o (Advice on the Correct Use of [Our] Language for Schools, 1959, Budapest). Like in Poland, the main preoccupation was with the ‘correctness’ of language use. It did not necessarily mean giving up to purism. A decision that the new form of standard Magyar should not be ‘chauvinistic,’ taken at the conference, Anyanyelvi m˝ uveltségünk (Our Language Politics), held in Pécs during late 1959, opened the leeway for retaining and reintroducing international words and foreign linguistic loans to Magyar. At the conference, much time was taken up by the question on how to enforce the use of such specifically Magyar letters, as [á], [í], [˝ o], [ú], or [˝ u] in typewriters. Some proposed ordering specially customized typewriters from the West, but in the times of the intensified Cold War, this solution was ideologically suspect. Hence, the technical problem continued well into the 1960s. Most significantly, the conference approved the consensus on the appropriate shape of standard Magyar, as presented in the works authored by L˝ orincze, László Deme, and Béla Kövés. Between 1959 and 1962, the seven volumes of the new authoritative dictionary, A Magyar nyelv értelmez˝ o szótára (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest), were published. The work was edited by László Országh (1907–1984) and Géza Bárczi. The latter was the author of the sole new interwar dictionary of Magyar, Magyar szófejt˝ o szótár (1941). Bárczi and Országh’s dictionary was badly needed, and replaced the very first authoritative dictionary of Magyar, namely Czuczor and Fogarasi’s dated six-volume

704 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

A Magyar nyelv szótára (The Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1862–1874, Pest). In 1961, Deme and Pál Fábián published their much-needed Helyesírásí tanácsadó szótár (The Dictionary of Advice How to Write Correctly, Budapest) based on the 1954 edition of A magyar helyesírás szabályai. After having gone through numerous editions, Deme and Fábián’s work was published, as Helyesírásí kéziszótár (The Orthographic Dictionary, 1988, Budapest), and still remains in print titled Magyar helyesírásí kéziszótár (The Dictionary of Correct Writing in Magyar, 1999, Budapest). With the popular user in mind, József Juhász shortened Bárczi and Országh’s dictionary into one-volume Magyar értelmez˝ o kéziszótár (The Short Explanatory Dictionary of Magyar, 1972, Budapest). Beginning with the fifth edition published in 1982, this dictionary was broadened to two volumes, and remains the standard Magyar dictionary to this day. László Grétsy and Miklós Kovalovszky combined the tradition of Deme and Fábián’s dictionary with that of Magyar értelmez˝ o kéziszótár edited by Juhász, and published the two massive volumes of Nyelvm˝ uvel˝ o kézikönyv (The Handbook of Language Cultivation, 1980–1985, Budapest). In 1996, Grétsy shortened it to one-volume Nyelvm˝ uvel˝ o kéziszótar (The Dictionary of Language Cultivation, Budapest). ‘Correctness’ of writing and speech was a never-ending concern. In 1971, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences founded the Committee of Correct Writing, which came up with 100 new rules. Between 1981 and 1984, they were discussed and tested. In 1984, the principles were enshrined in the eleventh edition of A magyar helyesírás szabályai, and duly reflected in Deme and Fábián’s Helyesírásí kéziszótár (1988). To propagate and preserve correctness of Magyar, the Anyanyelvápolók Szövetsége (Union of the Cultivators of the Mother Tongue) was founded in 1979. It publishes the tellingly titled journal, Édes anyanyelvünk (Our Beloved Mother Tongue). The whole social movement, which developed around the issue of language correctness, on one hand, channeled people’s attention away from politics, while, on the other, was contributing to the fortification of the national in Hungary’s national communism. Such officially encouraged preoccupation with language correctness (sometimes dubbed ‘purity’ in more emotional terms) served similar roles in Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the 1980s, this preoccupation gained a new dimension in Hungary, when Budapest dared to speak on behalf of Magyar minorities in the neighboring states. The return of the issue of these minorities to politics also allowed Hungarian politicians to use the question of the Magyar language in foreign politics. The diverging norms in Magyar spoken by these minorities as well as the ‘threat of bilingualism’ became a new field of activity and worry for ‘language cultivators’ working for the sake of their ‘beloved mother tongue.’ To this end the border between ‘us and them’ had to be also drawn in language. This process was

The Hungarian Nation

705

facilitated by the publication of the four volumes of György Lakó’s monumental A magyar szókészlet finnugor elemei (The Finno-Ugric Elements in the Magyar Lexical Stock, 1967–1978, Budapest). This work confirmed what was ‘truly Magyar’ in Magyar. Other dictionaries identified ‘foreign imposters’ lurking in ‘our language,’ István Kniezsa’s two-volume A magyar nyelv szláv jövevényszavai (The Slavonic Loan Words in the Magyar Language, 1955, Budapest), or Ferenc Bakos’s A magyar szókészlet román elemeinek története (The Etymological Dictionary of Romanian Elements in the Magyar Lexical Stock, 1982, Budapest). Éva L˝ orinczy’s four-volume Új magyar tájszótár (The New Dictionary of the Magyar Dialects, 1979–2002, Budapest) described the dialect area of Magyar that extends well into the territory of present-day Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The graphic presentation of this area is given in Dezs˝ o Juhász and László Murádin’s eight-volume A romániai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza (The Atlas of the Magyar Dialects in Romania, 1995–2003, Budapest). The Magyar dialectal area in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia was presented in Petro M Lyzanec’s three-volume A kárpátaljai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza (The Atlas of the Magyar Dialects in Carpathia, 1992–2003, Budapest), and of the Slovak region of Nitra in Anna Sándor’s A Nyitra-vidéki magyar nyelvjárások atlasza (The Atlas of the Magyar Dialect in the Nitra Region, 2004, Bratislava). Certainly, besides being a ‘national argument’ such dictionaries and atlases may also be the sign of reconciliation and friendly cooperation. Much depends on how politicians use research of this type. In the communist period, Loránd Benk˝ o’s magnificent four-volume A Magyar nyelv történeti-etimologiai szótára (The Historical-Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1967–1976, Budapest) was published. Between 1993 and 1997, the German translation of this dictionary was published, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen (Budapest) so as to make the findings on Magyar available to scholars worldwide. So far, neither Czech, Polish, nor Slovak has been analyzed in such an extensive and detailed etymological dictionary. Bearing this in mind and remembering other specialized Magyar dictionaries, I dare say that Magyar is the best researched and described Central European language. The tremendous effort, which has been invested into the task, perhaps, amounts to a consolation and compensation for the loss of historical Hungary. A memory of this kingdom still lives in the Magyar language. On the other hand, like in other Soviet bloc countries, no publication of an extensive encyclopedia was allowed. Between 1959 and 1962, the six volumes of Új magyar lexikon (The New Magyar Lexicon, Budapest) came off the press. Its later editions were extended to seven volumes. The prewar Révai Nagy Lexikona with its 21 volumes remained the best and most extensive Magyar encyclopedia ever published. It was not reprinted in communist Hungary in order to isolate readers from the ‘bourgeois past’ (Balázs 2000: 163–165; Benk˝ o 1972: 367–374; Fodor 1983: 65, 77; Forgács 1998: 110–118; Janich and Gruele 2002: 325; Kósa 1999: 72).

706 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The end of communism: Rediscovering the world and Greater Hungary? The proclamation of the Republic of Hungary (1989), the first free parliamentary elections (1990), and the withdrawal of the Soviet/Russian troops (1991) precipitated the systemic change from communist totalitarianism to democracy, and from the centrally-planned to market-oriented economy. There was no overlord in the Kremlin to tell Budapest what to do. The significance of the Magyar minorities abroad became obvious in the 1980s when despite official slogans of ‘mutual socialist fraternity’ in the Soviet bloc, the rift between Hungary and Romania over Ceau¸sescu’s maltreatment of Transylvania’s Magyars deepened to the point of open conflict. In an unprecedented move, to reach international public opinion, Budapest and Bucharest succumbed to purchasing advertising space in Time to voice their mutual grievances. A highly atypical event when members of the Soviet bloc reached out for ‘national justice’ across the Iron Curtain to a ‘capitalist journal.’ At that time, Moscow was not able to contain ethnonational conflicts any more, as aptly exemplified by the flare-up of armed fighting in the Soviet Union itself, namely between Armenians and Azeris in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh located in Soviet Azerbaijan. The centrality of the Magyar minorities for Hungarian politics has not been reflected either in Czechoslovakia or in Poland. In the former case, there are not any significant Czech or Slovak minorities living abroad (that is, outside the territory of former Czechoslovakia). A partial exception to this rule is the group of 57,000 Slovaks in Vojvodina, who amount to 2.8 percent of this Serbian province’s population. But Slovak, like Magyar, is one of Vojvodina’s official languages, which lessens the potential for conflict. One would expect that on the plane of foreign relations, Poland would do much of the sizeable Polish minorities, which number 0.4 million in Belarus, 0.3 million in Lithuania, 0.2 million in Ukraine, and 60,000 in Kazakhstan. Although numerically not much smaller than their Magyar counterparts, these Polish minorities with almost 1 million members look hardly impressive if compared with Poland’s population of 38 million. On the contrary, size matters in the discourse on minorities in Hungary, where the popular knowledge is that two-thirds of the Magyar nation reside in Hungary, whereas the remaining one-third live in the neighboring states. The explanation of the dilemma is that Warsaw was much more preoccupied with the question of Poland’s borders, which shifted 300 km westward than with the Polish minorities remaining in the East. It was Moscow that guaranteed the Polish western border until the signing of the final German-Polish border treaty in 1990. The Kremlin also allowed for and facilitated the expulsion of Germans from the German territories, which became western and northern Poland after 1945. Poles expelled from interwar Poland’s eastern territories incorporated into

The Hungarian Nation

707

the Soviet Union, replaced these expelled Germans. Afterward, the myth was that no more Poles remained in the Soviet Union. Warsaw depended solely on Moscow for maintaining the postwar status quo and did not raise the issue of the Polish minorities after the last approved transports of Poles arrived from the Soviet Union in 1958. The propaganda match between Hungary and Romania over the Transylvanian Magyars unfolded among equals. Poland had no chance to stand up to the Soviet overlord, it had too much to lose (Ethnic Groups of Vojvodina 2005; Magocsi 2002: 199). In Hungary, ethnonational programs and parties had their heyday in the 1990s. In 1997, in reply to these expectations, Article 6.3 was added to the amended Constitution of 1949. It provides, ‘The Republic of Hungary bears a sense of responsibility for the fate of Magyars living outside its borders and shall promote and foster their relations with Hungary.’ Not surprisingly such wording worried Romania and Slovakia, because it seems to have given free rein to Budapest in pursuing the interests of Magyars abroad. No similar provision is to be found in the Polish Constitution of 1997, and the so-called ‘repatriation program,’ which aspires to bring Poles to Poland from Kazakhstan is a low-key affair without any significance for Poland’s foreign relations. Before 2000, the number of ‘repatriates returning to Poland’ was no more than several tens per year, and the number rose recently to a few hundreds. According to the 2001 census, in Hungary, 99 percent of the population of 10.1 million speak Magyar as their first language. The conservative Magyarcentered estimates claimed that in 1990 Hungary’s minorities included, 37,000 Germans, 18,000 Croats, 13,000 Slovaks, 9000 Romanians, 3000 Serbs, and 2600 Slovenes. No mention was made of Jews or Roma. At the threshold of accession negotiations with the European Union, Budapest and Brussels agreed that there were 0.5 million Roma, and 0.4 million members of other minorities in Hungary. The 2001 census distinguishes between actual speakers of a minority language and those claiming membership in a minority. The numbers are 48,600 and 190,000 for Roma, 33,700 and 62,200 for Germans, 14,300 and 15,600 for Croats, 11,800 and 17,600 for Slovaks, 3400 and 3800 for Serbs, and 3200 and 3000 for Slovenes. Estimates of minority associations tended to be substantially higher at 200,000 Germans, 110,000 Slovaks, 80,000 Croats, 25,000 Romanians, 5000 Serbs, and 5000 Slovenes. These numbers reflect several phenomena, namely the associations’ wishful thinking, combining the number of actual members of a minority with the estimate of those who became Magyarized (of course without taking into consideration what the latter may think), fear of some members of minorities that declaring their non-Magyar national background would endanger their prospects of career and social mobility in Hungary. The latter is especially true of Roma, who in the past were not registered in censuses, and who are now afraid that singling them out as an ethnolinguistically-defined group may lead to their further discrimination. Some sources assess the number

708 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Hungary’s Roma as high as 800,000. The social exclusion and discrimination of Roma is dramatic throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and to this day there are hardly any schools, which offer some education in Romani. But their situation is improving in Hungary, because 50,000 more Roma dared to declare themselves as such in 2001 than in the 1990 census. Jews disappeared from statistics altogether, because at last they became fully assimilated as Magyars. Nowadays, the religion being not of much concern, it is difficult to assess their number by taking into consideration how many confessors of Judaism live in Hungary. Estimates speak of the community of 80,000 Jews concentrated in Budapest. In the early 1990s, very few of them (invariably belonging to the older generation) still could speak Yiddish. In Austria-Hungary, this language was disparagingly dubbed as ‘jargon,’ or ‘bad German,’ and it was not allowed to declare it in censuses. This perception of Yiddish continued in Hungary, and has prevented Jews from declaring it in censuses. On the other hand, the pull of Magyarization was most felt in Budapest, where half of Hungary’s Jews lived during the interwar period. As a result, Yiddish-speaking Jews resided outside the capital and its vicinity, especially in eastern Hungary. The brunt of the Holocaust was starker there than in the capital, which left the majority of modern Hungary’s Jews almost homogenously Magyarophone. The total number of the members of minorities established in the 2001 census is 314,000. Out of them 213,000 speak minority languages. At 2 to 3 percent of Hungary’s population, minorities are negligible. Even if high estimates for Roma and other nationalities are taken into consideration, their share in the Hungarian population is not more than 10 percent. Hence, one wonders why the 1993 National and Ethnic Minority Rights Act (Law No LXXVII) is so liberal as to grant the possibility of creating minority self-governments parallel to regular ones in communes where minorities amount to 30 percent of the population. Among others, Poles were recognized as a national minority, though most of them arrived in Hungary after 1939 as refugees from Poland occupied by Germany and the Soviet Union. In Europe the usual standard is that a minority is recognized if it has been present on the territory of a state for more than a century. The number of minority elementary schools increased from 322 in 1990 to 395 in 2000, and the number of minority secondary schools more than doubled, from 10 in 1990 to 23 in 2000. The problem is that as in communist Hungary, there prevail bilingual schools and Magyarophone schools with the minority language taught as a subject. Thus, preservation of the actual knowledge of minority languages clearly is not a priority and the dominance of Magyar continues. The situation of minority languages in minority education is similar in Poland (Gyáni 2004: 556; Kardos 2001: 349–353; Magyar statisztikai évkönyv 2001: 228; Results 2001; Šatava 1994: 175–180). The suspicion is that Budapest became so strongly involved in the development of the protection of culture and languages of Hungary’s minorities with

The Hungarian Nation

709

an eye to demanding similar privileges for the Magyar minorities. That is not surprising should one bear in mind the continued importance of these minorities for Hungarian politics. Unlike most of the Central European Germans who were expelled to postwar Germany when they found themselves living outside the post-1945 German borders, the Magyar minorities survived largely intact. West Germany and, now united Germany, has not only accepted the expellees but also granted the constitutional right of (re-)acquiring German citizenship for ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe when they decide to ‘return’ to Germany. Beginning in the 1990s, these ethnic Germans were offered German citizenship and passport without the need of going to Germany. In 1992, the severe criticism, which this right generated in Poland and the Czech Republic convinced Berlin to limit this law to persons who were born prior to 1993. Attempting to take over some electorate from the ethnonationalist groupings, Hungary’s mainstream parties decided to emulate the German example. In 2001, the status law (Act LXII on Magyars living in neighboring states) on the so-called ‘[ethnic] Magyar identity card’ was adopted. It gives Magyars living in Hungary’s neighboring states (except Austria) privileges in access to employment, social, and health services when they come to Hungary. Also, transfers of monies were predicted to these Magyars who due to old age or health reasons were not able to travel to Hungary. Bucharest gave a nod to the implementation of this law’s provisions in Romania, though it meant unequal treatment of Romanian citizens of non-Magyar ethnic origin. The Slovak government, however, did not allow it. In the 1990s, the strongly ethnonationalist and populist administration of Vladimír Meˇciar brought about the split of Czechoslovakia, and stalled to the halt the negotiations on the accession of Slovakia to the European Union and NATO. In 1998, he was unsaddled from power but the danger was that the issue of Magyar identity card, which his party portrayed as the ‘Magyar danger,’ could return Meˇciar to office. This would have barred the country from entering the EU and NATO, again. Fortunately, Budapest, criticized for its ‘not consulted step’ by the OSCE and the EU, withdrew part of its support for this initiative. Bratislava reciprocated in 2003 by allowing a limited use of Magyar identity cards in Slovakia. In 2002, the situation with the government’s overtures to the ethnonationalists’ program was repeated in Hungary. The purely internal political struggle between the conservatives and the social democrats (the former lost the elections to the latter this year) spilled into the sphere of international relations. The conservatives won the battle to have a referendum on granting Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Magyars living abroad in full emulation of the (West) German model of (re-)granting ethnic Germans living outside Germany in Central and Eastern Europe with German citizenship. Due to low turnout, the referendum was declared invalid (showing that the average Hungarian citizen did not share the politicians’ interest in the Magyar minorities abroad). Otherwise, it would

710 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

have triggered similar controversy in Slovakia and Romania, as the Magyar identity card did 2 years earlier. The Polish conservatives, who wished to emulate the Hungarian model complete with the ‘Polish identity card’ for ethnic Poles in the post-Soviet states, resigned from pursuing this policy having observed what kind of negative international repercussions it could generate5 . It is estimated that nowadays (2002), there are 1.6 million Magyars in Romania, 0.6 million in Slovakia, 0.29 million in Serbia, 160,000 in Ukraine, 20,000 in the Czech Republic, 16,000 in Croatia, and 7000 in Austria, and 6000 in Slovenia. Apart from Austria (a Western-style democracy since the state’s reunification in 1955), democratization that followed the fall of communism (1989) also improved the protection of minority rights in all these states. Initially, the situation of the Magyar minority was worst in Miloševi´c’s Yugoslavia when the state’s gradual breakup was followed by a succession of wars. Despite his 1988 claims to this end, Miloševi´c did not fully terminate autonomy of Vojvodina, perhaps, because Serbs constituted a majority of the population in this region, unlike in Kosovo. In addition, 0.2 to 0.25 million Serbian refugees from Bosnia and Croatia settled in Vojvodina. 40,000 to 100,000 Magyars left this province afraid of being drafted to the Serbian army, or of the war engulfing entire Serbia. Some returned after the fall of Miloševi´c’s regime in 2000. 6000 Magyars left Croatia’s Slavonia or died there when they found themselves in the midst of Croatian-Serbian warfare. Another (but mercifully brief) downturn in the fate of a Magyar minority took place in Meˇciar’s Slovakia when the parliament passed the Act on State Language in 1996. It limited the possibility of using Magyar in official contexts. The act’s anti-minority thrust, mainly aimed at Slovakia’s Magyars, was not mitigated by the 1995 SlovakHungarian treaty, which also covers minority rights. Meˇciar merely paid lip service to the treaty, and it remained to Bratislava to implement the treaty’s provisions after his downfall in 1998. In Austria, Magyars seem to be content with the level of the protection of their minority rights, whereas Slovenia contracted with Budapest the treaty on minorities in 1992, and Hungary’s treaties on good neighborliness with Ukraine (1991), Croatia (1995), and Romania (1996) also cover the sphere of minority rights. The 2004 enlargement of the European Union granted the Magyar minorities of Slovakia and Slovenia (alongside both states’ citizens of other ethnic backgrounds) full access to Hungary’s employment market. The same provision was extended to Romania’s Magyars upon this country’s accession to the European Union in 2007. It seems that in this manner the ‘question of Magyar minorities’ will be soon a thing of the past, contrary to the wishes of ethnonationally minded politicians in Hungary and elsewhere, who have tried to use these minorities as an instrument of politics time and again (Fox 2001; Jeszenszky 2003: 23; Klemenˇciˇc and Zupanˇciˇc 2004; Kováˇc 1998: 328–331; Ludányi 2003: 593; Magocsi 2002: 199; Pribilla 2001).

The Hungarian Nation

711

The freeing of economy, society, and culture from the constraints of the communist regime in Hungary, had similar effects as elsewhere in Central Europe. Free press, television, and radio channels proliferated. The rise of satellite television was especially significant in relatively affluent communist Hungary, because it gave the average Magyar direct access to Western culture unfettered by censorship. In the late 1980s, perhaps, per capita there were more owners of, technically speaking, illegal satellite dishes in Hungary than in Czechoslovakia or Poland. Video recorders, present in 2 percent of households in 1987, had helped the spread of free media since the early 1980s. After the end of communism, via satellite television (the Duna [Danube] channel) Budapest broadcasts Magyarophone programs to the Magyar minorities all over Central Europe. Thanks to this and various bilateral and international measures, the Magyar minorities do not face the possibility of forced assimilation any more. In turn, scholarly and cultural cooperation develops between Hungary and the states with Magyar minorities. Although language remains an important element of politics, the obsession with preserving Magyar and its variously defined ‘purity’ among the minorities is gone. Hungary’s academic circles accepted the fact that the previously unified Magyar language does diverge into slightly different Magyars in the neighboring states. After all, the rise of much more differentiated Englishes separated by oceans did not lead to a splintering of the English language. Purism being a largely spent force of ethnonational politics, today, the point of its sword is directed against English linguistic loans as much in Hungary as elsewhere in Central Europe. But the ideological element is of little significance in this half-heartedly pursued campaign. Previously, the action of doing away with ‘ugly Germanisms’ was combined with the separation of Hungary from Austria-Hungary and the expulsion of Germans from Hungary and Central Europe after 1945. The very success of Magyar nation-building was at stake. Today, English functions as the new lingua franca of Central Europe. Magyar, along with the new EU member states’ languages, became one of the enlarged Union’s official languages, which indicates that the growing significance of English is not a one-way phenomenon (Forgács 1998: 123; Gyáni 2004: 666; Lanstyák 1996; Pete 1988). As remarked above, various shorter dictionaries based on the seven-volume A Magyar nyelv értelmez˝ o szótára are published to this day in updated editions that stripped them of the veneer of communist propriety. The immediate challenge that faces Magyar linguists is to compile a brand-new multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Magyar language, which would aptly reflect the rapid lexical change entailed by democratization, development of economy, globalization, and the rise of the entire new field of information technology. So far, in Central Europe, only the Polish language was described in such a new dictionary, namely, Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (The Practical Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1994–2005, Poznan). ´ A similar task still waits to be

712 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

undertaken by Czech and Slovak linguists. When there is no new dictionary of Magyar of this type, users can refer to the 19-volume encyclopedia, Magyar Nagylexikon (The Great Magyar Lexicon, 1993–2004, Budapest), reprints of interwar Révai Nagy Lexikona, and to Magyar Wikipedia (founded in 2002). At 14.6 million words in late 2006, this Wikipedia amounted to 30 conventional volumes, which makes it the most extensive modern-day Magyar-language encyclopedia available. In Poland, the 31 volumes of Wielka encyklopedia powszechna (The Great Universal Encyclopedia, 2001–2005, Warsaw), similar in scope to Magyar Nagylexikon, were produced slightly later. In Slovakia, out of the planned 12 volumes of Encyclopaedia Beliana (The Beliana Encyclopedia, 2001–, Bratislava), four were published by 2005. On the other hand, the Czech reader must content herself with the medium-size encyclopedia, Universum. Všeobecná encyklopedie (Universum: A Universal Encyclopedia, Prague), which is an enriched Czech translation of German Das Bertelsmann Lexikon (The Bertelsmann Lexicon). It was published in the ten-volume edition in 2000 and in the four-volume edition 2 years later. Both editions contain exactly the same amount of printed matter. In addition to Magyar Nagylexikon, the publication of Magyar Katolikus Lexikon (The Magyar Catholic Lexicon, 1993–, Budapest) continues. Out of the planned 12 volumes, 10 were published by 2005. This attempt at producing a universal encyclopedia written from the standpoint of Catholic worldview reminds one of the Polish Encyklopedia katolicka (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1973–, Lublin). But out of the latter’s planned 20 volumes, only half were published by 2005. This proves the strong link between Catholicism and Magyar language and culture, similar to that in the Polish case, though Calvinism remains a significant element of Magyardom, unlike in present-day Poland, where no other religion rivals the supremacy of Catholicism. The Magyar Catholic encyclopedia draws on the example of its 13-volume predecessor, Egyetemes Magyar Enciklopédia. (The Magyar Universal Encyclopedia, 1859–1876, Eger), and its shorter four-volume follower from the interwar period, Katolikus lexikon (The Catholic Lexicon, 1931–1933, Budapest.) Interestingly, there was no attempt to compile a Polish-language universal Catholic encyclopedia before the times of communist Poland. Like in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, the number of secondary and university students grew rapidly also in postcommunist Hungary. In 1980, persons with full secondary education accounted for 7.2 percent of the population. In 1990, the percentage actually decreased to 6.8, and then grew quite rapidly to 8.8 percent 6 years later. The same drop and leap was observed in the share of university graduates, who constituted 2.7 percent of the population in 1980, 2.4 percent in 1990, and 3.1 in 1996. Secondary school and university graduates together with the graduates of secondary-level technical

The Hungarian Nation

713

schools constituted 17.9 percent of Hungary’s inhabitants in 1996. Understandably, the book industry, which caters to their intellectual needs, increased its production from 8000 titles in the late 1980s to 9000 in 2000, 10,000 in 2002, and 11,200 in 2004. In Hungary, almost 100 titles per 100,000 inhabitants were published in 2002, that is, slightly more than in Austria or Germany. On the other hand, the indicator was much lower in Slovakia and Poland at 55 and 50, respectively. But in this field, the Czech Republic, where 140 book titles appeared per 100,000 inhabitants in 2002, outdid Hungary. Besides the steady development of book publishing, the rise in perusal of electronic equipment was even more spectacular. In 1987, 2 percent of households enjoyed videos, and 42 percent a decade later (Gyáni 2004: 573; Judit 2005: 7, 17). The steady rise in political and economic significance of Hungary was also paralleled in the cases of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. This success was sealed with the accession of all these four states to NATO and, in 2004, to the European Union. This last event is of much import, as it elevated the states’ national languages to the status of the EU’s official languages. Thus the sphere of their use increased considerably at the international level. The success of these four postcommunist states slowly but steadily turns them into immigrant countries, which means that people from all around the world acquire Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. As members of the OECD, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia belong to the exclusive club of the 30-odd richest states in the world. There is nothing on the horizon, which could change this positive trend. Hence, the importance of the four languages, and the number of their users will continue to grow, despite periodical outbursts of ethnonationally minded politicians, who strive to bolster their electorate by prophesying doom. They see danger in globalization and immigration, and foresee that the widespread teaching of English and the broadening use of this language will edge out the national languages from culture and social life. Earlier, similar developments did not encroach on the national languages either in France or Germany, so one can expect a similar outcome of the recent social, economic, and cultural changes in Central Europe as well.

10 The Czech Nation: Between Czechoslovak and Czech Nationalism

The Czechoslovak language shall be the state, official language of the Republic. Article 1 of the Constitutional Law of 29 February 1920 Establishing the Principles of Language Rights Within the Czechoslovak Republic So closely akin are these two branches of the great Slav family tree that up to 1860 they used the same literary language; it was only then that one of the Slovak dialects was adopted as the Slovak language. And now the political union is gradually bringing about the return to one language, the Czechoslovak language. (Baerlein 1929: 11) The Czech and Slovak languages shall be used equally in the promulgation of laws and other general binding legal regulations. (a) Both languages shall be used equally in the dealings of all state organs of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and of both [Czech and Slovak] Republics, in proceedings held before them and in all their contacts with individual citizens. Article 6.1 of the Constitutional Act No 143 of 27 October 1968 Concerning the Czechoslovak Republic According to a popular saying, when Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918, it became an Austria-Hungary in miniature. This historian’s simile indicated that the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks displayed all the good and undesirable features of the Dual Monarchy. On the positive side, it was the only Central European polity where democracy survived throughout the interwar period. In general, the state was a welcoming home to three nations (the Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians), and three sizeable minorities (Germans, Magyars, and Poles). The Czechoslovak economy (concentrated in the Czech lands, formerly Austria-Hungary’s most significant powerhouse) was the strongest in the region, 714

The Czech Nation

715

and enabled the fast development of historical Hungary’s backward regions of Slovakia, and, especially, Subcarpathian Ruthenia. On the other hand, the Czechoslovak democracy did not govern fairly, and it bestowed advantages upon the three ‘state nations,’ mainly toward the Czechs and the Slovaks. Pleas for more rights and decentralization on the part of the Slovaks and the Ruthenians were not heard in Prague, let alone those of the German and Magyar minorities. During the Great Depression, there were always more employment opportunities earmarked for Czechs and Slovaks than Germans or Magyars. Last but not the least, within the strict confines of legalism, measures were taken to assimilate the minorities. The minorities despised these measures and perceived them as unfair. This love–hate relationship that the ‘state nations’ and the minorities had with Czechoslovakia closely reflected the vagaries of the uneasy relationship between the Czechs and Vienna prior to 1918. Following the period of Theresian and Josephine reforms, the rules of the political game were more or less the same for all the ethnolinguistically-defined groups in the empire. They were heard if they enjoyed representation by their own nobilities, who felt a link with their non-estates co-ethnics (peasants, burgers). Numbers mattered too. The Magyars, who could fall on the tradition of Hungarian statehood continued within the administrative and political structure of the Austrian Empire, presented a political, demographic, and military potential, which Vienna had to respect. The minute and distant population of the Ruthenians, without its ethnolinguistically defined nobility or burgher stratum, was largely left alone to its own devices, and, in return, hardly ever demanded anything of the Austrian administration. To their disadvantage, most Ruthenians were Greek Catholics, which, by definition, made them into second-class subjects, because Roman Catholics were favored. (Obviously, their position in this respect was better than that of Orthodox Serbs or Walachians [Romanians].) The Czechs fell into an intermediate category between these two extremes. The tradition of the statehood of the Crown of the Czech Lands was remembered, but it did not bear on the everyday workings of the Austrian administration and politics, unlike that of the Kingdom of Hungary. The gradual development of the Czech lands into the powerhouse of Austria supplied the Czechs with a trump card. But before the card could be dealt, a Czech nation or mass national movement had to emerge. The imagining of the ethnolinguistically defined Czech nation was a prolonged process. First, the traditional estates of Bohemia and Moravia were more interested in preserving the administrative and political separateness of their crownlands rather than in merging them in the interest of a postulated Czech nation. Very different from this attitude were the Magyar nobility’s efforts to coax Vienna to agree to the reunification of Transylvania with the rest of Hungary. The successful 1848 re-incorporation of Transylvania into Hungary was annulled a year later by the

716 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

suppression of the Hungarian War of Independence. But in 1867, the Ausgleich (Compromise) restored this desired reunification. Second, the Bohemian and Moravian estates were predominantly Germanspeaking, as was one-third of the two crownlands’ non-noble population. Nonetheless, in the eyes of the ethnolinguistically-oriented nationalists, this pitted the nobles against the remaining two-thirds of the populace, who spoke Czech. The dilemma was not shared by the overwhelmingly Magyarophone Hungarian natio, who, seeking the transformation of Hungary into a Magyar nation-state, could rely on the plurality composed of Magyar-speaking peasants and German-speaking and Jewish (that is, Yiddish-speaking) burghers, who readily adopted the Magyar languages and the aspirations of Magyar nationalism as their own. Third, Hungarian noble Landespatriotismus (estates state-centered patriotism) was translated into Magyar ethnolinguistic nationalism in the first half of the 19th century, and was followed by the parallel transformation of PolishLithuanian Landespatriotismus into Polish ethnolinguistic nationalism in the last three decades of the same century. The Landespatriotismus of the Czech lands was a non-existent category. Instead, Bohemia and Moravia prevailed as loci of noble identification. In 1810, Bernard Bolzano proposed to solve this predicament by overhauling the Bohemian natio into an all-inclusive bilingual (Czech- and German-speaking) Bohemian nation, whose identity would be grounded in their polity (or civic values), not in ethnic peculiarities such as language or religion. Possibly, a similar development could unfold in Moravia if the model succeeded in Bohemia. The turning point was in 1848, when Bohemian Czech-speaking intellectuals opposed the project of creating a Great German nation-state out of the German Confederation, with their own plan for the ethnolinguisticallydefined Czech nation, embedded in Austria’s Slavophone lands, destined to become a separate administrative unit of the empire. In the course of the second half of the 19th century, this founding idea of Austroslavism became popular in Bohemia, but not particularly in Moravia. In 1905, the Moravian Ausgleich was contracted. It officially reflected and respected the ethnocultural difference existing between Slavophone (Moravian-speaking) and Germanspeaking Moravians, which allowed for preserving the traditional unity of the Moravians and their crownland. The emergence of a bilingual Moravian civic nation, in line with the guidelines, which Bolzano had devised for the Bohemians nearly a century earlier, was a realistic possibility prior to the Great War. The founding of the postwar order in Central Europe on the basis of the (ethnolinguistic) national principle sealed the success of Czech ethnolinguistic nationalism. Ethnolinguistically blind Moravian civic nationalism did not stand a chance. Neither did the projects of making the eastern half of Austrian Silesia

The Czech Nation

717

into a ‘free industrial republic,’ or nation-state of the (East Austrian) Silesians (Slunzaks) with Czech, German, and Polish as official languages, or of Germany’s Upper Silesia into the nation-state of the Upper Silesians (Szlonzoks) with German and Polish as official languages. The national principle, espoused and propagated by United States President Woodrow Wilson and the Allies, provided that language equates with a nation, which, in turn, is equivalent to a state. As a result, eastern Austrian Silesia was partitioned between Czechoslovakia and Poland, and Upper Silesia between Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Poland. On one hand, Czech ethnolinguistic nationalists faced the competition staged by noble Landespatriotismen turned into nascent civic nationalisms, which hindered their project of uniting the lands of the Czech Crown into an ethnolinguistically-defined Czech nation-state. The other face of the same ideological coin was Austroslavism developed by the ‘father’ of Czech nationalism, František Palacký. Faced with Vienna’s staunch opposition to the reunification of the Czech lands, he hoped to exert more effective pressure, if representatives of all the Slavic national movements in the empire demanded a larger Slavic unit. With time, the ploy turned against the goals of Czech nationalism. What the empire’s Slavs could not gain from Vienna, the Magyars obtained in the 1867 Ausgleich. Croatian protests were silenced with the Nagodba signed the following year. The cultural and linguistic autonomy, the Croats received in Hungary’s Croatia-Slavonia, was limited and often observed in the breach, but it turned the attention of Croatian nationalists away from grander projects of Austroslavism, already branded Pan-Slavism and perceived as inimical to the Dual Monarchy, due to the ideological and financial support Russia granted to Austria-Hungary’s Austroslavists and Pan-Slavists. Moreover, Croatia-Slavonia being an ersatz Croatian nation-state, Croatian nationalists hoped for the transfer of Dalmatia from the empire’s Austrian half in order to build a Croatian nation-state, which they envisaged as composed of Croatia-Slavonia and Dalmatia. Not only were the Croats increasingly less interested in Austroslavism, the empire’s Serbs of Vojvodina (bordering the Serbian nation-state established in the early 19th century) preferred to cooperate with Belgrade rather than with Czech nationalists. Resources, political support, and expertise flowing from Czech (Czechoslovak) nationalists and expatriates (such as Pavel Josef Šafaˇrík) was helpful and appreciated, but would not turn Serbian nationalists’ heads from their project of uniting all Serbian lands in a Serbian nation-state. In order to weaken the ideological thrust of Croatian and Serbian nationalisms, Budapest and Vienna played them against one another, which, contrary to expectations, spawned political cooperation between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. They fell back on the early 19th-century tradition of Illyrism, which appealed for cultural and political cooperation of all South Slavs mostly divided between the waxing Austrian Empire and the waning Ottoman Empire. The first success of this movement came in 1850, when the unity of biscriptural (Cyrillic- and

718 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Latin alphabet-based) Serbo-Croatian language was proclaimed by Croatian and Serbian nationalists in Vienna. Eventually, this language, rather than Croatian, was adopted in Hungary’s autonomous Croatia-Slovenia, and Serbo-Croatian, not Serbian, replaced Russified Church Slavonic as official language in Serbia and Montenegro. But a complication to this picture was added by Austria-Hungary’s 1878 seizure of Bosnia-Herzegovina. On one hand, Croatian and Serbian nationalists made overtures to the region’s Slavophone Muslims, while on the other, Vienna and Budapest veered between the support for Serbo-Croatian or Bosnian as an official language of Bosnia-Herzegovina (before Bosnian won this contest in 1890). In addition, neither Croatian nor Serbian politicians could stomach the ‘anti-Slavic Mohammedan faith’ of the Bosnians. As a result, Bosnian nationalism began to coalesce, which also worked against the sought-for ethnolinguistic unity of all South Slavs. Finally, the establishment of increasingly independent Bulgaria in 1878 effectively limited the influence of Illyrism turned Yugoslavism, to the southern section of Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and Montenegro. The political dimension of Austroslavism, as developed by Palacký, received its cultural underpinnings even earlier, in Ján Kollár’s idea of Slavic reciprocity (slovanská vzájemnost in Czech), which he presented in his 1837 work, Über die Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation (On the Reciprocity Between the Tribes and Vernaculars of the Slavic Nation, Pest). He proposed that there was, or should be, a single Slavic nation to which all Slavs belonged. Naturally, this Slavic nation ought to have a single national Slavic language, which Kollár defined as composed of four literary dialects of Bohemian, Polish, Russian, and Serbian (Illyrian). Accordingly, each educated Slav would be required to master all the four. Kollár and Šafaˇrík (Šáfarik) were Protestant scholars of Slovak origin, who mainly wrote in Czech and German, and participated in the political and scholarly activities of Czech nationalists and scholars concentrated in Prague. Their Pan-Slav ideas transgressed the legalistic confines of Palacký’s Austroslavism limited to the borders of the Austrian Empire. They claimed that there were no Czech, Slovak, or Czechoslovak nations, but only a single Slavic nation. In this scheme, Czechs and Slovaks constituted the nation’s Czechoslovak branch. These ideas pitted them against Czech nationalists and Austroslavists, and the young generation of Slovak nationalists (spearheaded by L’udovít Štúr), who insisted on the separateness of the Slovak nation and its Slovak language. Austroslavism waned when confronted with the rise of Yugoslavism and Austro-Hungarian dualism. The anti-Austro-Hungarian and pro-Russian character of Pan-Slavism made it unattractive to law-abiding subjects. The acceleration of the Magyarizing trend in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy, between the 1870s and 1914, blunted the hopes of Slovak nationalists that they could go it alone. Striving for secondary and university-level education in their

The Czech Nation

719

own language, which was unavailable, they settled for such education readily available in Bohemia and Moravia as of the 1880s, when the policy of official Czech (Moravian)-German bilingualism was introduced in both crownlands. This, which appeared to be a limited success to Czech nationalists, was something of that their Slovak counterparts could only dream. The development of Czech-Slovak educational and political cooperation in the three decades before the Great War, gave some political voice to Slovak nationalists, and allowed their Czech counterparts (striving for a position similar to that granted in 1867 to the Magyars) to flex their economic muscle by extending Czech influence into Upper Hungary, much to Vienna’s and Budapest’s displeasure (Hroch 2003; Greenberg 2004: 137; Kováˇc 1998: 345–352).

In search of the Czechoslovak nation During the war, Slovak nationalists developed several options to gain political autonomy for Slovakia. Some proposed a union with Russia, a solution, which was favored by Ruthenian nationalists. This Pan-Slav dream was also popular among the Young Czechs, and officially voiced by their leader, Karel Kramáˇr (1860–1937), which, in 1916, earned him a 15-year sentence of hard labor for high treason, and galvanized Czech nationalism. A year later, he was released under amnesty. The Bolshevik Revolution nullified the possibility of building a large Slavic nation-state under Romanov rule, and limited Kramáˇr’s program to the carving of an independent Czech nation-state out of Austria-Hungary. Meanwhile, other Czech and Slovak politicians still hoped for a larger union of the Czech lands, Slovakia, and Poland. However, Polish politicians were not enthusiastic, and, as usual, distrustful of their Czech and Slovak counterparts’ enthusiasm for Russia and Pan-Slavism. Hence, most Czech politicians focused on the idea of founding an autonomous Czech nation-state within the Dual Monarchy, whose demise was not obvious until mid-1918. On 22 October 1915, Czech and Slovak émigré politicians signed the Cleveland Agreement, which foresaw the creation of a federal state of the Czechs and the Slovak, composed of Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia, and Slovakia. The following year in February, in Paris, the Czech National Council was formed, in which the Czechs were represented by Tomaš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, and the Slovaks by Milan Rastislav Štefánik. While studying in Prague, ˇ Štefánik had received a stipend from the Ceskoslovanská jednota (Organization of Czechoslavic Unity), and belonged to the Masaryk-led group of politically minded Slovak students. The adjective ‘Czech’ in the name of the Czech National Council was replaced, variously, by ‘Czecho-Slovak’ and ‘Czechoslovak’ in the Kiev (Kyiv) Agreement, signed on 29 August 1916, by the representatives of Czechs and Slovaks living in Russia. Under Štefánik’s enormous pressure, Ján Kvaˇcala’s (1862–1934) group,

720 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

which propagated the idea of autonomous Slovakia unified with Russia, lost the contest, and the establishment of a common Czechoslovak (Czecho-Slovak) state with autonomous Slovakia became the official goal of Russia’s Czechs and Slovaks. (It was a traumatic experience for both Štefánik and Kvaˇcala, for the latter was the former’s teacher in the Protestant secondary school in Pozsony [Bratislava]). As a result, in 1917, it became possible to form the Czechoslovak league, which was mainly drawn from Czech and Slovak POWs in Russian captivity. Czech leaders preferred to term their proposed common state with the Slovaks as ‘Czechoslovakia,’ whereas Slovak politicians usually talked of ‘CzechoSlovakia’ to emphasize the autonomous status they expected for their country within a federal state of the Czechs and the Slovaks. This vacillation in usage showed on 12 January 1917, when the Allies stated their goal in the war was, ‘[l]iberation of the Italians, Slavs, Romanians, Czecho-Slovaks from foreign government control.’ In the preliminary drafts of this declaration there were three suggestions, ‘the Czechs,’ ‘the Czech nation,’ and ‘the Czecho-Slovaks.’ Beneš pressed for the latter, and Štefánik agreed, as otherwise the Slovaks might have not been mentioned at all. Meanwhile, in Austria-Hungary, Czech and Slovak members of the Reichstag justified their idea of the union of the Czech lands and Slovakia, claiming that, in this manner, the ‘first common state of the Czechs and Slovaks,’ or Greater Moravia, would be recreated. On 6 January 1918, in Prague, Czech members of the Reichstag together with Czech deputies from the diets of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia, among others, demanded the establishment of the Czech nation-state, which would include this part of Hungary mainly inhabited by the ‘Slovak branch [of the Czechoslovak nation].’ On 24 May, the secret meeting of Slovenská národná strana (SNS, Slovak National Party), including Slovak leaders from other parties, was held in Turócszentmárton (Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). They agreed to throw their support behind the idea of Czecho-Slovakia. Among those present was a Catholic priest, Andrej Hlinka (1864–1938), who had been, since 1906, the leader of the SNS’s rightist and strongly Catholic platform that stood for the independence of Slovakia. Štefánik’s power was grounded in the support he received from Czech politicians, and in his personal charisma and renown, which he gained as a successful general in the French army. All these offset one serious predicament. Like Kollár and Štúr, Štefánik was a Protestant, which limited his immediate popular appeal, as Catholics accounted for six-sevenths of the Slovaks. Gradually, Hlinka’s political influence grew, especially after Štefánik’s tragic death in a plane crash on 4 May 1919. A rumor was spread that actually it was a secret assassination conducted by Czechs to allow for future Czech-led centralization of Czechoslovakia at the expense of Slovak autonomy. However, it was Štefánik, who refused the demands of Slovak commanders in the Czechoslovak League to use Slovak as a language of command,

The Czech Nation

721

alongside Czech. Sensibly, he required that Czech be used as the sole language of command for the sake of the force’s military efficiency. Hlinka succinctly summed up the decision made during the secret meeting by declaring, ‘Let us not be afraid to announce that we are for the Czechoslovak solution. The 1000-year-long marriage [of the Slovaks] with the Magyars did not work. Now it is time for divorce.’ On 30 May 1918, the Pittsburgh Agreement was signed between the representatives of Czech and Slovak organizations in the United States, ‘in the presence of Prof. Masaryk, Chairman of the Czecho-Slovak National Council’ (my emphasis). It provided for the creation of an independent and common state of the Czech and Slovaks, comprised of the Czech lands and Slovakia. In Czecho-Slovakia, Slovakia would enjoy political, administrative, juridical, and cultural autonomy. It was also emphasized that Slovak would be the official language of Slovakia, including politics, administration, education, and all other aspects of public life. Between 29 June and 3 September Paris, London, and Washington recognized the Czecho-Slovak Council as their ally. On 12 September the SNS established the Slovak National Council in Budapest. A dramatic struggle unfolded between Vienna, which wished to preserve the unity of Austria-Hungary, Budapest, which strove for keeping the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary, and national movements pushing toward establishing their own separate nation-states. On 16 October, Emperor Charles I issued the manifest on federalization of the monarchy’s Austrian section and appealed to national leaders for cooperation in preserving the empire. Although the Allies’ favor was with the Czechs, Masaryk replied 2 days later with the declaration of the independence of the Czechoslovak nation. Vienna had no choice but to agree to the partition of the empire along ethnolinguistic lines. On 21 October 1918, the German-Austrian National Council convened in Vienna, attended by German deputies from the Alpine lands and the Czech lands. Masaryk wanted to unite all the historical lands of the Czech Crown, even if that meant inclusion of a sizeable German minority. With this desire, he did not differ from Budapest, which wished to preserve all of historic Hungary for the Magyar nation-state, and from Warsaw hoping that most of former Poland-Lithuania’s territory could be gained for the Polish nation-state. The novel principle of (ethnolinguistically-defined) national self-determination was a useful argument for the creation of nation-states in Central Europe. Their leaders were nevertheless ready to counter this principle, when it meant further territorial aggrandizement of their postulated nation-states, even at the expense of another nation’s right to self-determination. In order to preempt the inclusion of the predominantly German-speaking areas of the Czech lands in Germany-Austria, the independence of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Prague on 28 October. Apparently, without any knowledge of this declaration of independence, two days later, the members of the Slovak National Council gathered in Turˇciansky Svätý Martin, and issued their

722 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Declaration to the Slovak Nation. First, the ‘National Council of the Slovak branch of the Czecho-Slovak nation’ declared its attachment to the principle of national self-determination ‘accepted by the whole world,’ and insisted that this council alone represented the ‘Czecho-Slovak nation living within the frontiers of Hungary.’ Further, the phrase was used interchangeably with the term the ‘Slovak nation living in Slovakia.’ It was emphasized that the Slovak nation is a part of the ‘Czecho-Slovak nation united in its language and the history of its culture.’ Last but not the least, for this Czecho-Slovak nation full independence was demanded ‘on the basis of the principle of national self-determination as formulated by President Wilson on 18 October 1918, and accepted by the Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs on 27 October’ (Bˇelina et al. 1993: 142; Buc 1960: 46–47; Harna and Fišer 1998: 126, 131, 135; Kováˇc 1998: 156, 166–167, 173, 176, 179; Krekoviˇc et al. 2005: 170–171; Krofta 1946: 707; Lettrich 1955: 288–289; Luft 2003; Schwartz 1939: 34). This declaration indicated how uncertain Slovak politicians were concerning the wording of their demands, and how to present the Slovaks to the world; as a separate nation, a branch of the Czechoslovak nation, or a fraternal nation united with the Czech nation in its desire to build a common Czechoslovak state. Slovak leaders hoped the Slovak nation would gain independence, but they were not sure if the Allies would support their endeavors, because that would mean a direct clash with Magyar interests. Despite the espousal of high ideals of equality in the application of the principle of national self-determination, it was clear that not each applicant for the status of nation, complete with its own nation-state, would be heard. For example, the Allies refused to hear the national demands of the Szlonzoks and the Slunzaks, because they clashed with Czech and Polish interests, which were considered to be of more significance for the postwar order in Central Europe. For this reason, Slovak leaders settled for the formula of Czechoslovakism, as proposed by Czech politicians, because the idea of independence for the Czechs had already gained steady support among the decision-makers of international politics. In turn, Masaryk preferred Czechoslovakia to a purely Czech nation-state, for this solution provided a clear-cut Czechoslovak national majority better suited to oppose the German minority living in the Czech lands. Other considerations included the Slovak market for Czech goods and services, and idealism of Slavic reciprocation. In 1917, Russia became an ideologically non-national and anti-Western Soviet Union, thus making the project of building a democratic All-Slav nation-state an impossibility. But Czechoslovakia (alongside Yugoslavia) could become an embodiment of such liberal Pan-Slavism on a lower scale. The difference in Czech and Slovak aspirations was not clear to outside observers. But the Slovak insistence on writing the name of their common state with the hyphen in the middle, ‘Czecho-Slovakia,’ spoke volumes to average Slovaks. Czech leaders insisted on ‘non-hyphenated Czechoslovakia,’ and won out

The Czech Nation

723

due to the overwhelming political and economic influence of the Czech lands in the new state. Obviously, the heart of the matter was not the hyphen, but two differing visions of the common state. Slovak leaders wanted a federal Czecho-Slovakia with broad autonomy for Slovakia; however, Czech politicians insisted on emulating the French model, which, eventually, produced centralized and unitary Czechoslovakia in the interwar period. This bred suspicion among numerous Slovaks that Magyar dominance over them would be replaced with its Czech counterpart, no question that it be more benign, but dominance the same. On the other hand, the Czech elite thought that the Slovaks should be thankful for their helping hand in the areas of politics, education, and economic development. The Czechs saw Slovakia as the terrain of their civilizing mission, a selfimposed task that proved the ‘high civilizational level’ of the Czech nation and, ideologically, was compatible with Slavic reciprocity. (They were not so willing, when the Allies burdened them with a similar task in even more backward Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which the average Czech dubbed ‘our Asia beyond Košice.’) The ideal of this mission was encapsulated in the Czech term kulturnost (literally, ‘culturedness’), a fetish notion of how an individual, or nation should be ‘civilized.’ The focus was on literacy, emulation of Czech (understood as inherently ‘Western’) institutions, and a ‘proper conduct’ or decorum of an individual in public. This Czech fetishization of culture stemmed from the German approach to Kultur, as something, which had to be carried by Kulturträgers (‘carriers of culture’) to nations ‘standing at a lower level of civilizational development.’ But the word kulturnost is a direct loan from Russian kultúrnost’. Imperial Russia’s civilizing mission in Asia was expressed in this term since the 1880s, and Stalin made the concept into the justification basis of the Soviet policy of nation- and language-making in the 1920s and 1930s. In Polish, this politics of culture was usually individually oriented, the ideal of ‘being cultural’ (by´c kulturalnym) means to ‘be civilized’ as an individual. Prior to 1918, Magyarization, as applied to the Slovaks, were equated with making them ‘cultured,’ or ‘civilized.’ This discourse of ‘culturing nations’ became so much ingrained in Slovakia itself that the Slovak coinage kultúrnost’ to this day describes the ideal of individual cultivation to which each educated Slovak tends to aspire. In practice, the Czech policy of ‘civilizing’ Slovakia meant the unprecedented influx of Czech civil servants, professionals, and teachers. In 1910, there were 7500 Czechs in Slovakia. By 1921, their number had increased to 71,700, compared with only 15,600 Slovaks in the Czech lands. In 1930, there were 121,000 Czechs in Slovakia and 44,500 Slovaks in the Czech lands. In Slovakia’s civil service, 3457 Czechs and 4135 Slovaks were employed in 1921. By 1930, the numbers increased to 4334 and 6382, respectively. In the postal services, the ratio of Czech and Slovak white-collar employees was 1375 to 1423

724 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in 1921; in 1930 the respective figures were 1456 to 2233. In 1921, 3402 Czech and 1903 Slovak railwaymen served in Slovakia; 9 years later, the numbers were 2916 and 2436, respectively. On the other hand, of the 1300 employees of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense in the 1920s, only 6 were Slovaks, and of the 131 generals in the Czechoslovak army only 1 was a Slovak. In January 1938, there were only 422 Slovaks among 11,820 career military officers (3.6 percent). Similarly, there were only 4 Slovaks among the 417 employees of the Ministry of Education in Prague. And 94 Czechs and 68 Slovaks staffed the ministry’s Slovak branch in Bratislava. Only 2 of the 17 ministers in the Czechoslovak cabinet formed in 1919, were Slovaks. During the 20-year history of interwar Czechoslovakia, 93 men held 322 ministerial portfolios, often rotating them among themselves. Of these 93, only 4 were Slovaks, who among themselves held 17 of the portfolios (5.5 percent). In 1938, as few as 1.6 percent of the employees of the central ministries were Slovaks. In the Ministry of Unification, overseeing Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Slovaks made up 11.8 percent of the staff. The visible inequality of the Czech-Slovak union bred resentment among the Slovaks, though some of this inequality was due to the sheer lack of qualified Slovak personnel. Budapest’s insistence on making most of the elementary education available in Magyar, and all secondary and university education exclusively in this language, actually barred most Slovak children from any but rudimentary education. In Czechoslovakia, the first ever Slovak university opened in Bratislava in 1919, and the full Slovak-language education system was founded. Accordingly, the number of Slovak university graduates grew threefold between 1920 and 1937; in the 1920s, 63 Slovak-language secondary schools were established (there were none before 1918), and the level of illiteracy in Slovakia dropped from 14.7 percent in 1921 to 8.2 percent in 1931. (The level of illiteracy was relatively low in 1918 thanks to almost full literacy among the Magyar minority, at that time almost half of the Slovaks could not read or write.) Generous support was given to Slovak-language book industry, hence numerous Slovak writers emerged and most of world classics appeared in Slovak translations. Between 1901 and 1918, only 2700 book titles appeared in Slovak (on average, 150 each year), many rather in Prague and Budapest than in Slovakia. In Czechoslovakia, the production jump-started to several hundred per year and stabilized at 650 per annum in the mid-1930s. Ironically though, in many cases, the Czech language replaced Magyar as the dominant language in Slovakia. For instance, the Slovak national theater, established in Bratislava in 1919, staged plays exclusively in Czech until 1932. In Czech eyes, the tradition of lasting common statehood produced the image of the Slovaks as ‘brothers of the Czechs’ combined with the stereotype of an exotic Other living in the unspoiled wild country epitomized by the High Tatras, slivovitz, and sheep cheese. This Czech Orientalization of the Slovaks was not

The Czech Nation

725

accepted by the latter, who aspired to modernity and kultúrnost,’ and thought they had already achieved it. Hence Czech ‘civilizing overtures’ were not only unjustified but also unwelcome. These had to be suffered in the danger of Magyar irredentisms, and Budapest’s propaganda denials that there was not such a thing as Slovak culture in Upper Hungary, ergo, Upper Hungary had been severed from ‘indivisible Hungary’ in an unjustified manner. The Slovaks saw themselves as cast by the Czechs in the permanent position of ‘younger brothers.’ When one remembers about this long-lasting Czech-Slovak tension, it was then obvious that the ‘pomlˇcková válka’ (hyphen war) that raged in early 1990, was not an insignificant aberration, a clash over nothing. In April 1990, the name of Czechoslovakia was changed to that of Czecho-Slovakia. As the Slovaks saw this, it was a momentous change, from the model of centralized state dominated by the Czechs to a truly federal state of the fully equal Czech and Slovak nations. What Slovak leaders had envisaged seven decades earlier, was finally achieved, too late though to preserve Czecho-Slovakia, hyphen or no hyphen (Dunham 1976: 22; Eberhardt 1996: 114; Holy 1996: 86, 102–103; Janos 1997: 8–9; Kováˇc 1998: 196–200; Kultúrnost’ 2005; Pop 2005: 129– 130; Rothschild 1977: 92; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 81–83; Tomaszewski 1997: 281). ∗ ∗ ∗ On 29 February 1920, the Constitution was promulgated. Czechoslovakia was proclaimed as the democratic, unified, and indivisible nation-state of the Czechoslovak nation (Preamble and Art 3.1). This proclamation in favor of národní stát (ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state) rather than národnostní stát (multinational state) jarred with the multinational, multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multireligious reality of Czechoslovakia. The Preamble also pointed to the ‘modern principle of [national] self-determination’ as the ultimate justification of Czechoslovak statehood. Obviously, the German and Magyar minorities, which used to be the dominant nations in defunct AustriaHungary disagreed, and demanded that they also enjoy self-determination. These reverberations prolonged the process of stabilizing the Czechoslovak borders until 1924. The first to defy the Czechoslovak declaration of independence were 3 million Germans living in the Czech lands, who turned out to be the largest German minority that found itself outside the Germanophone states of Austria and Germany. On the abdication of Charles I on 11 November 1918, rump Austria assumed the name of German-Austria (Deutschösterreich). Vienna’s obvious goal was to get united with Germany in a common German nation-state, in agreement with the principle of national self-determination. The Allies prohibited the name ‘German-Austria,’ and Vienna had no choice but to accept this

726 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

dictum, among many others, by the signing of the Treaty of Saint-Germain on 10 September 1919. Meanwhile, between 29 October and 3 November 1918, the provinces of German Bohemia (Deutsch Böhmen), the Sudetenland, and German South Moravia (Deutsch Süd-Mähren) were proclaimed, along with the direct incorporation of the German-speaking areas of southern Bohemia and southern Moravia (not included in German South Moravia) to the provinces of Upper and Lower Austria, respectively. In this manner, the outlying areas of Bohemia and Moravia together with the western half of Austrian Silesia became part of German-Austria. By Christmas 1918, the Czechoslovak troops had seized all these areas. When on 4 March 1919, the German-Austrian National Assembly had its inaugural meeting in Vienna, German deputies from the Czech lands did not dare to attend it, which triggered demonstrations in the German-speaking areas; 54 Germans died. Vienna did not react. The economy and army were in disarray, hunger and unemployment were rampant, the popularity of Bolshevik-style parties increased throughout Central Europe. At the end of the Great War, Italy annexed South Tyrol. In March 1919, Soviet Hungary was proclaimed, and a month later, Soviet Bavaria. The German-Austrian government had a hard time maintaining the territorial integrity of the Alpine Austrian lands. This prevented it from flexing its muscle in the Czech lands. At Saint-Germain, the cession of South Tyrol to Italy was confirmed, and the Allies coaxed Vienna to cede Lower Styria (the southern section of Styria) to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1920, the Allies forced Budapest to cede Burgenland to Austria, but it was a meager consolation for the loss of the empire. What is more, between 1919 and 1921, the inhabitants of Voralberg voted, in the locally organized plebiscites, in favor of transferring their region from Austria to Switzerland, and the inhabitants of rump Tyrol and Salzburg for the cession of their regions to Germany. Vienna barely prevented this looming partition of Austria, because the Swiss disregarded the Voralberg plebiscite, and the Allies threatened to intervene if Tyrol or Slazburg unilaterally joined Germany, which would constitute a violation of the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), because it banned the union of Germany with Austria. In addition, the Treaty of Saint-Germain provided that, in 1920, Vienna would cede three small territories, which were incorporated into southern Bohemia, southern Moravia, and Slovakia, respectively. In 1918, Prague and Warsaw provisionally divided the eastern half of Austrian Silesia, which housed Austria-Hungary’s biggest industrial basin. In late 1918, the Poles attempted to conduct elections to the Polish Sejm in this disputed territory. With the support of French troops, the Czechoslovak army intervened in January 1919, and pushed the Polish forces from the basin. The short conflict left 150 dead. The Allies promised a plebiscite, but in the context of growing interethnic violence, they split the region between Poland and Czechoslovakia. The latter was granted the entire industrial basin, which also secured Prague’s

The Czech Nation

727

control over the only railway link between the Czech lands and Slovakia. On the other hand, the Allies did not wish to fortify Poland’s industrial potential too much, as Warsaw stood a reasonable chance of winning a good part of Germany’s Upper Silesian industrial basin (the second largest in continental Europe) in the 1921 plebiscite. Although Germany won the plebiscite, in 1922, the Allies granted the easternmost sliver of Upper Silesia together with most of this industrial basin to Poland; around 10,000 Poles left the Czechoslovak section for Poland. The process of national differentiation started in eastern Teschen Silesia in the mid-19th century. Most of the 390,000 inhabitants preferred to identify themselves on the basis of their localities and region in the face of the increasing nationalist conflict, which unfolded between the Czech national movement supported from Prague and Troppau (Opava) and its Polish counterpart, bolstered by activists from nearby Cracow. In interwar Poland, more Slunzaks identified themselves as Poles than Szlonzoks from Poland’s section of Upper Silesia. The important example to be followed was the stance of the Habsburg family. One of its branches adopted Polish citizenship and settled ˙ in Zywiec (Saybusch), near Teschen Silesia. During World War II, they fought against the Third Reich in the Polish forces in the West. On the other hand, in the context of limited democracy, forced assimilation did not allow for the continuation of the ethno-regional Slunzakian (slonsakisch or schlonskisch in German, šlonzácký in Czech, and s´la˛zakowski in Polish) movement in Poland’s section of Teschen Silesia; Warsaw claimed them to be ‘Germanized and Czechized Poles.’ However, such ethnoregional identification continued to develop on the Czechoslovak side of the border, and received support from the local Germans like during the period before World War I. Josef Kozdo ˙ n ´ (Koždon, ˇ 1873–1949), this movement’s leader since the early 20th century, acted as the ´ mayor of Ceský Tˇešín (the Czechoslovak section of former city of Teschen partitioned between Czechoslovakia and Poland) in the interwar period. Prague did not suppress this movement because it took the thrust from the local German and Polish national movements, in this strategically crucial industrial region, where Czechs did not constitute even a plurality of the population (although Prague’s official theory was that the Slunzaks were Czechs, Moravians, and Polonized and Germanized Morawecs.) According to the 1921 Czechoslovak census, 70,000 Poles lived in this area, but Warsaw disagreed claiming that there were 120,000 to 150,000 Poles. The discrepancy was caused by the fact that census takers allowed the inhabitants to declare themselves as ‘Silesians’ (Slunzaks), but they demanded their respondents to declare their mother tongue by choosing between Czechoslovak, German, and Polish. It was not permitted to declare Silesian as one’s mother tongue. Later, the Slunzaks were apportioned between the national categories of the Czechoslovaks, Germans, and Poles on the basis of the linguistic declaration. The 50,000 to 80,000 Poles, which Warsaw

728 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

claimed that were not accounted for in the census, were the Slunzaks of the Czechoslovak and German mother tongue. This method of ‘linguistic partition’ of the Slunzaks, allowed Prague to achieve a Czechoslovak plurality of 296,000 in Czech Silesia; Germans numbered 252,000, and Poles, 70,000. Although, in the 1930 census, Prague allowed the Slunzaks to declare Silesian as their native language, a decade of Czechization and suppression of their national movement drove the number of declarations of Silesian nationality down to 25,000, including a mere 4000 Silesians who actually dared to declare Silesian as their mother tongue. This national and ideological squabbling over the ethnolinguistic identity of the Slavophone inhabitants of the Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia elicited a unique local-based reaction. In 1934, the young communist poet, Ervín (Erwin) Goj (1905–1989), published his first collection of poetry lavishly praised by the most renowned interwar Czech critic, František Xaver Šalda (1867–1937). Atypically, the collection was written in a new language, which the author called Lachian (lašˇcina). Accordingly, he adopted a nom de plume, Óndra Łysohorsky. He derived both names from the mountain Lysá Hora, located in northern Moravia. In his Lachian, Łysohorsky merged specifically Czech letters ([ˇc], [š]) and Polish ones ([ł], [ó]) in order to reflect the peculiarities of the Slavic dialect spoken in the eastern half of former Austrian Silesia, northern Moravia, the eastern section of the western half of Austrian Silesia, and southernmost Upper Silesia. He called the region Lachia, and its population of 1.5 million, the Lachian nation. The popularity of his Lachian poetry, which empathized with the plight of unemployed workers and impoverished peasants of Lachia, never translated into a national movement for creating a Lachian nation-state. But, during World War II, Łysohorsky as a refugee in the Soviet Union, published his poetry in Russian translations, and Stalin lent his ear to Łysohorsky’s appeals for independent Lachia. As a result, much to émigré Czechoslovak politicians’ chagrin, he was nominated to the post of the representative of Teschen Silesia in the All-Slavic Committee in 1941, where he spoke exclusively in Lachian. The émigré Czechoslovak politicians continually demanded that Łysohorsky speak exclusively in Czech, and considered him a danger to the territorial and national unity of postwar Czechoslovakia on par with Slovak autonomists and independists. After his return to Czechoslovakia, he managed to publish just one book in Lachian (1958) thanks to the support he still received from Moscow. Later, Prague silenced him, and Łysohorsky shifted to writing in German and publishing his poetry in East Germany. German was his other mother tongue, because he came from a family where it was spoken along with the local Slavic dialect. In the Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia, Prague faced an ethnoregional problem similar to that of the Hluˇcínsko (Hultschiner Ländchen), or a small fragment of Germany’s Upper Silesia, which, on the basis of the Treaty of Versailles

The Czech Nation

729

(28 June 1919), Berlin transferred to Czechoslovakia in 1920. It was inhabited by the Morawecs (Morawzen or Mährer in German, Moravci in Czech, Morawiacy in Polish). Germany did not oppose the cession, as most of the inhabitants were Slavophone, and their region was rural and backward unlike the industrial basin of Upper Silesia over which Berlin and Warsaw clenched in a prolonged struggle. The Slunzaks’ region, Teschen Silesia, and almost all of Germany’s Upper Silesia were included in the Breslau (Wrocław Diocese). However, the Morawecs’ homeland in southern Upper Silesia constituted part of the Moravian Archdiocese. This ecclesiastical border produced and conserved the ethnic difference of the Morawecs vis-à-vis Germans, Slunzaks, and Szlonzoks, who lived in the Breslau Diocese. In Prussian and German censuses, Morwecs were registered as Mährers (literally, Moravians), and their language as mährisch (literally, Moravian). But residing in Upper Silesia and divided from Moravia by the state border and the belt of German-speaking population in Austrian Silesia, the Morawecs did not identify with the Slavophone Moravians of Moravia. The written and printed language of the Morawecs retained the use of the Gothic script, which graphically made it similar to German, and distinguished it from Moravia’s Moravian language, which usually employed the Antiqua since the mid-19th century. The Allies agreed with Prague that the Slavophone character of the Morawecs and the inclusion of their territory in the Moravian Archdiocese was proof enough that they were Czechs. But they resented the transfer of their region to Czechoslovakia, which earned them the Czech nickname Prájzací (Prussians). In the 1921 census, out of the Hluˇcínsko’s 50,000 inhabitants, 16.3 percent declared German nationality, 80.15 percent Moravian, and 3.55 percent Czech. In self-declared democratic Czechoslovakia, it was curious that census-takers were filling in and signing census returns themselves in the Hluˇcínsko. Such an unusual practice was employed to ensure that they do not declare themselves Germans en masse. As in the case of the Slunzaks, the declaration of Moravian nationality was re-defined as ‘Czechoslovak’ in the census’s official results. The Morawecs resented the imposition of Czech-language schools, and when Prague denied them German-minority schools for which they appealed, they sent their children to private German-language schools organized by the Sudetenland German minority. Prague’s forced assimilation of the Morawecs turned them into clearly pro-German and increasingly German-speaking ‘Hultschiners’ and 4600 of them (one-quarter of the adult population) refused to accept Czechoslovak citizenship, and left for Germany.1 During the interwar period, 10,000 Morawecs remaining in Germany fully identified as Germans. Apart from the Hluˇcínsko, the Czech elite appealed for the cession of Lusatia from Germany to Czechoslovakia. They argued that the Slavophone character of the Sorbs would justify such a step, and the fact that the region used to be part of the lands of the Czech Crown in the 15th century. The Sorbian national movement agreed due to the long-established tradition of cooperation

730 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

with the Czechs. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Czech-language Protestant books were smuggled from Lusatia to Bohemia, Sorbian Catholic priests were educated in Prague, and when the Sorbian national movement emerged in 1848, it emulated its Czech counterpart. Although the Czechoslovak delegation at the Peace Conference in Paris raised this subject, the delegates were not prepared to pursue it at the expense of concessions in the fields where the Czechoslovak diplomacy had already been successful. Sorbian leaders understood it and hoped that Czechoslovak pressure on Berlin would at least result in autonomy for the Sorbs. No autonomy was granted, but the subsequent internationalization of the Sorbian question brought about the tentative recognition of the 100,000-strong Sorbs as a nation. This allowed for the development of the Sorbian national movement in interwar Germany almost until 1939, when the use of Sorbian was prohibited in the Third Reich along with all other languages but German. After a period of flux, in the first years after the Great War, the territory of the Czech lands included in Czechoslovakia stabilized at 82,870 sq km. Out of this number, Bohemia accounted for 56,062 sq km, Moravia for 22,356 sq km, and Czech Silesia for 4452 sq km. The Hluˇcínsko of 320 sq km was administratively incorporated into Czech Silesia. Out of divided Teschen Silesia, Prague received 1150 sq km, which was also included in Czech Silesia. (Poland’s section of this region amounted to 950 sq km.) To a degree, ‘Czech Silesia’ is a misnomer employed to distinguish this territory from ‘Polish Silesia,’ that is, Poland’s sections of Upper Silesia and eastern Austrian Silesia, and from ‘German, or Prussian Silesia,’ that is Lower Silesia and this section of Upper Silesia, which remained with Germany. In Czechoslovakia, Czech Silesia was officially referred to as ‘Silesia’ (Slezsko), which emphasized Prague’s will to continue considering entire historical Silesia as one of the lands of the Czech Crown. The tacit understanding was that on ‘historical basis,’ Czechoslovakia could still claim all of Silesia, but this legalistic theory was not acted upon. (Otherwise, Germans would have outnumbered Czechs in Czechoslovakia.) In this approach, Prague was similar to imperial Vienna. The label of ‘Austrian Silesia’ is a modern misnomer too. The official Austrian name of this crownland was the ‘Principality of Lower and Upper Silesia,’ which emphasized the Habsburgs’ standing claim to German/Prussian Silesia, which Friedrich the Great had seized from Maria Theresa in 1740–1742 (Barker 2000: 17; Bˇelina et al. 1993: 162–164; Eberhardt 1996; Gawrecká 1997; Hannan 2005; Hroch 2003: 74–75; Jerczynski ´ 2006: 224; Krofta 1946: 730; Łysohorsky 1990; Plaˇcek 2000; Polanski ´ 1980: 233; Prinz 1993: 381; Semotanová 2003: 47; Serafin 1996: 80; Sobota 1929; Tomaszewski 1997: 26; Zahradnik and Ryczkowski 1992). To establish Czechoslovak rule in Slovakia was not an easy task either. Masaryk delegated it to his former student, a Slovak and convinced proponent of Czechoslovakism, Vavro Šrobár (1867–1950), nominated the Plenipotentiary

The Czech Nation

731

Minister for Slovakia. On 2 November 1918, he commenced the activities of the governmental commission for Slovakia in Szakolca (Skalica). A detachment of Czech troops with a few Slovak volunteers seized northwestern Slovakia. To Prague’s surprise, the Belgrade military convention (13 November), which required Budapest to evacuate Transylvania, Croatia-Slavonia, and Banat, made no mention of Slovakia. The new Hungarian prime Minister, Mihály Károlyi, gave orders to push nascent Czechoslovak administration out of Upper Hungary (Slovakia). The standard Slovak language and Slovak national literature are steeped in the dialectal tradition of central and western Slovakia. This emphasized the ethnolinguistic difference between these two regions and eastern Slovakia, contributing to the emergence of the nascent ethnolinguistic group of the Slovjaks, or eastern Slovaks. Their displeasure at the possibility of Czech rule and traditional attachment to Hungary allowed Budapest to proclaim the independence of the pro-Hungarian Slovjak People’s Republic with its capital in Kassa (Košice). Meanwhile, on Beneš’s request, the French government protested the oversight of Slovakia in the Belgrade military convention, and demanded, on behalf of the Allies, evacuation of Slovakia by Budapest. Czechoslovak troops advanced accordingly, and the successive Entente demarcation lines of 6 and 23 December reaffirmed their gains. On 30 December, they seized Kassa, and on 1 January 1919, Pozsony (Bratislava). On 4 February, Šrobár, at the head of provisional Czechoslovak administration for Slovakia, moved from Zsolna (Žilina) in northwestern Slovakia, to Pozsony (Bratislava). The city was made the capital of Slovakia, and its name changed to Bratislava. In January, the city had been briefly renamed Wilsonove Mˇesto (literally, ‘Wilson’s City’) in honor of United States President Woodrow Wilson. It was his principle of national selfdetermination, which enabled Slovakia to detach from Hungary and become part of Czechoslovakia. Following the proclamation of the Soviet Republic of Hungary on 21 March 1919, Hungary’s military forces were re-consolidated. Red Budapest rejected the Allies’ 20 March demand of further territorial cessions. On 25 March, Šrobár introduced a state of emergency in Slovakia. At the Allies’ encouragement, by 4 April, the Czechoslovak Army had occupied Hungarian territory to the depth of 50 to 80 km south of Slovakia. It was a preventive measure to stop the spread of Bolshevism in Central Europe. Prague was not prepared for the Hungarian counteroffensive. The Magyar troops took back two-thirds of Slovakia, and brought about the proclamation of independence of the pro-Hungarian Soviet Republic of Slovakia with its capital in Prešov (eastern Slovakia) on 18 June. Five days earlier, the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border had been established at the Peace Conference in Paris, but revolutionary Budapest had no intention to observe it, especially after having gained common border with Poland. Warsaw clenched with Prague in the conflict over the industrial

732 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

basin in Teschen Silesia, was supportive of Budapest’s endeavors to maintain the territorial integrity of historical Hungary. On the other hand, the Polish government was weary of the possibility of Budapest’s military cooperation with Soviet Russia in the spread of the communist revolution westward. This would endanger Józef Piłsudski’s project of recreating Poland-Lithuania as a Polish nation-state. In mid-April 1919, Romanian troops successfully attacked Red Hungary’s armies, and the Czechoslovak army joined the attack at the beginning of May. Magyar soldiers withdrew from Slovakia to protect Budapest, which fell into Romanian hands anyway on 4 August. The regime of Soviet Slovakia had been extinguished already on 5 July. The Czechoslovak government established control over entire Slovakia. Meanwhile, in August, the anti-Bolshevik Hungarian security forces helped Hlinka illegally cross the border to Poland. He was accompanied by Father František Jehlicska (Jehliˇcka, 1879–1939), perhaps a Hungarian agent, who had previously opposed the separation of Slovakia from Hungary, but in this new situation preferred that Slovakia would become an independent state rather than be included as part of Czechoslovakia. This was in agreement with Hlinka’s view that Slovakia should either enjoy wide autonomy within Czechoslovakia, or become independent. In Warsaw, on 27 August, the Polish security service supplied Hlinka and Jehlicska with Polish passports done in false names in order to enable them to present the views of Slovak autonomists and independists at the Peace Conference in Paris. Unfortunately, just like representatives of the Szlonzoks or the Slunzaks, they were not allowed to present their views and demands before the conference. Jehlicska returned to Budapest and published a journal appealing for an autonomous Slovakia in Hungary. When the Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920) precluded this solution, he went to Poland. Warsaw gladly supported his appeals for independent Slovakia under Poland’s protection. Obviously, the project was impossible with Poland engaged in the deadly war with Bolshevik Russia (1919–1920) and also busy with the establishment of its administration in the ethnically non-Polish eastern territories gained from Soviet Russia. Warsaw paid lip service to Slovak independence, first, to lessen Prague’s political pressure on Hungary, a prospective ally of Poland’s, and second, to boost its position in its contest with Prague over the regions of Árva (Orava in Czech and Slovak, Orawa in Polish, and Arva in German) and Szepes (Spiš in Czech and Slovak, Spisz in Polish, and Zips in German). This old disputed borderland between PolandLithuania and historical Hungary was claimed by Warsaw as rightfully Polish and Budapest did not contest this claim, because this, in turn, weakened Prague’s hold over these two areas of Slovakia. The populations living in Árva and Szepes practiced a traditional transhumant economy like the Goralians (Górale) in the Polish section of the Tatra Mountains, or the Lemkos and the Ruthenians (Rusyns) of Subcarpathian Ruthenia further to the east along the arch of the

The Czech Nation

733

Carpathians. The Goralians and the Slavophone inhabitants of Árva and Szepes spoke in their distinctive dialects, which were much alike but markedly different from standard Polish or standard Slovak. Nationalism was a novel idea to them, and most of all they wished to retain the unity of their regions not unlike the Szlonzoks or the Slunzaks. As in the case of Upper Silesia and eastern Austrian Silesia, the Allies promised plebiscites in Árva and Szepes. Due to the growing level of interethnic violence, in 1920, the Allies divided both regions between Czechoslovakia and Poland without any plebiscite. In its propaganda directed at Orava and Spiš, Warsaw used the argument that Poland would be a Catholic haven for the two regions’ inhabitants, and a deliverance from the possibility of having to live in Czechoslovakia, a state ruled by ‘Godless Czech heretics.’ This argument also resonated strongly with Hlinka and other Slovak leaders of Catholic provenance. From the religious-ideological Poland appeared to be a better choice than a common state with the Czechs, provided there was no chance of founding Slovakia as an independent nationstate. The division of Orava and Spiš additionally fuelled anti-Czech feeling among the Slovaks, as Prague was commonly accused that this was the price it paid to secure the inclusion of the entire Teschen Silesian industrial basin in the Czech lands. The unexpected decline and closure of whatever few industrial factories existed in overwhelmingly agricultural Slovakia amounted, in the Slovak eyes, to another anti-Slovak policy perpetrated by Prague to make Slovakia into a ‘colonial appendage’ of the Czech economy. Such was the effect of political and economic unification of Slovakia and the Czech lands without any provisions made for protecting the much weaker Slovak economy. In the heat of political and military struggles for Czechoslovakia, neither Slovak nor Czech leaders reflected on what effect the founding of such a state may have had on the Czech or Slovak economy. At that time, national and ideological goals had priority. Politicians and their followers naively believed that independence, presented as ‘deliverance from Austrian and Magyar tyranny,’ would be enough to provide prosperity for all Czechs and Slovaks. Instead, in interwar Slovak publications, Prague was frequently accused of odbúrovanie priemyslu (‘intentional destruction of the industry’) in Slovakia. Border ‘corrections’ continued. In 1923, Poland ceded one village to the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia, and, the following year, two Slovak villages were transferred to Poland. In 1922, Hungary gained a village from Slovakia, and two further ones in 1924. The eventual territory of Slovakia amounted to 49,021 sq km. Out of Orava and Spiš, Slovakia received 1661 sq km and 3473 sq km, and Poland, 357 sq km and 195 sq km, respectively. The postwar wave of Magyar refugees fleeing Slovakia was the harbinger of what the future of ethnolinguistic homogeneity held in store. Between 1918 and 1924, 147,000 Magyars fled or were forced to leave Slovakia. At least 45,000 of those remaining in Slovakia were denied Czechoslovak citizenship, and many

734 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

thousands were coaxed with administrative measures to move to the Czech lands or central and northern Slovakia where Slovaks constituted the majority of the population. As a result, by the early 1930s, long-established Magyar majorities disappeared in 200 localities in Slovakia. In Czechoslovakia, similar occurrences took place in the Hluˇcínsko and the Czech section of Teschen Silesia, from where 4600 Germans and 10,000 Poles fled after the establishment of Czechoslovak rule, or left Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. But no comparable refugee waves originated from among the 3 million Germans living in the Czech lands. Perhaps, the relatively low level of military conflict generated by Prague’s dismantling of the German-Austrian provinces in Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia was crucial in convincing local Germans that they might remain safely in the new state of Czechoslovakia. This state’s democratic character confirmed their hopes, while the high level of development of the Czech economy, and economic aid and political support flowing from neighboring Germany and Austria helped them recreate a high level of living standard, which they had enjoyed before 1914. On the contrary, the Czechoslovak-Hungarian war over the control of Slovakia lasted almost for a year between November 1918 and July 1919. The Slovak economy declined and the level of Slovak-Magyar ethnic tension was much higher than that between the Czech and Germans in the Czech lands. In Bohemia and Moravia, fully official Czech-German bilingualism had developed since the 1880s, and language use in education and local administration had also been liberalized in Austrian Silesia, first, in the 1870s, and again at the beginning of the 20th century. On the contrary, full and often forced Magyarization was Budapest’s policy in Upper Hungary prior to 1918 (Bˇelina et al. 1993: 161–162; From Minority Status to Partnership 2005; Kováˇc 1998: 182–184, 214; Krofta 1946: 730; Mócsy 1982: 494; Semotanová 2003: 47; Tomaszewski 1997: 28–29, 48). In light of the difficulties which Prague faced when striving to establish Czechoslovak rule in the borderland regions of the Czech lands, and in entire Slovakia, the unexpected and not sought-for incorporation of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was easy; a virtual windfall of pure good luck. The predominantly Greek Catholic Ruthenians lived in a region of Upper Hungary that was an even more undeveloped backwater than Slovakia. Two-thirds of the population, that is, almost all the Ruthenians were poor peasants and transhumant shepherds. The Magyar nobles and large landowners did not see Ruthenia as anything more than a ‘primeval deer forest.’ The impoverished and overwhelmingly agricultural population failed to produce a single national movement unlike the Slovaks. The majority of the inhabitants identified with their localities, religion, and the King of Hungary. Hence, the collapse of Austria-Hungary in October 1918, followed by the succession of independence declarations of the successor nation-states, elicited an array of confused political answers among the Ruthenians. Numerous Ruthenian National Councils, which sprang up in November,

The Czech Nation

735

proposed various, frequently mutually exclusive, solutions to the ‘Ruthenian question.’ The Bolshevik revolution precluded the old-established option of uniting Ruthenia with Russia. Some leaders appealed for autonomous Ruthenia in Hungary, others for unification with independent Ukraine, or the incorporation of Hungarian and Galician sections of Ruthenia in Czechoslovakia. The volatile existence and speedy disappearance of the Ukrainian nation-state, partitioned between Poland and Soviet Russia, excluded the Ukrainian option and the possibility of uniting the Ruthenians of Galicia (already incorporated in its entirety into Poland) with those of Upper Hungary in an autonomous Ruthenia. Poland, being an upstart nation-state with a lot of bad publicity on its backwardness and intolerant Catholic character, did not appear to be an attractive option for the Ruthenians. Romania was not either. Although the state had been established almost six decades earlier, it was seen as an epitome of backwardness. What is more, its Orthodox religion could mean suppression of the Ruthenians’ Greek Catholicism. Bucharest, having gained so many new territories after the war, which had to be integrated, was not interested in Ruthenia either. In late 1918, the most viable and gladly accepted idea was Budapest’s proposal of founding autonomous Ruthenia within Hungary. In December 1918, the administration of Hungary’s autonomous Ruthenia was established and an appropriate law to this end was issued on 21 December. Meanwhile, the organizations of the Ruthenian emigrants in the United States obtained the most decisive voice on the future of Ruthenia, as did their Czech and Slovak counterparts. They had much easier access to President Wilson, the main shaper of the postwar order in Central Europe, than their co-ethnics in distant Ruthenia. Wilson, however, discouraged the Ruthenian independists’ dream of a united Ruthenian nation-state composed of eastern Upper Hungary, southeastern Galicia, and Bukovina, which they proposed to him in a letter of 21 October. This would have unsettled too many already reached compromises between Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the Allies. Gregory Zsatkovich (Grigorii Zhatkovich, Žatkoviˇc, 1886–1967), the leader of US ‘Hungarian-Ruthenians,’ met Masaryk in Philadelphia, at the end of October 1918. Masaryk proposed that if the Ruthenians decide that their region should be incorporated into Czechoslovakia, they would receive a wide-ranging autonomy. Beneš supported this option because it would give Czechoslovakia a common border with Romania, which was a ‘natural’ Czechoslovak ally, because both states had to face enmity of rump Hungary, at the cost of which their territories increased substantially. The US Ruthenian organization held a meeting in Scranton, Pennsylvania on 12 November. In December, the plebiscite held by them among US Ruthenians, yielded the result of 67 percent votes for the inclusion of autonomous Ruthenia in Czechoslovakia. Masaryk entrusted the control of Ruthenia to Šrobár, who had already had on its plate the difficult task of establishing Czechoslovak rule in Slovakia. In early January

736 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

1919, Czechoslovak troops seized the westernmost sliver of Ruthenia together with Ungvár (Uzhhorod) on 13 January. At that time, political life of proCzechoslovak Ruthenians concentrated in Eperjes (Prešov) and Ungvár, soon renamed Užhorod. The Hungarian administration with its center in Munkács (Mukaˇcevo) controlled most of Ruthenia, which received its autonomous structures complete with the national assembly in February and March 1919. After the communist takeover in Budapest (21 March), the Soviet Hungarian regime dismantled the Ruthenian autonomy on 18 April, because they sought to build an ethnically homogenous (though communist) Magyar nation-state. The anti-Ruthenian (or, in general, anti-minorities) character of Béla Kun’s regime was already apparent in late March. This conributed to the convening of the meeting of the Ruthenian National Councils of Prešov, Užhorod, and Chust (Khust in Ukrainian, Huszt in Magyar) with the delegation of United States Ruthenian leaders, which took place in Užhorod on 8 April. They formed the Central National Ruthenian Council, which, on 16 April, made Zsatkovich the minister of the ‘Russian (Ruthenian) state in Czechoslovakia.’ He negotiated with Masaryk the principles on the basis of which Ruthenia will enter Czechoslovakia, and represented the Ruthenian interests in the Czechoslovak delegation at the Peace Conference in Paris. In the second half of April, the Romanian offensive moved westward against Soviet Hungary, and the Hungarian administration was replaced with the Romanian military in Ruthenia, which, in turn, gave up its prerogatives to its Czechoslovak counterpart headed by the Czech civil servant, Jan Brejcha, on 1 August. On 10 September 1919, the Treaty of Saint-Germain provided that the region’s name would be ‘Subcarpathian Ruthenia,’ it would enjoy a wide autonomy in Czechoslovakia (including its own national-regional parliament), and the region’s borders would not cross north of the Carpathians. The last precaution was taken not to alienate Poland, because on 5 December 1918, the Galician Ruthenian/Lemko leaders proclaimed the National Lemko Republic, which they intended to be united with Subcarpathian Ruthenia within the Czechoslovak borders. The Polish army dispersed the republic’s structures in February 1919, but they persisted to function through the spring of 1920. The Ruthenians held grudges against the Czechs just as they had against the Slovaks. First, Prague did not honor its agreements with the Ruthenians, and did not provide them with their national assembly and true political autonomy until 1938. The influx of Czech civil servants, teachers, and doctors was not as resented as it was in Slovakia, because there were hardly any Ruthenian counterparts who were qualified for these positions. In 1921, the illiteracy rate in Subcarpathian Ruthenia was 50 percent, and even higher among the Ruthenians themselves (67 percent), because Magyars and Jews inhabiting this region usually could read and write. On the other hand, Czech civil servants and professionals sent to Subcarpathian Ruthenia did not consider it as an appealing employment

The Czech Nation

737

opportunity and mostly preferred to stay away. The region’s economy was even more fragile than that of Slovakia, and cheap and good quality products from the Czech lands stifled any industry, thus perpetuating the agricultural-cumpastoral character of the Subcarpathian economy. Finally, Ruthenian leaders were displeased by their region’s western border, which they saw as too much skewed in favor of Slovakia. It left in Slovakia Prešov, which had been the seat of the Greek Catholic eparchy since 1816. Even though ethnically Slovak, the town was a significant center of Ruthenian culture and politics. In the interwar period, the region extending between this city and Subcarpathian Ruthenia became known as Prešov Ruthenia (Preshovska Rus in Ruthenian). Half of its inhabitants, that is, about 100,000 were Ruthenians. Last but not the least, Prague intent on lessening pro-Hungarian sympathies among the Ruthenians, did not oppose the growth of the Orthodox Church supported from Serbia. The Greek Catholic clergy was usually pro-Hungarian, because they did not want any dramatic social change bound to be generated by the sudden transfer of their homeland from Hungary to Czechoslovakia. At least one-third of the Ruthenians converted to Orthodox Christianity. In the 1930s, the pro-Hungarian trend in the Greek Catholic Church largely disappeared. The clergy acknowledged and favored the separateness of the Ruthenian nation, which brought about their support for suppressing pro-Ukrainian or Pan-Slav (pro-Russian) tendencies, much in line with Czechoslovakia’s international interests. Subcarpathian Ruthenia’s military administration headed by Šrobár was terminated in early 1922, but continued de facto until 1923. The first Governor of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Zsatkovich, resigned on 16 April 1921 in protest against Prague’s centralizing policies, which did not deliver the promised autonomy. It was the first sign of the Ruthenians’ displeasure with their marriage with Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, for the first time ever, the Ruthenian-language educational system was organized in Czechoslovakia. By 1930, illiteracy had sunk to 30 percent. Prague did not attempt to replace Ruthenian-style Cyrillic with the Latin alphabet, and Czechoslovakia was the only Central European nation-state, in which one of the official languages was not written in Latin characters. It proved a useful instrument of policy in Prague’s relations with its minorities, though it was usually not used wisely. For instance, on Czechoslovak banknotes the legend was given in Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian, German, and Magyar. Czechoslovakia’s Germans took offence that their language should be ranked ‘lower’ than that of ‘uncivilized highlanders.’ The international borders, which encircled Subcarpathian Ruthenia, were decided in the Treaty of Saint-Germain (10 September 1919) and the Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920). Prague established the internal Carpathian-Slovak border in the General Statute for Organization and Administration of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (7 November 1919). In 1921, two villages were transferred from Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Romania, and two received in return. Finally, the

738 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

region’s territory stabilized at 12,617 sq km (Bˇelina et al. 1993: 163; Krofta 1946: 722–723, 730; Magocsi 2005; Pop 2005: 102–113, 117, 125–129; Rothschild 1977: 83–82, 92; Semotanová 2003: 47). As in the case of Poland, the Czechoslovak borders were a result of complicated international and ethnonational negotiations and compromises. Their precarious status was emphasized by Prague’s postwar military conflicts with Hungary, Poland, and German-Austria. The only neighboring state with which Prague enjoyed cordial relations was Romania. The same was true of Poland, which fought wars with all its neighbors and forwarded territorial claims against them all except Romania. In order to fortify the legitimacy of the Czechoslovak statehood on the ethnonational basis, the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920 (29 February) legalized the category of the Czechoslovak nation, as for the first time officially mentioned in the declaration of independence (28 October 1918). The Language Law issued on the same day as the Constitution, in pursuance of Article 129 of the Constitution, made the ‘Czechoslovak language’ the state and official language of Czechoslovakia, in agreement with Article 7 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain. In this manner, at the symbolic level, Czechoslovakia gained its ‘Czechoslovak nation,’ and its ‘national Czechoslovak language.’ To a large degree, the Czechoslovak example was followed in the 1921 Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which made Serbocroatoslovenian the official language of the state. The concepts of the Czechoslovak nation and language allowed for lumping Czechs and Slovaks into Czechoslovaks in official statistics, which provided Czechoslovakia with a clear national majority. The notion of the Serbocroatoslovenian language played a similar role, as it bound the kingdom’s state nations of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in a linguistically united national unity, which after 1929, was defined as the Yugoslav nation. Statistically, actually only Serbs and Croats were lumped into the composite national category of Serbocroats justified by the agreed upon existence of their common Serbo-Croatian language. In practice, the Slovenes stayed out of the constitutionally proposed linguistic union, but did not bristle at their treatment as one of the state nations of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Likewise, the Slovaks disagreed with the concept of the Czechoslovak language, but usually consented to Prague’s statistical lumping them together with the Czechs, as Czechoslovaks. The Slovenians and the Slovaks were quite small nations, so these legal constructs gave them respectively more say in the kingdom (until the introduction of dictatorship in 1929) and Czechoslovakia than their numbers would justify. In practice, the Slovenians’ status was anomalous placing them between the definitive state nation of the Serbocroats and the national minorities. A similar uneasy status was reserved for the Ruthenians, who were not counted as a straightforward minority, but on the other hand, were not included in the category of the Czechoslovak nation.

The Czech Nation

739

As a result, these legal constructs meant that Czechoslovaks numbering 8.76 million in 1921 accounted for 65.5 percent of Czechoslovakia’s population. Their number grew to 67 percent (9.68 million) in 1930. In statistics, Ruthenians were also referred to as ‘Little Russians’ (pre-1918 Russian usage for Ukrainians). In 1921, there were 0.46 million (3.4 percent) Ruthenians in Czechoslovakia, and their number grew to 0.55 million (3.8 percent) in 1930. Czechoslovaks together with Ruthenians constituted a clear-cut ‘national’ majority of 68.9 percent in 1920, and 70.8 percent in 1930. The data did not look so optimistic if Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians were counted separately. In 1921, Czechoslovakia housed 6.84 million (50.3 percent) Czechs, 3.12 million (23.4 percent) Germans, 1.98 million (15.2 percent) Slovaks, 0.74 million Magyars (5.6 percent), 0.46 million (3.4 percent) Ruthenians, 181,000 (1.3 percent) Jews, and 76,000 Poles (0.6 percent). Jews were distinguished exclusively on the linguistic basis, that is, if they had indicated Hebrew or Yiddish as their mother tongues. But taking into consideration Judaism as the main indicator of Jewishness, the number of Jews grew to 0.35 million (2.6 percent). Half of this increase was made up by Czech-speaking Jews and the other by German-speaking ones. The story repeated itself in the case of the Slunzaks numbering around 80,000 (0.6 percent), who, on a linguistic basis, were partitioned between Czechs, Germans, and Poles in statistics. Last but not the least, the 45,000-strong Morawecs (0.3 percent) should have been singled out as a separate national or ethnic group on the linguistic basis, and if their will were to be taken into consideration, they ought to have been merged with Germans as a statistical category, not with the Czechoslovaks. The estimated 100,000 (0.7 percent) to 200,000 (1.5 percent) Roma, mainly living in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, clearly did not show up in prewar statistics. On the linguistic basis, they were mainly apportioned to Magyars and Slovaks. Considering these factors, the Czechs did not constitute a weak majority in Czechoslovakia, but rather the strongest plurality at some 48 to 49 percent of the population. The differences in the share of population varied even more widely in the confines of historical regions out of which Czechoslovakia was made. Because Germans, not Czechs, constituted the strongest plurality in Czech Silesia, the region was merged in 1928 with Moravia into the Moravian-Silesian Land. In 1930, in the Czech lands, 7.23 million Czechs accounted for 67.7 percent of the 15 million-strong population. They were followed by 3.07 million (28.8 percent) Germans, 150,000 (1.4 percent) Jews, 93,000 (0.9 percent) Poles, 44,500 (0.4 percent) Slovaks, 23,000 (0.2 percent) Ukrainians, and 11,400 (0.1 percent) Magyars. Czech scholars termed the former regions of German-Austria in ˇ the Czech lands as the Czech Borderlands (Ceské pohraniˇci). It amounted to 38 percent territory of the Czech lands and was home to 3.7 million inhabitants in 1930, including 2.7 million Germans and 1 million Czechs. Outside the Czech Borderlands, 6.3 million Czechs lived versus only 0.5 million Germans.

740 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In Slovakia, 2.25 million Slovaks amounted to 67.7 percent of the 3.32 millionstrong population in 1930. Perhaps, if Roma were properly accounted for, the percentage of Slovaks would be lowered by three points. And 0.57 million Magyars constituted 17.2 percent of the population, while Hungarian sources raise this number by even 100,000, which would make Magyars into one-fifth of interwar Slovakia’s population. However, the singling out of Roma as a separate category would perhaps nullify this gain. Moreover, 137,000 Jews and 110,000 Ruthenians constituted 4.1 percent and 3.3 percent of the population, respectively. Like Germans in the Czech Borderlands, Magyars constituted the majority of population in southern Slovakia, and Ruthenians in the east of this region. In 1930, while the population of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was 0.73 million, Ruthenians, numbering 0.45 million, constituted 61.6 percent of this population. Hence, they constituted a weaker majority than Czechs in the Czech lands or Slovaks in Slovakia. The inclusion of the predominantly Ruthenian-speaking localities from Prešov Ruthenia would have increased the share of Ruthenians at least to 68 percent. Unlike in the Czech lands or Slovakia, there was no single large minority in Subcarpathian Ruthenia; a 109,000 (15 percent) Magyars and 90,500 (12.5 percent) Jews balanced out each other. Czechs and Slovaks accounted for 35,000 (4.8 percent), Germans for 13,000 (1.8 percent), and Romanians for 13,000 (1.8 percent). Between 1921 and 1930, the official statistics indicated that the state nations of the Czechoslovaks and Ruthenians grew in absolute numbers, as did their share in Czechoslovakia’s total population. In the case of the minorities, the absolute numbers of Germans, Jews, and Poles grew, but their share in the population decreased. Tellingly, only the absolute number of Magyars sank by 53,500, which translated into the slump from 5.6 percent of the population to 4.9 percent. This clearly indicates that the strongest assimilatory measures were aimed at the Magyar minority in interwar Czechoslovakia, perhaps in response to Budapest’s unambiguous irredentist intentions vis-à-vis Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. At the official level, Austria did not show such intentions at all, and Berlin began to play the German minority card in Czechoslovakia only in the mid-1930s. Similar measures were then applied to the German minority. For instance, in 1936, there were 0.87 million unemployed in the Czech lands, including 0.53 million in the Czech Borderlands. This situation forced tens of thousands of Germans to take up seasonal jobs in Germany, and made them even more dependent on aid flowing from this country (Eberhardt 1996: 114–119, 172; Harna and Fišer 1998: 142; Prinz 1993: 395; Rothschild 1977: 89–90). As in Poland, Czechoslovak legislation organized the use of official and minority languages in this country on a historical basis. Different laws and regulations applied to the Czech lands that had belonged to the Austrian section of the Dual Monarchy prior to 1918, and to Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which

The Czech Nation

741

had been part of historical Hungary. The internationally recognized autonomous status of Subcarpathian Ruthenia drew a line of difference between it and Slovakia, though both regions had been administratively homogenous parts of Hungary before 1918. Last but not the least, minority language use regulations mainly applied to the territories where these minorities concentrated, that is, in the Czech Borderlands and in southern Slovakia. There were two basic sources of language legislation, namely the AustroHungarian regulations and the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which formed the foundation on which the basis of the Czechoslovak language regulations was grounded. To reiterate, beginning in the 1880s, full Czech-German bilingualism in administration, education, and politics developed in Bohemia. These developments were mirrored in Moravia, but to a lesser degree. For instance, prior to 1918, the only Czech-language university was the Czech section of the University of Prague. In addition, the Moravian elite tended to call their Slavic language ‘Moravian,’ ‘Slavic,’ or ‘Moravian-Slavic,’ despite the fact that, with time, it became almost indistinguishable from standard Czech of Bohemia. The long-established tradition of the separate Moravian statehood was re-confirmed in the 1905 Ausgleich, which produced full German-Moravian linguistic equality in a negotiated manner, unlike in Bohemia, where Czech-German linguistic equality was born out of the ongoing interethnic strife. In Austrian Silesia, German remained the sole official language of this crownland until 1918, though elementary and secondary education in Czech and Polish became available between the 1860s and 1880, especially in the region’s eastern half, that is, Teschen Silesia. At the beginning of the 20th century, Czech and Polish were also allowed into local self-governments at the discretion of the localities concerned. The Hluˇcínsko was an exception to the Austro-Hungarian tradition of language regulation, because it was a territory transferred from the German Land of Prussia. In line with the Prussian regulations and the local tradition, the Morawecs’ Moravian (Morawec) language in the Gothic script was used in (usually religious) publications and religious instruction provided in churches. The local Catholic clergy gained secondary and divinity seminary education in Moravian by attending schools in Olomouc (Olmütz), the capital of the Moravian Archdiocese, in which the Hluˇcínsko was included. The Moravian language had been a medium of instruction along with German in the Hluˇcínsko elementary schools between 1849 and 1873. Afterward, in the freshly united German Empire, German, as the official and national language of this polity, had replaced all minority languages (including Moravian) in the educational system, the control of which Berlin had seized from the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Berlin allowed for the return of minority languages (including Moravian) to elementary education in last years of the Great War, intent on ensuring the loyalty of the minorities to the faltering empire.

742 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the Hungarian section of the Dual Monarchy, legislation was unitary and provided for the entire Kingdom of Hungary with the exception of autonomous Croatia-Slavonia. In 1867, Magyar was made the sole official and national language of this polity. The 1868 Nagodba (compromise) elevated Serbo-Croatian to this level in Croatia-Slavonia, though the presence of Magyar gradually increased in this territory before 1918. The famous 1868 Nationality Law introduced for the first time in world history the concept of language rights for ethnolinguistically defined minorities. In this package, the threshold of 20 percent was introduced, and remains popular in Central European minority language regulations to this day. It basically meant that in komitats (counties) and communes where the members of a single minority group made up at least one-fifth of the population, elementary and secondary education was provided in the minority language, and this language was given the status of an auxiliary language in state and selfgovernmental offices. Soon, Budapest ceased to observe the Nationality Law. In the 1870s, the number of minority-language secondary schools was scaled down, and Magyar-minority language bilingualism forced on elementary education in state schools. Most of the denominational schools, controlled and organized by the Catholic, Greek Catholic and Protestant Churches, emulated this example. After 1905, bilingual minority elementary education was replaced with straightforward Magyar-medium elementary schools. This measure failed to Magyarize the minority educational systems catering for Germanspeakers, the Romanians of Transylvania, and the Serbs of Vojvodina. In the former case, despite the 1867 Ausgleich, German remained the dominant language throughout Austria-Hungary, and German-speakers (including Jews) made their political statement of loyalty to the Kingdom of Hungary by acquiring Magyar. In return, they and their Churches demanded education in German too, which Budapest acquiesced to. In Transylvania, the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches sided with the Romanian national cause, and continued to provide education in the Romanian language in defiance of Budapest’s extralegal policy of forced Magyarization. The same pattern was followed in Vojvodina, where the Orthodox Church provided SerboCroatian-language education for the local Serbs. There were no such Churches that would identify with the Slovak or Ruthenian national cause. Neither Slovaks nor Ruthenians were numerous in comparison with Transylvania’s Romanians, nor could they count on help from their own nation-state as Vojvodina’s Serbs did. Upper Hungary (Slovakia and Ruthenia) was a backward region even by Hungarian standards, so no local entrepreneurs could afford to finance independent private educational systems in Slovak and Ruthenian either. In practice, prior to 1918, almost no elementary schools catering to these two languages remained in Upper Hungary, and there was no question that Slovak or Ruthenian could be used as auxiliary languages in state

The Czech Nation

743

and self-governmental offices. The logic of the transformation of Hungary into the ethnolinguistically homogenous Magyar nation-state did not allow for that. After the declaration of independence, the tradition of bilingual administration in Bohemia and Moravia allowed for the speedy introduction of Czech as the official language. The German language persisted in the German-Austrian provinces of the Czech lands until the end of 1918. In preparation for establishing Czechoslovak rule in Slovakia, the law of 10 December 1918 announced Slovak as the official language of this region. Its introduction was delayed in these areas, which remained under Hungarian control until July 1919. In August, the Romanian army handed over the administration of Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Prague. Article 11 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain provided that the Ruthenian National Assembly would decide on the issue of the official language of this region. Significantly, this treaty’s Article 7 tacitly transferred to Prague the decision on which would be the official language for all of Czechoslovakia. The 1920 Language Law annulled any language regulations issued earlier, most significantly the status of an official language for the Slovak language in Slovakia. Article 1 made Czechoslovak ‘the state and official language’ of Czechoslovakia. This was a purely ideological statement to emphasize the national, that is, Czechoslovak, character of the state. In practice, it did not change anything in official language use, which developed in late 1918. Czech was used in this capacity in the Czech lands, and Slovak in Slovakia, and the Language Law’s Article 4 openly made this practice into a law. The only concession for the sake of Czechoslovak was that matters presented in Czech and dealt with in Slovak, and those presented in Slovak and dealt with in Czech were deemed to have been dealt with in the language in which they were presented. This was possible due to the tacit construct of the Czechoslovak language as consisting of its two varieties of Czech and Slovak. Article 6 provided that the National Assembly of Subcarpathian Ruthenia would decide on the region’s official language ‘in a manner consonant with the unity of the Czechoslovak State.’ This assembly never gathered before 1938, hence the use of official language was decided by everyday practice of the state organs and administration. In 1920 and 1925, laws of less importance referred to this language as ‘Ruthenian (Little Russian).’ Czech ruský is ambiguous, because it also means ‘Russian.’ In this meaning, the adjective is derived from Czech Rusko (Russia), while ruský as referring to Ruthenian is related to Czech Rus (Ruthenia), as in Podkarpatská Rus (Subcarpathian Ruthenia). The alternative name maloruský (Little Russian) was equally confusing, because it was the usual pre-1918 designation for ‘Ukrainian,’ though in interwar Czechoslovakia one spoke of the language of the Ukrainians as ukrajinský (Ukrainian), not ‘Little Russian.’ Earlier, in 1919, General Statute for Organization and Administration of Subcarpathian Ruthenia had introduced the unambiguous term rusínský jazyk

744 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(Ruthenian language). In official statistics and publications, usually the term rusínský (Ruthenian) was employed. Before 1918, the Hungarian administration had used the term ‘Hungarian-Ruthenian,’ that is, Ruthenian. The language question in Subcarpathian Ruthenia was fraught with difficulties and complications conditioned by political, religious, and national considerations. Prior to the 17th century, on the territory of future Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Church Slavonic was used as the language of books, education and liturgy among the Uniates (Greek Catholics), like among their coreligionists elsewhere in the Habsburg lands, and Poland-Lithuania. The situation was similar among all the Orthodox Slavs and Walachians (Romanians). Ruthenian (ruski), that is, the vernacular Slavic of Wilno (Vilnius) and Kijów (Kyiv), written in Cyrillic characters, was an official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the southeastern corner of the Kingdom of Poland (Ruthenian Voivodeship) until the end of the 17th century. This long-established tradition of Cyrillicbased literacy in vernacular Slavic prompted the codification of the Russian language in the 18th century. Similarly, the primers of 1699 and 1770, targeted at the Greek Catholic population of future Subcarpathian Ruthenia, introduced elements of the local vernacular into Church Slavonic. Opposed to this trend, the Greek Catholic Church authorities confiscated and destroyed the copies of the 1770 primer. Another primer of this kind appeared in 1797 and was not suppressed. Its further editions were brought out in 1799, 1815, and 1846. In the 18th century, Latin predominated as the medium of instruction in Greek Catholic schools, but the trend changed at the end of the 18th century, thanks to the 1797 primer. The language, variously referred to as Slavonic or SlavenoRuthenian (Slavic-Ruthenian), was basically Church Slavonic with an increasing number of vernacular elements. In 1830 and 1833, two grammars of SlavenoRuthenian appeared. The 1830s saw some attempts to write poems in the local vernacular, but the use of Slaveno-Ruthenian and Latin for written purposes persisted. After 1848, the nascent Ruthenian national movement emerged, but its leader Aleksander Dukhnovych proposed to replace Slaveno-Ruthenian with Russian. It was a completely different solution compared to Štúr’s. He stood for the codification of distinctive vernacular Slovak language, and strongly opposed the use of Bibliˇctina (derived from the late-16th-century Bohemian translation of the Bible) or Bernolaˇctina (language based on the western Slovak dialect, hence, too similar to standard Czech) as written languages of the Slovaks. Although Dukhnovych’s stance contributed to the rise of the Russophile orientation among the Ruthenians, he also wrote in the vernacular, which gave some credibility to the use of vernacular Ruthenian for written purposes. But the first Ruthenian cultural associations founded in 1850 and 1866, employed Russian in their publications. It resulted in a language that was the Ruthenian vernacular oriented toward standard Russian. In practice, the Church Slavonic

The Czech Nation

745

basis of Slaveno-Ruthenian was replaced with the local vernacular and specialized (abstract, religious, administrative) Church Slavonic vocabulary with its Russian counterpart. This development replicated the change of Slaveno-Serbian into Russified Serbian at the beginning of the 19th century. The pro-Russian and pro-vernacular traditions were served by the locally produced Russian-Magyar dictionary (1881) and the Ruthenian-Magyar dictionary, respectively. The proponents of the Russian orientation wished to discredit the project of the Ruthenian vernacular language and dubbed it iazychiie (uncultured mixture of languages). The proper Slavic designation for a language is iazyk; the ending –chiie made this neutral word into a derogative term. Another difference and point of contention was the Cyrillic. The proRussian authors used the Russian grazhdanka, or the Cyrillic as modernized by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century. The proponents of vernacular Ruthenian stuck to the Church Slavonic Cyrillic as still employed in religious books produced in the Russian Empire. At the end of the 19th century, Budapest’s Magyarization policy encroached on the Ruthenians’ Russianand vernacular literacy. In 1894, it was proposed to replace the Ruthenian Cyrillic with the Magyar version of the Latin script. Budapest favored the vernacular, as it perceived Russian an ideological instrument of spreading anti-Austro-Hungarian Pan-Slavism. The language became officially known as ‘Hungarian-Ruthenian.’ In 1901, the future president of short-lived independent Subcarpathian Ruthenia of 1939, Avhustyn Voloshyn (Vološin, 1874–1945), published a Russian-language grammar of Hungarian-Ruthenian, which as he presented it in the book, was slightly Ruthenized Russian. Six years later, he published another grammar, this time in Magyar. Voloshyn termed the language, which he described in this work, as kisorosz/rutén (Little Russian/Ruthenian). It was almost exclusively based on the dialect from eastern Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Prior to the Great War, Russophile activists arrived in future Subcarpathian Ruthenia from Galicia and Bukovina. A Ukrainophile orientation was represented mainly by immigrants from Galicia, who called their language variously, as ‘Ruthenian’ and ‘Ukrainian,’ and proposed that it be used in Subcarpathian Ruthenia instead of Russian or vernacular Ruthenian. The most popular newspaper of the Subcarpathian Ruthenians was Nedilia (Sunday). Beginning in 1898, its editorial office was moved to Budapest and the Hungarian government supported the publication of this newspaper because it spread the pro-Hungarian feeling among the Ruthenians, and favored vernacular Ruthenian. In 1916, Cyrillic was increasingly removed from public use, and the newspaper began to be published in the Magyar-style Latin alphabet, as Negyilya. In 1919, Czech academics declared that the Ruthenians’ vernacular was ‘indisputably a Little Russian [Ukrainian] dialect.’ Hence, the region’s administration rejected any proposals to create a separate Ruthenian language. The authorities

746 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

deemed Ruthenians to be a regional group of the Ukrainian nation. By extension, they also fell back on the tsarist theory that Little Russians (Ukrainians) and White Russians (Belarusians) were part of the Great Russian (Russian) people. As a result, Russian (with its pre-1917 set of Cyrillic characters) was recommended as the medium of education in Ruthenian secondary schools. In practice, however, the Galician version of Ukrainian (still known as ‘Ruthenian’ in Poland and among Galicia’s numerous Ukrainians) became the language of education in Ruthenian schools. The Soviet version of Ukrainian was suspect because of Bolshevism, and in the 1930s, underwent deep Russification, which made it too similar to Russian, and as such unusable in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In 1926, Voloshyn published a new grammar of Ruthenian, this time almost exclusively based on Soviet Ukrainian. It did not catch on, and the Galician immigrant, Ivan Pankevych’s (1887–1958) grammar based on Galician Ukrainian (published in 1922, 1927, and 1936) was favored. The Russophile group appealed for the use of Russian at least in secondary schools. They had their way in 1936 when Prague replaced Galician Ukrainian with Russian as the medium of education in Ruthenian schools. In practice, teachers often used vernacular Ruthenian in classroom. To complicate the situation further, Czech along with (Carpatho-)Ruthenian were made official languages of state and local administration in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Because there was no standard Ruthenian, Russified Ruthenian was employed and its appropriate usages for employment in signs on government buildings, documents, and for other official functions were created in the 1920s. The diglossia of using Galician Ukrainian/Russian in school, Russified Ruthenian in office, and vernacular Ruthenian at home did not exist in Slovakia’s Prešov Ruthenia. Russified and vernacular Ruthenian was the medium of education in Ruthenian schools located in this region. Scholars did not have any neutral and popularly accepted name for the language of the Ruthenians, which, in practice, was many languages, with the ongoing disagreement on how to use them thrown in for good measure. The compromise was to term it (in Czech) the souˇcasný spisovný jazyk na Podkarpatské Rusi (contemporary written language of Subcarpathian Ruthenia). In a nutshell, from the legal perspective, Czechoslovak was the official language in entire Czechoslovakia, though at the regional level it was the official language of the Czech lands and Slovakia, whereas Cyrillic-based Ruthenian (Little Russian) in Subcarpathian Ruthenian. In reality, Czech was used in the Czech lands, Slovak in Slovakia, and Russified Ruthenian in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. However, Czech initially dominated in the administration, and university-level and secondary education. Later, the domination subsided but Czech remained in use in Slovakia. In Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Czech retained its de facto dominant position of a co-official language along with Russified Ruthenian in the interwar period. It was also present in the Ruthenian educational system, in which the Galician (Polish) version of Ukrainian was followed

The Czech Nation

747

by slightly Ruthenized Russian as the language of instruction, though teachers also customarily used vernacular Ruthenian, especially in the lower standards of elementary school. Curiously, unlike the Slovaks, the Ruthenians did not receive their own national university, though the German minority was allowed to retain their German-language University of Prague. Actually, no university-level educational institution was founded in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Ruthenian secondary school leavers could continue education in the Free Ukrainian University in Prague, but this institution catered mostly to anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian émigrés from Soviet Ukraine. The Ruthenian (Russian) Departments of Law and Pedagogy, established at the Slovak University in Bratislava, trained civil servants and teachers for Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Ruthenian Students in Bratislava, training to become civil servants, acquired official Russified Ruthenian in addition to Galician (Western) Ukrainian, while those training to become teachers mainly Galician Ukrainian. After 1936, both groups of students were required to acquire Russian only. In the Ruthenian (Russian) theater established in Užhorod, plays were produced in Ukrainian. Masaryk, however, funded the construction of the National House of Prosvita (a pro-Ukrainian educational organization whose name means ‘enlightenment,’ ‘education’) as the center of Ruthenian culture, which included a library, museum, and cinema. In reality, it functioned as a center of Ukrainian national culture. Besides the state nations of Czechoslovakia, the Language Law protected the rights of recognized ethnolinguistic national minorities in line with Prague’s international obligations. As in Hungary’s 1868 Nationality Law, language protection was reserved for minorities in these communes and localities, in which they constituted at least one-fifth of the inhabitants. The rights included the use of a minority language as an auxiliary language in state and self-governmental offices, and on plaques with street, locality, and office names. Uniquely, when there was no traditional Czechoslovak name of a locality, the minority one could be used. There were no attempts at Czechoslovakization of each placename, unlike in Poland’s section of Upper Silesia, where all German place names with no Polish/Slavic counterpart were Polonized immediately after Warsaw took control in 1922. In addition, in localities with 50 percent of the inhabitants belonging to a minority, full bilingualism was introduced. Minutes of self-government meetings were produced in the language(s) in which they were delivered, but the fragments in a minority language had to be translated into the state language and vice versa. In communes with at least 80 percent of the inhabitants belonging to a minority, the minutes and self-governmental administering could be conducted exclusively in a minority language without the necessity to translate anything into the state language. Later, this practice was allowed in localities with 75 percent of the population belonging to a minority. In the sphere of education, minority schools were to be established

748 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in each commune, where in the course of three consecutive years, there were at least 40 children of the same age, who belonged to a single minority. Last but not the least, civil servants of a minority background who were not fluent in Czechoslovak (or Ruthenian in Subcarpathian Ruthenia), were allowed 8 years of grace (through August 1926) to master this language (Dulichenko and Magocsi 2005; cf Faulmann 1880: 186; Magocsi 1979, 2004; Pop 2005: 124; Sobota 1929: 14–16, 48–52, 1931: 73, 180, 215–243, 443–451, 1946: 117; Tichý 1938). Despite the shortcomings in actual practice, the liberalism of Czechoslovak minority language protection legislation mostly allowed for the maintenance of the minority language, culture, and education in the traditional areas of settlement of these minorities. Although the Allies imposed similar levels of legal protection of minority rights in Hungary and Poland, forced assimilation of the minorities in both countries often progressed relentlessly. The increasingly authoritarian character of government in Poland after 1926 (Piłsudski-led coup), and in Hungary after 1920 (establishment of Miklós Horthy’s regime) facilitated this process. Following the 1933 national socialist takeover in Germany, authoritarianism became the standard mode of rule in Central Europe, and acceptance grew for the use of extralegal measures to achieve a higher degree of ethnolinguistic homogeneity in the region’s nation-states. It is not to say that Prague did not have these same desires, but the letter of the law and the democratic principles were observed in Czechoslovakia until the dismantling of this state in 1938. For instance, political refugees from Poland found safe haven in Czechoslovakia. However, where law permitted the legal course of Czechoslovakization, it was invariably followed. For instance, according to the largely massaged census, the Morawecs (Hultschiners) were classified as Czechoslovaks, so Czech-language education was imposed on their children, despite their repeated requests to provide them with German-language schools. The hardest test, which Czechoslovak democracy faced time and again from its inception, was setting up cabinets, which would enjoy a majority in the parliament. The actual multinational character of Czechoslovakia led to the political polarization along national lines. Within the national confines, parties were divided politically between social groups (peasants and farmers vs city-dwellers), and ideologies (nationalists and autonomists vs fascists vs conservatives vs christian democrats vs socialists vs communists). A few parties, identified with the Czechoslovak project, secured 74 mandates out of 281 in the 1920 elections, 74 mandates out of 300 in 1925, 85 out of 300 in 1929, and 83 out of 300 in 1935. They could not hope to gather a majority, hence each time the forming of a cabinet entailed informal cooperation with other parties, which were usually Czech. The shadowy and extralegal institution of the Czechoslovak democracy was the Five (pˇetka), or the leaders of the five most important Czechoslovak and Czech parties, which met with President Masaryk each week and decided on the cabinet’s policies. The parties voted unanimously in the parliament. In 1926,

The Czech Nation

749

the further fragmentation of the political scene required the replacement of the Five with the Eight. The Five facilitated the maintenance of political stability, but on the other hand, limited democracy and excluded Slovak, Ruthenian, and minority parties from actual decision-making. This deepened the autonomist and independist orientation among the Slovaks and general displeasure with Czechoslovakia among the Ruthenians and the minorities as well. The huge unemployment of 0.74 million in 1933 remained at the level of 0.7 million to 0.6 million until 1937, when it decisively sank to 0.4 million. It hit mostly the German minority in the Czech Borderlands, and the underdeveloped provinces of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. This generated a considerable wave of emigration, especially among the Slovaks. In 1937, income per capita in Slovakia was half of that in the Czech lands, and even lower in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In 1935, in the parliament, there were 206 (68.6 percent) Czechoslovak deputies, 72 (24 percent) German deputies, 10 (3.3 percent) Magyar deputies, 8 (2.8 percent) Ruthenian deputies, 2 (0.7 percent) Polish deputies, and 2 (0.7 percent) Jewish deputies. In comparison with the official shares of the national groups and minorities in the population, the Czechoslovaks (67 percent), Germans (22.3 percent), and Poles (0.6 percent) were slightly overrepresented, while Magyars (4.8 percent), the Ruthenians (3.8 percent), and Jews (1.3 percent) under-represented. In 1937, Czechoslovak elementary students, who accounted for 66.7 percent of this group, had at their disposal 10,409 (68.2 percent) elementary schools. German students of the same age (20 percent) enjoyed 3281 (21.5 percent) German-language elementary schools. Their Magyar, Ruthenian, Polish, and Jewish counterparts accounting for 5.4, 5.2, 0.7, and 1.5 percent, respectively, were short-changed with 806 (5.3 percent), 545 (3.6 percent), 90 (0.6 percent), and seven (0.02 percent) elementary schools with their national languages as medium of instruction. This disproportion was not so striking in the case of Jewish students most of whom, out of their own volition, attended Czech-language and German-language schools. In the seven ‘Jewish schools,’ as indicated in statistics, education was conducted in Hebrew, but Zionism was not a popular trend in Czechoslovakia at that time. In the field of education, the Ruthenians, who constituted a state nation of Czechoslovakia, fared worse than the minorities, with the exception of Jews, who were a special case (Kerner 1940: 175; Rothschild 1977: 102, 110, 116, 120, 126; Semotanová ˇ 2003: 52; Statistická roˇcenka Republiky Ceskoslovenské 1937: 236; Tomaszewski 1997: 34–36). The main grudge that Slovakia and Ruthenian leaders held against the Czechs was that Prague did not keep its promises of instituting wide-ranging autonomy for both nations as promised in 1918. Numerically much smaller than the Czech nation, the Slovaks and the Ruthenians had a hard time to make their voices heard in Czechoslovakia, unlike Germans whose number was half of that of the Czechs. At the symbolical level, the Czechoslovak anthem was composed from

750 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Czech anthem and the Slovak anthem played immediately after the Czech one. There was no place for a Ruthenian anthem in this arrangement. The grand coat-of-arms of Czechoslovakia was composed of all the eight coats-of-arms of the regions, but the ones of the Czech lands (six) dominated. The regular coat-ofarms was the depiction of the Bohemian lion with the small Slovak coat-of-arms on its breast. In 1919, almost a thousand Czech Catholic priests demanded a revision of the trial of Jan Hus. They also demanded reforms, including the abolishment of celibacy and the replacement of Latin with Czech in liturgy. The Vatican did not budge and the following year, the national Czechoslovak Church came into being. Masaryk threw his wholehearted support behind it, and half a million Czechs joined it. In 1925, Prague organized the national celebrations of the anniversary of Hus’s death. Hus was burned at the stake in Constance in 1415. In protest of Prague’s support for the looming ideological split among mainly Bohemia’s Catholic clergy, the Catholic Church suspended official contacts with Czechoslovakia. The Vatican resumed relations with Prague only 2 years later. These celebrations and their repercussions reaffirmed the popular belief among the Slovaks, Moravian Czechs (Moravians), Germans, and Magyars that (especially Bohemia’s) Czechs were ‘Godless atheists hardened in their heretic ways.’ The Slovenská l’udova strana (SL’S, Slovak People’s Party), founded in 1905 as a Catholic counterbalance to the Protestant-oriented Slovak National Party (SNS), functioned as an internal platform within the SNS until 1913. Hlinka, the SL’S’s charismatic leader, became the most revered national politician among the Slovaks after Štefánik’s death in 1919. The first ever Slovak Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, Milan Hodža (1878–1944), held this position quite late (1935–1936), and premiership being a largely technocratic institution, it did not help him gain popularity among Slovaks. No Slovak was ever made the President of Czechoslovakia. In 1935, the Czech, Beneš, succeeded octogenarian Masaryk. In 1925, in recognition of Hlinka’s unique position and his endeavors to ensure autonomy for Slovakia, the SL’S was renamed after him, as the Hlinkova slovenská l’udova strana (HSL’S, Hlinka Slovak People’s Party). In the same year, the party garnered the most Slovak votes, clearly marking the shift of political power in Slovakia from the hands of pro-Czechoslovak Protestant SNS to the Catholic HSL’S. Because the majority of the Slovaks were Catholics, it was a natural tendency after the introduction of popular male and female suffrage in 1918. SNS had no choice but to recognize this political reality, and in 1932, joined the HSL’S in the autonomist bloc. Meanwhile, in 1928, an HSL’S activist and lawyer, Vojtech Tuka (1880–1946), published a notorious article in the HSL’S’s official press organ Slovák (The Slovak), which he edited. He claimed that the Slovak National Council’s declaration of 30 October 1918 contained a secret clause, which provided that the common state of Czecho-Slovakia would

The Czech Nation

751

be founded for 10 years only. Hence he declared the period of vacuum juris (literary, legal void), which could only be ameliorated by a renewed round of Czech-Slovak negotiations in the form of their common state. In 1929, Tuka was found guilty of high treason and imprisoned for 15 years despite Hlinka’s protests, who believed in Tuka’s innocence. On one hand, the article played into the hands of Hungarian revisionists, but, on the other, emphasized the unsatisfied aspirations of the Slovak autonomists. Paradoxically, Prague made Tuka into a martyr of the Slovak national cause. Another crisis in the Czech-Slovak relations unfolded in 1933. Its background was formed by the two different visions of Czechoslovak history. Masaryk supported Hussitism as the unifying symbolical-cum-historical ideology of Czechoslovakia. But this Protestant hero fostered no support among the Orthodox Ruthenians, and the Catholic Slovaks and Greek Catholic Ruthenians saw him as an odious heretic. As a result, state-sponsored Hussitism deepened ethnolinguistic and national cleavages that had already criss-crossed Czechoslovakia. Palacký wrote about Greater Moravia, and Ján Hollý created the mythologized national link between the Slovaks and this early medieval polity with its brief tradition of Cyrillo-Methodian Christianity. Proponents of Czechoslovakism considered Greater Moravia the first common state of the Czechs and the Slovaks. Because the prospect of transforming Moravian regionalism into nationalism was not realized, there were no Moravian nationalists to counter this claim. Within this imagined national tradition the laconic medieval record about quidam Priwina (‘a Pribina’) gave rise to the myth of the ‘first Slovak state.’ With the support of the Frankish Empire, Pribina established a statelet in the area of present-day southwestern Slovakia. In 828, the Bishop of Slazburg consecrated the first Christian church in this polity. Five years later, the Great Moravian ruler Mojmir (Moimir) annexed Pribina’s polity. Interwar Slovak national historians, who christened Pribina’s statelet as the ‘Nitra Principality,’ presented this event as the destruction of the first Slovak state. This invested the Czechoslovak idea of Greater Moravia as the first Czechoslovak state with ambiguity, and allowed Slovak autonomists reinterpret it as the first instance of Czech dominance over the Slovaks. Hence, Slovak nationalists identified with the Nitra Principality and the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition, because this facilitated their differentiation vis-à-vis the common Czechoslovak tradition of Greater Moravia. The Westoriented Czechs of Bohemia associated the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition with Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, rejected Catholicism in favor of the Hussite tradition, and sometimes perceived Greater Moravia as an empire that suppressed the nascent Czech principality of Bohemia. This opened a cleavage between them and the Slovaks, as well as the Moravians (Moravian Czechs), and the Germans (German-speakers) of the Czech lands. On the other hand, the Czechs of Moravia had no qualms about accepting Greater Moravia,

752 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition and Catholicism as the pillars of their own Moravian-Czech-Slavic identity. In this respect, on the mythological plane, they were closer to the Slovaks, while their rejection of anti-Catholic Hussitism allowed for their affinity with Moravia’s Germans (German-speakers). When the first Slovak university was inaugurated in Bratislava (1919), Slovak politicians agreed that it should be named after the 17th-century famous theologian and writer, Ján Amos Komenský (Johan/John Comenius). As a Protestant, he had to emigrate from the Czech lands in 1624. He was a member of the Czech Brethren Church, which arose from Hussite Christianity, but especially Protestant Slovaks saw him as a common Czech and Slovak writer. In the Czech eyes, he wrote in Czech, and in the Slovak ones, in Old Slovak, that is, Bibliˇctina. In the case of the Magyar minority, Catholicism and the millennium-long tradition of shared statehood in historical Hungary underwrote their commonality with the Slovaks. On the other hand, it was the Magyar incursion that destroyed Greater Moravia in the early 10th century, which allowed Czechoslovak politicians to drive a wedge between this minority and the Slovaks, by accusing the former of the destruction of the first Czechoslovak state. This nicely merged with interwar Hungary’s attempts at regaining Upper Hungary, which Prague likened to the Magyar destruction of Greater Moravia. Ruthenian leaders and thinkers also sought to place their nation in this mythologized pattern of the early medieval Slavic past. In the 12th-century Gesta Hungaroroum chronicle, a story of Prince Laborec (Laborets’ in Ruthenian) was recorded. Perhaps a vassal of Greater Moravia, his castle might be located in the region of Užhorod. In 896, he unsuccessfully defended eastern Greater Moravia against the Magyar invasion. Incidentally, as he fled, Magyar troops managed to assassinate him in what today is eastern Slovakia. The 19th-century romantic writers, the Slovak, Bohuš Nosák-Nezabudov (1818–1877), and the Ruthenian, Anatolii Kralyts’kyi, popularized this figure. In the interwar period, Ruthenian writers and poets made him into the national hero of the Ruthenian nation parallel to the ‘Slovak prince Pribina.’ Voloshyn called him the ‘last ruler of the independent land of the Ruthenians (Marchia Ruthenorum).’ Similarly, to the ‘first Slovak state of the Nitra Principality,’ Laborec’s march was made into the ‘first Ruthenian state.’ As seen against this background, the 1933 clash of the proponents of Czechoslovakism and Slovak nationalists was not surprising. Hlinka and Slovak Catholics organized in Nitra the purely ecclesiastical celebrations of the 1100th anniversary of the consecration of the first Christian church on the territory of Czechoslovakia. (Obviously, this event was a politically motivated construct, because Pribina’s original church had been consecrated in 828 or 829, not in 833.) In an endeavor to repossess the Great Moravian, Pribina, and Cyrillo-Methodian complex of traditions for the mythological legitimization

The Czech Nation

753

of Czechoslovak statehood and nationhood, Prague transformed these celebrations into a state event. In the presence of Czechoslovak politicians, ecclesiastical hierarchs, and foreign diplomats, supporters of Hlinka and Slovak nationalists literally carried him to the official podium, where the HSL’S leader read the declaration demanding separate Slovak national statehood within truly federal Czecho-Slovakia. Hence, it turned out that the tradition of the ‘first common state of the Czechs and Slovaks’ could not be reclaimed for Czechoslovakia, and, at the same time, neither the Slovaks, nor the Ruthenians, Moravia’s Czechs, and Czechoslovakia’s minorities identified with the official Hussite ideology of Czechoslovak statehood (Kováˇc 1998: 24–27, 202, 219; Krekoviˇc et al. 2005: 30–31; Pop 2005: 20, 2005a; Rothschild 1977: 115; Semotanová 2003: 46; Tomaszewski 1997: 37, 45–46, 50–61; Tˇreštík 1999: 172–174). The endgame of interwar Czechoslovakia commenced in the mid-1930s. The erstwhile Allies were not interested in reversing the authoritarian trend in Central Europe, and acquiesced to the existence of the Soviet Union, which was admitted to the League of Nations in 1934. Nor did the Allies enforce the treaties contracted with Germany and other Central European states. In 1933, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. Two years later, the Saarland was reincorporated into Germany after a plebiscite. Later, in the blatant breach of the treaties, Berlin remilitarized the Rhineland (1936) and carried out the Anschluß of Austria, renamed ‘Ostmark’ (Eastern March). The Czech lands became fully encircled by the territory of the Third Reich. This situation and the strengthening of cooperation between Berlin and Budapest encouraged Hungary to press for the realization of its plans of regaining some of former Upper Hungary, that is, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The justification of Berlin’s and Budapest’s schemes on the Czechoslovak territory was the principle of national self-determination. At least in the Czech Borderlands and in southern Slovakia, Germans and Magyars constituted the majority of the population. Konrad Henlein’s national socialist party garnered most of the German votes, and entered the Parliament as the second largest party in 1935. With Berlin’s full support, Henlein complained about the mistreatment of the minorities in Czechoslovakia. In 1934, he appealed for decentralization of Czechoslovakia, and 2 years later, demanded that the state should be federalized along the ethnolinguistic lines. In April 1938, he sought full political autonomy for the Czech Borderlands, renamed in his and German propaganda as the Sudetenland. (One of the German-Austrian provinces of 1918, located in western Austrian Silesia and northern Moravia had borne this name too.) Similarly, in 1936, yielding to Budapest’s pressure, Magyar minority parties in Slovakia united under the roof of a single party led by János Esterházy. Now their demands for more rights and autonomy for the minority were better heard on the international plane. Masaryk’s resignation from the presidency required reshuffling of the established power patterns in Czechoslovakia, which weakened

754 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the state, because his successor, Beneš, did not muster a similar charisma. In March 1938, Warsaw informed Hlinka that Poland would support the independence of Slovakia. On 29 September 1938, Berlin, London, Rome, and Paris signed the Munich Agreement that demanded the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. On the following day, Prague accepted the terms, and Warsaw issued the ultimatum demanding the eastern section of Czech Silesia complete with most of the industrial basin and the strip of adjacent Slovak territory. On 1 October, Prague acquiesced. On 1 November Poland demanded seven tiny areas from Slovakia, and on the following day, in the course of the so-called First Vienna Arbitration, Hitler and Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) handed over southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Hungary. The days of the ‘First Republic’ of Czechoslovakia were over, and the transitional period of the ‘Second Republic’ of Czecho-Slovakia led directly toward World War II (Henlein 1936; Kováˇc 1998: 204; Rothschild 1977: 126, 130; Tomaszewski 1997: 51). Generally, interwar Czechoslovakia was the most modern and best-developed state in Central Europe. This respectable record was marred by regional differences; Slovakia in its predominantly agricultural character was reminiscent of Poland and eastern Hungary, and backward Subcarpathian Ruthenia could be compared to Poland’s eastern regions on the border with Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine. This emphasized even more the high level of development attained in the Czech lands, where 60 to 70 percent of former Austria-Hungary’s industrial potential was concentrated. Between 1913 and 1929, the GNP, generated in the lands of which Czechoslovakia was constituted, grew by 52 percent. The same indicator for Austria was only 5 percent. Obviously, the Czech lands were responsible for this stupendous economic growth. In 1930, 34.6 percent of the Czechoslovak workforce was employed in agriculture, but it meant 25.5 percent for the Czech lands and 56.7 percent for Slovakia. Still, all these indicators compared very favorably with Hungary and Poland, where 49 percent and 61 percent were employed in agriculture in the 1930s. If one treated data on agricultural workforce as the index of national development, the ranking of those employed in the sector would be as follows, Jews (13.6 percent), Poles (16.2 percent), Germans (23 percent), Czechs (26.9 percent), Slovaks (59.8 percent), Magyars (63.8 percent), and Ruthenians (82.1 percent). Naturally, the more members of a national group that were employed in agriculture, the narrower was its elite of the educated and industrial owners. This translated directly into the political and economic influence of a given state nation, or minority in Czechoslovakia. Jews and Poles apart, as tiny minorities, the main power holders were Czechs and Germans. Unlike workers in Poland and Hungary, industrial workers (57.3 percent) constituted the majority of the Czechoslovak workforce, which explained the genuine popularity of the communist party in the Czech lands after 1945.

The Czech Nation

755

This popularity was instrumental in establishing the Soviet regime in 1948, when such regimes had to be forced on the unwilling populations in Hungary and Poland. The elite, composed of professionals (0.5 percent), white-collar workers (6 percent), and managers, entrepreneurs and senior civil servants (5.8 percent), accounted for 12.3 percent of the workforce and was concentrated in the Czech lands. Indicative of this phenomenon was the number of professionals and civil servants, who amounted to 5.7 percent of the Czech workforce, 3.5 percent of the Slovak workforce, and only 2.1 percent of the Ruthenian workforce. In the case of the minorities, this indicator was 6 percent among Jews, 4.3 percent among Germans, 3.8 percent among Magyars, and 2.3 percent among Poles. Not surprisingly, better-educated Magyars bettered Slovaks in this competition, and Jews surpassed everyone. However, unlike in Poland and Hungary, restricting access to higher education on the basis of ethnolinguistic, national, or religious basis was a practice unheard of in Czechoslovakia. It was the sole Central European state, where Jews could freely pursue university education. Illiteracy had been negligible in the Czech lands since the 1860s. Between 1921 and 1930, it further decreased from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent. During the same period, it decreased in Slovakia from 14.7 percent to 8.2 percent, and from 50 percent to 30.9 percent in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. For all of Czechoslovakia, the overall decrease was from 7 percent to 4.1 percent. In the Czech lands, the general level of education was much better too. The percentages of males and females (generations of 25 to 29-year-olds are taken into consideration) who finished only elementary school were 63 and 74 in 1920, and 36 and 48 two decades later. The same percentage ratios for Slovakia were 85 to 88, and 78 to 83, respectively. Moreover, in 1940, at least 1 percent of Slovakia’s population still did not have any education, though such a phenomenon had not been observed in the Czech lands since the end of the 19th century. In 1940, in the Czech lands, 2 percent males and 1 percent females achieved university education, as well as 61 percent males and 40 percent females finished various types of schools of secondary education. In Slovakia, almost no women attended university, 1 percent males finished university education, and secondary education was achieved by 24 percent males and 15 percent females. Production of Czech books soared from 2300 titles in 1913, to 4600 titles in 1919. Afterward, it grew steadily to almost 6000 titles in 1937. Between 1901 and 1918, the average number of 150 Slovak titles was published annually. The production grew more than fourfold to 650 titles in 1937. In the late 1930s, annual book production in Hungary and Poland amounted to 3500 and 8700 titles, respectively. In per capita terms, this meant 25 titles per 100,000 inhabitants in Poland, 35 in Hungary, and 44 in Czechoslovakia. Following only the United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia was the second European country with regular radio

756 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

broadcasts, which began there in 1923. In the highly urbanized and industrialized Czech lands, radio sets became common household objects during the 1930s, while in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, ownership of radio sets was largely limited to the elite and well-to-do city-dwellers, as could be seen in Hungary and Poland (Musil 1995: 26, 41, 43; Rothschild 1977: 91–92; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 39, 81; Semotanová 2003: 44, 52). As in Poland and Hungary, language became a significant instrument of politics in interwar Czechoslovakia. This was already visible from the preceding overview of language legislation, which emphasized the sought after ethnolinguistic unity of the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks, in the context of the continued opposition of the comparatively large minorities of Germans and Magyars. The imposition of the legally and socially prescribed dominance of Czechoslovak (Czech) in the Czech lands was not such a big change for the German minority as the parallel imposition of Czechoslovak (Slovak) in Slovakia in the case of the local Magyars. The pre-1918 domination of German in the Czech lands was ‘soft’ with a varying degree of official bilingualism, and even multilingualism. On the contrary, the domination of Magyar was near to absolute in Upper Hungary (that is, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia). However, the overwhelmingly rural character of Upper Hungary translated into continuing traditionalism and weakness of the nascent national movements. This did not permit an easy instrumentalization of language into a weapon of politics, unlike in the Czech lands with the full-fledged popular educational system and a high degree of urbanization and industrialization. Schooling and constant interaction with those speaking other languages taught one to realize that one does not simply speak, but that one speaks something, which is a language. With not even an autonomous nation-state of theirs in Austria-Hungary, Czech nationalists took delight in the percental ‘decline’ of Germandom in ‘their’ capital of Prague. In 1880, Prague was a city of 266,000 inhabitants. Germans (including German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews) numbering 42,500 accounted for 13.7 percent of the population. By 1921, Prague had grown to house 625,000 inhabitants, while the number of Germans decreased to 30,500, or 4.6 percent of the population. The invisible ‘Sprachgrenze’ (language border) that exists exclusively in peoples’ heads, not unlike the ethnic boundary, was reified time and again on administrative maps of Bohemia and Moravia. Any changes in the run of these imaginary lines, Czech and German nationalists interpreted as ‘advances’ or ‘losses’ of their nation, and appealed for active ‘national struggle’ on the ‘language front’ to prevent the latter. The ritualized stand-offs between Czech and German promenaders confronting each other every Sunday morning in Prague’s center became the symbol of this struggle and sometimes ended as language riots. The Czech concept of the ‘Czech borderlands’ yielded the nationalist usage of hraniˇcáˇri (literally, frontiersmen)

The Czech Nation

757

for Czechs living in these predominantly German areas. Similarly, Germans spoke of Sprachgrenzlers (language frontiersmen), and conceptualized the CzechGerman border as a Volksgrenze, or the border of the ethnolinguistically-defined nation. The de facto dominance of Czech within the constitutional scheme of the common Czechoslovak state language for the Czech lands and Slovakia, led to conflicts in the field of language between the Czech and Slovak elites. The worst standoff took place in 1931 when the handbook, Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (The Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, Prague and Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), by the Czech scholar, Václav Vážný (1892–1966), was published. It was the first officially endorsed codification of Slovak for use in office and school. The publication was written in the spirit of Czechoslovakism. It encouraged the use of words and constructions similar or identical to Czech on the other hand, it discouraged the use of words which Slovaks considered as their own, because many of them appeared to be unacceptable Germanisms or Magyarisms to the Czech observers. In reaction to this imposition, the periodical Slovenská reˇc (The Slovak Language) was founded in 1932. It copied the model of Czech Naše ˇreˇc (established in 1917), Magyar Magyar Nyelv˝ or (established in 1872), and Polish Je˛zyk Polski (established in 1913), all ‘standing on the guard’ of the national languages. These periodicals, including the Slovak one, are published to this day. Slovenská reˇc permitted to reaffirm ‘linguistic sovereignty’ of the Slovak language vis-à-vis Czech. The new consensus was based on the 1919 edition of Samo Czambel’s Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (The Guide to the Written Slovak Language, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin) prepared by Jozef Škultéty (1853–1948). The main principle of this consensus was to purify Slovak of foreign linguistic loans, especially of Bohemianism and Germanisms. Since then, the idea of ever-closer union of Czech and Slovak toward some future Czechoslovak linguistic unity was dead. The main reason for the initiative’s failure was that it was Slovak that was to become more similar to Czech, and no similar concession of making Czech similar to Slovak was required. This linguistic quarrel pushed most Slovak linguists and philologists from the Protestant Slovak camp of Czechoslovakism to Hlinka’s Catholic circle of Slovak autonomists and independists. Prague’s similar heavy-handed linguistic policy toward Subcarpathian Ruthenia meant that Russian supplanted Galician Ukrainian in Ruthenian schools in 1936 despite parents’ protests. Ruthenian leaders were too divided and politically insignificant in Czechoslovakia to be able to counter Prague’s dictum, unlike their Slovak counterparts (Cornwall 1994: 927, 930–931; Kaˇcala 2001: 33–35; Sayer 1996: 153, 209). The tacit but apparent domination of Czech in Czechoslovakia was ideologically intertwined with Hussitism and the unusual veneration of Masaryk that verged on the cult of personality. For instance, the second Czech university founded in Brno (1919) was named after him, and the significant Czech-language

758 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

encyclopedia, Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (The Masaryk Scientific Dictionary, 1925–1933, Prague) as well. The political system in interwar Czechoslovakia depended so much on the person of Masaryk that his resignation from the post of President (1935), and subsequent death 2 years later must have also destabilized it. In this, democratic Czechoslovakia was not much different from authoritarian Poland, where the death of Józef Piłsudski (1935), acting as State Leader, also sent a wave of instability. In Slovakia, a comparable elevated status was enjoyed by Hlinka, and in Hungary by Horthy. The former died as late as 1938, which allowed for smoother transition of power from prewar to wartime independent Slovakia. Horthy’s regime carried through from 1920 through World War II, which, perhaps, ensured more stability in truncated post-Trianon Hungary than one would expect. The widespread respect, which Masaryk enjoyed in Czechoslovakia, did not usually carry across into naming institutions after him in Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. This cult of Masaryk coupled with the dominating position of Prague as the center of Czech politics, culture, and economy fortified the sought-for ethnolinguistic homogeneity of the Czech lands. On the contrary, in Poland, the leading role of Warsaw was contested by scholars, politicians, and entrepreneurs from Cracow and large cities (Lwów, Poznan, ´ Wilno), in Hungary a similar contest was played out even across the new Hungarian-Romanian border between Budapest and Cluj (Kolozsvár), and in Slovakia between ‘cosmopolitan Bratislava’ and ‘truly Slovak Turˇciansky Svätý Martin.’ But the ubiquitous presence of Germans through the Czech lands and in Czechoslovak politics belied the treasured myth of ethnolinguistic homogeneity. The last flowering of Germanophone literature written in the Czech lands, including Franz Kafka (1883–1924), took place between the two World Wars. Although a non-Czech speaker would not notice, but even where the Czech ethnolinguistic homogeneity had already been achieved, it was largely a myth. In Bohemia, the tension was between spisovná ˇceština (standard written Czech) and obecná ˇceština (Prague’s interdialect used as standard spoken Czech, and not directly related to spisovná ˇceština), and between both these forms and local dialects in Moravia and Czech Silesia. In addition, due to the centuries-long tradition of Czech/SlavicGerman bilingualism, the knowledge of German remained widespread among Czechs. As a result, Czechs were trilingual in Bohemia, and quadrilingual in Moravia and Czech Silesia. The myth of unity of the Czech language remains mainly due to the fact that non-Czech-speakers usually cannot peer into the complicated diglossia of spisovná ˇceština, obecná ˇceština, and the Moravian and Silesian dialects, and Czech-speakers themselves have at their disposal only dictionaries of spisovná ˇceština, which function as dictionaries of the Czech language. In Bohemia, obecná ˇceština is acquired at home, but local dialects in Moravia and Czech Silesia. Thus, in Moravia and Czech Silesia, a local Czech needs to master obecná

The Czech Nation

759

ˇceština, and the complicated patterns of code-switching between spisovná ˇceština and obecná ˇceština by perusal of literature, mass media and participation in social life. There are no dictionaries or textbooks of obecná ˇceština, which makes the task of learning Czech quite onerous for foreigners. Proportions in the mix of spisovná ˇceština and obecná ˇceština amount to crucial speech acts that indicate formality and intimacy between speakers. To put it simply, one would have problems wooing a Czech monoglot by speaking to her or him exclusively in spisovná ˇceština. It would be the same predicament in English, if one pursued a romance speaking exclusively in academese. Understandably, like prior to 1918 and also in interwar Czechoslovakia, the main efforts at codifying standard Czech meant the codification of spisovná ˇceština, and the situation lasts largely unchanged to this day. Between the two World Wars, some appealed for doing away with spisovná ˇceština in favor of obecná ˇceština as standard Czech. This solution would entail three serious drawbacks. First, it would be emulating the model of the Slovak codification, though the average Czech saw the Slovaks and their language as somewhat belated and undeveloped if not simply backward. Second, numerous publications produced in spisovná ˇceština since the end of the 18th century would be lost for the Czech reader, and, even worse, for the Czech national cause. Third, new standard Czech grounded in obecná ˇceština would still remain a foreign language to the Slavophone inhabitants of Moravia and Czech Silesia. Hence, the slow spread of spisovná ˇceština-based Czech into the regions would be nullified and a similar process had to be repeated again in the case of spisovná ˇceština elevated to the rank of standard Czech. It could be dangerous for Czech nation building because it would emphasize ethnolinguistic differences existing between the Czech lands. In the 19th century, these differences limited the thrust of Czech nationalism to Bohemia, and the spread of this nationalism to Moravia and Czech Silesia was completed only in interwar Czechoslovakia (Eckert 1993: 143–149; Harna and Fišer 1998: 161; Tarajło-Lipowska 1994: 91–93). The codification of standard Czech as to be used at school and in office was achieved in the last three decades of the 19th century. The Matice cˇeská’s influential Brus jazyka ˇceského (The Whetstone of the Czech Language, 1877, Prague) set the course equalizing correctness with Czechness, meaning ‘purifying’ this language of Germanisms and other foreign linguistic loans. Further editions of this work followed in 1881 and 1894. This work replaced the more conservative Prawidla ˇceského prawopisu (The Principles of Correct Writing in Czech, 1846, Prague), earmarked for use in secondary schools and teachers’ colleges. Following the puristic principles of Brus jazyka ˇceského, the Moravian, František Bartoš (1837–1906), published his Rukovˇet’ správné ˇceštiny (The Handbook of Correct Czech, 1891, Telˇc/Teltsch) for schools. Two further editions followed in 1893 and 1901. Jan Gebauer’s archaizing and purist Mluvnice ˇceská

760 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

pro školy stˇrední a ústavy uˇcitelské (The Czech Grammar for Schools and Teachers’ Colleges, 1890, Prague and Vienna) and officially adopted Pravidla hledící k ˇceskému pravopisu a tvarosloví (The Rules of Czech Orthography and Morphology, 1902, Prague) made the Dobrovský-Gebauer codification of the Czech language into the standard. Subsequent editions of Gebauer’s grammar, revised first by Václav Ertl, then after his death, by František Trávníˇcek, were used in Czech schools until World War II. In emulation of Gebauer’s Pravidla hledící k ˇceskému pravopisu a tvarosloví, the official textbook, Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu s abecednim seznamem slov a tvaru˙ (The Rules of Czech Orthography with the Dictionary of Words and Their Conjugated Forms, Prague) was published in 1913. Reeditions followed in 1917 and 1919. The publication gave prescriptive guidance to be followed in Czech schools. In 1921, the Ministry of Schools and National Education officially espoused this textbook and sponsored the new edition, which underlaid the transformation of Czech into an official form of Czechoslovak language to be employed in the Czech lands. Decisions regarding standard Czech were reached in Prague. There was no other Czech power or intellectual center to challenge them. Unexpectedly, Russian linguists who fled Bolshevik Russia, such as Roman Jakobson or Nikolay Trubetzkoy (1890–1938), and their Czech colleagues with broad AustroHungarian education, such as René Wellek (1903–1995) or Bohuslav Havránek, formed the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926. It remained active until the outbreak of World War II, and some of its members, having migrated to the United States, decisively influenced the development of linguistics, literary theory, and Slavic studies in the second half of the 20th century. Their international renown allowed the circle to lambaste prescriptivism and purism of Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu and Gebauer’s grammar propagated by the journal, Naše ˇreˇc, in Spisovná ˇceština a jazyková kultura (Written Czech and Language Culture, Prague, 1932) edited by Havránek and Miloš Weingart. Significantly, they appealed to the Czech Academy of Sciences and Art that it should work out the new principles of Czech orthography and writing that would take into account the latest developments in linguistics. These appeals and new approaches to language standardization though strongly reverberating across Czechoslovakia and Central Europe, did not elicit any official reaction. The Czech Academy of Sciences and Art took up the matter only after the war in Nové vydání pravidel ˇceského pravopisu. Zpráva pro diskusi (The New Edition of the Rules of Czech Orthography: An outline for discussion 1956, Prague), which became the standard prescriptive guidance already the following year when the academic edition of Bohuslav Havránek and František Trávníˇcek’s Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu (1957, Prague) appeared. In 1958, the school edition, Zavádˇení nových Pravidel ˇceského pravopisu na školách (Introducing the New Rules of Czech Orthography for Schools, Prague), was published and reprinted frequently as Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu until 1993, when

The Czech Nation

761

the completely new edition was published and approved by the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Physical Education. In 1918, the name of the Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art (founded in 1890) was changed to that of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Art. No similar national academies were established for the Slovaks or Ruthenians. The Czech academy was intended to function as the national academy of entire Czechoslovakia, though the role was not adequately reflected in its new name. This constituted another argument for Slovak and Ruthenian leaders that Czechoslovakia was a mere disguise for building a Greater Czech nation-state, a project not much different from Berlin and Vienna’s aspiration to forge a Greater German nation-state by a union of Germany and Austria. The difference was that the German and Austro-German national programs converged, while Slovak and Ruthenian national aspirations diverged vis-à-vis those of the Czechs. As in the case of Magyar and Polish, history of the Czech language in the interwar period was marked by the increasing preoccupation with the prescriptive ideal of correctness. All the three languages were made into official languages in three brand new nation-states. The typically Central European ideological coupling of national statehood with the ideal of ‘linguistic sovereignty,’ entailed a wave of purism against ‘foreign elements,’ which threatened the ethnolinguistic unity. The 1931 Slovak rejoinder to the Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu, which was considered ‘too Czech,’ was part of the same phenomenon. The Czech prescriptivism and purism as established and popularized by the Czech Academy of Sciences and Art and Naše ˇreˇc, caused the establishment of the new journal, Naše úˇrední ˇceština (Our Office Czech, 1921–1933), to ‘weed out’ Germanisms from Czech officialese. Czech technical and natural science vocabulary was codified by the seven-volume Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný, the ten-volume Komenského slovník nauˇcný (The Komenský [Comenius] Scientific Dictionary, 1937–1938, Prague), and Vladimír Teyssler (1891–1958) and Vacláv Kotyška’s (1865–1945) 17-volume Technicky slovník nauˇcný. Ilustrovaná encyklopedié vˇed technickych (Scientific Dictionary of Technology: Illustrated encyclopedia of technical sciences, 1927–1949, Prague). In addition, between 1930 and 1943, the six volumes of the Dodatky (Supplement, Prague) to 20volume pre-1918 Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (Otto Scientific Dictionary, 1888–1909, Prague) were published in 12 parts. Despite these achievements, no monolingual multivolume and authoritative dictionary of the Czech language was published. It was a painful realization for the Czech elite because of such a close link between language and nationalism in Central Europe. This deficiency made Czech into a backward language vis-à-vis German, and, even worse, Magyar ˇ and Polish. Štepan František Kott’s seven-volume Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (Czech-German Grammatical and Phraseological Dictionary, 1878–1893, Prague) was not monolingual, and the three volumes of

762 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Pˇríspˇevky (Supplement, 1897–1906, Prague) to this lexicographic work did not ameliorate this deficiency. In an endeavor to improve the situation, František Pastrnek (1853–1940) initiated in 1905 the action of gathering material for the intended Thesaurus ˇceského jazyka (Thesaurus of the Czech Language). Six years later, this initiative inspired the creation of the Chancery for the Dictionary of the Czech Language in the Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art. During the Great Depression, the work on the dictionary faltered but was resumed already in 1931. In 1935, on the centenary of the publication of the first volume of Josef Jungmann’s five-volume Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), the first fascicle of the nine-volume2 Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1935–1957, Prague) appeared. The publication of this first ever monolingual authoritative dictionary of the Czech language spanned the times of late interwar Czechoslovakia, World War II, and early communist Czechoslovakia. (The interwar user of Czech had to content herself with Pavel Váša and František Trávníˇcek’s twovolume Slovník jazyka ˇceského [Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1934–1937, Prague]. Another edition appeared in 1941.) This dictionary’s fate followed that of the Czech nation, and most surprisingly, was not discontinued. But its history was checkered. Between 1935 and 1948, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Art was the main overseer of this dictionary. When the communist regime was established in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the academy’s freshly founded Ústav pro jazyk cˇeský (Institute for the Czech Language) took over the control of this publication for the next 5 years. ˇ In 1952, the centralized Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Ceskoslovenská akademie vˇed) was established, and controlled the dictionary beginning in 1953. The Governmental Publishing House (Státní nakladatelství) printed the lexicographic work in 1935–1938 and 1945–1948. When the rump Czech lands were organized as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia within the Third Reich, this ambitious project was downgraded to an extensive school dictionary, and it was printed by the School Publishing House (Školní nakladatelství). Following the 1948 communist takeover, the renewed Governmental Publishing House was downgraded to the rank of the State Publishing House of Textbooks (Státní nakladatelství uˇcebnic) in 1948, before it was finally renamed as the State Pedagogical Publishing House (Státní pedagogické nakladatelství) in 1951. To make this dictionary acceptable to the changing regimes, the fascicles published during the period of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were purged of the terms, ‘Czechoslovak,’ ‘Czecho-Slovak,’ and any other words, abbreviations, and acronyms derived from them. These restrictions were dropped in 1945, but the installation of the Stalinist regime demanded following the ‘genius of Stalin’s contributions on marxism in linguistics,’ as

The Czech Nation

763

accordingly noted in the short introduction to Volume VI. Similar linguisticcum-ideological changes did not save the Dodatky of the Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný, whose publication was discontinued in 1943, and the last two planned volumes never appeared. The Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského collected the entire vocabulary of spisovná ˇceština, which appeared in Czech-language publications between 1870 and the mid-20th century. It was reasoned that the gap between the 1830s (when Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký appeared) and 1870 was covered by ˇ Kott’s Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický. Despite all odds, the completion of the Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského made the Czech language, at last, equal to German, Magyar, or Polish, as nationally minded linguists and linguistically-minded politicians saw it. The brevity of the interwar period and the need of expanding resources in other fields of linguistics and lexicography did not permit the continuation of Gebauer’s incomplete Slovník staroˇceský (Old Czech Dictionary, 1903–1916, Prague), which intended to gather Czech vocabulary from the Middle Ages to the mid-18th century. The publication of a similar Polish dictionary, Słownik staropolski (Old Polish Dictionary, Warsaw) commenced only in 1953, but Magyar received its Magyar nyelvtörténeti szótar (Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest) between 1890 and 1893. In the case of Slovak, the publication of Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (The Historical Dictionary of the Slovak Language, Bratislava) commenced in 1991, 2 years after the fall of communism. The rather unreliable Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského (The Short Etymological Dictionary of the Czechoslovak Language, 1933, Prague) by Josef Holub was published 6 years after the equally unreliable Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, Cracow and Warsaw) by Aleksander Brückner. Despite the 1931 quarrel over too much Czechized for the Slovaks’ liking Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu, Holub’s work continued the increasingly discredited official line, which emphasized unity of the Czechoslovak language. But the argument was that standard Slovak stemmed from Bibliˇctina and Bernolaˇctina. The former was not much different from late 16th-century Czech, and the latter, from the dialectal point of view, was closer to Czech than standard Slovak. Even for Slovak scholars, it was difficult to dispute the official pet theory that the Czechoslovak culturalcum-linguistic commonality existed at least between the Middle Ages and the mid-19th century. This ‘joint approach’ to Czech and Slovak linguistics was resurrected for a short period of time after 1945, and culminated in the publication of Václav Machek’s Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Language, 1957, Prague). The 1968 and 1997 editions of Machek’s dictionary dropped the Slovak language from the title, which resulted in the first straightforward etymological dictionary of the Czech language, Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague). So far, not a single stand-alone

764 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

etymological dictionary of Slovak has been published, whereas the never completed publication of the over-ambitious Magyar etymologiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, Budapest) lasted between 1914 and 1944. A simple one-volume Magyar szófejt˝ o szótár (Magyar Etymological Dictionary, Budapest) appeared in 1941. The pioneer period of the codification of Magyar between the 1820s and 1870s was recorded in A Magyar nyelvújítás szótára (Dictionary of the Magyar Language Reform, 1902–1908, Budapest). In the case of Czech, a similar special role was played by Karel Novák’s (1862–1942) Slovník k ˇceským spisu˚m Husovým (The Dictionary of Hus’s Czech-Language Writings, 1934), because Hus’s language was regarded as the acme of 16th-century Czech from which spisovná ˇceština was derived, and to which a Czech-speaker should ideally look for guidance. Hus’s works have been frequently reprinted for public consumption in the Czech lands and Slovakia since the interwar period. Last but not the least, in 1937, Pavel Váša and František Trávníˇcek’s Slovník jazyka ˇceského (Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague) came off the press. It was re-published in 1941, 1946, and 1952. The last date was highly symbolic. In 1952, the Czechoslovak lexicological and lexicographical conference convened in Bratislava. Its task was to incorporate the tenets of marxism into Czechoslovak linguistics, and to work out methods that would ensure ideological compliance of Czech and Slovak dictionaries, grammars, and language textbooks with the requirements of the communist system. The same process, which required full compliance of humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences with the marxist dogma, unfolded across the Soviet bloc, including Hungary and Poland. In practice, cultural elements, ideas, interpretations, terms, and words, perceived as incongruent with a contemporary version of Soviet Marxism, were either purged, suppressed, or criticized and branded as ‘backward’ or ‘bourgeois’ (Auty 1980: 180–181; Havránek and Weingart 1932: 250–251; Karlík et al. 2002: 422; Neustupný 1989: 221; Weingart 1937: 30–33, 44–45).

Again: The twilight of German-Czech bilingualism The descent of Czechoslovakia into World War II commenced with the Munich Agreement (29 September 1938), when the West betrayed the last Central European democracy. The Sudetenland and other territories ceded from the Czech lands to the Third Reich amounted to 28,600 sq km and were populated by 3.18 million Germans and 0.32 million Czechs. Czech sources speak of at least 0.6 million Czechs living in these territories during the war. The Germans who remained in the rump Czech lands amounted to 0.37 million (conservative Czech sources speak of 0.25 million Germans). Neighbors did not miss the opportunity to betray Czechoslovakia either. On 1 October, in reply to the Polish ultimatum, Prague gave up most of its section of Teschen Silesia (830 sq km) along with 65 percent of its black coal mining potential. A month later, on

The Czech Nation

765

1 November, Poland demanded seven tiny pieces of the Slovak territory, and accordingly obtained them. On the following day, Hitler and Mussolini granted Hungary southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The former territory amounted to 8900 sq km and the latter to 1500 sq km. Their populations included 0.5 million Magyars and 0.27 million Slovaks and Ruthenians. Slovakia lost its second biggest city, Košice, and Subcarpathian Ruthenia its biggest, Užhorod, so that the region’s capital had to be moved to Chust. As a consequence, Czechoslovakia lost three-tenths of its territory, onethird of its population, and four-tenths of its income. The truncation of Czechoslovakia did not produce the sought-for ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity either. Over 1.25 million Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians found themselves on the territories ceded to Germany, Hungary, and Poland, while 0.5 million Germans and Magyars remained in rump Czechoslovakia. On 5 October 1938, Beneš resigned from the presidency and left the country. He was replaced by Emil Hácha (1872–1945), President of the Supreme Administrative Court, who was elected as President of Czechoslovakia on 30 November. Earlier, on 7 and 11 October, autonomy was granted to Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, respectively. This action came a little late, but at this point, Prague finally complied with the Czech-Slovak Pittsburgh Agreement (1918), and the promise of autonomy for the Ruthenians, as stipulated in the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919). But this could not save Czechoslovakia, just as Emperor Charles I’s declaration on federalization of the Dual Monarchy (October 1918) did not save Austria-Hungary. After 1918, the Allies and most of the monarchy’s variegated national movements turned against the polity spelling its doom. In 1938 and 1939, not only the Western European powers, but also Italy, Germany, and the neighboring states (except Romania and the Soviet Union) were bent on dismantling Czechoslovakia. On 19 November 1938, the acts on the autonomy of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia were adopted, and the name of Czechoslovakia was changed to the more appropriate one of Czecho-Slovakia. In early 1939, Berlin and Warsaw encouraged the Slovak leaders to declare independence of their autonomous region. In this manner, Germany’s attention could focus exclusively on the rump Czech lands and the Polish-Hungarian alliance would face a weaker polity of stand-alone Slovakia rather than Czecho-Slovakia. Father Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), Hlinka’s successor as the HSL’S chairman, became President of autonomous Slovakia. On 13 March 1939, Hitler demanded of him that Slovakia declare its independence, and the following day, this event took place. Slovakia left Czecho-Slovakia, which separated Subcarpathian Ruthenia also from this state. Without any international or Czecho-Slovak opposition, the Third Reich occupied the rump Czech lands on 15 March, and on the next day, they were incorporated into Greater Germany as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. (Czech Silesia was not mentioned in the polity’s name,

766 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

because it had been almost fully annexed by Germany and Poland in 1938.) On the same day, when German troops entered the Czech lands, the President of autonomous Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Voloshyn, had no choice but to declare independence of its region following his telephone conversation with Hácha. The polity’s name was changed to that of Carpathian Ukraine, and Voloshyn requested Berlin to grant protection to the Ruthenian nation-state. Budapest would have none of that, and Berlin was too much interested in Hungarian support for its offensive politics in Central Europe to protect the independence of Carpathian Ukraine. Between 14 and 18 March 1939, Hungary annexed Carpathian Ukraine. On 23 March, Germany extended its protection to independent Slovakia, but Berlin chose not to react when Hungarian troops entered eastern Slovakia on the same day and seized a territory of 1900 sq km with an almost exclusively Slovak and Ruthenian population of 40,000. Bratislava had no choice but to accept the new Slovak-Hungarian border on 4 April. Further border changes took place after Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland in September 1939. Slovakia was only the third country that participated in this partition on the German side. In reward, Bratislava regained the Slovak territories ceded to Poland in 1939. The Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia, which had been incorporated into Poland at the same time, was annexed directly to Germany. Interestingly, between 1938 and 1939, Slovak diplomacy pressed Berlin hard to assist Slovakia in ‘regaining’ Slovácko (also Moravské Slovensko, or Moravian Slovakia), that is, the ethnographically differentiated region of southeastern Moravia, where the local dialect is closer to standard Slovak than standard Czech. (The ethnolinguistic distinctiveness of this region, largely neglected and not acknowledged in Czechoslovakia, was to become the launch pad for the Moravian national movement after the fall of communism.) Eventually, Bratislava’s demands extended to entire Eastern Moravia and a section of eastern Czech Silesia. Berlin did not budge, because this would unnecessarily antagonize Czechs in the protectorate, and diminish the protectorate’s territory and economic viability (Deák 1996: 107, 129, 133; Eberhardt 1996: 115, 117; Harna and Fišer 1998: 177; Mezihorák 1994; Pop 2005: 140, 144; Rothschild 1977: 132; Sobota 1946: 89; Tomaszewski 1997: 272–273). Immediately after the Hungarian and Polish annexations, the arrival of Magyar and Polish troops and civil servants commenced. They were accompanied by the return of some Magyar and Polish inhabitants, who had left these areas between 1918 and the early 1920s, when they became part of Czechoslovakia. The phenomenon of ‘returns’ were not so pronounced in the Sudetenland, as relatively few Germans had left their home regions for Germany or Austria after World War I. However, the influx of German soldiers, civil servants, and entrepreneurs from Germany to the Sudetenland, and later, to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was pronounced. During World War II, the protectorate and the Sudetenland found themselves in the center of wartime Germany,

The Czech Nation

767

which insulated them from the danger of Allied and Soviet air raids almost until the end of the war. This entailed the influx of German children and civilians from other areas of the Third Reich exposed to such attacks. As a result of the 1938–1939 border changes, 169,000 refugees left the territories incorporated to Germany (including 139,000 Czechs and 10,500 Jews), 22,000 left the territories annexed by Poland (including 18,000 Czechs), 11,600 left the territories seized by Hungary (including, 10,000 Czechs), and 8200 left independent Slovakia (including 7600 Czechs). Slovak sources claim that the number of Czech refugees and expellees was as high as 20,000. At first, the refugees usually fled to the rump Czech lands. Later on, they came to the protectorate, but many preferred to emigrate to Western Europe and Northern America. The majority of the participants of this exodus were Czechs and Czech Jews, which indirectly supported the usual Slovak, Ruthenian, German, and Magyar complaint that Czech officials dominated the structures and offices of entire Czechoslovakia. Because the protectorate formed part of the all-German economy, by 1945, 84,000 Czechs from this territory were employed in the Sudetenland, and as many as 600,000 throughout the Third Reich. It should also be noted that following the Hungarian occupation of Carpathian Ukraine, 40,000 Ruthenians crossed the border to Poland’s Galicia, where they joined the Ukrainian national movement, which was especially active later, when this region was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine, and then, into Germany’s Generalgouvernement. In this latter polity, that is rump Poland, Ukrainians enjoyed a better educational system, complete with secondary schools, than Poles whose education was limited to elementary schooling. The border changes also had direct bearing on the situation of official languages. In 1938, Czech, Slovak, and Ruthenian (including Russian and Ukrainian as employed in official capacity in Subcarpathian Ruthenia) were replaced by German, Polish, and Magyar in the Czechoslovak territories annexed respectively by Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Simultaneously, Slovak and Ruthenian (including Ukrainian) achieved elevated national status in autonomous Slovakia and autonomous Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which previously was denied to them by the actual domination of Czech throughout Czechoslovakia. In 1939, the situation changed again with the demise of Czecho-Slovakia and the German-Soviet partition of Poland. In the territories, which Poland gained in 1938, Polish was replaced by German and Slovak as official languages. In briefly independent Carpathian Ukraine, Ukrainian replaced Ruthenian. Carpathian Ukraine was organized as the autonomous Kárpátalja (Carpathia) in wartime Hungary with two official languages, Magyar and HungarianRuthenian (that is, vernacular Ruthenian). Despite official discouragement, the Russophile faction of the Ruthenian elite continued to publish books in Russian.

768 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Hungary was suddenly transformed from almost an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state into a multi-ethnic one. This necessitated the introduction of a modicum of minority education in Slovak and was allowed in Felvidék (Upper Hungary), which became the accepted Hungarian name for the annexed southern and eastern Slovak territories. Slovakia reciprocated by keeping some Magyar schools for the remaining Magyar minority, but the relations were permanently soured by Bratislava’s references to the ‘bleeding border’ between Slovakia and Hungary, and officially supported Slovak irredentism, a direct reflection of interwar Hungary’s irredentism. On the other hand, there was much rejoicing since, for the first time in history, the Slovaks achieved their own nation-state complete with Slovak as its official language. The interwar Slovak-Czech bilingualism, spread in Slovakia under the guise of the official Czechoslovak language, was firmly replaced by Slovak monolingualism. A good indicator of this process was the fact that in 1939, in independent Slovakia (which had lost much territory to Hungary), the production of Slovak books immediately rose to 700 titles, that is by 8 percent in comparison to the 1938 output. Another sign of the swing of the pendulum was the official announcement that Bohemianisms constituted 46.5 percent of all ‘barbarisms’ (that is, linguistic loans) of which Slovak was to be purged. In this scheme, the number of unwanted Germanisms and Magyarisms amounted to 8.2 percent and 3 percent, respectively. However, Bratislava allowed for considerable development of German-language educational and cultural life for the 135,000 to 150,000strong minority of the so-called ‘Carpathian Germans’ under the leadership of Franz Karmasin (1901–1970). The budget of German minority education in Slovakia tripled between 1940 and 1943, and the schools followed the curriculum employed in Germany. As a German satellite, Slovakia had no choice, and the intensifying Slovak-German relations in the fields of economy and military affairs, also helped spread the knowledge of German among Slovaks (Carpathian German History 2005; Dulichenko and Magocsi 2005; Education for Minorities in Slovakia 2004; Gebhart 1999: 16; Jánský et al. 1940: 9; Kováˇc 1998: 213, 224; Krekoviˇc et al. 2005: 183; Krofta 1946: 846; Magocsi 2005; Pop 2005: 147; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 83; Two Years of German Oppression in Czechoslovakia 1941: 135; Varsik 1940; Zimmermann 1999: 46). The language situation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia stood in stark opposition to the unprecedented elevation of Slovak to the position of the sole official language in Slovakia. The official Czech monolingualism was immediately replaced with Czech-German bilingualism. The vast majority of the protectorate’s population were Czechs, but due to the German political, economic and cultural dominance, German was the dominant language and Czech found itself a weaker partner of this bilingual pair; like Slovak used to vis-à-vis Czech in interwar Czechoslovakia. The Czecho-Slovak government with Hácha at its helm remained in power as the protectorate’s government.

The Czech Nation

769

Despite incorporation into the Third Reich, the situation of the protectorate was more similar to Vichy France than the Generalgouvernement. The bilingual German-Czech administration stopped at the levels of the center and regions. In counties and communes, prewar Czech-language administration remained. In the Generalgouvernement, a modicum of Polish- and Ukrainian-language administration was allowed exclusively at the lowest local level. But Vichy France was largely left to govern itself as long as this did not clash with Berlin’s interests. The German protector intervened directly in the protectorate. Immediately, the left-handed organization of traffic was changed to right-handed; Czechoslovak politicians had not been able to agree on this change for two decades. Next, on 17 November 1939, all Czech university-level educational institutions were closed. The Czech University of Prague was merged with its German-language counterpart and German completely replaced Czech as the medium of instruction. Thereafter, a university education was available only through the medium of German, which was a drastic change. Until that time, the Czech-language University of Prague had been continuously catering to the educational needs of the Czechs already since 1882. The Czech Academy of Sciences and Art continued to function, but the protectorate’s authorities favored its German counterpart, the Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften (German Academy of Sciences),3 which was founded in Prague in 1941. Berlin did not attempt to liquidate Czech-language secondary education as it did in Poland, but each educated Czech was expected to speak fluent German. Accordingly, the educational system began to teach this language intensively, and the network of German national schools for the protectorate’s German minority and children of civil servants, who had arrived from Germany, too developed. On 21 March 1939, the commander of the German troops in the protectorate announced German and Czech as official languages of the polity, but in reality, the protectorate’s German administration never employed Czech. On the contrary, the Czech administration was obliged to use both languages, with the exception of communes where civil servants could choose either Czech or German as the language of administration. On 23 April 1940, Czech civil servants were given 2 years of grace for mastering German. After 22 January 1941, German civil servants were no longer allowed to use Czech in administration. Full German-Czech bilingualism was demanded on plaques and signposts with names of localities and streets, as well as those of offices, companies, schools, and other public institutions. Any information on posters, banknotes, tickets, office forms, bills and so on, was given in German and Czech. This bilingualism was also used in cinemas, radio broadcasting, telephone services, and commerce and business correspondence and bookkeeping. German commissars delegated to 150 Czech communes ensured the observance of bilingualism. Wherever German students attended Czech schools, teaching had to be conducted in both languages, but certificates were issued to such

770 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

students exclusively in German. On 1 June 1940, it was prohibited to display and use any Czechoslovak national symbols or memorabilia, including the words, ‘Czechoslovakia,’ ‘Czecho-Slovakia,’ and adjectives, abbreviations and acronyms derived from them. This entailed a widespread action of removing labels and inscriptions with such offensive words (including the term, ‘made in Czechoslovakia’) from machines, books, clothes etc. The penetration of German was such that it intruded even on Czech syntax and usage. The official terms, ‘Führer,’ ‘Reichsregierung,’ (the government of the Third Reich), or ‘Reichsprotektor in Böhmen und Mähren’ (the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia) were featured in Czech texts in German, and often in Gothic characters, though Czech texts were published exclusively in the Antiqua script. A similar practice extended to using exclusively German-language versions of foreign place-names in Czech publications, for instance, German Wien (Vienna) instead of Czech Víden ˇ (Kavulok 1942: 99–100; Krofta 1946: 809; Protektorát 2005; Sobota 1946: 90–115). As in the rest of Europe under Berlin’s control, most persecutions were directed against Jews and Roma under the framework of Endlösung (the ‘final solution’). In Poland and Lithuania, German forces killed 92 percent and 90 percent of the local Jews, respectively. The third highest percentage of Jews killed was in Czechoslovakia, where 85 percent Jews perished, or 270,000; specifically, 80,000 to 90,000 from the Czech lands, and similar numbers from Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The number of Roma killed was not exactly established but it was at least in the tens of thousands on the territory of interwar Czechoslovakia, including 5000 from the Czech lands. Due to repression, 50,000 Czechs also lost their lives. The entire number of prewar Czechoslovak citizens killed during World War II is estimated at 370,000, or 2.5 percent of the population. There were many fewer than 5 million (including 3 million Jews) victims of national socialist terror in Poland. The Czech inhabitants of the protectorate enjoyed a privileged status. For all practical reasons, they were treated as Reich citizens but did not have to serve in the German army. On one hand, they were not trusted, whereas on the other, it was more important for the war effort that they ensured smooth running of the protectorate’s industry. At the end of the war, most of the Reich’s industrial output flowed from this area and from the formerly Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia. Although the postwar Czechoslovak historiography unanimously vilified the protectorate’s Czech administration as traitors, it seems that they always acted on the borderline of open disloyalty to Germany striving to ensure as much cultural and political autonomy for the Czechs as possible. In this, they did not differ from the Vichy regime. However, unlike in Vichy France, such efforts in the protectorate cost some high Czech officials their lives, including the protectorate’s Prime Minister, General Alois Eliáš (1890–1942). But Czech culture

The Czech Nation

771

survived and was largely intact thanks perhaps to their endeavors. Additionally, the slump in the production of Czech books during the war was slight. In 1948, the annual output of 5500 titles had already caught up with that of 1937. In Poland, the prewar level of book production was finally achieved in 1965. In the protectorate, the publication of Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského continued, and the School Publishing House for Bohemia and Moravia published the new edition of Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu s abecednim seznamem slov a tvaru˚ (Prague) in 1941 (Magocsi 2002: 189; Kováˇc 1998: 229–231; Pop 2005: 151; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 41; Semotanová 2003: 59; Surosz 2004).

Czechoslovakia: A home to two nations? When Germany occupied the Czech lands of Czecho-Slovakia on 15 March 1939, Beneš was in the United States. He and his supporters argued that this act made the Munich Agreement null and void. This interpretation paved the way for the founding of the Czechoslovak National Committee in the United Kingdom on 16 April. A degree of legitimacy was given to the body by Masaryk’s son, Jan (1886–1948), who chaired this committee. In November, the former Czechoslovak Prime Minister and a Slovak, Milan Hodža (1879–1944), established the Slovak National Council in Paris. His and other Slovak leaders’ insistence that postwar Czechoslovakia should be a genuine federation led to their withdrawal from the Czechoslovak government in exile in late 1942. After this, the government was an exclusively Czech affair. The Czechoslovak National Committee had spawned the government. Between 1939 and 1941, Paris, London, and Washington recognized it. The Western Allies also agreed with Beneš’s interpretation of the Munich Agreement, and announced it void and null in 1942. Meanwhile, Beneš and the Polish government in exile declared their eagerness to form a common Czechoslovak-Polish federation. Simultaneously, Slovak communists proposed transforming Slovakia into a Soviet-style republic, or to incorporate it into the Soviet Union. But in 1943, it was clear that the Allies leaned to the idea of recreating Czechoslovakia in its prewar shape. In December, in opposition to the ruling HSL’S regime, Slovak democrats and communists founded the Slovak National Council. They pledged to fight the Germans and Tiso’s regime and then agreed to the re-establishment of Czechoslovakia as a federation of the equal nations of the Czechs and Slovaks. On 12 December 1943, the Czechoslovak–Soviet agreement on friendship and cooperation was signed in Moscow. This made it possible to form a Czechoslovak army in the Soviet Union. In the initial period, 90 percent of the soldiers were Ruthenians. Ironically, no Ruthenian was a member of the Czechoslovak government. To add insult to injury, Beneš stated in June 1941 that Subcarpathian Ruthenia might belong either to postwar Czechoslovakia or Soviet Russia. Obviously, nobody asked the Ruthenians. Further, when in Moscow during

772 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

December 1943, he said that he expected the region to return to Czechoslovakia but that it should be united with Soviet Ukraine on the cultural and linguistic plane. Not surprisingly, Moscow proposed in March 1944 that in exchange for the cession of Subcarpathian Ruthenia to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia would receive a section of prewar German Upper Silesia. (Eventually, all of this German region was granted to Poland.) It was obvious that the Kremlin wanted to incorporate this ‘last Russian land,’ which so far had not been gathered into Soviet Russia. In this, the communist government took over the tsarist political ideal of ‘gathering all the Russias.’ Beneš’s behavior projected an apparent happiness to be rid of it. Curiously, he pronounced in March 1945 that the Allies had ‘forced’ Prague to incorporate Subcarpathian Ruthenia in 1919. The Red Army reached Subcarpathian Ruthenia in April 1944. The Soviet propaganda immediately declared the Ruthenians to be part of the Ukrainian nation. The Czechoslovak administration was allowed to administer only onethird of the region. In November, the Soviet-controlled Ruthenian organizations ‘demanded’ the ‘reunification’ of their land, then renamed as Transcarpathian Ruthenia, with Soviet Ukraine. The Czechoslovak administration left the region in December. In the Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement of 29 June 1945, Beneš ceded ‘Transcarpathian Ruthenia’ to the Soviet Union, and two months later, issued decree No. 60, which stripped the Ruthenians of Czechoslovak citizenship. Nobody consulted the Ruthenians. Zsatkovich, the first governor of Czechoslovakia’s Subcarpathian Ruthenia, who lived in the United States, protested and announced that the region was and continued to be part of Czechoslovakia. Ruthenians refer to the Soviet annexation as the ‘Ruthenian Munich Agreement.’ Meanwhile, Bratislava, located in the west of Slovakia, began to lose control of the state’s mountainous center. On 12 August 1944, a state of emergency was declared. On 29 August, the German troops entered Slovakia to help the HSL’S regime. The following day, the Slovak National Council announced via the radio station in Banská Bystrica the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising. And 60,000 Slovak soldiers and 18,000 guerillas controlled much of central Slovakia until 27 October, when Germans seized Banská Bystrica. The uprising continued as a guerilla war, but troops withdrew to eastern Slovakia, where they could expect aid from the advancing Red Army, which had entered Slovakia on 6 October. The uprising was the sign of popular support for renewing Czechoslovakia as an equal federation of both nations, and for cooperation with the Soviet Union. On 4 April, Soviet troops entered Bratislava, the HSL’S regime fled the country, and the German troops withdrew to the protectorate. The following day, Beneš and his government arrived in Košice, and announced the so-called Košice Government Program, whose basis was that postwar Czechoslovakia would be a common polity of the Czechs and Slovaks. It

The Czech Nation

773

was an unusual concession on the part of Beneš, who was the staunch proponent of Masaryk’s idea of Czechoslovakia, as a nation-state of the single Czechoslovak nation. On 21 April 1945, US troops entered western Bohemia. Between 5 and 9 May, brief anti-German uprising broke out in Prague, Soviet troops entered the city at the end of the war, and fronts stopped at the outskirts of Bohemia and Moravia, which spared the Czech lands the unprecedented damage wreaked by total war that occurred in Slovakia and elsewhere in Central Europe. Postwar Czechoslovakia was built as a democratic, though pro-Soviet state, mostly thanks to Beneš’s cordial relations with Moscow, and the genuine character of the communist movement in the Czech lands. The Czech lands had been heavily industrialized since the 1870s, and the communist party had strong organic support among the Czech industrial workers since the interwar period. In rural Poland and Hungary, where anti-Bolshevik sentiment had been equally strong, Moscow had to force local communist parties on the unwilling populaces to ‘justify’ to the Western Allies the communist takeovers, which took place in both states in 1947. In the following year, the Czech communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. Conveniently, Beneš died the same year, and the communist security forces assassinated Jan Masaryk. No prewar Czech politicians of international renown remained in postwar Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the degree of political and administrative autonomy enjoyed by Slovakia was dismantled. The Soviet-controlled Satalinist regimes in Central Europe sought to create centralized and ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-states. In 1949, the traditional administrative divisions of Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia, and Slovakia were replaced with 19 small regions bearing no relation to historical administrative boundaries, with the exception of the division between the Czech lands and Slovakia. Having rather willingly resigned itself to the loss of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Prague aggressively went about securing some territorial gains from the historical lands of the Czech Crown contained within the German boundaries. Czechoslovak politicians argued that if Moscow ‘indemnified’ Poland with the greater part of the German lands east of the Oder-Neisse line for the loss of its eastern Polish territories to the Soviet Union, a similar measure might be extended to Czechoslovakia. Prague demanded the southernmost strip of Germany’s eastern Lower Silesia, and Upper Silesia, because German censuses recorded some Bohemian- and Moravian-speakers in these areas as recently as the 1920s. From a historical perspective all of Silesia was part of the Czech lands, but there were not enough Czechs and Slovaks, who could viably populate it following the expulsion of the German-speaking inhabitants. In 1945, Czech troops moved to these areas, but they withdrew following Warsaw’s threat that in retaliation Polish soldiers would invade the Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia. To Prague’s attempt at securing Germany’s Lusatia with its Slavophone Sorbs for Czechoslovakia, Poland replied with a similar claim. Moscow cut the squabble short leaving the Sorbs and their homeland in the Soviet Zone of Occupation,

774 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

though the Kremlin pressed East Germany to grant them a modicum of cultural and linguistic autonomy. The territory of Czechoslovakia was generally recreated in its prewar shape less Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In July 1945, Slovakia returned the prewar Polish sections of Orava and Spiš to Poland. In 1946, it gave a small area to the Soviet Union, and received a similar one from the Soviet Union the following year, which straightened the border. Also in 1947, Budapest was made to give up a small bridgehead of territory across the Danube, so that Bratislava was better shielded from nearby Austria and Hungary. The wartime Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian, and German and Magyar minority leaders, who were active in the protectorate, the Sudetenland, Slovakia and Hungary’s autonomous Carpathia were eliminated from public and political life. Conveniently, before he could be tried, Hácha died of ill health in May 1945. In the same month, Henlein committed suicide in Plzen, ˇ where he found himself in US captivity. The two most important politicians of independent Slovakia, Tiso and Tuka, fled to the American Zone of Occupation in Germany, and were promptly extradited to Czechoslovakia. They were tried, found guilty of high treason, and despite protests of the international community and Slovak leaders in the United States, executed in Prague, in 1947 and 1946, respectively. After the Red Army fully overran Carpathia in March 1945, Voloshyn fled to Prague. The Czechoslovak authorities gave him up to the Soviets in May. Two months later, he died in a Moscow prison. During the war, Esterházy outraged all the major political forces. He supported autonomy for Slovakia, and did not accept Budapest’s invitation to ‘return’ to Hungary following Budapest’s annexation of southern Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. He preferred to lead the Magyar minority in independent Slovakia and help Polish refugees escaping to the West. He was the only MP in the Slovak Parliament who protested against deportation of Slovak Jews to German extermination camps. In 1944, the Hungarian fascist regime imprisoned him, then the Soviets captured him and handed over to Prague. In 1947, the Slovak National Court condemned him to death, but due to international protests the court commuted his sentence from capital punishment to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1957. Like the Germans in postwar Poland, the huge German and Magyar minorities were the biggest obstacle standing in the way of making postwar Czechoslovakia an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state. The Western Allies and the Soviet Union agreed to use collective responsibility in order to expel Germans. Between 1945 and 1947, 3 million fled, were evacuated, or expelled from the Czech lands and Slovakia mainly to southern Germany and Austria. After the Czech Borderlands were emptied of their traditional German population, they were partly populated by settlers, 1.65 million Czechs and 0.25 million Slovaks. Unlike in the Polish case, the expelled Germans were prewar Czechoslovak citizens, so Beneš had to issue decrees that stripped them of their citizenship. In the Czech lands, a similar measure was to be applied to Poles (including, Slunzaks)

The Czech Nation

775

in the Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia, which had been incorporated into Poland in 1938. At Poland’s behest, Moscow’s intervention limited this measure to Poles who came to this area after the annexation. The local Polish population was re-granted with Czechoslovak citizenship in a process similar to national rehabilitation, which was applied to the Szlonzoks living on the territory of prewar Poland’s section of Upper Silesia. The Hultschiners posed Prague with a problem similar to that, which Warsaw faced in the case of the Szlonzoks, Kashubs, and Mazurs residing on prewar Germany’s territory. In Poland, the latter were recognized as ‘autochthons’ (ethnic Poles) in the process of national verification. Prague applied a similar procedure to the Hultschiners, and they were not allowed to leave for Germany, even if they so desired. In addition to Germans, Magyars were also to be expelled from Slovakia. Beneš deprived them of Czechoslovak citizenship, as well. In the framework of the CzechoslovakHungarian ‘population exchange,’ between 1945 and 1948, 95,000 Magyars left Slovakia for Hungary, and 72,000 Slovaks left Hungary for Slovakia. In the action of ‘re-Slovakization’ (similar to that of ‘re-Polonization’ directed at the autochthons in Poland), 382,000 stateless and terrorized Magyars applied to be recognized as ‘Slovaks.’ 282,000 were granted this status, which caused the number of Slovakia’s Magyars to sink to 451,000. But because Czechoslovak citizenship was not re-granted to them until 1948, the situation permitted the closure of Magyar-language schools and cultural institutions. 45,000 Magyars were condemned to hard labor and dispersed across Czechoslovakia. The postwar population movements were rounded up by the arrival of 33,000 Czechs from prewar Poland’s Volhynia, and 20,000 from Transcarpathian Ruthenia, because they wanted to avoid living in the Soviet Union (Bˇelina et al. 1993: 211; Chászár 2003: 560–562; Chocholatý 1991; Eberhardt 1996: 133; From Minority Status to Partnership 2005; Górny 2005; Harna and Fišer 1998: 193, 205; Kováˇc 1998: 231–244; Magocsi 2002: 191; Mat’ovˇcík et al. 1999: 340, 345; Palys 1997; Plaˇcek 2000; Pop 2005: 152–164; Semotanová 2003: 62, 66–67; Stanˇek 1991; Šutaj 1999: 212; Tomaszewski 1997: 140, 144–145, 273–275; Zahradnik and Ryczkowski 1992). By the late 1940s, Czechoslovakia was re-established as a heavily centralized, ethnically homogenous nation-state with a Stalinist regime at its helm. The situation was similar in Hungary and Poland. As Soviet satellites, all three states had to closely follow the tenets of the system as worked out in the Soviet Union. Between 1948 and 1949, many members of the prewar Czechoslovak elite, 145,000 Czechs and 82,000 Slovaks, who could not accept the communist regime, emigrated to Western Europe and Northern America. Bearing in mind the fact that there were almost three times as many Czechs as Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, the proportion of Slovak émigrés was nearly two times bigger than that of Czech émigrés. Anti-communist feeling was much more widespread in predominantly rural, traditional and strongly Catholic Slovakia

776 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

than in the heavily industrialized and urbanized Czech lands. In this respect, the Slovaks shared more with the Polish than the Czech experience. Their opposition to the communist regime was deepened by the forced collectivization of the countryside and the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church in 1950. The ‘struggle against bourgeois-nationalist deviation,’ which marked the epoch of late Stalinism in Central Europe, amounted in Czechoslovakia to political purges mainly aimed at Slovak leaders and the few remaining Jews. This prompted the latter to leave, and put control of Czechoslovakia firmly in the Czech hands. The 1948 communist Constitution defined Czechoslovakia as a ‘unitary state of the Czechoslovak people,’ in which equal rights were enjoyed by the ‘two brotherly Slavic nations of the Czechs and Slovaks.’ Despite official de-Stalinization, in the mid-1950s, it was obvious that the Czechoslovak option led and implemented by Czech communists was in ascendance. The new Constitution of 1960 re-named the Republic of Czechoslovakia as the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The façade Slovak autonomous institutions were liquidated, and in the new state coat-of-arms the Slovak one was removed from the Bohemian lion’s breast, and his crown replaced with a communist red star. In Hungary the 1956 uprising, and in Poland the 1956 events, marked the shift of power from Stalinists (internationally-minded communists) to national communists. A similar process unfolded in Czechoslovakia rather late, in 1968. It had been preceded by permitting Czechoslovak tourists travel to Western Europe; 168,000 in 1965 and 300,000 2 years later, while the Polish and Hungarian borders were tightly sealed. These travels and the example of the national path to communism as established in Hungary and Poland, entailed an increase in social displeasure with the system. But the predominantly Czech governing elite (consisting of only partly reformed Stalinists) was aware that national communism might emphasize the Czech-Slovak national cleavage, which would endanger the unitary character of Czechoslovakia. But the worsening economic situation elicited public criticism in late 1967, which led to sweeping changes in the communist party the following year, under the slogan of ‘building socialism with a human face.’ The Prague Spring commenced. In Slovakia, industrialization and reconstruction of the country after the war was welcomed by the population at large, but the falling standard of living (caused by siphoning resources off to heavy industry) and the feeling of discrimination made the Slovaks sympathize with the Czechs in their desire for a change. What differed the two nations was that, additionally, the Slovaks wanted to federalize the state. The discussions on federalization conducted in the central committee of the communist part in June 1968, brought to the fore the question of autonomy for Moravia and Silesia. But the idea of tripartite federation consisting of Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia, and Slovakia, was perceived by Slovak leaders as a

The Czech Nation

777

Czech ploy to belittle Slovakia. Unlike Czechs, the average Slovak is not aware of the long-established ethnoregional cleavage that separates Moravia and Silesia from Bohemia. The Slovak fear was that Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia as two ‘Czech entities’ of a tripartite federation, the Czechs would still prevail over the Slovaks. Meanwhile the Kremlin decided that institutional and political changes in Czechoslovakia endanger its grip on the Soviet bloc, and ordered the Warsaw Pact to intervene. On 21 August, Bulgarian, East German, Hungarian, Polish, and Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia giving the rise to the Brezhnev doctrine, according to which Moscow could intervene in any Soviet bloc state that appeared bent on leaving the bloc. At the end of August ‘normalization’ (normalizace) set in propped by the decision that Soviet troops would remain in Czechoslovakia indefinitely. Apart from sending a wave of several hundreds of thousands of refugees, who fled to the West, the ‘normalization’ paved the way for national communists to power. Significantly, the leader of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubˇcek (1921–1992), and the leader of the ‘normalization,’ Gustáv Husák (1913–1991), were both Slovaks. On 27 October 1968, the parliament passed a constitutional act to federalize the state, which entered in force on 1 January 1969. Czechoslovakia was transformed into a dual federation of the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic. The ‘normalization’ rendered the political dimension of this federalization impotent already in 1970. Centralism was back, but with more formalistic devolution. Stalinists were finally out of power when Husák became president in 1975. He held this office until the fall of communism in 1989, and though a Slovak, he governed in the spirit of Czechoslovakism, which precluded any real possibility of political autonomy for Slovakia. This situation, and the fact that the interests and autonomous inspirations of Moravia and Silesia were not reflected on the political plane at all, led to the rise of popular resentment at ‘Pragocentrismus,’ that is, centralization of power and economy in Prague and Bohemia. This feeling was widespread in Slovakia, Moravia and Silesia. On the other hand, both Czechs and Slovaks perceived the federal institutions of Czechoslovakia (invariably located in Prague) as ‘Czech’ (Barta 2003: 574; Bˇelina et al. 1993: 280; Kováˇc 1998: 263–265, 268–269, 280, 294, 298; Musil 1995: 197, 209–210; Rychlík 1998: 135, 233; Semotanová 2003: 73; Tomaszewski 1997: 175, 189–194, 205, 209). In communist Czechoslovakia Czech dominated as the official language of the state until 1968, though Slovak was consistently employed in the official capacity throughout Slovakia. This domination of Czech in the framework of de facto Czechoslovakism showed, first, in the stalling of the further codification of Slovak. Between 1946 and 1949, Anton Jánošik (1904–1971) and Eugen Jóna published the fascicles of the first volume of the intended first multivolume authoritative dictionary of Slovak, Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského (The Dictionary of the Written Slovak Language, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). After

778 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the communist takeover, the publication of this work was discontinued and the task of compiling an authoritative dictionary of Slovak transferred from the Matica slovenská in Turˇciansky Svätý Martin to Bratislava, where the task was taken up by the Slovak Academy of Sciences, when it was re-established in 1953. The Matica slovenská was perceived as the hotbed of anticommunism and Slovak ‘bourgeois nationalism.’ Three conferences on marxist linguistics (1960, 1962, and 1963) worked out the tenets on the basis of which an authoritative dictionary of Slovak should be compiled. These conferences copied the Soviet model of imbuing a language with the communist ideology, and Russifying it. (In the case of Slovak, as in the cases of other official languages in the Soviet bloc states, this Russification usually amounted to the adoption of Russian words and concepts pertaining to Soviet-style communism.) When Štefan Peciar’s sixvolume Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1959– 1968, Bratislava) was published, the circle of the Matica slovenská immediately accused it of making the Slovak language too close to Czech. With the Prague Spring just around the corner, a conference in 1966 condemned the situation and worked out theses to emphasize the separateness of Slovak vis-à-vis Czech. Many Slovak intellectuals readily espoused these theses, which significantly contributed to the unprecedented political emancipation of Slovak after 1968. Subcarpathian Ruthenia was annexed by the Soviet Union and transferred to Soviet Ukraine, and largely disappeared from the Czechs’ and Slovaks’ public memory. Only briefly in 1945, prior to the annexation, Ruthenian leaders had appealed for the making of postwar Czechoslovakia into a triple federation. In Soviet Transcarpathian Ukraine the Ruthenians, at least officially, were made into Ukrainians, and no concessions for the Ruthenian language were made. Ukrainian and Russian replaced Hungarian-Ruthenian and Magyar, which had functioned as official languages in wartime Hungary’s Carpathia. Moscow’s de facto policy of Russifying Soviet Ukraine beginning in the 1930s also left its mark on Transcarpathian Ukraine. Prešov Ruthenia, located in eastern Slovakia, never featured in state politics. Unlike in the case of Moravia and Silesia, no politician proposed that the region could be made into a separate entity within federalized Czechoslovakia. The postwar Ukrainian National Council (1945– 1949) active in this region, appealed for Ruthenian territorial autonomy, but Slovak leaders disagreed, claiming that Prešov Ruthenia is part of the indivisible Slovak national territory. Bratislava denied the same concessions to the Prešov Ruthenians that it was seeking to obtain for Slovakia from Prague. After the war, Russian was used in Ruthenian publications and schools. In 1952, Prague declared them to be ‘Ukrainians,’ hence the Ukrainian language replaced Russian. In the wake of the Prague Spring, some Ruthenian intellectuals appealed for at least limited use of the Ruthenian vernacular. Due to frequent language changes, the persistence of the vernacular in everyday life, and the domination of Slovak, in the 1950s and 1960s numerous Ruthenians adopted Slovak and

The Czech Nation

779

began to send their children to Slovak schools. Soon they became Slovakized, and the process was facilitated by the abolition of the Greek Catholic Church (1950), which had been the main axis of the Ruthenian national identity. In this, Prague followed Moscow, which had abolished this Church in western (prewar Poland’s) Ukraine in 1946, and in Transcarpathian Ukraine 3 years later. The situation of Slovak improved spectacularly after the introduction of the federalization package. Article 6 of the Constitutional Act No 143 of 27 October 1968 provided that the Czech and Slovak languages should be used equally in the promulgation of laws, in the dealings of all state organs of Czechoslovakia and both republics, in proceedings held before them and in all their contacts with individual citizens. In practice it meant that federal laws were mainly written in Czech and then translated into Slovak, but the equalization of the status of Slovak with Czech spilled over to the mass media and cultural life. The ‘normalization,’ which de facto did away with the political autonomy for Slovakia, did not limit the newly found equilibrium between Czech and Slovak. In statewide radio and TV news, sports commentaries, and programs Czechophone and Slovakophone speakers and interviewees spoke one after another and with each other. The same mixing of Czech and Slovak appeared in periodicals, though it did not spread to such an extent as in the electronic mass media. Czechophone cinema and TV films recorded in Czech were shown in the original in Slovakia, and vice versa, Slovak ones were broadcast in the original in the Czech lands. In theaters, irrespective of where they were located, Czech and Slovak performances were interspersed. Emigration of Slovaks to the Ostrava region, and later, to Prague, and of Czechs to eastern Slovakia, led to the intensification of Czech-Slovak contacts in private life, including numerous marriages. In such mixed families parents usually spoke exclusively in their native languages, and their children the language of the region where their home was located, meaning Slovak in Slovakia, and Czech in the Czech lands. Hence, no minority schools were provided for Slovaks living in the Czech lands (with the exception of a single Slovak elementary school in Ostrava), and for Czechs in Slovakia. This was possible due to the genetic and typological closeness of both Czech and Slovak, and entailed the emergence of the unusual phenomenon, called ‘suprastandard bilingualism,’ meaning that Czechs and Slovaks would speak with one another using their native languages, and without switching to the language of their interlocutors, unless for an expression, unusual word, local color, or a humoristic effect. On the other hand, since Czechoslovakia was a single country, no university departments of Slovak opened in the Czech lands, and of Czech in Slovakia. Slovak students wishing to study Czech philology simply enrolled in Czech universities, and vice versa. On the other hand, the authorities discouraged research into differences between Czech and Slovak, and it was plainly prohibited for the mass media to comment on linguistic matters in such

780 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

a manner that a single word or expression would be unambiguously identified as Czech or Slovak. The legislated equality between both languages in practice was not full, as there were twice as many Czechs as Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, and among the Czechs the old perception continued that Czech was more prestigious than Slovak. Moreover, the average Czech often condemned the use of Slovak dialects, especially those from eastern Slovakia. The Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (founded in 1952), de facto was a Czech institution; it oversaw the compilation of an extensive one-volume Slovak-Czech dictionary, Slovensko-ˇceský slovník by Želmíra Gašparíková (1901– 1968) and Adolf Kamiš. Its three editions were published in Prague in 1967, 1984, and 1987. The Slovak Academy of Sciences reciprocated with an equally ˇ extensive Czech-Slovak dictionary, Cesko-slovenský slovník by Jozef Michaláˇc and Andrej Šumec, published in Bratislava (1979, 1981). But these two dictionaries never became popular references, which would have remained permanently in print. In schools, one used the Czech linguist, Jaroslav Neˇcas’s (1913–1988), Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdilných výrazu˚ (SlovakCzech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary of Words that are Different in Both Languages, Prague) published in four different editions in 1963, 1964, and 1989. It was a return to the tradition of such practical dictionaries (for instance, František Frýdecký and Petr Kompiš’s Pˇríruˇcní slovník ˇcesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský [The Reference Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary], 1919, Prague), which had been popular immediately after World War I before the official concept of the Czechoslovak language had prevented further compilation of bilingual Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech dictionaries for half a century (Bosák 1998: 17–21; Daneš et al. 1997: 261–262; Dulichenko and Magocsi 2005; Koˇrenský 1998: 18, 28–32; Kaˇcala 2001: 44; Magocsi 2002: 213). Postwar Czechoslovakia was built as a Slavic nation-state of the ‘Czechoslovak people.’ Hence, only the Polish and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) minority education systems survived the war, in eastern Czech Silesia and eastern Slovakia, respectively. In this ideological framework there was no place for non-Slavic minority educational systems. The first exception was made for Magyars in Slovakia, who did not declare themselves as Slovaks, when they regained Czechoslovak citizenship in 1948. The interwar tradition of bilingual signposts with locality and street names survived but exclusively in the regions populated by the Magyar and Polish minorities. (In Hungary and Poland such practice was never adopted either in the interwar nor communist period. Bilingual signposts made an appearance only in East Germany, where Sorbians lived.) In the early 1950s, Czechoslovak citizenship was re-granted to few Germans, who were allowed to stay, but no minority schools were provided for their children until the fall of communism. The only concession was German socio-cultural associations established in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, the knowledge

The Czech Nation

781

of German among those born after 1945 is almost nil, like in the case of Poland’s Germans. At the end of the 1940s, like Poland, Czechoslovakia accepted Greek and Macedonian communist refugees, who fought in the Greek civil war. About 10,000 of them were settled in western Czech Silesia, recently emptied of its German population. A modicum of Greek and Macedonian education was organized for them. In the 1950s, most Macedonians left for Yugoslavia’s Macedonia, and many Greeks decided to return to their country after the end of the authoritarian regime in 1974, and Greece’s accession to the European Communities in 1981. As before the war, Jews were not considered a national minority, and during censuses had to declare themselves as belonging to one of the state nations (Czech, Slovak) or minorities (most often Magyar and German). The Roma (then known as ‘gypsies’) were recorded in Czech censuses as a national minority beginning in 1921. After 1945, like in Poland or Hungary, they were treated more as a depressed and parasitic social class (‘Lumpenproletariat’) than a national or ethnic minority. To ‘productivize’ them, their traditional patterns of life and economy were abolished, they were dispersed and forced to take up occupations allocated by the authorities. As during the interwar period, no minority schooling in their Indic language of Romani was provided in communist Czechoslovakia. This reflected the Central European practice, which to this day remains largely unchanged. Lacking a sound command either of Czech or Slovak, Roma children received no schooling (in the blatant breach of legislation on compulsory education, which requires all citizens aged 16 and less to attend a school) or were sent to schools for the mentally retarded. As a result, from the linguistic, social, and economic vantage, they were made into the most isolated ethnolinguistic group in Central Europe. Despite the similarities shared by Czechoslovakia with Hungary and Poland in their approach to national minorities, Prague continued to publish statistical data on Czechoslovakia’s minorities throughout the communist years, unlike the two other states, or Romania and East Germany, for that matter. In 1974, Czechoslovakia housed 0.58 million Magyars (4 percent of the population), 77,000 Germans (0.5 percent), 71,000 Poles (0.5 percent), and 51,000 Ukrainians (Ruthenians) (0.3 percent). Hungarian sources tended to beef up the number of Czechoslovakia’s Magyars to 0.75 million, by adding to the official number those who underwent ‘re-Slovakization’ between 1945 and 1948. The authorities treated Roma as ‘fully integrated’ and ceased to indicate them in statistics. According to estimates, in 1975, 183,000 of them lived in Slovakia, and 83,000 in the Czech lands. In 1950, in Czechoslovakia, there were 8.38 million (67.9 percent) Czechs and 3.24 million (26.3 percent) Slovaks. By 1991, the numbers grew to 9.83 million (63.1 percent) and 4.83 million (31 percent), respectively. Thanks to their higher birth rate, the Slovaks’ share in the population grew steadily. After the expulsion of Germans, by 1950, the Czech lands had become almost

782 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

homogenously Czech, with Czechs amounting to 8.34 million (93.8 percent of the population). They were followed by 0.35 million (2.9 percent) Slovaks (who, alongside Czech, settled in the borderlands of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia denuded of Germans), 160,000 (1.8 percent) Germans, 71,000 (0.8 percent) Poles, 19,500 (0.2 percent) Ukrainians (Ruthenians), and 13,000 (0.1 percent) Magyars. In the following decades, the relations remained unchanged except for those of Germans and Poles, whose number plummeted to 81,000 and 66,000 in 1980. In 1980, there were 9.73 million (94.6 percent) Czechs in the Czech lands, and 0.36 million (3.5 percent) Slovaks. Slovakia remained more ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, because most local Magyars were allowed to stay, which was not the case with the Germans who were almost fully expelled from the Czech lands. Between 1950 and 1980, the number of Slovaks increased from 2.98 million (86.7 percent) to 4.32 million (86.5 percent). Magyars numbered 0.35 million (10.3 percent) in 1950, but in the following decade many of those, who were ‘re-Slovakized’ returned to Magyarness, so there were 0.52 million (12.4 percent) Magyars in 1961. By 1980, their number had grown to 0.56 million (11.2 percent). Between 1950 and 1980, the number of Czech grew slightly from 40,500 (1.2 percent) to 57,000 (1 percent), and that of Ukrainians (Ruthenians) decreased slightly from 48,000 (1.4 percent) to 39,000 (0.8 percent). The interwar laws mainly governed the language and other rights of recognized minorities until 1968. On 27 October 1968, the Constitutional Act No 144 recognized Magyars, Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians (Ruthenians) as minorities and granted them a modicum of minority rights, including education in their native languages. This law was never carried out to its fullest with regard to the German minority. No German-language minority schools were founded. In 1990, there were two Slovak- and 28 Polish-language minority elementary schools in the Czech lands, and 257 Magyar-language ones and ten Ukrainian-language ones in Slovakia. During the communist period, the number of Magyar-language elementary schools decreased dramatically from 565 in 1955. Still, this Magyar-language minority educational system ensured preservation of the language and the Magyar identity based on it. In the case of other minorities, the speech communities may be too small to preserve their languages. For instance, in 1991, in the Czech lands out of 59,000 Poles 52,000 claimed to speak Polish, and out of 48,000 Germans 41,000 claimed to speak German. Due to the specific dynamics of the Czech-Slovak bilingualism, it is obvious that most Slovaks living in the Czech lands, or their children, would soon and willingly become Czechized. In 1991, only 0.24 million Slovaks out of 0.31 million spoke Slovak. As a result, 9.77 million Czechs accounted for 94.8 percent of the population of the Czech lands, but the total number of all Czech-speakers was 9.87 million (95.8 percent). Due to the postwar action of ‘re-Slovakization,’ a reverse phenomenon was observed in Slovakia. In 1991,

The Czech Nation

783

0.57 million people declared themselves as Magyars, but 0.61 million indicated Magyar as their native language. Similarly, 17,000 persons declared themselves as Ruthenians and 13,000 as Ukrainians, but 57,000 indicated Ukrainian as their native language. During the interwar period, Ruthenians (Ukrainians) exclusively professed Greek Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Their Greek Catholic Church was banned briefly after World War II (in emulation of the Orthodoxization action pursued in the Soviet Union against Greek Catholics / Uniates in the territories that had belonged to Poland and Czechoslovakia before 1939), but it was legalized in Slovakia during the Prague Spring. In 1991, there were 179,000 Greek Catholics and 34,000 Orthodox Christians. As in the case of Slovaks living in the Czech lands, the knowledge of Czech was dwindling among Slovakia’s 59,000 Czechs (A Special Remedy 1999; Barta 2003: 574; Breton 2003: 49; Daneš et al. 1997: 260; Eberhardt 1996: 133–134, 136–137; From Minority Status to Partnership 2005; Magocsi 2002: 213; Reban 1981: 234–239; Ruthenians in Slovakia Fighting for Their Rights 1997; Šatava 1994: 50, 52, 57, 274; ˇ Statistická roˇcenka Ceské Republiky 2001: 562). The postwar social and cultural development in Czechoslovakia followed the communist pattern imposed on Central Europe by the Soviet Union. Growing access to secondary and university education was coupled with indoctrination, which was to ensure imbuing the new generations and elite with communist values and loyalty to the state and the Soviet Union. After 1945, Czech-language universities were re-established, and the Slovak one in Bratislava was purged of independists. In 1946, a new Czech university was founded in Olomouc, and 13 years later, a new Slovak one in Košice. Numerous other institutions of higher learning without ‘university’ in their names sprang up, as in Hungary and Poland. The share of persons over 15 years of age with secondary education in the Czech lands grew from 4.8 percent in 1950 to 22.9 percent in 1991. The corresponding numbers for Slovakia were 3.1 percent and 24.3 percent. In the Czech lands, people with university education amounted to 0.9 percent in 1950, and to 7.2 percent in 1991. The corresponding indicators for Slovakia were 0.5 percent and 7.7 percent. This slightly privileged status of Slovakia in access to secondary and university education commenced after the ‘normalization,’ in the 1970s. Repression was not as harsh and widespread there as in the Czech lands. This transfer of intellectual capital from the Czech lands to Slovakia was even more clearly visible in book production. The level of 1937 production of 5500 Czech titles was reached in 1948. But after the communist takeover, censorship and forced closure of private publishers severely limited the number of published titles, which reached a meager 4000 in 1985. Because there was not much of a private publishing industry in Slovakia, similar restrictions were not so painful there. The demands of communist propaganda and education were such that the annual number of Slovak titles published consistently grew from its wartime high of 700 to 3000 in 1985. The overall number of book titles

784 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

published in Czechoslovakia grew from 6150 in 1937 to 7000 in 1985, but that of Czech books declined by almost one-third, while that of Slovak ones grew more than fourfold. In 1953, television broadcasting commenced in Czechoslovakia. Like in Hungary and Poland, by the 1960s almost all households enjoyed radio sets, and by the next decade, television sets. Industrialization, collectivization of the countryside, urbanization, and growing access to secondary and university-level education contributed to the rapid change in the social structure of the population, especially in Slovakia. Such changes had commenced in the Czech lands in the late 19th century, that is, earlier than anywhere in Central Europe. But the communist system accelerated them. In the Czech lands the share of workforce employed in agriculture decreased from 33.1 percent in 1948 to 9.4 percent in 1989. In Slovakia the change was even more dramatic from 60.6 percent to 12.2 percent. At 57.9 percent in 1970, workers attained the highest share in the population of the Czech lands, while a similar peak of 59.1 percent was reached in Slovakia a decade later. Between 1950 and 1959, the overall share of white-collar workers grew in Czechoslovakia from 16.4 percent to 19 percent. The distinct cleavage between the Czech lands and Slovakia in this regard, leveled out by the 1980s. In the Czech lands, the share of white-collar workers increased from 30.5 percent in 1961 to 45.5 percent in 1991. The corresponding indicators for Slovakia were 25.2 percent and 43.6 percent. At the end of the communist period, the economic and educational development and structure of Czech and Slovak society became similar. Eventually, Czechoslovakia made good on its interwar promises to the Slovaks (short of genuine political autonomy). Ironically, this promise of better life and free national development for the Slovaks, pledged by democratic Czechoslovakia, was carried out by communist Czechoslovakia (Magocsi 2002: 208; Musil 1995: 32, 74; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 41–42, 44, 84; Semotanová 2003: 67, 77). The codification of the Czech language was largely completed in interwar Czechoslovakia and was wrapped up with the publication of the first monolingual multivolume authoritative dictionary of Czech, Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (1935–1957). In the period immediately after the war when a modicum of democracy survived, and communism had not been established enough, highlights of this prewar codification were re-published. For instance, the new one-volume editions of Váša and Trávníˇcek’s Slovník jazyka ˇceského appeared in 1946 and 1952. Trávníˇcek’s Mluvnice spisovné ˇceštiny (The Grammar of Written Czech, 1948–1951, Prague) grew out from this interwar codification, and was reprinted in 1949 and 1951. However, at the beginning of the 1950s, following the Soviet model, the communist authorities took care to imbue the standard language with principles and values, which reflected the ideological interests of the communist system. The same process unfolded almost at the same time in Hungary and Poland. In Czechoslovakia the theoretical ground

The Czech Nation

785

for the changes was prepared in 1952, at the Czechoslovak lexicological and lexicographic conference held in Bratislava. The butt of criticism issued by procommunist party marxist linguists, was the interwar ‘bourgeois’ codification and its ultimate ‘emanation,’ in the form of Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského. The newly established Institute of the Czech Language (incorporated into the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) was entrusted with the preparation of a new codification of the Czech language that would comply with the communist ideology and the needs of the Soviet-style system. It was easier in Czechoslovakia than in Poland, because a sweeping language reform had been introduced in the latter country in 1936, so only a minor one could follow in 1956. In interwar Czechoslovakia no similar language reform was conducted, and minor changes were limited to updated editions of pre-1918 textbooks and guides of ‘correct’ Czech usage. Hence, the situation in postwar Czechoslovakia was better suited for a thorough change. Immediately, after the completion of the publication of Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského, there began to appear the fourvolume Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (The Dictionary of the Written Czech Language, 1957–1971, Prague) edited by Bohuslav Havránek. In his person and work, the descriptivist ideals of the interwar Prague Linguistic Circle opposed to the purism and prescriptivism of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Art, were partly put to work within the framework of Czech marxist linguistics. In 1957, Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu (1957, Prague) was published, which amounted to the first language reform of Czech conducted in the 20th century. In the following year, an abbreviated school edition of Pravidla appeared. In 1951, Havránek ˇ and Alois Jedliˇcka’s Ceská mluvnice (The Czech Grammar, Prague) was published, and superseded Trávníˇcek’s Mluvnice spisovné ˇceštiny, in preparation for the 1957 reform. The work’s second edition, which appeared in 1960, became the standard work on Czech grammar for the entire communist period. In 1966, both authors published an abbreviated version of this grammar for schools and the general user. On the basis of Havránek’s Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského, Josef Filipec (1915–2001) and František Daneš (1919–) edited the single-volume Slovník spisovné ˇceštiny pro školu a veˇrejnost (The Dictionary of Written Czech for Schools and the General User, 1978, Prague). Beyond the communist codification of Czech, lexicographic research into other aspects of this language was limited. In 1952, František Kopeˇcný edited the new version of Holub’s 1933 Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského, titled as Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague). Significantly, Holub’s original ‘Czechoslovak language’ was replaced with the ‘Czech language.’ Two further editions of this work (1967, 1978), titled as Struˇcný etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Short Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague) were prepared by Stanislav Lyer. The concept of the Czechoslovak language, sanitized by mentioning Czech and Slovak separately on the cover, reappeared in the first original postwar

786 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

etymological dictionary, Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Languages, 1957, Prague) by Václav Machek. In the next two editions of 1968 and 1971, the ‘Slovak language’ was dropped from the title, Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague). The historical dimension of Czech was surveyed by two one-volume dictionaries, Slovníˇcek staré ˇceštiny (The Little Dictionary of Old Czech, 1947, Prague) by František Šimek and Malý staroˇceský slovník (The Little Old Czech Dictionary, 1979, Prague) by Adolf Kamiš (1915– 1991) and Karel Kuˇcera (1947–). In 1956, Havránek worked out the principles, on the basis of which full-fledged Staroˇceský slovník (The Old Czech Dictionary, 1968–, Prague) was compiled. Its fascicles reached the end of letter P in 2004. But the dictionary commenced with letter N, at which Gebauer’s Slovník staroˇceský was terminated in 1916. All the aforementioned dictionaries have attempted to gather the entire corpus of Czech words, which were attested in writing by the end of the 15th century. So far no dictionary has recorded the Czech vocabulary in use between the 16th and 17th centuries. By comparison, only the 17th-century Polish vocabulary has not been recorded in a dictionary yet. Practically, the entire historical Magyar vocabulary was collected in the form of dictionaries, though a similar process in the case of Slovak began only after the fall of communism, in 1991. Bearing in mind that out of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak, exclusively Magyar enjoys multivolume etymological and etymological-historical dictionaries, at the present moment an all-embracing dictionary, similar to The Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, could be compiled only for the Magyar Language. In interwar Czechoslovakia, like in Hungary and Poland, numerous encyclopedias appeared, which greatly facilitated the spread of the standard languages in the relative absence of widely accepted authoritative dictionaries, and school dictionaries based on them. In the communist period, the premium was on codifying the standard languages in line with the demands of the communist ideology. Encyclopedias were tricky, since when published, it was impossible to trace all the copies down and destroy them in the wake of some dramatic political change like de-Stalinization, which necessitated a groundbreaking overhaul of communist ideology and official interpretation of the past. The communist authorities’ preferred approach was not to compile encyclopedias. In almost half a century of communism after World War II, only a single Magyar multivolume dictionary and a single Polish one were published, and none in Slovak. Due to de-Stalinization, the Prague Spring, and the ‘normalization,’ the compilation of a modest Czech-language encyclopedia was delayed until the 1980s. As a stop-gap measure, the four-volume Pˇriruˇcní slovník nauˇcný (The Reference Scientific Dictionary, 1962–1967, Prague) appeared. Between 1984 and 1987, the six volumes of Malá ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie (The Small Czechoslovak Encyclopedia, Prague) were published. From the official point of

The Czech Nation

787

view, this obviated the need to compile a Slovak-language encyclopedia, because Malá ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie covered entire Czechoslovakia, and, for all practical reasons, political, cultural, and economic life in post-1968 Czechoslovakia, was fully bilingual. Not surprisingly, Slovak intellectuals interpreted this approach as continuing dominance of Czech over Slovak. Interestingly, Malá ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie was the first Czech-language encyclopedia with the word ‘encyclopedia’ in the title. All the previous ones were titled as ‘scientific dictionaries’ (slovníkí nauˇcné) ( Janich and Greule 2002: 305; Karlík et al. 2002: 422–423).

No name: The Czech nation-state In the 1980s, Czechoslovakia was like a beleaguered fortress. A strong presentiment developed toward all the neighbors (especially those, which participated in the 1968 intervention), except West Germany. But the attraction of capitalism, liberalism and the economic success made this state into an ideological enemy, as well. In addition, the vocative group of Sudeten German expellees concentrated in southern Germany, next to the Czechoslovak border, fortified Prague’s mistrust of West Germany. The most scorn, however, was reserved for ‘Polish traders,’ a pejorative term, popularly used by Czechs and Slovaks to refer to Polish tourists, who were seen to arrive in Czechoslovakia from their economically depressed country, to ‘buy out’ the communist ‘bonanza’ of consumer goods that were more freely available in Czechoslovak shops. This led to the imposition of stricter border entrance requirements for Polish citizens, which were duplicated in Hungary, as well. This official policy, and the dislike felt by the average Czech or Slovak to the Poles, and cultivated by the communist authorities, did not prevent the development of clandestine cooperation networks between Czechoslovak and Polish anti-communist dissidents. The relations developed especially in the 1980s, after the 1980–1981 eruption of freedom in Poland, which became an inspiration for oppositionists elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, and endangered the legitimacy of the communist rule. In Czechoslovakia Václav Havel (1936–) symbolized the opposition movement, as much as Lech Wałe˛sa (1943–) did in Poland. In Poland the negotiated transition from communism to democracy took place in 1988 and 1989. Moscow did not intervene, and seemed even to approve and encourage this transition. In the wake of these changes, CzechoslovakPolish cooperation intensified in late 1988. In January the following year, the arrest of Havel caused a wave of protests. Like its East German counterpart, Husák’s normalization regime did not wish to give in to the pressure of liberalization. Finally, on 17 November 1989, the mass student rally in Prague unseated the regime. On 10 December, the mixed government was constituted with the representatives of the anti-communist opposition. Nine days later,

788 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Havel became President of Czechoslovakia. Dubˇcek, a Slovak and the moral beacon of the Prague Spring, returned to politics, but Havel would not follow the ‘middle path’ of Dubˇcek’s favorite ‘socialism with a human face.’ Havel stood for a fully democratic Czechoslovakia with a capitalist economy, and prevailed. Dubˇcek died shortly afterward, in a car crash (1992). In Slovakia this meant passing power to Slovak nationalists, organized in the Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko (HZDS, Movement for Democratic Slovakia) under the leadership of Vladimír Meˇciar (1942–). In June 1992, his party won the second free Slovak elections, and gained almost half of the mandates in the Slovak National Council (Slovenská národná rada), or the republican parliament of Slovakia. The wave of freedom, inescapably brought back to the fore the issue of political autonomy for Slovakia. Immediately, the atmosphere thickened, because representatives of Moravia and Silesia, in 1991, under the umbrella of the Moravská národní straná (Moravian National Party), demanded the transformation of postcommunist Czechoslovakia into a triple federation. And, as in 1968, Slovak leaders were afraid that it was a Czech ploy to drown out the Slovaks in a new federation. After much debate and numerous disagreements, on 19 April 1990, the new name of the state was accepted, the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, or in short, Czecho-Slovakia. But the adoption of the new Constitution of Czecho-Slovakia was delayed until 14 March 1991. The Constitution was declared to be made on behalf of the ‘people of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, composed of the Czech nation, the Slovak nation, and other nationalities living on the territory of our state.’ Furthermore, Article 3.1 defined Czecho-Slovakia, as ‘a common state of two independent nations, the Czech nation and the Slovak nation, and of the nationalities living on its territory.’ The appeals of Hlinka and his followers were at last realized. The Slovaks received the maximum of political autonomy and sovereignty as possible within a single state. Despite this unprecedented achievement, the poll ratings of Federal President Havel decreased in Slovakia from 60 percent in early 1990 to 52 percent in mid-1992. The plunge in Slovak trust for the federal government was even more dramatic from 46 percent to 26 percent. This contrasted with the Czechs’ high support for the president (90 and 78 percent, respectively), and the federal government (78 and 46 percent, respectively). Most Slovaks saw the federal structures as ‘Czech.’ But even less Slovaks approved of their Slovak republican government (28 percent in mid-1992), as opposed to 51 percent Czechs, who approved the Czech republican government. The economic transition was less dramatic in the Czech lands with a respectable service sector, and a reasonably sized industry producing consumer goods. This was not the case in Slovakia, which had been developed in the Soviet manner. This promoted heavy industry at the expense of the other branches of economy, since production for a planned war effort to spread the communist

The Czech Nation

789

revolution worldwide, took precedence before the consumer needs of the population. The drop in Slovak GDP was more dramatic and subsequent recovery slower, which produced high unemployment in Slovakia, of 14.4 percent in 1993, when the rate was of a mere 3.5 percent in the Czech lands (5.1 percent for entire Czecho-Slovakia in 1992). The Slovak displeasure translated into insulting Czech politicians visiting Slovakia, including President Havel in the spring of 1992. Unlike Havel, Václav Klaus (1941–), Czechoslovak Minister of Finance between 1989 and 1992, and Czecho-Slovak Prime Minister between late 1991 and mid-1992, was not interested in preserving the federation. He deemed that letting Slovakia out of the federation would be a good idea, as this would terminate capital transfers from the richer Czech lands to Slovakia. In June 1992, his party, Obˇcanská demokratická strana (ODS, Civic Democratic Party), won the republican elections in the Czech lands. Klaus resigned from Czecho-Slovak premiership, and became the Czech Prime Minister. He was an ideal partner for his Slovak counterpart, Meˇciar. These two readily recognized that separation suited them both. Together, they negotiated the peaceful dissolution of Czecho-Slovakia. On 11 October, the sovereignty of Slovakia was declared, and the Slovak Constitution adopted. Without the promised referendum, on 25 November, the Czecho-Slovak Parliament passed the act on the dissolution of Czecho-Slovakia, to enter in force on 1 January 1993. The Czechs had no choice but to declare the sovereignty of their state, and adopt their own Constitution on 16 December. Neither Klaus nor Meˇciar wished to leave the decision on the dissolution to a referendum, because in a July 1992 poll, the majority of Czechs (53 percent) and a plurality of Slovaks (42 percent) were for preserving Czecho-Slovakia. But in two separate nation-states, the number of cabinet, parliamentary, and ambassadorial positions doubled. From the point of view of ethnic entrepreneurship, this perspective was equally enticing for ODS and HZDS members. In the second half of the 1990s, independent Slovakia under Meˇciar’s HZDS leadership was dangerously gravitating toward becoming an authoritarian state with political supremacy guaranteed for ethnic Slovaks, to the detriment of the national minorities. This stalled the progress of Bratislava’s accession negotiations with NATO and the European Union. Only the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland participated in the first NATO enlargement following the end of communism (1999). This endangered the privileged status of Czech-Slovak relations on which Slovakia’s economy remained highly dependent, and disenchanted the population at large. The parliamentary elections in late 1998 brought the opposition to power, and it could form its government unhindered thanks to the coalition of Magyar minority parties, which garnered 9.12 percent of the vote. They did so willingly, as Meˇciar’s ethnonationalist policies had alienated Slovakia’s national minorities. Thanks to this change, in early 2004, Slovakia joined NATO along with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and

790 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Romania. Hence, on 1 May, Slovakia was also able to accede the European Union alongside the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and six other new member states. The biggest fear was that if Bratislava had not managed this feat, it would have entailed clamping the requirement of Schengen visas on Slovak citizens, which would have terminated the nadstandardní vztahy (‘suprastandard relations’) between Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Basically, after the dissolution of Czecho-Slovakia, citizens and enterprises from both states, were enjoying a wider range of legal, economic, social, and employment privileges than their counterparts from any third states. In this manner, a trace of former Czecho-Slovakia survived in the practice of ‘suprastandard relations’ between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Bˇelina et al. 1993: 312–315; Hochman 1998: 76–77; Kolesár 2003: 45, 47; Kováˇc 1998: 320, 338; Musil 1995: 229, 233; Rychlík 1998: 326–328; Semotanová 2003: 80; Tomaszewski 1997: 280). Before 1993, the Czech nation-state had never existed separate of Czechoslovakia. What is more, unlike in the case of Slovakia, no single short name developed for referring to the Czech lands. The compromise enshrined in the 1992 Czech Constitution, named this state, as the ‘Czech Republic.’ When a Czech wants to refer to her country in brief, she speaks of the ‘Republic,’ or ˇ of ‘Cesko’ (literally, Bohemia), if she is from Bohemia. But the latter form is rarely used by the inhabitants of Moravia or Silesia, who are indignant at the Bohemian practice of referring to the Czech Republic, as if it were just a Greater Bohemia. The popularity of the Moravian-Silesian parties and pressure groups showed in the 1991 census, in which 1.36 million (13.2 percent) people declared their nationality as Moravian, and 44,000 (0.4 percent) as Silesian. Their voice could not be disregarded. The Czech Constitution was made on behalf of ‘the citizens of the Czech Republic in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia.’ Nowhere the concept of the Czech nation was mentioned. Similarly, the 1997 Polish Constitution limited the previous political thrust of ethnolinguistic nationalism, when it equated the Polish nation with all the citizens of the Republic of Poland. On the contrary, the Slovak Constitution was made on behalf of the ‘Slovak nation,’ and the Hungarian one on behalf of the ‘Magyar people,’ with provisions for ethnic Magyars living outside Hungary. This concession toward Czech Moravians and Silesians, and the Moravians and the Silesians, was largely of symbolic value, as reflected in the current Czech coat-of-arms composed of two Bohemian lions, and the Moravian and Silesian eagles. The appeals for transforming the republic into a dual federation fell on Prague’s deaf ears. Czech politicians feared that such a dual federations would sooner or later split, like that of Czecho-Slovakia. Perhaps, they were right, as today there are no examples of extant dual federations in the world. Prague also resisted the attempts to change the name of the state to ‘Bohemia-Moravia,’ or even ‘Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia.’ The 2000 decentralization of the republic (required as a preparation step before joining the European Union) yielded 14

The Czech Nation

791

regions unrelated to historical administrative borders. On the contrary, the historical borders of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia are largely reflected in the 1990 territorial organization of the Czech Roman Catholic Church. However, this is of little social importance, as the 1991 census showed that 40 percent of Czechs did not profess any religion. In the 2001 census, this percentage grew to unprecedented 59 percent, whereas it was a mere 13 percent in Slovakia. In addition, Moravian-Silesian parties declined, and ceased to be a significant political force in the second half of the 1990s. In 2001, the number of Moravians plunged to 0.38 million (3.7 percent) and of Silesians to 11,000 (0.1 percent). The Moravians are concentrated in southern Moravia (that is, the historical region of Slovácko), and the Silesians (that is, Slunzaks) in Czech Silesia. Two factors explain this decline. First, the equitable development of the entire Czech Republic prevented overlapping of social and ethnic cleavages, unlike in Poland. Second, unlike Poland’s Silesians (Szlonzoks) many of whom indicated their language as Silesian, the Czech Republic’s Silesians (Slunzaks) declared Czech as their mother tongue, which actually changed the possibility of ethnolinguistic cleavage into a mere regional one. This phenomenon stemmed from interwar Czechoslovakia, where, for instance, Slunzaks were not allowed to declare their own Slunzakian language, and had to choose between Czech, German, and Polish. In its Preamble, the Czech Constitution legitimized the statehood of the Czech Republic relating it to those of the Crown of the Czech lands and of Czechoslovakia. Surely enough, no mention of Czechoslovakia was made in the Slovak Constitution. On the political plane, Czechoslovakism is a dead idea in Slovakia. However, the Czech Constitution pays mere lip service to Czechoslovakism. For instance, in the 1991 census, 3500 persons declared themselves as Czechoslovaks, but the statistical office did not accept these declarations, and did not indicate them in the census’s results. Last but not the least, the Preamble also stated that the founding of the Czech Republic amounted to the renewal of an independent Czech state. This verges on the mythic, because no state going by this name, or any sovereign Czech nation-state, for that matter, had existed prior to the Czech Republic. This ambiguity, which riddles the concept of Czech national statehood and the lack of any popularly accepted brief name for this polity, shows in titles of books devoted to Czech history. Some refer to ˇceské dˇejiny (‘Czech history’), which makes it unnecessary to mention the name of the country, while others speak of the zemˇe Koruny ˇceské (‘lands of the Czech Crown’), or the zemˇe ˇceské (‘Czech lands’). In Slovakia, this complication does not exist and one comes across works straightforwardly titled, as ‘history of Slovakia,’ or ‘Slovak history.’ To add to this onomastic-cum-ideological schizophrenia, after the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia, not a single book titled ‘history of Czechoslovakia,’ or ‘Czechoslovak history’ was published either in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, though works going by these titles were numerous in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1992. Should a reader like to find a

792 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

recent book titled in this way, she could easily purchase one either in Poland or Germany (Doležálek 2006; Lemberg 1993; Magocsi 2002: 198; Nekvapil 2000: 685, 687; Národnostní složení obyvatelstva 2005; Population and Housing Census, May 26, 2001: Basic data 2005; Šatava 1994: 50; Semotanová 2003: 77). In Czecho-Slovakia minority rights were guaranteed in Articles 24 and 25 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms adopted by the Czecho-Slovak Federal Assembly on 9 January 1991. The charter in its entirety was incorporated into the Czech Constitution. In the linguistic field, they included the right to education and contacting administration in minority languages. Due to the aforementioned slump in the number of Moravians and Silesians (Slunzaks), the number of Czechs in the Czech Republic grew from 8.36 million (81.2 percent) to 9.25 million (90.4 percent) between 1991 and 2001. In 2001, Moravians and Silesians together amounted to 0.39 million (3.8 percent), and continued to declare Czech as their mother tongue. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of Slovaks sank from 0.31 million (3.1 percent) to 193,000 (1.9 percent) mainly due to their moving to Slovakia. Moreover, Slovaks born in the Czech lands did not have their own minority language schools, and having become proficient only in Czech, they decided to declare themselves as Czechs. The specific Czech-Slovak bilingualism, which existed in Czechoslovakia, also allowed 15,000 Slovak-speakers to declare themselves as Czechs. The number of Poles dropped from 59,000 (0.5 percent) to 52,000. But the drop is not so significant if one takes into consideration only Polish-speakers who numbered 52,000 in 1991 and 51,000 in 2001. Most of those, who did not speak Polish and declared themselves as Poles in 1991, preferred to refer to themselves as Czechs 10 years later. The same phenomenon was observed in the case of the German minority, the number of its members decreased from 48,500 to 39,000, but the gap between the corresponding numbers of German-speakers, 41,000 and 41,300 was negligible. The biggest discrepancies occurred in the case of Roma. Their number plunged from 33,000 to 12,000, while the number of Romani-speakers remained almost constant at 24,000 and 23,000, respectively. Like in Hungary, Poland, or Slovakia, the Czech Republic’s Roma have been plagued by unemployment, social marginalization, rampant discrimination, regular denial of Czech citizenship, and ghettoization. To limit the brunt of social exclusion directed at them, they preferred to declare themselves as Czechs. Hence, whatever the number of Czechs in the republic, in 1991, the number of Czech-speakers amounted to 9.7 million (97 percent). For all practical reasons, the Czech Republic, like postcommunist Hungary and Poland, is an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state. Slovakia is still the only exception to this pattern, mainly thanks to the Magyar minority. In 2001, it amounted to 0.52 million (9.7 percent) persons, and practically all of them spoke Magyar. The same was true of Slovakia’s 90,000 (1.7 percent) Roma, who continued to speak Romani. Hence, the size of the Slovak speech community added up to 4.6 million (85.8 percent). Between

The Czech Nation

793

1991 and 2001, the number of Polish-language elementary schools remained constant at 28, but the number of students plummeted from 3200 to 2400. In 1991, there were two Slovak-language elementary schools, one remained in 1995, and even it was dissolved in 2000. Simply, Slovak parents were not interested in sending their children to a Slovak-language school, as indicated by the steep drop in students from 584 in 1990, to 73 five years later, and to a mere 22 in 1999. On the other hand, no German- or Romani-language schools were established. Practically, all German-speakers are proficient in Czech (like their Polish counterparts who are fluent in Polish), but in the case of Roma, the lack of education in their language deepens their social exclusion, because many do not know Czech, or have a very limited and substandard command over this language. Unlike in the cases of Magyars and Poles, no significant Czech minorities exist in Central Europe outside the territory of former Czechoslovakia. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of Slovakia’s Czechs decreased from 53,000 to 45,000. Federal Czechoslovakia’s specific tradition of Czecho-Slovak bilingualism entailed that not a single Czech-language school was established, or was even demanded by the Czech minority in Slovakia. Perhaps they will assimilate to Slovakdom in a short time, while the Czech Republic’s Slovaks assimilate to Czechdom. There is not much effort on the part of either of both minorities to prevent this scenario. The underlying thinking behind this phenomenon is that Czechs and Slovaks do not really appear foreign to one another, and assimilation does not bar one from understanding and participating in one’s ancestral culture, be it Czech or Slovak. Besides, statistics record 19,000 Czechs in Austria, 13,000 in Croatia, 9000 in western Ukraine, 6000 in Romania, and 3000 in Ukraine. Unlike their Magyar and Polish counterparts in relation to their respective nation-states, these Czech minorities do not appeal to Prague for some special status or the ‘right to return’ to the Czech Republic. On the other hand, Czech politicians even of nationalist ilk do not attempt to utilize these minorities for political ends. In Slavophone states, in most cases, they have already assimilated. Thanks to the long period of peaceful coexistence of Czechs and German-speakers in the Austrian Empire, and then in Austria-Hungary, Czechs living in Austria concentrate in Vienna, speak German, and frequently do not know Czech anymore, like Magyars in Austria’s Burgenland (Hochman 1998: 191, 197; Magocsi 2002: 199; Minority Language Education in Slovakia 2005; Nekvapil 2000: 687; Národnostní složení obyvatelstva 2005; Population and Housing Census, May 26, 2001: Basic data 2005; ˇ Šatava 1994: 50; Statistická roˇcenka Ceské Republiky 2001 2001: 562). During the postcommunist years, social changes in the Czech Republic were similar to those that occurred elsewhere in Central Europe. Significantly, they were not as sweeping, because the Czech lands had been already better developed than Germany and Austria in the interwar period. Additionally, development has been more equitable in the Czech lands from the social and

794 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

geographical perspective than elsewhere in the region. Between 1990 and 2000, the share of the workforce employed in the service sector grew from 42.7 percent to 55.4 percent, in industry declined from 45.9 percent to 39.5 percent, and in agriculture from 11.4 percent to 5.1 percent. Numerous new universities and higher education institutions were established, so the overall number of students almost doubled from 96,000 in 1990 to 157,000 in 1999. On average, access to the internet is easier and the penetration of mobile phone networks is deeper in the Czech Republic than elsewhere in Central Europe. Book publishing increased at a higher rate than elsewhere in all of Central Europe. In the late 1980s, 4000 titles of Czech-language books were published per annum. By 2000, the number of Czech titles trebled to 12,000, and reached an all time high of 15,700 titles 4 years later. This was more than double the number of Czech-language book titles published in Czechoslovakia in 1937. The dynamics of Slovak book production was more sluggish in comparison. The late 1980s annual output of 3000 book titles was basically maintained. The production grew to 4000 titles in 1996, but fell to 2500 the following year. Later, in 1998, a peak of 4500 titles was reached before production leveled out at 3500 to 4000 titles beginning in 1999. In 2002, 140 book titles were published per 100,000 inhabitants in the Czech Republic, while the indicator was 100 for Hungary, 60 for Slovakia, and a mere 50 for Poland. Per capita, in 2002, the Czech Republic produced more book titles than Germany (90), France (100), or the Netherlands (120). This places the republic squarely in the center of the Western European development trends, which is not that much true for Hungary, Poland, or Slovakia (Essential Facts about the Czech Book Production in the Year 2004 2005; Informationen zur politischen Bildung (Tschechien) 2002: 29, 34; Lakatos et al. 2005: 8; Mandys 2005: 91; Publishing Market Watch 2004: 18). The split of Czecho-Slovakia into the Czech and Slovak nation-states terminated the unique post-1968 tradition of ‘suprastandard’ bilingualism. Apart from few publications, which attempted to preserve this tradition, the mass media, education, administration, and other fields of public life became exclusively monolingual, that is, Czechophone in the Czech Republic, and Slovakophone in Slovakia (obviously, with the exception of various linguistic concessions granted to minorities). Usually, when some Czechoslovak films or radio programs are re-broadcast, they are not translated either into Czech or Slovak, if the originals were in the other language. Such translation would also be impractical because Czech and Slovak were often mixed in these films and programs to reflect a specific social milieu, local color, or were the basis of humor. But new Czech-language films and other programs are required by law to be dubbed or subtitled when broadcast in Slovakia. Necessarily, though reluctantly, national and private TV and radio stations in the Czech Republic reciprocated by dubbing and subtitling Slovak films and programs. Article 6.1 of the Slovak Constitution made Slovak the ‘state language’ of Slovakia. This language attained this

The Czech Nation

795

status for the second time in the 20th century, the first being the period of the short-lived independent Slovakia during World War II. However, in the case of the Czech language, its post-1993 situation is unique. Czech has never been the sole language of any polity before. Despite its de facto dominance, Czech shared the status of official language with Slovak in communist Czechoslovakia, and with Slovak and Ruthenian in interwar Czechoslovakia. In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and beginning in the early 1880s in Austria-Hungary, Czech shared this position with German. Earlier, the official use of Czech had been limited to education, culture and some local official needs. In the Czech Republic, the Constitution did not confer any special status on the Czech language. What is more, the Czecho-Slovak Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, incorporated into this Constitution, referred exclusively to the linguistic rights of minorities. The position of Czech as the de facto official language of the Czech Republic was established through a plethora of low-rank acts and laws issued between 1991 and 1993, which regulated the use of the medium of education, language of contracts, language of administration, language of courts and so on. The Czech-Slovak suprastandard relations permitted the continuation of the strong presence of the Czech language in Slovakia. In part, this explains the phenomenal growth of book production in the Czech Republic. It is not only targeted at the Czech market, as numerous Czech-language books and periodicals are exported to Slovakia, where they are eagerly purchased. The Slovak population is half the size of the Czech Republic, and more translations of world fiction and scholarly literature are available in Czech than in Slovak. This Slovak perusal of Czech-language publications is not reciprocated in the Czech Republic. Slovak-language books and periodicals are hardly available even in Prague, once the capital of Czechoslovakia. Not ˇ surprisingly then, the first ever popular extensive one-volume Cesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský slovník (Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary, 2004, Bratislava) by Tána ˇ Balcová and Štefan Gren, ˇ to be published after the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia, came off the press in Slovakia. In 2005, the Slovak Academy of Sciences announced that one of its priorities is to compile a new authoritative Czech-Slovak dictionary. The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (which had superseded the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1992) did not reciprocate this pledge. Ironically, on the cultural plane, Czechoslovakism is quite popular in Slovakia, but seems to be moribund in the Czech Republic, though it was the Slovaks, who reacted so unfavorably to the official policy Czechoslovakism, when they lived in Czechoslovakia. The Czech Prime Minister’s 2005 proposals to renew the pre-1993 custom of broadcasting mostly Slovak-language programs on Czech public television on Mondays and of reintroducing the common label ‘Made in Czechoslovakia’ for Czech and Slovak products failed. But Czech and Slovak radio DJs usually speak of ‘Czechoslovak’ rock and songs, when referring to pre-1993 hits (Koˇrenský 1998: 100–101; Manowiecki 2006).

796 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

At the very end of communism in 1989, the reprint of Havránek’s Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (1957–1971) appeared in eight small volumes. Even more significantly, in 1989 and 1990, Josef Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (1835–1839) was reprinted for the first time since its publication. The situation resembled the early 1950s in Poland, when Samuel Bogumił Linde’s and Jan Karłowicz’s authoritative dictionaries of the Polish language were reprinted prior to the 1956 communist language reform and the compilation of the new authoritative dictionary of this language by Witold Doroszewski. Strangely enough, no reprint of the best authoritative dictionary of Czech, Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského, appeared. But the ground was prepared for the new language reform, which would free Czech from the straitjacket of communist and Soviet linguistics. In 1993, the new edition of Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu was published and approved by the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Physical Education. Thus, the new norm of Czech was officially introduced to schools and offices. The following year, in line with the new principles, the new edition of Filipec and Daneš’s Slovník spisovné ˇceštiny pro školu a veˇrejnost came off the press. Unlike in the case of Polish, no attempt has so far been made at compiling a new, postcommunist multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Czech language. The sole new dictionary, not directly drawing from some earlier works was Jiˇrí Rejzek’s ˇ Ceský etymologický slovník (Czech Etymological Dictionary, 2001, Voznice). Interestingly, no atlas of the Czech dialects was published during the existence of Czechoslovakia. It was perhaps due to a realization that the compilation of such an atlas would have shattered the concept of Czechoslovak language, so dear to the hearts of the Prague governing elite at least until 1968. On the other hand, it had already become apparent in the 1920s that the Slovaks would not have supported the compilation of any dictionary or atlas of the Czechoslovak language, perceiving this possibility as a stealthy attempt at the eventual Czechization of the Slovak language. Similar considerations delayed the publication of Jozef Stolc’s four-volume Atlas slovenského jazyka (Atlas of the Slovak language, 1968–1984, Bratislava). It was certainly the 1968 federalization of Czechoslovakia (which entailed de jure and de facto equality of Czech and Slovak in the state) that made the publication of this Slovak atlas possible. ˇ Hence, the five volumes of Jan Balhar (1931–) and Pavel Jancák’s Ceský jazykový atlas (Atlas of the Czech Language, 1992–2006, Prague) came off the press in the wake of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The lack of any new post-1989 multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Czech language is also reflected in the similar fact that no publisher has successfully endeavored to produce a new multivolume universal Czech-language encyclopedia. Between 1999 and 2001, the ten-volume Universum. Všeobecná encyklopedie (Universum: The universal encyclopedia, Prague) was published and its four-volume reprint followed 2 years later. But it is a mere Czech translation of a German encyclopedia, Das Bertelsmann Lexikon, with some

The Czech Nation

797

specifically Czech articles added. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the reprint of Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby commenced and was completed in 2004. This is still the best and most comprehensive Czech-language and, in general, Central European encyclopedia. Hence, not surprisingly, Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby was also published on several CD-ROMs between 1997 and 2003. In 1998, the Publishing House Diderot brought out the four-volume Encyklopedia (The Encyclopedia, Prague), which, in 1999, was followed by the eight-volume Všeobecná encyklopedie (The Universal Encyclopedia, Prague) and the two-volume Velký slovník nauˇcný (The Great Scientific Dictionary, Prague). In 2000, Diderot began to publish the 20-volume Velká všeobecná encyklopedie (The Great Universal Encyclopedia, Prague), which was planned to be completed by 2006, but its publication stalled at Volume IV in 2001. Otherwise, the Czechs would have already received their first postcommunist authoritative encyclopedia4 at almost the same time, when the publication of the first ever Slovak authoritative encyclopedia, the 12-volume Encyclopaedia Beliana (Beliana Encyclopedia, 2001–, Bratislava) was initially planned to be completed. The difference is that Diderot’s is a private-capital undertaking, whereas the state and the Slovak Academy of Sciences support the publication of the Encyclopaedia Beliana. In Slovakia, the latter work is treated as a national priority, because in the paradigm of ethnolinguistic nationalism, the Slovak nation seems to miss a significant element of its identity and national culture, namely such an encyclopedia. Thanks to this official-cum-national support, the first volume of the new authoritative dictionary of Slovak, Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Slovak Language, 2006–, Bratislava) was published in 2006 (Hartmanová 2001; Janich and Greule 2002: 304–305). The Czech thirst for ideologically-laden symbols in the form of authoritative national encyclopedias and dictionaries appears to have been satiated by the numerous encyclopedias and dictionaries, which were published between the 1830s and 1970s. The Slovaks still crave for such works, while, in this respect, the Magyars and the Poles are of two minds about the ethnolinguistic dimension of their respective nationalisms. The strange Czech aloofness toward the traditional ethnolinguistic definition of Czechness may be explained on several counts. First, the ethnolinguistic continuity of the Czech nation has never been severed since the Czech nation emerged in the first half of the 19th century. The Polish-Lithuanian natio, which spawned the Polish nation in the last decades of the 19th century, retroactively interpreted the late 18th-century partition of Poland-Lithuania as the first great breach in the ethnolinguistic continuity of the Polish nation, and proposed the cultivation of the Polish language as an ersatz, first, of statehood, and then, of nationhood. The second severance of the continuity came with the German-Soviet partition of interwar Poland. The Magyars, who emerged as a nation between the 1820s and 1840s, saw the first discontinuity in the ethnolinguistic dimension of their nation following

798 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the suppression of their War of Independence (1849). The Ausgleich annulled this crisis, but not fully, as Hungary did not gain independence. It came in 1918, but at the cost of truncating historical Hungary to the ethnic Magyar nationstate with one-third ethnic Magyars left outside the polity. This discontinuity was partly ameliorated during World War II, but in 1945 it was repeated, and the Magyars are still coming to terms with it to this day. Last but not least, the Slovaks were not politically frustrated at some discontinuity, but rather at their inability to establish the internationally recognized separateness of their ethnolinguistic continuity, which slowly coalesced into historical Hungary during the second half of the 19th century. The Slovaks deemed the ‘closing’ of this continuity in interwar and communist Czechoslovakia as unjust. Shortlived wartime independent Slovakia was very much dependent on German aid, and subjected to German supervision; hence, it did not really fulfill the Slovak national aspirations. Finally, their dream of separate ethnolinguistic continuity came true in 1993 when Czechoslovakia was replaced by the two separate nation-states of the Czechs and the Slovaks. Other explanations of the Czechs’ growing disinterest in reaffirming their national identity on ethnolinguistic grounds may be the ethnolinguistic homogeneity of their nation-state, achieved after the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in the second half of the 1940s, and reaffirmed by the 1993 breakup of Czechoslovakia, mainly instigated by nationally-minded Slovak leaders. On the other hand, there are no sizeable Czech national minorities residing outside the republic, which would appeal to Prague for aid and other privileges on an ethnolinguistic basis, as it happens in the case of the sizeable Magyar and Polish minorities. Equitable social and economic development of the state, paralleling that of Western Europe, makes most ethnolingusitic arguments useless in the context of Czech politics. Last but not the least, ethnolinguistic nationalisms in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia still are joined in a feedback relationship with traditional Catholicism, perceived as an integral element of Magyarness, Polishness, and Slovakness. Most Czechs are as much blasé about religion as the inhabitants of the most urbanized and developed areas in Western Europe. Catholicism actually stood in the way of establishing the Czech nation and its nation-state, hence was disregarded, if not actively opposed, by most Czech politicians. Should self-declared atheism be the index of postmodernism and post-nationalism, perhaps the Czech nation would score the highest note in the entire European Union. It is well attested that when no religious difference overlaps with an ethnolinguistic cleavage, this contributes to lessening the intensity of any ethnolinguistic nationalism. Finally, economic well-being (in other words, self-satisfied consumerism), nearly full employment, participation in the global economy and culture, and disinterest in religion, engender not only disinterest in the ethnolinguistic dimension of nationalism, but also liberalism and tolerance. Hence, it seems that out of the eight postcommunist

The Czech Nation

799

member states of the European Union (2004), the Czech Republic along with Slovenia are best prepared to participate in Western Europe’s secular and liberal model of multiculturalism and tolerance of social difference, as long as it does not breach the legal order. Like that of Magyar, Polish, and Slovak, the postcommunist period in the history of the Czech language is characterized by the shedding of Soviet Russian linguistic loans in favor of English ones brought about by globalization and worldwide technological development in the fields of mass media, computers, and telecommunications. This led to a significant increase in contacts between Czechs and German-speakers, especially in Bohemia and southern Moravia, given that the Czech Republic shares half of its borders with Germany and Austria. Following the opening of borders after the fall of communism, German and Austrian tourists began to visit the Czech Republic en masse and Czechs reciprocated this interest. Soon, Germans and Austrians began to regularly visit Czech shops and markets in the borderland regions, and Czechs sought gainful employment across the border. As a result, the phenomenon of Czech-German bilingualism (largely liquidated after the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in the second half of the 1940s) made a modest comeback. The traditionally good Czech-Russian relations, fostered in the heydays of pre-1918 Pan-Slavism, were soured by the Soviet-inspired communist takeover and appeared moribund following the Soviet and Warsaw Pact intervention in 1968. Nowadays, the Czech Republic is separated by Slovakia and Ukraine from Russia. To the average Russian, the Czech Republic appears to be a genuine part of the West (unlike Poland), which they find more welcoming due to the state’s Slavophone character. Not surprisingly, Russians in tens of thousands flock to the region of Karlovy Vary, where there is the famous spa of Carlsbad (as English-speakers continue to call it), and to Prague. The colony brought back to the Czech Republic the Russian language, culture, publications, and the phenomenon of mixed CzechRussian marriages. The situation is similar to that in interwar Czechoslovakia, where numerous Russian and Ukrainian émigrés settled in the Czech lands after having fled the Soviet Union. In addition, Russian-language films, programs and music virtually disappeared from Hungary, Poland, and to a lesser degree, from Slovakia after 1989, but the Czech mass media still abound in them, including latest satirical programs on Russian politics, for instance, Gorodok (A Small Town). Democratization and liquidation of censorship facilitated ‘decentralization of Czech,’ and an increasing number of publications and mass media programs are produced now all over the republic. But the unique position of Prague (similar to that of Budapest in Hungary) is still felt in each aspect of Czech life, unlike in Poland, where there are numerous large urban centers (Cracow, Gdansk, ´ Wrocław), which contest Warsaw’s elevated position. Even in small Slovakia, the position of Bratislava is successfully challenged by the second largest Slovak

800 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

city, Košice, and by the revived traditional center of Slovak nationalism and culture, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin. Significantly, the Slovak National Library is located in the latter city. The unfettered freedom to use Czech in public as speakers see fit, in the context of growing social liberalism unattested elsewhere in more traditional Central Europe, led to the unprecedented tumbling of the barriers of prescriptivism and decorum. Anecdotes, gossipy books on celebrities (including Havel and his new wife), and comic cartoon series published in the most important political weeklies (for instance, ‘Zelený Raoul’ [Green Raoul] in the weekly Reflex) regularly feature profane and explicit sexual language. These would immediately entail libel actions on part of politicians and other celebrities elsewhere in Central Europe, and in numerous more traditional Western European states. To achieve the effect of chatty closeness with the readership, authors of such indecorous publication draw on Czech diglossia, that is, they almost exclusively employ obecná ˇceština, the use of which in print was previously reserved for dialogs in fiction and feature films. (The spread of obecná ˇceština to publications and mass media was not reciprocated by a parallel spread of spisovná ˇceština to the field of spoken communication.) Hence, however strongly prescriptivism of the Czech language and social propriety may be challenged, the barrier between obecná ˇceština (colloquial interdialect of Bohemia) and spisovná ˇceština (standard written Czech) is maintained by the virtue of communication effects a Czech-speaker may achieve by creatively employing Czech diglossia in her speech. Sadly enough, the forceful entry of obecná ˇceština into printed and electronic mass media, increasingly more on par with spisovná ˇceština, has not left a mark on dictionaries and Czech language school textbooks, which almost exclusively record the vocabulary and syntax of spisovná ˇceština. A partial exception to this rule, is Patrik Ouˇredník’s Šmírbuch jazyka ˇceského. Slovník nekonvenˇcnì ˇceštiny (The Trash-Book of the Czech Language: A dictionary of unconventional Czech, 1988, 1992, 2005, Prague). This acute lack of spisovná ˇceština dictionaries creates problems for the inhabitants of Moravia and Czech Silesia, who speak local dialects at home, and can actively master obecná ˇceština only by studying and living in Bohemia. For foreign learners of Czech, it frequently amounts to an insurmountable obstacle, and they rarely acquire obecná ˇceština, which makes them into ridiculous (in Czech eyes) speakers of spisovná ˇceština only, a form of Czech largely confined to formal writing and formal speeches. In the 1991 census, 1.35 million declared themselves to be Moravians, and 44,000 Silesians. The former concentrate in southern Moravia and the latter in Czech Silesia. On this ticket, several Moravian-Silesian national (regional) parties and associations came into being during the first half of the 1990s. In line with the ethnolinguistic model of Central European nationalism, some Moravian and Silesian leaders proposed to codify their respective Moravian and Silesian

The Czech Nation

801

languages. The projects could fall back on the long established, though often discontinuous, tradition of Moravian and Silesian as chancery, literary, and ethnic languages. Standard Moravian and standard Silesian would also allow dialectspeaking Moravians and Silesians to stand the ground vis-à-vis prestigious obecná ˇceština of Bohemia’s Czechs. If codified Moravian and Silesian could attain a similar degree of prestige, the Moravian and Silesian dialect-speakers could pose their languages as legitimate alternatives for the use of obecná ˇceština in their regions. Numerous local publications in dialects followed, but the demographic base was too small to consider a codification of Silesian. The Moravian movement, however, began the codification of the Moravian language. It flowered in the form of several bilingual Moravian-Czech glossaries, also available on the Internet. In 1998, a project of a Moravian grammar was published. However, the Moravian and Silesian movements lost social support in the second half of the 1990s, hence the plan to codify Moravian was abandoned. Interestingly, the use of the northern Moravian-Silesian dialects of Opava, Hluˇcín,5 Ostrava, and ˇ Ceský Tˇešín in the function of obecná ˇceština revived at the beginning of the 21st century. Although the dialectal differentiation is at its strongest in this corner of the Czech Republic, spisovná ˇceština and obecná ˇceština made their presence felt via the mass media and education. As a result, differences separating the local dialects are levelled out, and increasingly Czechized obecná sleštino-moravština (colloquial Silesio-Moravian) seems to be on the rise (Daneš et al. 1997: 18–19; Dulichenko 2004: 358; Janeˇcek 2005; Koˇrenský 1998: 50; Motýl 2006; Ouˇredník 2005). The 1993 breakup of Czecho-Slovakia entailed the full equalization of statuses between Czech and Slovak, which now function as separate official, state, and national languages in the Czech and Slovak nation-states, respectively. On the international plane, the situation was reaffirmed in 2004, when the Czech Republic and Slovakia joined the European Union along with eight other new member states. Among others, Czech and Slovak automatically became official languages of the Union. This development, as in the case of Magyar and Polish, ensures an elevated status for both Czech and Slovak throughout the European Union, and simultaneously increases their importance across the world. Bearing this unique achievement in mind, the high and equitable socio-economic development of the Czech Republic, and also widespread social liberalism, it comes as a surprise that Klaus, the Czech President since 2003, should be the most Eurosceptic among all the heads of state in the enlarged EU. In his pre-accession speeches, he advised Czech citizens that in the accession referendum they ought to vote against their country’s joining the Union, and nowadays (2005), he regularly proposes that the EU should be transformed, and accordingly renamed into a loose Union of European States. Similar opinions are voiced in the more traditional Central European states of Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia by radical parties of populist and ethnolinguistic nationalist leanings. Klaus, being

802 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

an economic liberal, and these populists and nationalists (often with programs steeped in popular Catholicism) make for strange bedfellows. Although this phenomenon may be not so strange at all, when the societies of the Netherlands and Germany, even more liberal than the Czechs, react negatively against immigrants and demand official reaffirming of their national cultures and identities, as construed in ethnolinguistic terms.

11 The Slovak Nation: From Czechoslovakia to Slovakia

The National Council declares that it alone is entitled to speak in the name of the Czecho-Slovak nation living within the frontiers of Hungary. [. . .] From the vantage of language, culture, and history, the Slovak nation is a part of the homogenous Czecho-Slovak nation. The Martin Declaration, 30 October 1918. (Bˇelina 1993:158) [T]here is no Slovak nation [or language], it is an invention of Hungarian propaganda. (1921) (In Korbel 1977: 98) Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk [T]he claim that the Slovak language was never a part of the Czech or the so-called ‘Czechoslovak’ language was proven correct by scholarly research beyond any doubt. (Kirschbaum 1960: 49) Slovak is the state language on the territory of the Slovak Republic. Article 6.1 of the Constitution of Slovakia, 1 October 1992. This chapter differs in composition from the two previous ones devoted to the politics of language in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the short 20th century. With the exception of the brief wartime interlude of independent Slovakia (1939–1945), the Slovak nation found itself residing in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1992. This necessitated the representation of much Slovak history, and the vicissitudes of Czech-Slovak relations in the previous chapter, which nominally was devoted to matters Czech. It would soon be demonstrated that the past of the common state of the Czech and Slovaks could not be seamlessly 803

804 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

divided into separate Czech and Slovak parts. Likewise, numerous international events of importance for the Slovaks occurred either in Hungary or on the plane of Czechoslovak-Hungarian relations. Understandably, these were dealt with in the two prior chapters. In order to avoid repetition, here the historical background is kept to a minimum, assuming that the reader has already acquainted herself with it. However, while focusing on Czechoslovakia in previous chapters, I could not do justice to independent wartime Slovakia, or to independent postcommunist Slovakia. The aim of the chapter is to address this gap, therefore it is more closely focused on matters Slovak. In addition, when writing on Hungary and Czechoslovakia, I came across the unexpected ‘stumbling block’ in the form of the Ruthenians (or present-day Rusyns). In the second half of the 19th century, no one seriously questioned the right of the Hungarian nation to statehood and at the same time, Czech leaders gradually won support among Vienna’s politicians for the project of re-establishing the defunct statehood of the Czech lands in the form of an autonomous, ethnolinguistically defined Czech nationstate (though with a considerable share of German-speakers in the population) within a federalized Austria-Hungary. In contrast, the Slovaks did not have it so easy. Until the Great War, neither Budapest nor Vienna recognized them as entitled to their own autonomous region let alone separate statehood. The Czechs saw the Slovaks as a branch of the Czech or Czechoslovak nation. In the latter case, the Slovaks at least made it into the composite name and ideology of Czechoslovakia. The Ruthenians were not so lucky. Before deciding to become a nation of its own, the Ruthenian elites had wished to be merged with the Orthodox Great Russian nation within the framework of the Russian Empire. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which appeared ‘godless’ to the average Ruthenian, dashed this hope. The emergence of independent Ukraine in 1917 appeared to afford another option, but this state proved to be too short-lived. In 1918, the breakup of Austria-Hungary led to the partition of the Ruthenians between Czechoslovakia and Poland. At that time, the vast majority of Ruthenians were peasants and transhumant pastoralists, still more attached to their localities and Orthodox Christianity than to the concept that they constitute a separate nation. This translated into the continuing weakness of the Ruthenian national movement. Although recognized as a state nation alongside the Czechoslovaks in interwar Czechoslovakia, neither Hungary nor the Soviet Union recognized this status when they seized Czechoslovakia’s Ruthenian homeland in 1939 and 1945, respectively. Because of its aforementioned weakness, Ruthenian nationalism could not exercise political autonomy or stage any effective opposition to Hungarian authoritarianism, Soviet totalitarianism, or the nationalisms of the Poles, Slovaks, and Ukrainians. In addition, with political borders having proliferated and changed at an ever increasing pace between 1914 and the late 1940s,

The Slovak Nation

805

the Axis powers and the Allies were not interested in any further complication of the political jigsaw of Central Europe, which would have been brought about by recognizing the Ruthenians as a nation. None of the great powers offered the option of independence to the Ruthenian nation. The Ruthenians, however, persisted as a distinctive ethnolinguistic community, and a tentative flowering of their culture, language, and nationalism came about in Central Europe after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Any presentation of language politics and nation-building in Central Europe would not be complete without taking into consideration matters Ruthenian. This is especially so in the case of the Slovaks, who border directly on the Ruthenians and share with them numerous cultural, ethnographic, and linguistic features. Hence, devoting a separate chapter to the Ruthenian questions, though commendable, would upset the structure of this work. Therefore, I settle for presenting elements of Ruthenian history and culture piecemeal, rather than excising them from the picture altogether. In the wake of this logic, I touch upon in this chapter the Ruthenians and their fate after 1945, the earlier periods of their past having been outlined in the previous chapters when they had some bearing on Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Polish history.

National myths and the Slovak vision of the Slovak past The origins and the travails of Slovak nationalism were similar to those of its Ruthenian counterpart, in that leaders of both ethnic groups could not resort to indisputable Slovak and Ruthenian statehoods in any attempt to invest their projects of Slovak and Ruthenian nations with internationally recognized legitimacy. In the 19th century, the model of modernity and nation-state was given by Western Europe, where states re-invented themselves as nation-states after the French Revolution. However, many scholars of nationalism (for instance, Liah Greenfeld 1992: 27–87) confer the badge of the first ever nation-state to 16th-century England. In Europe, the model of nation-state spread eastward when the Kingdom of Italy and the German Empire were established as nationstates in 1861 and 1871, respectively. German and Italian nationalists drew on Herderian thought that, in later reinterpretations, was used to equate language with nation. This linguistic definition of nation was an instrument and ‘glue’ that allowed for forging the Italian and German nation-states from the multitude of statelets, which had straddled Europe from the Apennine Peninsula to the Low Countries since the Middle Ages. Here, the continuity and antiquity of statehood conferred legitimizing significance in the Western European model of nation-state: Italian nationalists evoked the glories of the Roman Empire, and their German counterparts, that of the Ottonian Empire (that is, the Holy Roman Empire as founded in 962 by Otto I the Great on the basis of the eastern section of Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire.)

806 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The German-Italian model of ethnolinguistic nation-state, steeped in the tradition of vividly evoked, though defunct statehood, was easily adopted in Central Europe. Recently partitioned Poland-Lithuania gave credence to the Polish national movement, which first transformed Polish-Lithuanian natio into the Polish nation, and then broadened this category to embrace all the population defined as speaking the Polish language. Magyar nationalism followed a similar path. The Kingdom of Hungary survived as a separate political entity within the Habsburg lands and later within the Austrian Empire, complete with its Hungarian natio. Magyar nationalists not only broadened the category of the Magyar nation to take in all Magyar-speakers, but hoped to Magyarize all the non-Magyar-speaking population of historical Hungary so that to make them into part of such a ‘wider’ or ‘greater’ Magyar nation. This latter option was closed to Polish nationalists, as there was no Polish state to support such a policy (though it did not stop Polish politicians from proposing such projects), unlike in the Magyar case, which was boosted by the creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. Czech nationalism was an intermediate case between its Hungarian and Polish counterparts on one hand, and Slovak nationalism on the other. The composite character of the Czech Crown was indicated by the fact that no unitary, realmwide Czech natio ever developed. This was somewhat similar to the case of the Polish-Lithuanian natio or nationes. But in the latter case, common interests and institutions, the Polish language and later, Catholicism actually molded both nationes of Poland-Lithuania into a single one, in all but name. Tremendous territorial changes in the actual shape of the lands of the Czech Crown and religious differences prevented the emergence of a unified Czech natio, out of Bohemian, Lusatian, Moravian, and Silesian nationes. The core nationes of Bohemia, Moravia, and partly, Upper Silesia were unified by their use of the Bohemian chancery language, though religious issues tended to separate them. Following the 1620 standoff with the Catholic emperor, which the Protestant nationes of Bohemia and Moravia lost, the nobles had to convert to Catholicism or leave the Habsburg lands. As a result, a new ‘Pan-Austrian’ nobility developed, united by Catholicism and German. This process was facilitated by the fact that the Czech lands had been firmly embedded in the broader framework of the Holy Roman Empire since the 10th century. The political union of the Czech lands disappeared for all practical purposes by the mid-18th century, and the separateness of the Czech lands grew, engendering Landespatriotismen (regional patriotisms), which, in turn, further accelerated this process. Czech nationalists did not emerge from among the nobility (as in the Magyar and Polish cases), but stemmed from the bourgeois who spoke the Slavic vernacular, or cherished it as spoken by their (frequently peasant) parents or grandparents. Initially, these nationalists were mainly concentrated in Bohemia. In line with their traditional Landespatriotismus, numerous Bohemian nobles

The Slovak Nation

807

supported Czech nationalists, because this seemed to contribute to the glory of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The first project of the nascent Czech national movement was to resurrect 16th-century chancery Bohemian as standard Czech. Only in the mid-19th century was the concept of recreating the unity of the Czech lands formulated as an integral part of the Czech national project. The initially linguistic basis of Czech nationalism was completed with the referral to the composite statehood of the lands of the Czech Crown. The further course of Czech nationalism entailed the spread of standard Czech and the newly-revived concept of Czech national statehood among the Slavophone populations of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. From 1848, there was no hope that the German-speakers living in these regions would be attracted to Czech nationalism, steeped as it was in the Czech language, which would necessarily isolate them from Vienna and Prussia/Germany. On the other hand, the Czechs had no state like the Poles, which would make it possible to Czechize these German-speakers. At the turn of the 19th century, the attempts to write and standardize the Slavic vernacular in Upper Hungary were dictated by the desire of the Catholic Church to instill the Slavophone population with improved comprehension of the religion and to shield them from Protestant influences, which had not been uprooted in the course of the Counter-Reformation in Hungary, unlike elsewhere in the Habsburg lands. In the Czech lands, until the 1620s, there were locally-oriented nationes (estates), who spoke in chancery Bohemian and perceived themselves as different from the typically German-speaking nationes of other states within the Holy Roman Empire. Conversely, the Kingdom of Hungary enjoyed the unified Hungarian natio, with the partial exception of the Croatian natio, who maintained their separateness in the polity like the Bohemian natio in the Holy Roman Empire. But there was never any Slovak natio. The nobles of Upper Hungary constituted an inalienable part of the Hungarian natio. Practically all of them spoke Magyar (and Latin in the case of males), even if of Slavophone background (though by the 19th century, there had been some provisions for local use of Slavic in a handful of localities). Unlike in the Czech case, therefore, the burghers could hardly become a springboard for Slovak nationalism, because most of them spoke German and Yiddish. A substantial peasantry made up the bulk of Upper Hungary’s Slavophone population. Not being part of the estates, they had no regular political representation until the complete freeing of peasants from serfdom in 1848. Prior to that moment, those who could lend them a helping hand were Catholic and Protestant clergy of peasant origin. Slovak nationalism shares its peasant character with the Slavophone nationalisms in the Balkans, where elites used to be non-Slavic-speaking, and future nationalists emerged from among the ranks of the lower, Slavophone clergy. (In this region Orthodox hierarchs

808 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

tended to be Greeks, and burghers were of Armenian-, Greek-, Ladino-, and Turkic-speaking stock.) It was the clergy of Upper Hungary who began to write in various regional strands of the region’s Slavophone vernacular, before this process gave birth to the Slovak language as we know it nowadays. Obviously, the clergymen’s goal was not to produce any Slovak nation, far from it, but rather to improve the spiritual (and sometimes material) fate of the peasantry. This entailed the desire for spurring up social mobility, which was possible only by acquiring appropriate education and social conventions complete with an appropriate language. When the idea of popular education became established in the second half of the 18th century, German was identified as the language of social advancement in Upper Hungary. In the first half of the 19th century, Magyar steadily supplanted it in this role. Latin, the first official language of the Hungarian natio, remained the language of the Catholic Church and its liturgy, and of learning. In the latter case, German gradually replaced Latin as the language of scholarship in Upper Hungary during the first half of the 19th century, but it had to share this distinction with Magyar during the last century-quarter. In the first half of the 19th century, Slovak nationalism was not an obvious political choice that would attract a large following. The proposal that language equates with nation popped up from time to time among Upper Hungary’s Slavophone intellectuals, but the problem of ‘which language’ remained unresolved, with Bibliˇctina and Bernoláˇctina as the two main contenders. To add to the confusion, Upper Hungary’s Protestant Slavic-speakers and interested Czech intellectuals and politicians saw Bibliˇctina to be nothing else but the Czech language. Pavol Jozef Šafárik and Ján Kollár, two Protestant pastors of Slovak origin, who by ideological choice and the decision to settle in Prague became more Czech than Slovak, hoped to unite the Czech and the Slovaks into a Czechoslovak nation or people complete with its Czechoslovak language. Another idea of theirs was to reserve the distinction of ‘nation’ for all the Slavs (if implemented it would ensure a Russian hegemony over all the Slavic-speakers). This made the proposed Czechoslovaks into a branch of the proposed Slavic nation, and Czechoslovak into a ‘literary dialect’ of the Slavic language. Czech leaders sometimes tuned in, but more often than not maintained that Slovaks were just Czechs living east of Moravia. In this scheme, Slovak was nothing else but a dialect of the Czech language. These ideological constructs and squabbles were too abstract and impractical to appeal to the spatially and socially immobile peasantry, who still did not realize they and their descendants would become a Slovak nation. First of all, they were Catholic and Protestant peasants and shepherds, who lived their lives in their localities and excelled in loyalty to the emperor. After serfdom was done away with and a modicum of elementary education secured for some of them, the idea of being part of the Hungarian natio, construed as a multiethnic and

The Slovak Nation

809

multilingual all-embracing civic Hungarian nation, was an obvious source of collective identity. The problem was that the leaders of the Hungarian nation decided to make it into an ethnolinguistically homogenous Magyar nation. This barred Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speakers from any easy commonality with the Magyar nation, and simultaneously, caused them to coalesce into a separate Slovak nation. Czech ideological, educational, and organizational aid, though appreciated, did not make much difference beyond the narrow circle of Upper Hungary’s Protestant Slavophone elite. In the 1840s, the young generation of Slovak national activists, who took over the leadership of the movement from wavering Šafárik and Kollár, did not wish to make the Slovaks into an appendage of Czech or Czechoslovak nation. First, they were ‘ethnic entrepreneurs,’ whose assimilation would have deprived them of the status and privileges belonging to the ‘fathers’ and leaders of nations. These distinctions would have mostly passed to Czech politicians. Second, even if they had agreed to the submerging of the Slovaks in a greater Czech/Czechoslovak nation, Czech leaders from distant Prague would have been unable to address Slovak problems and desires as proactively as Slovak leaders on the ground in Upper Hungary. Another Protestant leader, L’udovít Štúr, decisively divorced Slovak nationalism from the possibility of it becoming part of Czech/Czechoslovak nationalism, when he codified the Slovak language as separate from Czech in 1843. Despite Kollár’s angry statements aimed at nullifying this achievement and František Palacký’s prediction that this codification would not last and Slovaks would return to Czech, the ethnolinguistic logic of Central European nationalisms ensured that thanks to its standard language, the Slovak nation became a gradually accepted and lasting political entity. The separateness of the Slovak nation and its national movement thus confirmed that what was missing was a tradition of statehood, which would confer Slovak nationalism with a legitimacy equal at least to that enjoyed by Czech nationalism. In the 1850s and 1860s, reaction set in throughout the Austrian Empire as elsewhere across Central Europe, which contributed to the temporary suppression of national movements. In this context, Palacký softened the ideological thrust of Czech nationalism with Austroslavism, or the vision of the Austrian Empire as the promoter and protector (against Russian autocracy) of the polity’s Slavic peoples. After the 1866 defeat at Prussia’s hands, Vienna lifted the clamp on the political aspirations of the Magyars in order to secure more legitimacy and popular support for the weakened empire. The 1867 founding of Austria-Hungary was of serious repercussions for the Czechs and the Slovaks. The concession of separate autonomous national statehood extended to the Magyars was denied to the Czechs. To mollify their anger, Vienna granted broad cultural and linguistic rights to Czechs, complete (in the 1880s) with a Czech-language university in Prague and the status of co-official language given to Czech in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech leaders wanted the establishment of an autonomous Czech

810 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

national statehood out of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Vienna could not agree to this, because it would entail losing the Magyars’ support and loyalty for the empire. In 1879, the Czechs were further antagonized by the dual alliance contracted by Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. To them, the founding of the German Empire in 1871 looked ominously like a precursor to the creation of a Great German nation-state, composed of the Austrian half of Austria Hungary and the German Empire. In such a polity, the Czechs would have been marginalized, which, in turn, would have facilitated their complete Germanization. The 1867 Ausgleich (compromise) placed the Slovaks in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy, and thus in a position worse than that of the Czechs, who lived in the empire’s Austrian part. The slow development of the Slovak elementary and secondary educational system in the 1850s and 1860s (when Magyar nationalists were busy opposing Germanization applied by Vienna in the kingdom) was cut short when the official policy of increasingly forced Magyarization began to unfold in the 1870s. What is more, the transformation of the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary replaced the purely administrative border between the Czech lands and Upper Hungary with an internal but, nevertheless, state border. This added a degree of spatial isolation to the growing disinterest of Czechs in all matters Slovak. Between 1874 and 1875, the Hungarian authorities dissolved the Slovaklanguage secondary schools and the Matica slovenská. The sole organizational basis of the Slovak national movement liquidated, aspiring Slovak students could receive sought-for secondary and university education in a language close to Slovak, only in Prague. The political hopes of the Czech national movement repeatedly frustrated, the Czech-Slovak political cooperation developed on the plane of Czechoslovakism in the 1880s. And when the Czech-language university was founded in Prague in 1882, Czech leaders facilitated the establishment of the association Detvan that catered mainly for Slovak Protestant students attending this university. Soon, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a professor at this university, became a mentor of the students. At the same time, numerous other students of Slovak background, including most Catholics, pursued university education in Budapest or Vienna, which distanced them from the idea of CzechSlovak cooperation if not from identifying with the goals of Slovak nationalism altogether. When the Slovak students who graduated from the Czech-language university in Prague entered adult life and various professions across Upper Hungary and the Czech lands, they became recognized leaders of the Slovak national movement and, together with their Czech colleagues, established the organˇ ization Ceskoslovanská jednota (Czechoslavic Unity) in 1895. In non-Czech and non-Slovak publications, the name of this organization is often incorrectly translated as ‘Czechoslovak Unity,’ because there is just a difference of a single

The Slovak Nation

811

letter between ˇceskoslovenský (Czechoslovak) and ˇceskoslovanský (Czechoslavic). Initially, in line with the concept of Slavic reciprocity, this organization aimed to facilitate cooperation between the Czechs and all other Slavs. But in reality, this cooperation was limited to that between Czechs and Slovaks. Three years later, this intensification in Czech-Slovak contacts led to the founding of the influential Slovak monthly Hlas (Voice) on the initiative of Detvan members. The periodical was published in Upper Hungary and popularized the ideals of Czech-Slovak cooperation until it went defunct in 1905. ˇ The problem was that, paradoxically, the priority for the Ceskoslovanská jednota was to protect the Czech nation and language in Bohemia’s predominantly German-speaking borderlands. The organization was not much interested in Moravia and merely paid lip service to Czech-Slovak cooperation on the assumption that the Slovaks were already a part of the larger Czech/Czechoslovak nation. Not surprisingly, this approach did not make Czech-Slovak or Czechoslovakism popular among Upper Hungary’s Slavicspeakers. Actually, the pro-Czech and Czechoslovak-oriented activities of Detvan members and Hlas writers alienated the Slovak Catholics and prevented consolidation of the Slovak national movement exactly at the turn of the 20th century when the Magyarization campaign increased considerably. In the 1890s, numerous contributors to Hlas hoped that Slovaks might ‘return’ to using Czech as their written language, which undermined the only solid ideological basis of Slovak nationalism, that is, the standard Slovak language. As attested by publications printed in Prague, the gross lack of knowledge on matters Slovak among numerous Czech intellectuals did not go down well with Slovak national activists, especially of Catholic provenance. Unfortunately, this almost traditional Czech disregard for Slovakia and its inhabitants has continued to this day. On the other hand, this widespread Czech ignorance of what the Slovaks were and wanted entailed serious misunderstandings regarding the political goals of Slovak nationalism and question on whether Czechoslovakism could facilitate them. Czech leaders saw the platform of Czech-Slovak cooperation as one of many political instruments to apply pressure on Vienna so that the Austrian administration would finally give in and agree to the re-establishment of the political unity of the Czech lands as a Czech nation-state. In this perspective, Upper Hungary was seen as another Czech land, maybe not ‘historically Czech’ but surely Czech on the ethnolinguistic basis. Most Slovak leaders could not disagree more, but their voice was not heard, as Catholic Slovaks lacked any unified organizational framework to express their views, while their Protestant counterparts, often dependent on Czech aid and support, tended to acquiesce Czech views on Slovaks. Hence, not only the average Czech but many a Czech politician failed to realize that Slovak leaders hoped that the Czechs’ help would stem Magyarization and convince Budapest to grant cultural or even regional autonomy to the Slovaks.

812 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the situation, Upper Hungary’s Slavic-speakers did not face the choice between becoming Slovaks or Czechs/Czechoslovaks, as many Czech intellectuals mistakenly believed, but between becoming Slovaks or Magyars. This dimension of the Slovak dilemma was lost even on Masaryk, who as late as 1896 criticized Štúr for his ‘radicalism’ and the ‘unplanned ferment’ of Slovak nationalism expressed in Štúr’s codification of the Slovak language as separate from Czech. All this was despite his earlier view in 1887 that it was impossible for Slovaks to ‘return’ to the Czech language. Masaryk’s political pragmatism remained colored by his ideological attachment to Czechoslovakism. Suitably, he shared a similar ethnoregional background with Šafárik and Kollár, who had created this ideology. Masaryk’s father was a ‘Hungarian Slovak,’ and Masaryk converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, which later earned him the dislike of Andrej Hlinka, the leader of Catholic Slovaks in interwar Czechoslovakia. From the Slovak perspective, Masaryk was a Slovak, who became completely Czechized. Although his Moravian-Upper Hungarian background gave him a better insight into matters Slovak, on the ideological plane, Masaryk persisted in treating the Slovaks as an integral part of the Czech nation. Beginning in 1895, Slovak leaders undertook political cooperation with their Romanian and Serbian counterparts in an effort to jointly limit the excesses of Magyarization. (Croatian politicians, enjoying cultural and elements of political autonomy in Hungary like the Czechs in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, did not join them.) But this cooperation did not amount to much in the face of Budapest’s hard-line Magyarizing and centralizing policies underpinned by limited suffrage, which concentrated on decision-making in the hands of the Magyarophone aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Thus, Slovak politicians, unable to receive effective support from Vienna, Budapest, or Hungary’s non-Magyar-speaking minorities, had no choice but to cooperate closely with their Czech counterparts. Annual Czech-Slovak meetings, inaugurated during 1908 in the south Moravian resort of Luhaˇcovice (Luhatschowitz), midway between Prague and Upper Hungary, were conducted until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Slovaks were a junior partner in this intensifying Czecho-Slovak cooperation, which entailed that they had to, at least tacitly, agree with the Czech ideology of Czechoslovakism as a common political program. When Magyarization accelerated after 1905 and the number of Slovak-language elementary schools plummeted dramatically, the Slovaks hoped to preserve their Slovakness in a symbiotic relationship with the Czechs. Not surprisingly, even Hlinka approved, as evidenced by his 1908 statement, that Slovaks and Czechs constitute a single nation. ˇ Following Masaryk’s political pragmatism, the Ceskoslovanská jednota agreed in 1908 to accept the ‘linguistic reality,’ which meant abandoning its efforts to entice Slovaks ‘back to’ the Czech language. Simultaneously, the traditional

The Slovak Nation

813

Russophile Pan-Slav tendency (dating back to Šafárik and Kollár) continued among some Slovak leaders as a weak counterweight to the dominant Czechoslovakism. In this scheme, the Czech lands, Poland (that is, mainly Russia’s share of this country), and Slovakia were to be formed into a union state incorporated into Russia under the protection of the Romanovs. When the Great War erupted, Masaryk fled Austria-Hungary, and began to propagate the idea of a Czech-Slovak state. This concept was popularized by his acquaintance, the British scholar Robert William Seton-Watson (1879–1951), who developed and described it in detail for Masaryk. The latter used this expertise in his memorandum, Independent Bohemia (1915, London), forwarded to his British friends and the United Kingdom government. The United Kingdom Foreign Office approved it as part of anti-Central Powers propaganda, but the basic assumptions of this plan appeared to be wholly unrealistic at the beginning of the war. First, the Central Powers had to be utterly defeated. Second, the Allies, free to decide the postwar political order in Central Europe, would agree to break up Austria-Hungary and to establish a Czech-Slovak state. The unthinkable became reality at the end of World War I. In 1916, the Counseil national des pays Tchèques (National Council of the Czech Lands) was founded in Paris by Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, and the sole Slovak representative, Milan Rastislav Štefánik (Masaryk’s former student). In Czech and Slovak historiography, the body is known as the ‘Czechoslovak National Council,’ but its original and internationally accepted name relegated Slovakia to the status of one of the Czech lands. The decision was explained by political expediency, since the ethnonym ‘Czech’ was much better known to the international decision-makers and Western public than that of ‘Slovak,’ while the compound ‘Czechoslovak’ could be downright confusing. It was an example of shrewd political marketing, which contributed directly to the creation of Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the decision obscured the Slovak national cause and, on the political plane, subjected it to the needs of Czech nation-statebuilding. At the instigation of the Slovak politician, Štefan Osuský (1889–1973), the council’s name was changed to the Counseil national tchéco-slovaque (Czech-Slovak National Council) in the summer of 1916, but this change was not advertised, and as such did not register with international public opinion. Popularly (though simplistically), the Czechs viewed Czechoslovakia as ‘their’ Czech nation-state. On the other hand, broad cultural, linguistic, and educational autonomy enjoyed by the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia allowed for the dynamic development and consolidation of a self-conscious Slovak nation. The incorporation of Upper Hungary within Czechoslovakia also prevented Slovaks from becoming Magyars, a process that seemed unavoidable had the Kingdom of Hungary managed to preserve its territorial unity after 1918 (Kirschbaum 1999: xxxix; Kováˇc 1997: 9–10, 14–15, 19, 35–36, 51–57, 62, 64–65, 69, 97, 99, 1998: 154).

814 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Czech leaders and intellectuals found Slovak insistence on the separateness of their language and nation vis-à-vis the Czechs and the Czech language baffling, incomprehensible, and even annoying when Czech-Slovak cooperation intensified at the turn of the 20th century. This was the function of how much the Czechs did not know and misunderstood Slovak political aspirations, and of the Slovaks’ inability to express those clearly when they became increasingly dependent on Czech aid. One does not bite the hand that feeds. But the situation led to conflicts and serious differences of opinion, which, in Czech eyes, made the Slovaks look like a spoiled younger brother, who always wants something. In turn, the Slovak stereotypical portrayal of the Czechs, made the latter into a scheming big brother, who always manipulates the Slovaks for his own ends, and never delivers on his promises, for instance, by turning a common Czech-Slovak state into Czech-controlled and centralized Czechoslovakia. Not surprisingly, Czechs, like Magyars, opposed the fledgling Slovak national historiography in its efforts to supply the Slovak national movement with the tradition of statehood that would invest the Slovak national project with more legitimacy. The obvious choice was Greater Moravia, about which Juraj Papánek and Juraj Fándly wrote at the end of the 18th century, in the context of the history of the Slavs, and wishing to boost Landespatriotismus in Upper Hungary by identifying the core of this medieval polity with their home region. In the 1830s, Ján Hollý wrote Greater Moravia and the tradition of its Cyrillo-Methodian Christianity into the paradigm of Slovak nationalism with his epic poems in Bernoláˇctina, which (in standard Slovak translations) to this day are assigned reading in Slovak schools. The beginnings of modern Slovak national historiography date back to the 1870s and are associated with Czech historians appreciative of the Slovak national project. At that time, the Slovak elite was so narrow that it could not specialize beyond pastoral services, education, politics, and journalism. In 1875, František Viktor Sasinek (1830–1914) proposed in his work Die Slovaken. Eine Ethnographische Skizze (The Slovaks: An ethnographic outline, Prague) that Greater Moravia was the common state of the Slovaks, Moravians, and Czechs. In his 1881 article, ‘O methode dejepisu Slovenska’ (On the Methodology of Slovak Historiography) published in the monthly Slovenské pohl’ady, Josef Ladislav Píˇc (1847–1911) identified Greater Moravia as the state of the Czechoslovak nation, but agreed that the separate Slovak nation emerged after the Magyars destroyed the polity. Finally in 1906, the Slovak historian Július Botto Jr (1848–1926) claimed that Greater Moravia was exclusively a Slovak state in his Slováci. Vývin ich národného povedomia (The Slovaks: Development of their national consciousness, 1906–1910, Turócszentmárton). This matter provided a legitimizing function to prove that this Slovak statehood did not completely disappear after the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary. Both, autonomous Croatia within the broader framework of

The Slovak Nation

815

Hungary, and the similarly autonomous Crown of the Czech lands in the Holy Roman Empire, offered a ready model to emulate. In 1784, the Upper Hungarian historian, Juraj Sklenár, located the core of Greater Moravia in Bulgaria and maintained that Upper Hungary was incorporated into this polity by treaty. First, this allowed Slovak statehood to be disentangled from the broader framework of Greater Moravia which, from the territorial viewpoint, had been a vast state. Then, in 1837, Štúr’s colleague, Alexander Boleslav Vrchovský (1812–1865), proposed that the medieval Hungarian magnate Matthaeus a Trenchin (Máté Csák, ˇ Trenˇciansky) (1260–1321) was a ‘Slovak King.’ At the turn of the 14th Matúš Cák century, centralized royal rule collapsed in Hungary. Actual power went into the hands of regional magnates. The most powerful of them all was Matthaeus a Trenchin, who controlled Upper Hungary. In the second half of the 19th century, numerous Slovak poets and writers claimed him for Slovak national history, like their Magyar counterparts for Magyar national history. Sándor Pet˝ ofi wanted to write an epic on the magnate, and in 1860, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences granted Károly Szász financial support to this end. But from the Magyar perspective, Matthaeus a Trenchin was one of numerous historical figures who could be mythologized into the national pantheon. Hence, Magyar historians and writers did not claim him as intensively as did their Slovak counterparts. In his 1881 article, Píˇc identified the magnate’s realm as ‘Slovakia independent of the Hungarian King.’ Ergo, even though Matthaeus’s realm broke up after his death, its very existence inspired Slovak and Czech historians to write about ‘Slovak nobility and natio’ as separate from their Hungarian counterparts. At that time, there also arose the myth of a vague ‘treaty’ signed between the ‘Slovaks of Greater Moravia’ and the invading Magyars, which supposedly guaranteed territorial and political autonomy for the latter, similar to that enjoyed by the Croatian natio.1 This anachronistic interpretation provided the Slovak national movement with an argument that the Slovak statehood, identified with Greater Moravia and survived one millennium of ‘Magyar occupation,’ submerged in the Kingdom of Hungary. In 1938, the Slovak academic and journalist Jozef Škultéty wrote the magnate into the Slovak national pantheon with his monograph, ˇ Trenˇciansky and His ˇ Trenˇciansky a jeho vláda na Slovensku (Matúš Cák Matúš Cák Rule in Slovakia, Prague). It was also Škultéty who decisively opposed Czechoslovakism, and in 1913, stated that language was the main feature of a nation. At that time, Czechoslovakists and Czech nationalists had already accepted the separateness of the Slovak language, but claimed that a close (though different) language did not make Slovaks into a separate nation. Jaroslav Vlˇcek (1860–1930), a Czech literary historian, who was born in Upper Hungary to a Czech father and Slovak mother, proposed a compromise between Czech and Czechoslovakist assumptions about the Slovaks and Slovak national demands. In 1879, he

816 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

wrote that Greater Moravia was a common state for the Slovaks and Moravians. He excluded from this equation the Czechs, which was a bow toward Slovak nationalists, but a tentative link with Czechdom was maintained via the Moravians, who gradually became Czechized in the last three decades of the 19th century. Commenting on language in 1913, Vlˇcek dubbed Czech and Slovak ‘fraternal but separate languages’ of the Czechoslovak nation. Unlike straightforward Czechoslovakists, he did not strive for the ‘return’ of the Slovaks to the Czech language, or for the submerging of Slovak in the Czech language as a dialect of Czechoslovak. As a measure of compromise, Vlˇcek proposed that Slovaks should write fiction and poetry in Czech and Slovak, while scholarly works were to be composed exclusively in Czech. These proposals, though well-intentioned, pleased neither Czechs, Czechoslovakists, nor Slovak nationalists. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was an urgent need of ideological clarity on the issue of what the Slovaks were: a nation in its own, an ethnic group, a branch of a Czechoslovak nation, or an appendage of the Czech natio? The stakes were high. In 1902, the MP of the Hungarian Parliament, Imre Hódossy, stated that Slovaks are descendants of Hussites, who migrated to Upper Hungary at the beginning of the 15th century, and who, in the second quarter of this century, controlled much of what today is southern Slovakia. This was a popular nationalist argument of gaining ‘more right’ to a territory by claiming that one’s ethnic (national) group settled there earlier than the ancestors of the contenders. The same approach was mobilized by Magyar intellectuals toward Transylvania’s Romanians, whose autochthonous status was disputed. Slovak leaders and scholars could not disagree more and continued emphasizing the autochthonous character of the Slovak population as dating back at least to the 5th century, that is, at least 400 years earlier than the coming of the Magyars. In this ideological contest, the Czechoslovakist claim that the Slovaks were a branch of the Czech/Czechoslovak nation played into the hands of Magyar nationalists. This fine point of ideological struggle in Upper Hungary was not readily noticed in Prague. It remained to nationally-minded Slovak nationalists to stand their ground. Not surprisingly, when the Allies approved the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Škultéty defended the principle of Slovak national self-determination against Magyar nationalists as well as Czech and Slovak Czechoslovakists, in his Stodvadsat’pät’ rokov zo slovenského života (One Hundred and Twenty-Five Years from the Life of the Slovak Nation, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). His voice was not heard in Prague and at the Peace Conference in Paris, where Hlinka, equally unsuccessfully, attempted to present arguments for the independence of Slovakia to the Allies on 20 September 1919. (The Treaty of Saint-Germain that decided the shape of Czechoslovakia had been signed 10 days earlier, and the Allies would not have renegotiated it even if they were sympathetic to the Slovak cause.) At that time, it was almost certain

The Slovak Nation

817

that Hungary would not manage to keep Upper Hungary within its borders. Therefore, Budapest agreed to cultural and regional autonomy for the Slovaks and the Ruthenians in order to prevent the incorporation of their homelands into Czechoslovakia. The need was to de-legitimize the concept of Czechoslovak statehood was clearly evidenced by Louis (Lajos) Steier’s (1897–1958) lavishly illustrated brochure, There Is No Czech Culture in Upper Hungary (Budapest), which was obviously directed at the international public. With international approval, Czech and Slovak (mostly Protestant) Czechoslovakists (led by Masaryk and Štefánik) founded Czechoslovakia in late 1918. Hungarian forces intermittently controlled most of Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia until mid-1919. Most of the fighting was done by Czech and Romanian soldiers, with operational support lent by French and Italian officers. Although some Slovaks participated as well, the Czech stereotype soon coalesced that the Slovaks were granted Czechoslovakia and their place in it ‘for free.’ More Slovaks than Czechs remained loyal to Austria-Hungary until the polity’s bitter end and were passive when the diplomatic and military struggle for Czechoslovakia unfolded. First, the national identity of the Slovaks was less emphatic than that of the Czechs. Second, while Austrian troops dissolved relatively peaceably and left the Czech lands, the Hungarian armies fiercely defended Upper Hungary. Much less numerous than the Czechs, the Slovaks were not in a position to confront the Hungarian military. Third, unlike among the Czechs, the ‘Protestant’ idea of Czechoslovak state was not popular among the Slovaks. But when Czechoslovakia was founded, most Slovaks accepted it, though with disbelief, because hardly any of them had imagined that would be the outcome of the war. Initially, Masaryk had to gain support and legitimacy for Czechoslovakia among Czechs and Slovaks in the United States. Czech and Slovak politicians in the Czech lands and Upper Hungary subscribed to the program quite late in 1918, when it was obvious that Austria-Hungary would not survive. In order to ensure swift cooperation, Czech politicians repeatedly promised their Slovak colleagues that they would receive whatever they wanted. The Slovaks clearly expressed their wish in the Cleveland Agreement (1915), the Pittsburgh Agreement (1918), and the Martin Declaration (1918) that they wanted a federal state, Czech-Slovakia, which would consist of the politically autonomous Czech and Slovak nation-states. Slovaks saw the initial centralization of Czechoslovakiaas necessary to preserve its territorial unity in the face of military conflicts with the Magyars, Sudeten Germans, and Poland. When this centralization continued and even deepened, the Slovaks resented it as a blatant breach of the Cleveland and Pittsburgh Agreements. They never thought that the tactical move of presenting Czechoslovakia to the international public as the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks would be acted upon. But the 1918 declaration of independence and the 1920 Constitution set the legal framework for the construction of

818 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

a unitary Czechoslovakia, which was carried out during the interwar period. Prague was more fearful of the German/German-speaking minority concentrated in the Czech lands than of Slovak displeasure. The minority numbered more than 3 million persons, that is, more than 2 million Slovaks. Seven million Czechs did not ensure ethnolinguistic homogeneity for Czechoslovakia. But such homogeneity was seen then as the ultimate legitimization of statehood. Czech and Slovaks constitutionally merged as the Czechoslovak nation accounted for 65.5 percent of the state’s population. Hence, they constituted a safe demographic majority. In the interwar period, the average Czech did not bother much about Slovakia (and even less so about Subcarpathian Ruthenia), hence Czechoslovakia appeared to him or her as a Czech nation-state. Not so in the case of the Slovaks, who continued to see the republic as a Czech-Slovak state, in which they were cheated out of the autonomy that they were promised. This frustration of Slovak political hopes bred the myth of Štefánik, according to which, Štefánik would have ensured autonomy for Slovakia had he not died in a plane crash in 1919. Some even accused the Czechs of assassination. In reality, Štefánik was a staunch Czechoslovakist, and prohibited the use of Slovak as a command language among the Slovak soldiers in the Czechoslovak legions. As Minister of War, in 1918, he introduced Czech as the sole language of command in the Czechoslovak army (Gromada 1969: 450; Kontler 1999: 84; Kováˇc 1997: 5, 10– 13, 16, 18–20, 30, 66–67, 69–71, 123, 1998: 38–39; Krekoviˇc 2005: 104–108, 169–171). Finally, besides the usual Central European recourse to separate language, nation, and statehood traditions, the legitimacy of Slovak nationalism had to be propped-up with the myth of national martyrdom. This trope became a de rigueur element of the ideological repertoire of nationalisms in this region. Polish nationalists decried the late 18th-century partition of Poland-Lithuania, and in the Romantic decade of the 1840s came up with the image of Poland as ‘Christ of Nations,’ destined to win independence not only for the Poles but for all the other (‘historical’) nations deprived of their states. Drawing on the past of Hungary, the Magyars claimed that they had suffered under the Ottoman and Austrian yokes since the Battle of Mohács (1526). In its own turn, the stereotype of ‘Ottoman yoke’ became the basic legitimizing instrument of the Balkan nationalisms. One could easily notice a reflection of this trope in Lithuanian nationalism, but here the Poles were portrayed as the oppressors on the anachronistic assumption that Poland-Lithuania was in reality a Polish nation-state. Soviet historiography also played this ideological card but in a ‘class-conscious’ way. It were not just Poles but the ‘Polish lords’ (that is, nobility), who oppressed Byelorussian (Belarusian) and Ukrainian peasantries. This became the founding myth of Soviet Byelorussia and Ukraine.

The Slovak Nation

819

The truncation of historical Hungary to almost ethnically homogenous Magyar Hungary at Trianon (1920) immediately fired up the national imagination. The new borders were deemed as ‘bleeding’ and marked with ‘Trianon crosses’ to memorialize the territorial loss. In the interwar period, numerous posters and postcards depicted post-Trianon Hungary, rather strangely, as a crucified Woman-Christ, or the territory of historical Hungary undergoing truncation on a cross. With a similar bitter feeling of ideological loss, Czech leaders invested in the Battle of White Mountain (1620), in the wake of which Bohemia and Moravia were re-Catholicized, and most of the chancery Bohemian-speaking nobility were expelled from both regions. What followed was reinterpreted in the 19th century by nationally-minded historians as Austrian (Habsburg) oppression, or poroba (yoke). Not surprisingly, Slovak historians and ideologues took over the Czech trope of poroba, and refined on it. In this line of thinking, the Austrian poroba suffered by the Czechs had just lasted three centuries, while the Slovaks had suffered the Magyar poroba for one millennium. Obviously, it was the Magyar destruction of Greater Moravia that marked the beginning of this ‘tisícroˇcná poroba’ (one millennium-long yoke). It was Šafárik, who gave a final shape to this stereotype of ‘tisícroˇcná poroba’ in the 1820s. On the other hand, in 1733, the Jesuit scholar from Upper Hungary, Samuel Timon, claimed in his Imago antiquae Hungariae (The Description of Old Hungary, Kassa [Košice]) that by defeating Greater Moravia, the Magyars had liberated the Slovaks (Slavs) from the Moravian yoke. In an ironic turn, Timon is often seen to be the ‘father of Slovak historiography.’ The hysteria of millennialism unleashed in Europe in 1000 AD was caused by the widespread expectation of the second coming of Christ and the final judgment. On the other hand, the millennial element in the Slovak concept of tisícroˇcná poroba promised the final coming of independent Slovakia. When Czechoslovakia was founded, the myth appeared to have been fulfilled and by the popular sentiment, Štefánik was anointed as the Christ-like ‘liberator of the Slovak nation.’ The picture of this Protestant general in the French army rapidly entered Slovak Catholic households placed next to saints, and it was often put into the hands of dead peasants before burying them. In independent wartime Slovakia, his portrait adorned numerous public buildings, lending charisma and legitimacy to this Catholic polity with a Catholic priest as its president. When Slovakia became independent in 1939, Hungary helped itself to the southern and eastern sections of the state, intent on reversing some of the territorial losses suffered at Trianon. Similarly, Budapest gained pre-1918 Hungarian territories from Romania, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and Yugoslavia. But the reversal of the Trianon decisions did not mean only amelioration of the national tragedy for the Magyars, but also a string of national tragedies for the neighboring nations. The Slovaks took over the Magyar trope of ‘bleeding

820 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

border,’ and they often referred in these emotionally charged words to the southern and eastern frontiers of wartime Slovakia. The frequent political use of the concept of poroba, brought another one of obet, or victim. In Central Europe, it became a popular genre of nationhood legitimization to present one’s nation as a ‘victim,’ or even ‘martyr’ wronged by a neighboring nation(s). In the biblical tradition, ‘the last will be the first,’ so the hope was that a real or imagined wrongdoing would be ameliorated in future in favor of the ‘victim-nation.’ In this paradigm of ‘national redemption,’ the Slovaks were presented as a victim of the Magyars and the Czechs; the Czechs as a victim of the Germans (Austrians); the Poles as a victim of the Russians and Germans (Prussians and Austrians); the Magyars as a victim of the Turks (Ottomans), Austrians, and the West; the Ruthenians as a victim of the Czechs, Slovaks, Soviets, and Ukrainians; the Austrians as a victim of the Germans; the Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians as victims of the Poles and Soviets (Russians); and the Germans as a victim of France and the West. Naturally, the list could be continued to include numerous accusations and counteraccusations traded by national historians and politicians in the Balkans (Krekoviˇc 2005: 71–85, 166–168, 170).

Interwar Czechoslovakia: The Slovak renaissance and Czech domination The Czech lands were the industrial engine of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. Similarly, Slovakia was the most developed region of the Kingdom of Hungary apart from Budapest and its vicinity. Not surprisingly, neither did Vienna readily resign itself to this loss until the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), nor Budapest until the Treaty of Trianon (1920). On 11 December 1918, with Budapest’s active support, the East Slovak (Slovjak) People’s Republic was proclaimed with its capital in Kassa (Košice). This short-lived pro-Hungarian polity with its capital in Eperjes (Prešov) survived until the end of December. Its president, Viktor Dvorˇcák (Gy˝ oz˝ o Dvortsák [Dvorcsák], Victor Dvortchak), acted upon the traditional loyalty and attachment of eastern Upper Hungary’s Slavophone inhabitants to the Kingdom of Hungary. The novel ideas of Slovak nationalism and Czechoslovakism spread much faster in western and central Slovakia, from where most Slovak national activists stemmed. On the other hand, eastern Slovakia was quite distant from the Czech lands, and in its rural and backward character shared more with nearby Ruthenia (easternmost Upper Hungary) than Bratislava or Turˇciansky Svätý Martin. In addition, Slovak nationalism’s most potent rallying instrument, the Slovak language, was steeped in the Central Slovak vernacular of Turˇciansky Svätý Martin, Bernoláˇctina was associated with western Slovakia, and Bibliˇctina was identified by Czechoslovakists with Czech and Slovak. No

The Slovak Nation

821

linguistic or cultural elements of eastern Slovakia were incorporated into the ideological framework of Slovak nationalism. Previously, attempts to commit the Eastern Slovak vernacular to paper did not gain any support, except that of the Slavophone Calvinists, who wrote and printed their religious books in the sariskij jazik (language of the Komitat of Sáros), which employed Magyar orthography. The first book in this language, a catechism, came off the press in Debrecen 1750. Under the influence of Slovak nationalism, some of the Slavophone Calvinists renamed their language as csiszta szlovenszka recs (pure Slavic/Slovak language) at the end of the 19th century. But it did not do away with the popular Slovak perception that they were more pro-Magyar than pro-Slovak. At the turn of the 20th century, several Slovjak newspapers (in Magyar orthography) were published in the United States, including Szlovjak v Amerike (Slovjak in America). Budapest played on this ethnolinguistic cleavage between the Slovaks and the Slovjaks and published school textbooks in Slovjak (officially named ‘Hungarian Slovak’) since 1875. The Hungarian authorities also supported the Eperjes archivist Dvorˇcák’s newspaper, Naša zastava (Our Opinion, 1907–1918, Eperjes), in the Sáros language. Dvorˇcák became the leader of the Slovjak national movement, and understandably, supported the use of Slovjak in the publications of the Slovjak People’s Republic. His career had parallels with that of Josef Koždon ˇ (Kozdo ˙ n), ´ the leader of the Slunzakian national movement in Austrian Silesia. The difference was that Prague tolerated Koždon ˇ because of the anti-Polish character of his movement, even though the Slunzaks were more pro-German then pro-Czech. Germany had no immediate plans of seizing Czech Silesia from Czechoslovakia, unlike ˇ Poland. In the interwar period, Koždon ˇ became the mayor of Ceský Tˇešín. On the contrary, Dvorˇcák’s pro-Hungarian stance was perceived as an unambiguous danger to the territorial unity of Czechoslovakia, so he had to flee. He settled in France, where he developed the Slovjak national movement and wrote against Czechoslovakia, which he considered a travesty of a nation-state, as clearly put in his Détruisez la Tchécoslovaquie fief du bolchevisme. Détruisez ce monstre tchéco-slovaco-germano-houngaro-ruthéno-polonais (Destroy Czechoslovakia, a Fief of Bolshevism: Destroy the Czecho-Slovako-Germano-Hungaro-Rutheno-Polish monster, 1936, Paris). Dvorˇcák took this line from Edvard Beneš’s Détruisez l’Autriche-Hongrie! (Destroy Austria-Hungary!, 1916, Paris), who had written in a similar vein about Austria-Hungary. After Budapest re-incorporated southern and eastern Slovakia along Subcarpathian Ruthenia in 1938 and 1939, Dvorˇcák returned to Kassa (Košice) in the Hungarian-held Slovjak region. He resumed the publication of Naša zastava, and in 1943, published his enlarged 1909 collection of poems in the Slovjak (Sáros) language, Vlasc a šerco (Power and Heart, Kassa). After 1945, the Slovjak national movement was suppressed because of its pro-Hungarian character, along with publications in Slovjak, sanitized in

822 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

scholarly literature as ‘Eastern Slovak.’ The last book in Slovjak, a textbook of Slovjak for Yugoslavia’s Rusyns was published in Košice in 1949, but its existence is not acknowledged by the Matica slovenská. The category of ‘Slovjak’ is used in United States censuses. The Eastern Slovak literary tradition revived after 1989, especially in the dialect of the neighboring regions Prešov (Šariš) and Spiš, which spawned quite an extensive Šariš-Slovak internet-based dictionary, compiled between 2000 and 2006. In 2002, an extensive two-volume historical dictionary of East Slovak (Slovjak) was published in Prešov, thanks to a subsidy from the Slovak Ministry of Culture. (It is quite a development as no one expects that any time soon the Polish government would subsidize a dictionary of the Silesian [Szlonzokian] language, or the Czech government a dictionary of the Lachian language.) To this day, the Eastern Slovak dialect sounds as strange and even foreign to standard Slovak-speakers as the east Moravian dialect to Czech-speakers. Slovaks tend to disparagingly speak of Slovjaks as východniari (‘easterners’).2 What is more, some Slavic-speaking inhabitants of eastern Slovakia were and still are Greek Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Czechs and Slovaks tended to unambiguously identify Greek Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity with the Ruthenians or Russia, as Calvinism with Magyardom. There was no basis here for associating these religions with Slovakdom, as in the case of Lutheranism. Most Slovak national activists and politicians were members of the latter denomination until 1918, and it did not make them any less Slovak though numerous Magyars and German-speakers of Upper Hungary were Lutherans as well. In Czech and Slovak eyes, Greek Catholicism (like Orthodox Christianity) was ruska vira (Ruthenian, Russian faith) and those who professed it were identified as rusnáci (Ruthenians). Although religion often functioned as the ethnic border between Slovaks and Ruthenians in eastern Slovakia, the barrier was never absolute, and all the population shared the same vernacular and way of life. To become a Slovak or Ruthenian was a political choice. Recently, Slovak scholars re-interpret this ambiguity, claiming that rusnáci identified themselves as such by religion. Within this group, on an ethnolinguistic basis, the scholars distinguish rusíni, or Ruthenians proper (present-day Rusyns), and Slovaks (Slovjaks). In this perspective, at the beginning of the 19th century in eastern Upper Hungary (that is, today’s eastern Slovakia and Ukrainian Transcarpathia) there were 153,000 Slovjaks (Greek Catholic Slovaks) and 359,000 Ruthenians. In 1948, it was estimated that 150,000 Ruthenians and 90,000 Greek Catholic Slovaks (Slovjaks) lived in eastern Slovakia (Prešov Ruthenia).3 Ironically, the cold shoulder given by mainstream Slovak nationalism to the cultural and political aspirations of these Slavic-speakers of eastern Slovakia, who wanted to become Slovaks, precipitated the coalescing of the Slovjak national movement. Like the Ruthenians, after the Great War, the Slovjaks saw a better future for themselves in Hungary than in Czechoslovakia, let alone the Soviet

The Slovak Nation

823

Union. It was also a pity that neither Masaryk nor Hlinka could make use of Church Slavonic and the Church Slavonic Cyrillic among some Slovjaks into the ‘proof’ of their Slovakness, despite the heavy use of the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition for the legitimization of Slovak and Czechoslovak statehood aspirations (Dulichenko 1981: 88–90; Gajdoš and Koneˇcný 1994: 30; Greguš 2001; Kováˇc 1997: 114, 1998: 182; Magocsi 1996a: 4; Ženuch ˇ 2002: 126, 131–133). Apart from the Slovjaks, Budapest supported the statehood aspirations of the Ruthenians, and the Hungarian authorities granted autonomy to their homeland, officially named Ruthenia, on 21 December 1918. At that time, there was no legal basis or desire in Prague to extend Czechoslovak rule to this easternmost corner of Upper Hungary. In addition, there was no administrative or clear ethnolinguistic border that would separate future Slovakia from Ruthenia. Thus, Budapest’s support for the Slovjaks could have prevented the incorporation of the Eperjes region in Slovakia. It must be remarked that Upper Hungary’s (Carpathian) Germans/German-speakers (who also refered to themselves as ‘German-speaking Hungarians’) proclaimed on 9 December 1918 the independence of their small mountainous homeland in Késmárk (Kežmarok), which also contested the planned frontier of Czechoslovakia. However, it was less Budapest than the example of the German minority in the Czech lands that was responsible for this event. At the turn of November, the minority proclaimed the independence of their homelands in the predominantly German-speaking borderlands of the Czech lands and sought unification with German-Austria. (Plainly, the Carpathian Germans, separated from their ethnic kin by the Slovaks, Czechs, and Magyars, could not plan a similar unification.) The Czechoslovak army seized the control of the German-held areas of the Czech lands by the end of 1918 and, in January the following year, most of Slovakia and western Ruthenia. Czechoslovak forces entered Bratislava on 1 January 1919. On 4 February, the seat of the Czechoslovak Ministry for Slovakia was moved to Bratislava. The contentious issue was Slovakia’s borders in the south and east. In the north, Prague and Warsaw agreed to follow the traditional GalicianUpper Hungarian border running along the Carpathian peaks with the exception of Árva (Orava in Czech and Slovak, Orawa in Polish, and Arva in German) and Szepes (Spiš in Czech and Slovak, Spisz in Polish, and Zips in German) that rubbed shoulders with the tiny Polish territorial foothold in the High Tatras. Since the Middle Ages, the Árva and especially Szepes borderlands between Hungary and Poland-Lithuania had been disputed. In the second half of the 19th century, the Polish intellectuals from Cracow, who took holidays in the Galician section of the Tatras, wrote the region and its population into the fabric of Polish national culture with folklore-inspired poems and stories. But in their transhumant economy, dialect, and ethnography, the population had more in common with the Slavophone mountainous populations of

824 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Árva and Szepes than with the Poles. All of the three mountainous groups are Goralians, or Górale in Polish, Horalé in Czech, and Horali or Gorali in Slovak, which literally means ‘highlanders,’ or ‘mountain dwellers.’ On the basis of its speech and the overall mountainous character of Slovakia, it is possible to argue that the Goralians are closer to the Slovaks than Poles. However, should one identify the area of Goralian settlement as the ethnolinguistic border between Slovakdom and Polishdom, there is no clear line to indicate where the Slovak ethnolinguistic area stops and the Polish one begins. A similar problem was encountered by Czech and Polish nationalists in Teschen Silesia, originally populated by Slavophone Slunzaks and Morawecs. In the Teschen region, Prague was determined not to give in to Polish demands, because the single coal and steel industrial basin of the Czech lands was located there along with the single railway link between the Czech lands and Slovakia. On the other hand, Warsaw did not wish to leave Árva and Szepes with Slovakia, because it claimed all the Goralians to be an ethnographic group of the Polish nation. Moreover, from the strategic vantage, the inclusion of Árva and Szepes in Poland would have broadened Warsaw’s vulnerable bridgehead in the Tatras. Initially, the Allies planned to organize plebiscites in Teschen Silesia, Árva, and Szepes, but after the brief Czechoslovak-Polish War over Teschen in January 1919, the intensification of the nationalist conflict in all three regions prevented such plebiscites. In 1920, the Council of Ambassadors divided all three regions between Czechoslovakia and Poland. Neither Prague nor Warsaw were pleased with the result. Czechoslovakia won most clearly in Teschen Silesia, because the entire industrial basin was granted to the country. Naturally, Slovak nationalists presented this as a ‘Czech success’ paid with the Slovak ‘loss’ of Árva and Szepes. Despite their traditional non-national identity, the continuing Polish-Slovak conflict in divided Árva and Szepes convinced numerous Goralians that they were Slovaks. The wartime inclusion of the Polish sections of both regions in independent Slovakia fortified this identification. When the prewar border was re-established in 1945, Warsaw had to accept the fact that the areas were inhabited by a Slovak minority. On the contrary, during World War II, in the Polish Tatras included in the Generalgouvernement, the link between the Goralians and the Polish nation was weakened when the German administration successfully organized the Goralenvolk, that is, the pro-German Goralian nation. The ethnolinguistic (though not national) separateness of the Tatra Goralians vis-à-vis the Poles continues to this day. Another twist in the Polish-Slovak contest over the Goralians was added in the 1970s when the Polish TV produced the extremely popular series on the mountainous robber Janosik (1688–1713), styled as a Tatra Robin Hood. Known as Juraj Jánošík, he had been earlier made into a Slovak national hero ranking as high as Štúr, and Cyril and Methodius. The first Slovak film ever shot in

The Slovak Nation

825

1921 featured Jánošík as the main protagonist and further ones followed in quick succession. Unlike other Slovak national heroes, Jánošík entered Slovak popular culture as a role model, symbol, allegory, and, recently, logo on numerous products. Naturally, Slovak intellectuals loathed Polish usurpation of ‘their’ national hero, but Warsaw wisely refrained from fashioning Janosik into a Polish national hero. He had never operated on the Galician side of the Carpathians, and ‘fought’ against the Hungarian administration, which did not fit the myth of centuries-long Polish-Hungarian friendship (Krekoviˇc 2005: 94–103; Pop 2005: 106–109). The near-collapse of Hungary after World War I was prevented by Mihály Károlyi’s government. The consolidation of power allowed Budapest to reaffirm Hungarian control in the kingdom’s peripheral regions, including Upper Hungary by December 1918. The losses at the beginning of 1919 could not be prevented when the economy faltered, the army was in growing disarray, and the popularity of the communist movement opened the cleavage between the elite and the impoverished masses. In March 1919, the Soviet Republic of Hungary was founded. On the instigation of the Allies, fearful of the spread of Bolshevism to Western Europe, Czechoslovak troops attacked and pushed deep into the Hungarian territory south of Slovakia’s envisioned southern border. Soon Hungary’s Red Army returned the blow and seized two-thirds of Slovakia. Aiming for the re-centralization of the state, Budapest de facto terminated in April the never fully implemented autonomy of Ruthenia and staged the proclamation of the independence of the pro-Hungarian Soviet Republic of Slovakia with its capital in Prešov (eastern Slovakia) on 18 June. Magyar communists entrusted the presidency of Soviet Slovakia to the Czech communist journalist Antonín Janoušek (1877–1941), which did not attract many Slovaks to this ‘godless’ polity run by an ‘atheist Czech.’ Five days before the founding of communist Slovakia, the negotiations on the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border had ended. But the revolutionary government had no intention to ratify this new frontier. First, the thrust of the Red Army seemed unstoppable and capable of recreating the territorial unity of the former Kingdom of Hungary. Second, the new border was drawn in blatant breach of the principle of national selfdetermination, because extensive predominantly Magyar areas were included in southern Slovakia. Third, there was a hope that eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia would form a land bridge for Bolshevik Russia’s Red Army to enter Hungary and Central Europe in an effort to spread communist revolution to Western Europe. Last but not least, Budapest wanted to have a common border with Poland perceived as Hungary’s ‘traditional friend,’ though the Polish-Soviet War was already in full swing at that time. In the situation, the Allies called upon Bucharest to restrain revolutionary Hungary. Romania was poised to gain most territory (including Hungary’s Transylvania) out of all the states that had already existed prior to 1914 and

826 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

turned against the Central Powers. The Romanian offensive commenced in April 1919 and Czechoslovak troops joined it in the following month. On 7 July, Red Slovakia collapsed when Magyar troops withdrew to protect Budapest, which eventually fell to the Romanian invaders on 4 August. The entire territory of eastern and southern Slovakia and Ruthenia found itself under Romanian control. In the autumn, Romanian troops withdrew from Slovakia. The negotiations between Prague and the US Ruthenian leaders on the incorporation of autonomous Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia began in March 1919, but were not finalized until the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919). Afterward, Hungary agreed to its new borders in the Treaty of Trianon (1920), hence the Romanian military administration left Ruthenia only in the autumn 1920. Prague carried out minor border adjustments that touched upon the Slovak territory with Austria in 1920, Hungary in 1922 and 1924, and Poland in 1923 and 1924. On 7 November 1919, Prague issued the first law on Ruthenia, the General Statute for Organization and Administration of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. It established the official name of the autonomous region, and most significantly for Slovakia, the Subcarpathian-Slovak border. Since then, the border has been the bone of contention between the Slovaks and the Ruthenians, because it left a considerable number of Ruthenians inside what became northeastern Slovakia. Ruthenians saw this border as a temporary and inherently unjust ‘line of demarcation.’ When it became apparent that there was no hope of rectification, the Ruthenians began to use the term ‘Prešov Ruthenia’ for denoting eastern Slovakia, which they considered as ‘rightfully belonging’ to Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The Ruthenian grudges against Czech and Slovak domination were heard even less at the international arena than those of the Slovaks. The influx of teachers, civil servants, and railwaymen brought 35,000 Czechs and Slovaks to Subcarpathian Ruthenia. And 135 elementary schools were founded for their children. At the same time, 32 percent of Ruthenian children did not attend elementary school, while the same indicator was a mere 8 percent in Slovakia. Ruthenians perceived this situation as Czechization, though there was no denial that the increase from 81 Ruthenian elementary schools in 1913 to 630 in 1936 did prevent the Magyarization of the Ruthenians, even if their homeland became part of Hungary again. This achievement, however, paled in the Ruthenian eyes, contrasted with what they perceived as ‘faithlessness, godlessness, atheism, and immorality’ propagated in the schools by the ‘Czech’ administration. A shadow of the accusation was also cast against the Slovaks, though in this case Ruthenian leaders felt resentment mostly because of the granting of Prešov Ruthenia to Slovakia rather than Subcarpathian Ruthenia. This Ruthenian-Slovak tension from time to time has resurfaced to this day, as exemplified by the struggle for the ‘national ownership’ of the United States artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987). His family originated

The Slovak Nation

827

from eastern Slovakia, which, according to Slovak historians, makes him into a Slovak, while their Ruthenian counterparts identify him as a Ruthenian. But the Ruthenians bore the worst grudge against Prague, which cheated them of their political autonomy guaranteed in the Treaty of Saint-Germain. No Ruthenian regional-cum-national assembly was elected until 1939 and the Czechoslovak President nominated the governor of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, though it was a prerogative reserved for this assembly. The Slovak autonomists grouped around Hlinka perceived the centralization of Czechoslovakia in similar terms. But unlike its Ruthenian counterpart, the Slovak autonomy was not guaranteed by any international treaty. Actually, in the Martin Declaration (30 October 1918), co-drafted by Hlinka, Slovak leaders agreed that the Slovaks were a branch of the Czech-Slovak nation on the linguistic and cultural-historic basis. There was also some ambiguity built into this declaration, because it announced that the Slovak National Council is authorized to speak exclusively on behalf of the Slovak nation living in Slovakia. In the next paragraph, the name of the council was given as National Council of the Czech-Slovak Nation in Hungary. What is more, the document was issued 2 days after the Prague proclamation of the independence of Czechoslovakia as the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks (28 October). The members of the Slovak National Council were not aware of this proclamation when they issued their declaration, and clearly they did not stress the separateness of the Slovak nation and did not demand any autonomy for Slovakia. The Slovak fear of continued Magyar domination was bigger than that of Czech domination in centralized Czechoslovakia. But Hlinka was opposed to unbridled Czechoslovakism and Czechoslovakia, dominated by Czechs, which drew more legitimacy in Slovakia from the relatively tiny group of Slovak Protestant Czechoslovakists than from the Slovak Catholic majority. Naturally, Hlinka fell back on the Slovenská l’udova strana (SL’S, Slovak People’s Party). It had emerged in 1905 as a splinter group from the Hungarian People’s Party and became a Catholic counterbalance platform within the predominantly Protestant Slovak National Party (SNS). The SL’S had left the SNS to form a separate party in 1913. During the Great War, free political life was suppressed. Hlinka re-established the SL’S in December 1918. Everything could still change there as Czechoslovak rule had not been established in Slovakia yet. The main butt of Hlinka’s criticism of the ‘centralism and liberalism’ of the Prague government was the Plenipotentiary Minister for Slovakia Vavro Šrobár. After seizing Slovakia in January 1919, on 20 January, Prague dissolved the Slovak National Council, its only political competitor in this area. In late March 1919, Hlinka met with a delegation of the US Slovaks and learned from them about the Pittsburgh Agreement, which guaranteed wide-ranging political and cultural autonomy for Slovakia in a federal Czecho-Slovakia. When the document became widely known in Slovakia, Masaryk downplayed its role as a non-binding opinion, unlike Hlinka who considered the Pittsburgh

828 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Agreement the sole legal basis of any arrangements between the Slovaks and the Czechs in Czechoslovakia. Masaryk pointed out that the Martin Declaration was the basis, not the Pittsburgh Agreement. The intensity of this ideological argument was such that the official publication of the latter document was massaged and omitted several points including the requests that the Slovaks be represented separately at the Peace Conference. The Czech avoidance of the subject caused Hlinka and the SNS to issue the resolution ‘appealing for the unconditional and complete right of self-determination for the Slovak Nation’ (24 March 1919). Prague did not react. Following the Hungarian incursion into Slovakia, Hlinka sought Polish help to represent the Slovak point of view at the Peace Conference in Paris. The Hungarian secret service supported this initiative and Warsaw granted Hlinka a false Polish passport and money in August. Unfortunately, Hlinka’s memorandum was presented 10 days after the signing of the Treaty of Saint-Germain. Poland, embroiled in the war with Bolshevik Russia, was in no position to get seriously involved in Slovakia, which would also compromise Warsaw’s friendly relations with Hungary. So Budapest was informed that Polish support for Hlinka was tactical and did not infringe on Hungary’s sphere of influence. Warsaw helped Hlinka in order to weaken Prague in its conflict with Poland over Teschen. But part and parcel of this conflict was also Spiš and Orava, which soon alienated Hlinka vis-à-vis the Polish government. (However, in interwar Czechoslovakia, he continued to use his Polish connection to put pressure on Prague.) After his return to Czechoslovakia, Hlinka was imprisoned. He was freed in April 1920 after having been elected to the Czechoslovak National Assembly. Ironically, the elections were carried out on the basis of the Czechoslovak Constitution promulgated on 29 February 1920. It reaffirmed the character of Czechoslovakia as the nation-state of the Czechoslovaks. The Language Law issued on the very same day on the basis of the Constitutions article 129, announced Czechoslovak to be the state and official language of the country. This law replaced any earlier legislation on language. Significantly, Czechoslovak superseded Slovak as the official language of Slovakia. In practice, nothing changed because Czech and Slovak were construed as two equally valid standard varieties of the Czechoslovak language. This law also mentioned Czech and Slovak separately by saying that the former should be employed in the lands that previously belonged to the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy and Germany, and the latter in the lands that had belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, with the exception of Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In reality, the Language Law opened Slovakia for Czechization because documents could be submitted to offices in either Czech or Slovak, and replies would be granted in one of the two languages. From the legal point of view, submitted documents and issued replies were in a single language, Czechoslovak. Because there were few Slovak elementary schools, let alone secondary ones or a

The Slovak Nation

829

university, prior to 1918, there were virtually no Slovak-speaking civil servants, and even those of them wrote much better Magyar than Slovak. Magyars constituted the bulk of the civil service corps in Upper Hungary. They left for rump Hungary after the establishment of Czechoslovak control over Slovakia. The situation necessitated the influx of Czech civil servants to Slovakia in order to run the Czechoslovak administration. Hence, many queries submitted to offices in Slovak were answered in Czech, much to the helpless dismay of Slovaks. The language situation was even more confused among the Ruthenians. Although the Constitution confirmed their autonomy, the document provided that the Ruthenian assembly would decide about the region’s official language. Because such an assembly did not convene until 1939, it was left to Prague to decide which languages to introduce. Thus, Czech dominated in offices, vernacular Ruthenian was used for symbolic purposes, and confusion prevailed in the educational system over employing Ruthenian, Ukrainian, and Russian (Buc 1960: 49–50; Eberhardt 1996: 172; Gromada 1969: 446–452; Kirschbaum 1999: 152; Kováˇc 1998: 179; Lettrich 1955: 288; Okuka and Krenn 2002: 356– 357; Ogonowski 2000: 250, 254; Pop 2005: 109–115, 142; Semotanová 2003: 47; Suhaj 1944; Yuhasz 1929: 23, 29–30). Czechoslovakia reproduced all the ethnolinguistic, national, political, and economic problems of Austria-Hungary, though it was established to improve on the record of the Dual Monarchy. In Czech eyes, the issue of the German minority, numerically larger than the Slovaks, overshadowed any aspirations and problems faced by the latter in Czechoslovakia. On the ethnolinguistic plane, Slovak leaders had a hard time to broaden the presence of Slovak-speakers in the predominantly and overwhelmingly Magyar-speaking areas of southern Slovakia. Between 1918 and 1924, 147,000 Magyars left or were expelled from Slovakia, and 45,000 were denied Czechoslovak citizenship. Long-established Magyar majorities disappeared in 200 southern Slovak localities. In 1919, Germans/German-speakers at 36 percent constituted the plurality of Bratislava’s population, followed by Slovaks (33 percent), and Magyars (29 percent). In 1930, Slovaks formed a plurality of the city’s inhabitants (33 percent), followed by Germans (25 percent), Czechs (23 percent), Magyars (16 percent), and Jews (4 percent). Slovak inhabitants of the city crossed the threshold mark of 50 percent in the mid-1940s. Already in 1961, they constituted 92 percent of the Slovak capital’s population, followed by 4.6 percent Czechs, and 3.4 percent Magyars. While the number of Germans living in Czechoslovakia grew from 3.12 million to 3.23 million between 1921 and 1930, that of Magyars decreased from 745,500 to 692,000. The gradient of this decrease was even steeper in Slovakia, from 637,000 to 571,000. This was the reflection of the harshness of the Czechoslovak-Hungarian military conflict in Slovakia, and of the Slovak reaction against the excesses of Magyarization prior to 1918. Having no possibility of a meaningful career, practically all the Magyar elite left Slovakia. Prague

830 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

justified the anti-Magyar situation by pointing to the fate of Slovaks in Lower Hungary, that is, rump Hungary. The 1920 census recorded 141,000 Slovaks in Hungary. The group of bilingual people who knew Slovak added up to 255,000, but they identified themselves as Magyars. Slovak and Czech leaders identified them as the ‘victims of Magyarization.’ The number of Slovaks in Hungary plummeted to 105,000 in 1930 and 15,000 in 1941. At the same time, the group of self-declared Magyars with some knowledge of Slovak dropped to 145,000 and 45,000, respectively. Interwar Hungary offered better opportunities of economic and social advancement than Slovakia. Between 1920 and 1938, 400,000 emigrated from Czechoslovakia, 54 percent of them, or 213,000 from Slovakia alone. Ironically, in the period, 150,000 Czech civil servants, teachers, railwaymen and their families settled in Slovakia. Only 44,500 Slovaks left for the Czech lands in search of education, employment, and career. In addition, during World War II, Slovaks living in Hungary preferred to define themselves as Magyars to avoid the excesses of renewed Magyarization in enlarged wartime Hungary. The existence of other Slovak minorities outside Czechoslovakia was closely connected to population migrations within the defunct Austria-Hungary, usually from the Czech lands and Upper Hungary to the depopulated Military Border that had separated the Habsburg lands and the Ottoman Empire. After the breakup of the Dual Monarchy, 76,000 Slovaks of ‘Lower Hungary,’ found themselves in Yugoslavia (mainly in Vojvodina and Banat). It is easy to distinguish them from Czech settlers, because the latter tended to settle in Slavonia. They numbered around 53,000 in 1931. In Romania’s section of Banat, about 47,000 Slovaks and 5000 Czechs were lumped together. Bucharest being an ally of Prague in the Little Entente, the Romanian government recognized the existence of the Czechoslovak nation. Slovaks as Magyars also straddled the historical Austrian-Hungarian, the former easternmost Lower Austria, like the latter in interwar Austria’s Burgenland. The number of Slovaks in Lower Austria sank rapidly from 30,000 in 1918 to 3600 in 1934. They eagerly assimilated to Austrian Germandom, like Magyars in Burgenland. What is more, sometimes they passed themselves off as Czechs and Moravians, or such categories were imposed on them. Around 50,000 inhabitants in Poland’s sections of Orava and Spiš, and another 50,000 in Czechoslovakia’s sections of both regions, Warsaw tended to define as ‘Poles,’ and Prague as ‘Czechoslovaks,’ or ‘Slovaks.’ But neither did Polish nationalism gain a significant following in Czechoslovakia’s sections of Orava and Spiš, nor its Czechoslovak/Slovak version in the Polish areas of both regions. Today, it is the region where the Slovak minority is concentrated in Poland. But the population still shares more in language and customs with the Gorals of the Polish High Tatras than with the Poles or the Slovaks. In the interwar period, the population of the High Tatras, and divided Orava and Spiš was even more homogenously Goralian.

The Slovak Nation

831

In 1930, 2.24 million Slovaks constituted 67.5 percent of Slovakia’s population. The minorities included 572,000 Magyars (17.2 percent), 148,000 Germans (4.5 percent), 140,000 Czechs (4.3 percent), 137,000 Jews (4.1 percent), and 110,000 (3.2 percent) Ruthenians. Technically speaking, neither were Czechs, Jews, nor Ruthenian minorities. Official statistics did not distinguish between Czechs and Slovaks, and lumped them together as Czechoslovaks. The Ruthenians were construed as a state nation of Czechoslovakia, whereas Jews were apportioned among Czechs, Germans, and Slovaks depending on which language they declared as their mother tongue in census. Yiddish, as earlier in Austria-Hungary, was not considered a language. The authorities dubbed it ‘Jewish jargon, or ‘kitchen German,’ and identified it as ‘German’ for official purposes. Similar exclusion from official statistics (though on different grounds) was suffered by Roma. They had been present in Central Europe since at least the 15th century, and a new wave of Roma reached this region after the mid-1850s when Roma slavery was abolished in Walachia and Moldavia (future Romania) between 1854 and 1856. Fearing the possibility of re-enslavement or wishing to improve their lot, many Roma left the state. Czechoslovak, or for that matter, Hungarian, and Polish censuses did not record them, on the widespread presumption that they were mere ‘vagrants’ or ‘lumpenproletariat,’ not a separate ethnic group complete with its own language. Roma became ‘visible’ when the Third Reich targeted them along with the Jews in the course of the Endlösung (‘final solution’). After World War II, the communist regimes once again denied the status of ethnic group or national minority to the Roma. Today, reliable statistics assess the number of Roma living in Slovakia at 0.25 million to 0.5 million, or 4.7 percent to 9.4 percent of the population. Projecting this ratio back into the past, one may safely assume that they numbered between 156,000 and 0.31 million in 1930. In official statistics, they were subsumed into Slovaks and Magyars. As in entire Czechoslovakia, the recognized minorities were entitled to the auxiliary use of their national languages in administration in these localities where a given minority formed at least one-fifth of the population. Education in a minority language was organized in localities where there were at least 40 children belonged to a given minority. In Slovakia, Magyars constituted one-fifth of the population or more in 26 counties, and Ruthenians in four. Like Germans in the Czech lands, Magyars managed to retain their educational system in Slovakia largely intact. In 1938, they enjoyed 660 elementary schools with Magyar as the language of instruction. It was a drop from 762 Magyarlanguage elementary schools in 1921, but it largely reflected the drop in the number and share of Magyars in Slovakia’s population from 21.2 percent in 1921 to less than 17 percent in 1938. The only serious grudge, which Magyars had against Prague in this field, was the lack of any Magyarophone universitylevel educational institution. Czech Germans retained their German-language university in Prague and other German-language higher education schools

832 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

in the Czech lands. They even had their own separate academy of sciences, Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen (Society for the Advancement of German Science, Art, and Literature in Bohemia; it was established in 1891 in response to the Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art, founded the previous year). Similarly, the Carpathian Germans retained their minority educational system in Slovakia, and a similar one was developed for Ruthenians. German-language education grew more easily in liberal Czechoslovakia than before 1918, under Budapest’s Magyarizing pressure. In 1921, there were 105 German-language elementary schools, 5 German-Slovak, 2 German-Magyar, and 3 German-MagyarSlovak. Interestingly, all 95 Ruthenian elementary schools were bilingual with Ruthenian and German as the languages of instruction. This was due to the fact that the areas of settlement of Germans and Ruthenians overlapped in northern Slovakia. Obviously, later German was replaced with Slovak in these schools. No minority schools were founded for Slovaks in the Czech lands or Czechs in Slovakia. They were construed as members of one Czechoslovak nation speaking their single Czechoslovak national language. In practice, Czech children attended Slovak-medium schools in Slovakia, and Slovak ones Czech-medium schools in the Czech lands. In Subcarpathian Ruthenia, minority schools for Czechoslovaks operated exclusively through the medium of the Czech language. In 1921, there were 56 secondary schools in Slovakia. In 39 of them, Slovak was used as the language of instruction. Magyar was used in three secondary schools, German in two, and Ruthenian (that is, Ukrainian and Russian) in one. In 16 minority secondary schools, teaching was conducted in Slovak and a minority language (German or Magyar). In one secondary school, located in Bratislava, German, Magyar, and Slovak were used as the media of education (Buc 1960: 15; Carpathian 2005; Education 2004; Eberhardt 1996: 114, 118–119; From Minority Status to Partnership 2005; History of Bratislava 2005; Kirschbaum 1999: lxxx; Marko and Pavol 1995: Móczy 1982: 494; Ogonowski 2000: 252–253, 261, 265, 267; Ondrejoviˇc 1999: 46; Racial 1922: 20; Rothschild 1977: 89; Šatava 1994: 149, 229, 237, 240, 249, 257; Time 1997: 9). The centralized character of Czechoslovakia proved a tragedy for the Slovak economy. This economy was directly and immediately attached to the much more vibrant Czech economy without any transitional provisions or tariff barriers that would have shielded the former from the full impact of Czech economic competition. As a result, 260 enterprises went bankrupt in Slovakia by 1935. Prague undertook no concentrated efforts to modernize the Slovak economy, so investment flowed mostly into agriculture and the traditional branches of industry. So by 1930, a mere 19.4 percent of the Slovak workforce was employed in industry compared with 42.1 percent in the Czech lands. Although the standard of living in Slovakia and the Czech lands rose over time, it was slower in Slovakia, which widened the economic and social cleavage between it and the

The Slovak Nation

833

Czech lands. For instance, between 1921 and 1930, the percentage of Slovakia’s population employed in agriculture dropped only slightly from 60.6 percent to 56.8 percent. And by 1937, Slovakia’s per capita income was only half of that in the Czech lands. In the absence of political or economic autonomy, Prague’s cultural policies did boost the development of Slovak culture and of the Slovaks as a nation. The main institution of the Slovak national and cultural life, the Matica slovenská, originally established in 1863 and dissolved by the Hungarian authorities in 1875, was renewed on 1 January 1919 in its traditional seat of Turˇciansky Svätý Martin. This opened the cleavage between the city and Bratislava where Prague located the main Slovak authorities on 4 February. These two centers of Slovak national and political life were associated with the pro-Czech, mainly Protestant Slovak camp, and the autonomist, mainly Catholic camp centered around Hlinka’s SL’S, respectively. Bratislava was perceived as a bureaucratic capital dominated by Czech civil servants and German and Magyar inhabitants, whereas Turˇciansky Svätý Martin appeared to be the ‘rightful’ Slovak capital. Repeated attempts undertaken in the 1920s to move the Slovak capital to Turˇciansky Svätý Martin proved fruitless. On the other hand, the military advised moving the capital to centrally-located Banská Bystrica, arguing that it might be difficult to defend Bratislava and Turˇciansky Svätý Martin since they were so closely located to Austria and Poland, respectively. On 27 March 1919, the Slovak National Theater was founded in Bratislava and the first ever Slovak university was inaugurated in the same city on 27 June. Both the theater and university took over the buildings and assets of the Hungarian-language theater and university, which had been active in Pozsony (Bratislava) between 1886 and 1918. The Magyars in Slovakia, unlike their kin in Romania’s Transylvania, or the Germans in the Czech lands, were not allowed to keep their theaters and institutions of higher learning. Interwar Bratislava’s Czechoslovak governing and intellectual elite was predominantly composed from Czechs and Czechophile Slovak Czechoslovakists. Not surprisingly then, the National Theater produced plays exclusively in Czech until 1932, and Czech played a significant role as a language of education at the university. Symptomatically, no Slovak Academy of Sciences was founded. Hence, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Art remained the sole academy of sciences in interwar Czechoslovakia. (This deficiency was partly addressed in 1926 when the Uˇcena Spoloˇcnost’ Šafaˇríková4 [Šafaˇrík Scientific Society] was founded.) Ironically, the Slovak university in Bratislava was named after the famous 17th-century expellee Bohemian Protestant writer and thinker, Ján Amos Komenský. It was a bow from Masaryk’s Slovak Protestant students, turned state officials, to their professor, turned Czechoslovak president, who wished to anchor the project of the Czechoslovak nation in the tradition of Hussitism. Propaganda brochures justified this decision by claiming that Hussites brought the ‘first books in the

834 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

national [that is, Czechoslovak, or Czech] language to Slovakia [in the 15th and 16th centuries],’ ‘woke up the national [that is, Czechoslovak] consciousness among the Slovaks,’ and were ‘ancestors of Protestant expellees from Bohemia who developed economy, and national [that is, Czechoslovak] culture and consciousness in Slovakia [between the 17th and 19th centuries].’ Certainly, Hlinka and his Catholic SL’S disagreed with this vision, which they saw as part of ‘atheist and heretic’ Prague’s broader strategy of Czechization. They replied with the Cyrillo-Methodian myth, which identified the beginning of the Slovaks and their state with Greater Moravia. Surprisingly, Masaryk did not utilize this myth, which would have allowed him to easily attract to Czechoslovakia the overwhelmingly Catholic Moravians and Slovaks, as well as Greek Catholic Ruthenians. Perhaps, such a move would have compromised himself in his own eyes, as his first significant political action was that of erecting a monument of Jan Hus. Against the will of the Austro-Hungarian authorities, he had campaigned to this end from 1889 until 1915, when the famous statute of Hus was finally allowed to be erected in Prague. Also, then Masaryk had won against the wishes of other Czech intellectuals, who had wanted incorporation of Catholicism into the vision of Czech nationalism. In Czechoslovakia, this victory of Hussitism as the ideological basis of Czech and, subsequently, Czechoslovak nationalism distanced this ideology from the Moravians and Slovaks. Understandably, Hlinka’s cantankerous relations with Masaryk and Prague meant Hlinka formed lasting friendships with Moravia’s Catholic clergymen. Masaryk realized the unifying force of the myths of Cyrillo-Methodian Christianity and Greater Moravia too late. In 1933, in Nitra, Hlinka and the HSL’S (in 1925 the SL’S changed its name in Hlinka’s honor, as the Hlinka SL’S) organized the purely ecclesiastical celebrations of the 1100th anniversary of the consecration of the first Christian church on the Czechoslovak territory. Prague decided to turn these celebrations into a state event. But the HSL’S did not allow assimilating the Greater Moravian and Cyrillo-Methodian complex of myths into an element of Czechoslovak national ideology. Slovaks carried the HSL’S leader to the podium, where, in the presence of the diplomatic corps and the state authorities, Hlinka delivered the declaration demanding separate Slovak national statehood within a truly federal Czecho-Slovakia. The way to this compromising standoff was long in making. In the 1920s, when everything seemed possible, there was time and many a chance to satisfy Slovak political and economic aspirations and demands. The Slovak economy could have been shielded against the direct competitive thrust of the Czech industry. The rhetoric of political Hussitism could have been toned down and elements of the Great Moravian tradition co-opted. Masaryk could have shared power more equally with Slovak parties and nominated more Slovaks to high state positions, and it would not have hurt to gradually introduce a modicum of

The Slovak Nation

835

political autonomy for Slovakia. Not surprisingly, Hlinka’s SL’S emerged as the strongest political force in interwar Slovakia. In 1925, it received 34.3 percent of the vote in Slovakia, which translated into 6.9 percent in entire Czechoslovakia. In the wider perspective the HSL’S was negligible; there were not enough Slovaks to support a party that would seriously challenge the Czech political domination in the state. But the HSL’S tended to hold the plurality of votes and mandates from Slovakia. Prague seemed to have recognized the force of this, and invited in 1927 two HSL’S members to take up ministerial portfolios in the government. Unfortunately, the Slovak-Czech relations were immediately soured by the 1928 administrative reform, which further centralized the state. The Slovak territory had been composed from 19 Hungarian komitats (or župy in Slovak) or their fragments. In 1923, Prague had limited their number to six, which had improved the central control and limited Slovak self-government. The new reform cut the number of župy to five and organized them into the Krajina slovenská, or the Slovak Province. In the system, it became one of Czechoslovakia’s four provinces, including two Czech and one Ruthenian. To add insult to injury, Prague nominated one-third of the members of the province’s assembly, including the assembly’s president. Obviously, the HSL’S won the first elections to the assembly in 1928, but Prague always nominated pro-Czech/Czechoslovak presidents, who acted as governors of the province. On the positive side, the central Ministry for Slovakia was abolished in 1927. On 1 January 1928, Vojtech Tuka, the Editor of the HSL’S’s daily, Slovák (The Slovak), published an article alleging that a secret clause to the Martin Declaration guaranteed the incorporation of Slovakia into Czechoslovakia only for 10 years. Because the clause was not prolonged, it resulted in ‘vacuum juris,’ which necessitated re-negotiation of the position of Slovakia in Czechoslovakia. Prague reacted very nervously and Tuka was stripped of his parliamentary mandate and imprisoned for 15 years on the charges of high treason. There was no secret clause to the Martin Declaration, but in Slovak eyes, the Czechoslovak government’s behavior seemed to substantiate Tuka’s claim. Understandably, HSL’S ministers left the government in 1929, and the following year, submitted to the National Assembly a bill for the autonomy of Slovakia. Of course, to no avail. In 1932, the Matica slovenská rejected the first ever normative handbook of Slovak, Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (The Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, 1931, Prague and Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), authored by the Czech scholar, Václav Vážný. This handbook allowed for the use of numerous Czech words as synonyms of their Slovak counterparts. It was an attempt to create a unified Czechoslovak language at the cost of Slovak, that is, by Czechizing this language. (In the first half of the 19th century, it was exactly Šafárik and Kollár’s fear that linguistic Czechoslovakism might not mean an equitable confluence of Czech and Slovak into Czechoslovak, but relentless Czechization

836 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Slovak.) Naturally, it brought an angry Slovak reaction (even supported by some Slovak Czechoslovakists) that increased the difference between both languages through a new wave of linguistic purism directed at ridding the Slovak language of Bohemianisms. In the mid-1930s, Slovak parties increasingly fearful of Prague’s domination began to unite on the anti-Czech ticket. In 1932, the HSL’S formed an autonomist coalition with the SNS. In the 1935 parliamentary elections, they were joined by the Polish Party from Teschen Silesia and the Ruthenian Autonomist Agrarian Union in an Autonomist bloc. They won 22 mandates, exclusively in Slovakia. Similar ethnonational consolidation of Germans and Magyars enabled a unified Magyar party to win 9 mandates (all in Slovakia), and allowed Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP, Sudeten German Party) to gain 44 mandates. Other German parties had to be satisfied with 22 mandates. On the other hand, the majority Czechoslovak Agrarian party won a mere 45 mandates. Henlein wanted autonomy for the Sudeten Germans in the Czech lands, and the Magyar party autonomy for Magyars in southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Because the SdP’s alliance with Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP offered the greatest challenge to the stability of Czechoslovakia, Prague decided to strike a compromise with Henlein, and, at its peril, largely disregarded Magyar, Polish, Ruthenian, and Slovak pleas. In addition, octogenarian Masaryk resigned from the Czechoslovak presidency. He preferred a personal style of governance, so when he left there were no developed mechanisms to share power and work out a consensus without the presence of Masaryk. In 1935, Milan Hodža was the first Slovak to become Czechoslovak Prime Minister, but this nomination could not placate anti-Czech and anti-Prague feelings in Slovakia, for he was a convinced Czechoslovakist, Protestant, Masaryk’s friend, and a former supporter of the Hlas circle, from which Slovak Czechoslovakists had emerged. In September 1936, the HSL’S resolved to fortify its efforts to obtain autonomy for Slovakia, and the idea gained popularity also among young Slovak politicians in the mainstream Czechoslovak parties. Prague continued in its vision of mere cultural autonomy for the Slovaks. In 1937, the second Slovak institution of higher education, Slovak Higher School of Technology, opened in Turˇciansky Svätý Martin (2 years later transferred to Bratislava). This event made no impression on the HSL’S. In the same year, Masaryk died, and Hlinka in the following year. They could not restrain and advise their successors any longer. In June 1938, the HSL’S again appealed to Prague to grant autonomy to Slovakia. Faced with national demands of Germans, Magyars, Poles, Ruthenians, and Slovaks, and with the pressure of Germany and Western powers, Hodža resigned from premiership on 22 September (Kálal 1919: 9; Kirschbaum 1999: lxxix, 152–153; Kollár 1994: 63, 65–66; Kováˇc 1997: 62, 1998: 370; Krekoviˇc 2005: 157–158; Rothschild 1977: 110, 115, 120; Semotanová 2003: 47; Skilling 1992: 70–73).

The Slovak Nation

837

On 29 September 1938, the Munich Agreement was signed. Prague had no choice but to resign itself to the dictate on the following day. Beneš, who had succeeded Masaryk as Czechoslovak President in 1935, resigned from the office on 5 October, and left the country. In line with the Munich Agreement, Germany occupied the so-called Sudetenland, or the borderland regions of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia adjacent to Germany and Austria (incorporated into Germany in March 1938). On 30 September, Warsaw demanded the Czechoslovak section of Teschen Silesia and a tiny adjacent piece of Slovak terˇ ritory north of the town of Cadca, and on the following day, Prague gave in to the ultimatum. The unexpected weakening of Czechoslovakia, suddenly left by its Western European protectors, allowed the HSL’S to declare the Slovak autonomy in Žilina on 6 October. Prague could do nothing but grant this concession, and on the following day, Josef Tiso, Hlinka’s successor as the Chairman of the HSL’S, was nominated the Head of the Slovak autonomous government. But the Slovak success soon turned bitter. On 11 October, Prague granted autonomy to Subcarpathian Ruthenia. On 1 November, Poland issued an ultimatum demanding Orava, Spiš, and five other tiny pieces of Slovak territory scattered along the northern border. Neither were weakened Prague or Bratislava in position to oppose Warsaw’s ultimatum. On the following day, in line with the Vienna Award, Berlin and Rome granted southern Slovakia and southern Ruthenia to Hungary. On 30 November, Emil Hácha was elected President of the radically transformed state. On 22 November, the National Assembly adopted a constitutional amendment that granted Slovakia autonomy, and changed the polity’s name to Czecho-Slovakia, informally known as the Second Republic. The political system of an independent future Slovakia began to speedily coalesce in short-lived autonomous Slovakia. On 8 November 1938, Slovak sections of all-Czechoslovak parties united with the HSL’S and formed the HSL’S-dominated Strana Slovenskej národnej jednoty (SSNJ, Party of Slovak National Unity). Only the minority German and Magyar parties were exempted from the de facto single-party system. On 18 December, the first elections to the Slovak Autonomous Parliament took place. It assembled for the first time on 2 February 1939. Meanwhile, the Slovak-Polish border treaty was signed on 30 November 1938 in Zakopane, a town in the Polish Tatras, previously straddled by Slovak Orava and Spiš. This event banished the last vesitiges of pro-Polish leanings in the SSNJ. In preparation for the dismantling of Czecho-Slovakia, Hitler met on 13 March 1939 Slovak politicians in Berlin and demanded that they declare the independence of Slovakia. The Slovak Parliament complied the following day. Independent Slovakia came into being for the first time in history, officially named as the Slovak State. Poland recognized it immediately after Germany. All in all, 27 states recognized Slovakia, including the wartime Allies, except

838 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the United States. On 15 March, German troops occupied the rump Czech lands, which were transformed into Germany’s Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a day later. On 18 March, Hungary occupied the briefly independent rump Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Slovakia, fearful of its irredentist southern neighbor, signed a Treaty of Protection with Germany on 23 March. On the same day, Hungary attacked Slovakia and seized a strip of Slovak territory adjacent to the border of Hungarian-occupied Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Berlin chose not to react, as its relations with Budapest took precedence over those with Bratislava. Slovakia lost to Hungary and Poland 21.8 percent of its interwar territory, and 26.4 percent of its population. Independent Slovakia measured 38,500 sq km and housed the population of 2.45 million. The Slovak territorial and demographic losses were proportionally smaller than those of the Czech lands, of 37.4 percent of the territory and 35.9 percent of the population. On 18 April 1939, the first anti-Semitic laws were adopted in Slovakia, which excluded Jews from society. On 21 July, the first ever Slovak Constitution was promulgated. In the Preamble, the Constitution entrusted the ‘Slovak Nation to Almighty God,’ and defined the Slovak state as the ‘living space’ earmarked for the Slovaks from times immemorial. The Slovak nation (of which Slovakia was the nation-state) was defined as a ‘Christian and national community.’ Article 1.1 changed the name of the Slovak State to that of the Slovak Republic. Article 3.3 proclaimed Bratislava the capital of the Slovak Republic, and Article 5.1 announced the white, blue, and red tricolor the national flag. The definition of Slovakia as the nation-state of the Slovaks, by default, made Slovak the state language as exemplified by Article 99. This added to all the ‘firsts,’ because in independent Slovakia, for the first time, Slovak became the sole official language of a state. Article 58 confirmed the single-party system, proclaiming the HSL’S (SSNJ) the sole party of the Slovak nation in Slovakia. Article 59 allowed the recognized national minorities (that is, Germans and Magyars) to form their own ethnolinguistically-defined parties. (The provision was not extended to the Czech, Jewish, and Ruthenian minorities, because there were no states, which would press Bratislava to do so.) At first, the Czechs, preoccupied with their own fate in the protectorate, calmly accepted the proclamation of Slovak independence. It was not unexpected, and many an average Czech sympathized with the Slovaks’ two-decade-long unsuccessful attempts to gain a degree of political autonomy. Even the shameful expulsion of 20,000 Czech civil servants, teachers, doctors, technicians, railwaymen, and their families from independent Slovakia to the protectorate did not turn the Czechs into enemies of the Slovaks. Only later, during the war, Beneš and his circle of émigré Czechoslovak politicians in London produced the theory of the Slovak ‘knife stabbed in the back of the Czechs’ (dýk do chrbta). They accused the Slovaks of breaking up Czechoslovakia, conveniently forgetting

The Slovak Nation

839

how coarsely Prague treated the Slovaks and their political aspirations in the interwar period. Independent Slovakia was the only state that joined Germany in its attack on Poland on 1 September, which commenced World War II. But too often, it is conveniently forgotten by Polish historians that Bratislava’s immediate aim was to regain the territories which Poland had seized from Slovakia in the previous year, not some all-out offensive against its northern neighbor. This would have been suicidal in a long-term perspective. (Similarly, in 1941, Finland joined the German onslaught on the Soviet Union, not to help the Third Reich but to regain the region of Viipuri [Vyborg] seized by the Kremlin in late 1939.) (Deák 1996: 131–133; Kirschbaum 1999: xliii–xliv; Kováˇc 1997: 74–75, 1998: 218; Semotanová 2003: 49; Tomaszewski 1997: 272–273) Interwar Czechoslovakia, whatever its failings might be, secured for the Slovaks unprecedented development of their language and culture, which actually made them into a nation in line with the Central European definition of nation, construed as a self-conscious homogenous ethnolinguistic entity. Constitutional Czechoslovakism that officially submerged Slovaks in the Czechoslovak nation and Slovak in the Czechoslovak language was not intended to suppress Slovakdom, but to contain the irredentism of the Sudeten Germans and Slovakia’s Magyars. Numerically, the German minority was larger than the Slovak nation and the Magyar Minority larger than the Ruthenian nation. So the two most significant minorities in Czechoslovakia were minorities in theory only. In their demographic, economic, and political weight, the Sudeten Germans were surpassed only by the Czechs. The same could be said of Slovakia’s Magyars in relation to the Slovaks only in demography. The political and especially economic influence of the Magyar minority for sure was greater than that of the Slovaks, especially in southern Slovakia, a mere stone’s throw from Budapest. The Ruthenians represented no significant political power let alone economic or demographic weight. In practice, their homeland, which had been a ‘primeval forest and deer preserve’ to the Magyars, was turned into a Czech protectorate, in which the Ruthenians themselves had little say. The concepts of the Czechoslovak nation and its Czechoslovak language lent the state necessary legitimacy on the plane of international relations, and offered the false security of a national majority to the Czechs. Even worse, constitutional Czechoslovakism swept under the carpet Czech-Slovak and Czech-Ruthenian tensions encapsulated in the phrase ‘Great Czech chauvinism’ of which Slovak and Ruthenian leaders accused Prague. These tensions soon came to the fore when Czechoslovakia broke up under the relentless pressure of Germany, France, Hungary, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The period of Germanization, instituted in Hungary after the defeat of the Hungarian War of Independence (1849), contributed to the development of educational systems in minority languages. This tolerant policy was replaced with Magyarization in the mid-1870s, that is, shortly after the founding of

840 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Austria-Hungary (1867). In 1874–1875, all the three short-lived Slovak-language secondary schools were liquidated. The all-time high of 1971 Slovak-language elementary schools in 1874 quickly declined to 241 in 1907. Czech help for the Slovak national movement and international shaming of Hungary at its relentless policy of Magyarization caused the rise of the number of Slovak schools to 365 in 1914. Ironically, most subjects in these schools were taught in Magyar anyway (18 to 20 hours per week). Slovaks, who constituted 11.9 percent of Hungary’s population in 1910, accounted for 4.8 percent students in teachers’ colleges, and 0.9 percent students at universities. In Czechoslovakia, the situation was immediately rectified. The full Slovak-language educational system (complete with secondary schools, teachers’ colleges, and a university) was in place already in 1919. In 1921, there were 2613 Slovak-language elementary schools in Slovakia, which accounted for 70.7 percent of all schools in this region. The balance was slightly tipped in favor of Slovaks, as they constituted 67.5 percent of Slovakia’s population in 1930. But the disproportion was not big and rather insignificant, if one remembers that children of Czechs, who moved to Slovakia, mostly attended Slovak schools. Czechs amounted to 4.3 percent of Slovakia’s inhabitants in 1930. The contentious issue of employing numerous Czech specialists in administration, schools and the railways of Slovakia cannot be properly understood without remembering that in 1919, there were a mere 97 Slovak civil servants in state and self-governmental administration in entire Hungary. In 1910, there were 461 Magyar, and 3 German judges and lawyers in Slovakia; 805 Magyar, 13 German, and 10 Slovak law, court and prison officials; 4257 Magyar, 129 German, and 345 Slovak elementary school teachers; and 638 Magyar, 12 German, and 10 Slovak secondary school teachers. In the context of high population growth and due to the lack of educational and career opportunities because of Magyarization, Slovak sources estimate that 0.71 million Slovaks (mostly Slovjaks) emigrated to Northern America between the 1870s and 1914. After the founding of Czechoslovakia, the number of Magyar and, less so, German civil servants and teachers dropped significantly in Slovakia. They left for Hungary, Germany, and Austria, did not know Czech or Slovak, which disqualified them from service, and were removed for political reasons in order to ensure the Czechoslovak character of the administration. In 1921, there were 1763 Czechoslovak, 397 Magyar, 47 German, and 3 Ruthenian civil servants in Slovakia; 198 Czechoslovak, 160 Magyar, 11 German, and 3 Ruthenian judges and lawyers; 4676 Czechoslovak, 1685 Magyar, 318 German, and 112 Ruthenian elementary school teachers; 431 Czechoslovak, 137 Magyar, 29 German, and 11 Ruthenian secondary school teachers; 1621 Czechoslovak, 1423 Magyar, and 121 German employees of post offices, and telephone and telegraph services; and 240 Czechoslovak, 60 Magyar, and 15 German doctors and officials in state hospitals.

The Slovak Nation

841

The visible replacement of Magyars with Czechoslovaks in state employment entailed a huge migration of Czech specialists to Slovakia. There were not enough Slovak and Ruthenian counterparts to fill in gaps left in the state service by Magyars, who left Czechoslovakia or were removed from office. Even when Slovak and Ruthenian specialists were available, they were typically literate in German and Magyar, with no knowledge of written Czech, and let alone Slovak, which had not been fully standardized yet or employed in secondary and university education. The Czechs had no intention to dominate Slovakia and its administration, otherwise they would have developed the Czech-language rather than Slovak-language educational system in the region. As a result, illiteracy in Slovakia dropped from 14.7 percent in 1921 to 8.2 percent in 1930, and to 5.4 percent a decade later. Practically, after 1920, every child living in Slovakia attended school. Those who did not (about 1 percent) were predominantly Roma. The liquidation of illiteracy was a staggering achievement, as it was estimated that prior to 1918, half of all Slovaks were either illiterate, functionally literate, or literate in Magyar, German, or Czech, not Slovak. Full literacy in Slovak paved the way for the rise of Slovakophone elite of civil servants, writers, teachers, professionals, and qualified workers. In 1938, in Slovakia, there were 2957 Slovaks employed in civil service, 900 in communal administration, 1133 in the rural police force, 5626 in the postal and telecommunications services, 14,562 in the state railroads, and 227 as judges. Serious discrepancies in the employment ratio between Czechs and Slovaks remained in the army and the central state institutions. In 1938, there were a mere 422 Slovaks in the 11,820strong officer corps. Slovaks accounted for 1.6 percent of the staff in the central ministries, and added up to 11.8 percent of the personnel in the Ministry of Unification responsible for Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Bratislava’s branch of the Ministry of Education employed 94 Czechs and 68 Slovaks. The developments in the field of education and the formation of the Slovak elite entailed a hike in Slovak-language cultural production. Between 1901 and 1918, 150 Slovak book titles were published per annum, that is a total of 2700 in the period. In addition, many of the publications were printed in Prague and Budapest, rather than in Upper Hungary. In Czechoslovakia, the number of Slovak book titles jumped to several hundred per year in the early 1920s, and the annual average leveled out at 650 in the mid-1930s. World classics were translated into Slovak, and numerous Slovak writers emerged. This made possible the organization of the first congress of Slovak writers in 1936. However, Czech dominated in scientific, technical, and scholarly literature, as well as in university- and secondary school-level textbooks and references. Also Czech, in the constitutional guise of Czechoslovak, was the language of politics and central administration in interwar Czechoslovakia. But attempts to produce a single-variety (that is, Czech-based) Czechoslovak language by official Czechization of Slovak were abandoned in the early 1930s. The de facto

842 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

co-official status of Slovak was respected in Slovakia, which prepared the ground for the introduction of Slovak as the sole official language of autonomous ˇ Slovakia in 1938 and independent Slovakia a year later (Durica 1989: 14; Holy 1996: 86, 102–103; Kaˇcala 2001: 34–35; Kováˇc 1998: 368, 371; Lettrich 1955: 64; Marko and Pavol 1995; Racial 1922: 11–14, 20–23; Rothschild 1977: 92; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 81–83). In Czechoslovakia, the widespread use of Slovak in all fields of public life blossomed, unlike before 1918 in Hungary, where Magyarization had thoroughly suppressed this language to the lower ranks of elementary school and a few low-circulation publications. At that time, it had been the main symbol of Slovak nationalism. In Czechoslovakia, the role of Slovak changed from symbolic communication to that of the medium for everyday communication. The legal practice and political decision initially confirmed the elevated status of Slovak as the official language in Slovakia, but the 1920 Constitution submerged Slovak in the overall concept of common Czechoslovak language. Soon, this decision paved the way for creeping Czechization of Slovak, and Prague used the idea of Czechoslovak nation to justify its denial of political autonomy to Slovakia. Masaryk envisaged that state should be nation not the other way round. This idealistic application of the Western European and American formula of civic nationalism could not be successful, given that all the nation-states in Central Europe and the Balkans justified their existence through ethnolinguistic nationalism. Placed in the middle of the region, the Czechoslovak use of civic nationalism for nation-state-building purposes backfired and progressively de-legitimized the state in the eyes of its minorities along with the Slovaks and the Ruthenians. The political struggle of Slovak leaders for autonomy and against Prague’s centralization was replicated on the plane of language too. Štúr’s 1843 codification of standard Slovak was rejected by Slovak Catholics and numerous Slovak Protestants who stuck to Bibliˇctina. The Catholic linguist, Martin Hattala, proposed a compromise that incorporated some elements of Bernoláˇctina. Catholics and Protestants accepted it in 1851. After that date, no new books were published in Bernoláˇctina, and the number of titles in Bibliˇctina was limited. In 1852, Hattala and the Protestant linguist, Michal Miloslav Hodža, presented the compromise codification in their anonymously published Krátka mluvnica slovenská (A Short Slovak Grammar, Preßburg), which was endorsed in its preface by three Catholic and three Protestant leaders. After the liquidation of the Slovak-language secondary schools and the Matica slovenská in 1874–1875, the public use of Slovak diminished, and no authoritative work on its grammar and orthography was published. In 1890, the Slovak linguist, Samo Czambel, addressed the situation by publishing his Slovensky pravopis (The Principles of Slovak Orthography, Budapest). In 1902, it was followed by his famous Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (The Guide to the Written Slovak

The Slovak Nation

843

Language, Turócszentmárton), which the average literate Slovak frequently perused to write in the Slovak language. It became popular to refer to the Štúr-Hattala-Hodža codification, and Czambel’s updated codification as the martinský úzus (Martin usage), because Slovak cultural and political life concentrated at that time in Turócszentmárton. The journalist, editor, historian, and national activist, Jozef Škultéty, was an appropriate person to carry on Czambel’s work of standardizing Slovak. He edited and updated Czambel’s Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (Turócszentmárton/Turˇciansky Svätý Martin) in 1915 and 1919, which produced the Czambel-Škultéty codification and which became widespread among the Slovak intellectuals and, in the 1920s, in Slovak public life. Škultéty brought about the re-establishment of the Matica slovenská in 1919, and remained its chairman until 1940. He was the first professor of Slovak language and literature at Komenský University in Bratislava, but was replaced in 1920 over his refusal to rename his subject as ‘Czechoslovak language and literature,’ in line with the 1920 Constitution. Afterward, exclusively Czech professors held this chair, which antagonized Slovak leaders. Bratislava, where Slovaks were in a minority, and the newly arrived Czech elite decided on all matters Slovak, the provincial capital appeared as a Czech Trojan horse to Slovak nationalists. The SL’S took the challenge and established the center of the party and its press in the Slovak capital. However, the increasingly anti-Czech and mostly Protestant SNS preserved Turˇciansky Svätý Martin as an alternative center of the Slovak national politics and contributed to making it into the cultural center of the Slovak nation. In Czechoslovakia, for the first time in history, Czech entered into direct and intensive contact with Slovak. Czech was standardized in the 1830s and widely used since that time. In the 1880s, it became a co-official language along with German in Bohemia and Moravia, and the first ever Czech-language university was founded in Prague. The rapid economic development of both the Czech lands produced a growing number of writers and readers of texts in Czech and the language came to be used in every sphere of public life including economy, technology, and science. Magyar and (less so) German played this role in Upper Hungary. Slovak did not have the necessary vocabulary or established tradition of use in these spheres, so the Czech language and ubiquitous Czech linguistic borrowings filled the communication gaps left by the removal of Magyar and German from most fields of public life in Slovakia. This necessity created discontent among Slovak intellectuals. The positive outcome of the situation was the eventual extinction of Bibliˇctina, which appeared old-fashioned in its continued direct contact of long standing with standard Czech. Slovak Protestants replaced it with Slovak as their language of liturgy, and Slovak Czechoslovakist shifted from Bibliˇctina to Czech if they had not done it yet.

844 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

At the end of the 19th century, Czambel decried the state of the Slovak language as ‘chaos,’ and appealed for the compilation of an authoritative multivolume dictionary to wrap up the codification of this language. Magyarization and economic weakness of Slovaks prevented accomplishment of this task. The codification and lexical deficiencies of Slovak led the renowned Czech linguist, Václav Ertl, to propose in the mid-1920s that the use of Slovak should be limited to literature, while Czech would be employed for administrative, technical, professional, and scientific purposes. It was an old thesis from which Masaryk and other Czech Czechoslovakists had resigned in the early 1890s, as it was the condition for swifter cooperation with Slovak Czechoslovakists. Had Ertl’s idea been implemented, this would have limited Slovak to folklore and private communication, and, today, Czech would be the official language of Slovakia. Ertl was a prolific author of academic and school grammars and textbooks, who continued the archaizing and purist tradition of Jan Gebauer’s Mluvnice ˇceská pro školy stˇrední a ústavy uˇcitelské (The Czech Grammar for Schools and Teachers’ Colleges, 1890, Prague and Vienna). This tradition further detached standard (written) Czech from the vernacular and made it easy to emphasize its closeness to ‘Slovak’ Bibliˇctina. This, and the fact that Ertl was a convinced Czechoslovakist, compelled him to publish his Struˇcná mluvnice ˇcesko-slovenská (A Short Czech-Slovak Grammar, 1919, Prague), which emphasized closeness of Slovak to Czech. After the founding of Czechoslovakia, there were no appropriate school grammars and textbooks of Slovak, now indispensable for the dynamically developing Slovak-language educational system, and for facilitating the spread of this language in Slovakia’s public life. To meet this demand, the secondary school teacher, Ján Damborský, wrote Slovenská mluvnica so zvláštnym zretel’om na prvavopis (The Slovak Grammar with a Special Attention Paid to the Rules of Correct Writing, 1919, Nitra). In the introduction, Damborský stressed that he prepared this grammar drawing on the Gebauer-Ertl codification of Czech and Czambel’s codification of Slovak. In line with Ertl and other Czechoslovakists’ proposal, the grammar made Slovak closer to Czech, especially by filling in lexicographic lacunae with Czech vocabulary and by allowing alternative grammatical forms, that is, Slovak and Czech ones. Understandably, Prague recommended this textbook for Slovak secondary schools and it went through further three editions in the 1920s. The broadened fifth edition appeared in 1930, titled Slovenská mluvnica pre stredné školy a uˇcitelské ústavy (The Slovak Grammar for Secondary Schools and Teachers’ Colleges, Nitra). The martinský úzus, propagated and protected by Škultéty and the Matica slovenská, became marginalized, much to the discontent of Slovak nationalists, who saw the officially accepted Czechized standard of Slovak as a Czechoslovakist plot to destroy Slovak. On the other hand, Prague rejected the martinský úzus as incompatible with constitutional Czechoslovakism. The government was afraid that emphasizing the difference between Slovak and Czech would

The Slovak Nation

845

play into the hands of Magyar and German irredenta, who were never tired of pointing out that Czechoslovakia was not a nation-state because there was not such a thing as a Czechoslovak language; ergo, there could not be a Czechoslovak nation or, more ominously, Czechoslovak nation-state either. The worst standoff came with the publication of the Czech scholar, Václav Vážný’s Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (The Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, 1931, Prague and Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). This was an extremely tense time in Slovak-Czech relations, immediately after the sensational trial and imprisonment of Tuka (1929), and shortly before Hlinka’s clash with Prague over the ecclesiastical (that is, Slovak) or state (that is, Czechoslovak) character of the 1100th anniversary celebrations of the consecration of the first (Slovak, or Czechoslovak?) Christian church in Nitra (1933). Vážný followed Ertl and Damborský’s Czechizing principles. It was not surprising in itself, but Vážný’s handbook was posed to become the first ever officially approved codification of the Slovak language. Ironically, the Matica slovenská co-published this work, which lent it some prestige previously accorded by Slovak nationalists exclusively to the martinský úzus. Vážný was the head of the Matica’s Department of Linguistics. In 1932, the angry outcry of Slovak linguists and nationalists at this ‘Prague codification’ of Slovak led to the founding of the monthly, Slovenská reˇc (The Slovak Language), by a circle of Matica scholars in Košice. They aspired to save the martinský úzus from Czechization. After a brief period of vacillation, the Matica slovenská made the monthly into its official language journal in 1933, and the editorial office was moved to Turˇciansky Svätý Martin. Heinrich Bartek (1907–1986) was the periodical’s editor from its inception to 1939. Vážný’s codification rejected numerous words branded as Germanisms and Magyarisms, and replaced them with Bohemianisms. Bartek and his team disagreed and worked out the four main principles to be followed in the future development of the martinský úzus. First, on the purist basis, Germanisms and Bohemianisms should be excluded from the standard. (By default, it meant that Magyarisms and Latinisms long-established in Slovak were to remain.) Second, neologisms were to be created from Slovak roots in order to avoid borrowing new words from German or Czech. Third, grammatical principles and word formation should closely follow Škultéty’s 1919 edition of Czambel’s Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej. Fourth, unlike in archaizing Czech (which produced the specific diglossia of spisovná ˇceština and obecná ˇceština in Bohemia), Slovak syntax and phraseology was to emulate the vernacular, that is, the dialect of Turˇciansky Svätý Martin. Once again, two codifications of Slovak competed with each other, as Bibliˇctina and Bernoláˇctina had done until the early 1850s when the ŠtúrHattala-Hodža codification replaced them in 1852. Much to Slovak nationalists’ bitterness, Vážný’s Czechoslovakist codification won hands down, because Prague decided to use it in Slovak administration, schools, and state-supported

846 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Slovak publications. Similarly, Kollár’s Old Slovak (that is, modernized Bibliˇctina written in Antiqua) had been used in Hungary’s Slovak-language schools until the founding of the Matica slovenská (1863), because the Hungarian authorities had supported the official status of this standard. These Slovak leaders and intellectuals who opposed Czechoslovakism and struggled for Slovak autonomy, along with the Matica, subscribed to Bartek’s codification, construed as ‘true,’ or ‘pure’ Slovak. Taking into consideration the political strength of communists in Czechoslovakia, and the long-lasting tradition of Czech and Slovak links with Russian intellectuals, it is an interesting question whether Soviet language policies influenced those of Czechoslovakia. Following the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ became the ideological butt of criticism. On the linguistic plane, it entailed the policy of ‘nativization’ (korenizatsia), which supported the development and spread of literacy in languages other than Russian. (In the tsarist empire, these languages had been usually suppressed in favor of Russian as the sole official language.) In Soviet Byelarussia and Soviet Ukraine, this led to the unprecedented standardization and development of Byelorussian (Belarusian) and Ukrainian in the 1920s. In the early 1930s, the Russian language was absolved from the ‘crime of Great Russian chauvinism,’ while propagators of nativization were accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism.’ In the course of the 1930s, the use of Byelorussian and Ukrainian was limited in favor of Russian, envisaged as the all-union language of the communist Soviet nation. Simultaneously, grammar, orthography, word formation, and vocabulary of both languages were progressively Russified to make them more similar to Russian. From the perspective of Belarusian and Ukrainian nationalists, ‘pure’ Belarusian and Ukrainian survived in interwar Poland’s sections of Belarus and Ukraine, and among the Belarusian and Ukrainian diaspora in Western Europe and Northern America. There are striking political and linguistic parallels between the ‘pure’ and Russified codifications of both languages, and the Czechoslovak and ‘pure’ codifications of Slovak, which arose at the very same time. The disunity of standard Slovak was deepened by the absence of an authoritative dictionary, the compilation of which Czambel had appealed for at the end of the 19th century. The first dictionaries of standard Slovak were multilingual and its goal was to facilitate the task of acquiring official Magyar and German by Slovak students. This early genre of Slovak lexicography was represented by Štefan Janˇcoviˇc’s Noví mad’arsko-slovenskí a slovensko-mad’arskí slovˇ ník (New Magyar-Slovak and Slovak-Magyar Dictionary, 1848, Szarvas), reprinted in 1863 in Preßburg, by Josef Loos’s Slovník slovenskej, mad’arskej a nemeckej reˇci (The [Trilingual] Dictionary of the Slovak, Magyar and German Languages, 1869–1871, Pest), and Adolf Pechány’s (Pechán) ˇ Slovník slovenský a mad’arský dl’a Josefa Loosa (The Dictionary of the Slovak and Magyar Languages Compiled in

The Slovak Nation

847

Accordance with the Principles of Jozef Loos’s Dictionary, 1906, Budapest). The first of the three dictionaries was marred by being steeped in the vernacular of Slovak settlers in Lower Hungary (today, Hungary proper), not in Štúr’s codification. The second dictionary became obsolete in the 1890s after the rise of Czambel’s codification complete with his Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (1902, Turócszentmárton), which contained the first ever Slovak dictionary with explanations in Slovak. Due to its small size, cheap price, and compactness, Czambel’s Rukovät’ became the guidebook for the average Slovak on how to write correctly in Slovak. Pechány’s dictionary followed the Czambel codification of Slovak, but it had to compete with Karel Kálal and Karel Salva’s Slovník slovensko-ˇceský a ˇceskoslovenský (The Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary, 1896, Rózsahegy [Ružomberok]). The latter work was compiled in reply to the ideological needs of Czecho-Slovak cooperation developing on the plane of Czechoslovakism. On one hand, it marked the difference between both languages, while on the other, clearly showed how closely they were related. Kálal and Salva also excluded some words, which they considered to be ‘un-Slovak’ Magyarisms and Germanisms. They replaced them with Czech borrowings, in turn making Slovak closer to Czech. Czambel’s acceptance of Magyarisms and Germanisms was to prevent this very development by maintaining a fast and fixed lexicographic border between Slovak and Czech. In 1900, the Czechoslovakist approach, which aimed at making Slovak more similar to Czech, was given a bonus in the form of L’udovít Al. Miˇcátek’s 3000-page-long Differenciálny slovensko-ruský slovník s troma prílohami a Skrátˇena mluvnica slovenského jazyka s krátkym úvodom (The Slovak-Russian Dictionary of Words That Are Different in Both Languages with Three Appendixes and a Brief Grammar of the Slovak Language, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). It emphasized the not so obvious similarity between Slovak and Russian by excluding words that were the same in both languages. In the appendixes, this expression of traditional Slovak Russophile Pan-Slavism was completed with a short list of words different in Slovak and Czech. Shortly after the founding of Czechoslovakia, several short dictionaries of the same kind pairing Slovak and Czech were published, namely František Frýdecký (1891–1943) and Petr Kompiš’s (1886–1945) 190-page-long Pˇríruˇcní slovník ˇcesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský (The Reference Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary, 1919, Prague), Josef Štefan Kubín’s 146-page-long Slovník slovenskoˇceský (diferenciální) (The Slovak-Czech Dictionary [of Words That Are Different in Both Languages], 1920, Prague), earmarked ˇ for offices and schools, and Peter Tvrdý’s 160-page-long Ceskoslovenský differenciálny slovník (Czech-Slovak Dictionary of Words That Are Different in Both Languages, 1922, Trnava). Tellingly, in the titles of their dictionaries, Kubín and Tvrdý wrote the compounds ‘Slovak-Czech,’ and ‘Czech-Slovak’ without the hyphen, as single words, ‘Slovakoczech,’ and ‘Czechoslovak.’ Especially in

848 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

the latter case, this looked as if the Czechoslovak language had materialized in line with the 1920 Constitution. Tvrdý, who was to become the most significant lexicographer of Slovak in the interwar period, clearly expounded his Czechoslovakist approach to this language in his small brochure, Chybné slová, výrazy a väzby, ktorým treba v slovenˇcine vyhýbat’. Väˇcšina ich prevzatá je z Czambelových diel, “Slov. štilistiky’’ Šenšelovej a zo “Slov. pohl’adov’’(Incorrect Words and Phrases, Which Have to Be Removed from the Slovak Language: Most of them are quoted from Czambel’s works, Šenšelová’s Slov[ak] Stylistics, and [the monthly] Slov[enské] pohl’ady 1922, Trnava). It was a gauntlet thrown into the face of the martinský úzus as defined by Czambel’s Rukovät’ and the first and still most significant Slovak scholarly and literary journal, Slovenské pohl’ady. In his vitriolic attack, Tvrdý drew on the prestige of and Czechoslovakist opinions popularized by Ertl and Damborský with a supportive political nod from Prague. The flowering of this Czechoslovakist approach to the codification of Slovak came with Miroslav Kálal’s 1100-page-long Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci (The Slovak Dictionary With Words Taken From Literary Works and Dialects, 1924–1926, Banská Bystrica). It was a reworked and broadened version of M Kálal’s father and Salva’s dictionary, and Pechány’s dictionary. As M Kálal announced in the Foreword, he also drew on the dictionaries of words that were different in Czech and Slovak by Miˇcátek, Frýdecký and Kompiš, Kubín, and Tvrdý. From the non-overtly Czechoslovakist dictionaries, he referred to Loos’s dictionary and also scanned for Slovak words ˇ and phrases Štepan František Kott’s ten-volume Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (Czech-German Grammatical and Phraseological Dictionary, 1878–1906, Prague). On the basis of the claim that Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci contains only those Slovak words that are different from Czech ones, Kálal claimed that his was the most complete dictionary of the Slovak language. The diminutive size of his work in comparison with Pechány’s two-volume Slovník slovenský a mad’arský dl’a Josefa Loosa, Kálal explained by saying that three quarters of the vocabulary in Pechány’s dictionary was shared with Czech. Interestingly, Kálal noticed the difference between standard Czech and Moravia’s dialects, which he assessed at 35,000 words. Some of these words, although shared with Slovak, made it into Kálal’s dictionary because they did not crop up in standard Czech. After the flurry of the Czechoslovakist Slovak lexicographic production at the turn of the 1920s, the attention of Prague and of the Slovak national leadership moved away from language to politics. It seemed that there were more pressing problems facing the new state and Slovak-Czech relations than the Czechoslovak language question. Slovak leaders, though aware of the symbolic and rallying force of the Slovak language, neglected it at the peril of the Slovak national movement. It was Tvrdý who delivered a pre-emptive coup

The Slovak Nation

849

de grâce to the Czambel-Škultéty anti-Czechoslovakist codification, when his extensive 730-page-long Slovenský frazeologický slovník (The Slovak Phraseological Dictionary, Trnava) came off the press in 1931.5 (It was more extensive than previous dictionaries because the latter were published in the pocket-size editions, unlike Tvrdý’s work.) Thanks to his close links with the Matica slovenská, its Department of Linguistics headed by Vážný ‘corrected’ Tvrdý’s dictionary in line with Vážný’s Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu published in the same year. In this manner, Vážný’s Czechoslovakist codification of Slovak received immediate support from the so far most extensive dictionary of the Slovak language compiled in agreement with the principles of this codification. The opposition of Bartek and those Matica scholars concentrated around the monthly, Slovenská reˇc, could not endanger the dominance of this Czechizing codification. First, Prague threw its weight behind Vážný’s codification and made it obligatory in office and school. Second, Bartek’s activities for the promotion of the CzambelŠkultéty codification were frustrated by the lack of official support, which could not be granted as long as Slovakia was not autonomous. Third, the BartekCzambel-Škultéty codification, as presented in and encouraged by Slovenská reˇc, did not receive an extensive (let alone authoritative) dictionary until the 1990s. The second enlarged 840-page-long edition of Tvrdý’s dictionary was published in 1933 (Prague and Prešov), and the 240-page-long Doplnky (Supplement) in 1937 (Prague and Prešov). In the Foreword to the second edition, Tvrdý reconfirmed his allegiance to Vážný’s Pravidlá and expressed his hope that the dictionary would help Slovaks to avoid ‘barbarisms’ and ‘foreign words.’ Obviously, he meant Slovak dialectal words, and Magyarisms and Germanisms, which the Bartek-Czambel-Škultéty codification encouraged, while Vážný’s Czechizing codification branded as ‘incorrect.’ However, in his Slovník inojazyˇcný (The Dictionary of Foreign Words (1922, Bratislava, and second edition, 1932, Žilina), Tvrdý also identified Bohemianisms, which contributed to the maintenance of the lexical boundary between Slovak and Czech. In 1932, the first ever, though short (three-volume), Slovak-language encyclopedia, Slovenský nauˇcný slovník. Priruˇcná encyclopedia vedomostí v troch dieloch (The Slovak Scientific Dictionary: A reference universal encyclopedia in three volumes, Bratislava and Prague) was published. Naturally, the principles of grammar and orthography employed in this groundbreaking work followed Vážný’s Czechoslovakist codification. In addition, all the other much more extensive encyclopedias and specialist reference work were published exclusively in Czech. Hence, this first Slovak encyclopedia in Czechizing Slovak was a springboard for Slovak students into acquiring Czech. If they wanted to study at university and become professionals in Czechoslovakia, they had no choice but to do so via the medium of the Czech language. No fullfledged Slovak-language multivolume universal encyclopedia was published in the 20th century. The first volume of such an encyclopedia, the still unfinished

850 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

12-volume Encyclopaedia Beliana. Slovenská vseobecná encyklopédia v dvanástich zväzkoch (Encyclopedia Beliana: The Slovak universal encyclopedia in twelve volumes, Bratislava) appeared in 2001. Interestingly, the compilation of a unified dictionary of Czechoslovak language was never seriously proposed. Czech and Slovak are as close to each other as Croatian and Serbian. The two latter languages were made into the single Serbo-Croatian (Croato-Serbian) language. Croatian and Serbian national activists signed a Literary Agreement to this end in Vienna in 1850. It would not have amounted to much if autonomous Croatia (1868), the Austro-Hungarian administration of Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro had not recognized SerboCroatian as an official language. Czech and Slovak leaders did not sign any agreement on creating a common Czechoslovak language, and neither did Vienna nor Budapest have any intention to recognize such a language (if it had been codified), as it would have compromised the state border between Austria and Hungary, which separated the Czech lands from the Slovaks in Upper Hungary. It was Czech leaders and a small group of Slovak Czechoslovakists who attempted to impose the Czechoslovak language and nation on the Slovaks. Obviously, the Catholic majority of Slovaks angrily recoiled from this imposition. Hence, it is more appropriate to compare the constitutional conception of Czechoslovak language with a similar one of Serbocroatoslovenian language introduced by the 1921 Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenians. This language never took off due to the Slovenians’ staunch opposition, who were never asked whether they agreed to the merger of their language with Serbo-Croatian. Similarly, no dictionary of Serbocroatoslovenian was ever compiled though dictionaries of Serbo-Croatian were a commonplace from the second half of the 19th century to the breakup of Yugoslavia. The flurry of small bilingual Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech dictionaries of words different in both languages stopped abruptly in the mid-1920s after the publication of Kálal’s Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci, which brandished an extensive Czech-Slovak index. Such dictionaries being the product of Czechoslovakist lexicographers, they had no intention to depict, let alone emphasize, the boundary between Czech and Slovak, after the 1920 Constitution announced Czechoslovak as the official language. Because of the same reason, no full-fledged bilingual Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech dictionary was compiled in the interwar period. Bartek’s camp of the ‘purely Slovak’ martinský úzus had no means to compile even a medium-size Slovak dictionary that could successfully compete with Tvrdý’s Slovenský frazeologický slovník, let alone produce a bilingual Czech and Slovak dictionary. On the other hand, such a dictionary would necessarily have illustrated numerous parallels and similarities between both languages at the very time when Bartek’s circle strove to emphasize the ‘unbridgeable’ difference between them. Finally, the rise of a politically independent Slovakia with Slovak as its sole official language, did

The Slovak Nation

851

more for separating the language from Czech, than any amount of dictionaries would have. The wartime independence of Croatia (1941–1945) did exactly the same for excluding Croatian from the linguistic commonality of Serbo-Croatian. But after the war, Slovak retained its precarious ‘linguistic independence’ in communist Czechoslovakia, unlike Croatian, which merged back with Serbian into Serbo-Croatian in communist Yugoslavia (Bakoš 1994: 77–79; Bosák 1998: 17; Kaˇcala 2001: 26–35; Kálal 1924–1926: 3–5; Ripka 1993: 282–283; Smith 1998: 47, 53, 73; Tvrdý 1931: 5, 1933: 6).

The first Slovak independence: A brief prelude of Slovak monolingualism The independence of wartime Slovakia was not a product of Slovak selfdetermination but of German aggression, which destroyed Czechoslovakia. From the Slovak viewpoint, it was a lesser evil. Berlin valued Slovakia (the Third Reich’s sole Slavic ally) less than Hungary, hence the greater evil would have been to stand fast by collapsing Czechoslovakia, only to allow Slovakia to be reincorporated into Hungary. But in the words of Tiso, who was elected President of Slovakia on 23 October 1939, ‘the [Slovak] state was born out of the political will of the Slovak nation, who did not wish [any other] but its own rule over itself.’ Tiso, being a Catholic priest, legitimized his rule and the independent Slovak statehood by drawing on the tradition of Catholicism deeply entrenched among most Slovaks, and pointing (as Hlinka had done before) to the ‘atheistic, liberal, and demoralizing character’ of Czechoslovakia. In emulation of Masaryk, Józef Piłsudski, Vladimir Lenin, Josif Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini, who wrote and reflected copiously on their nations and polities, Tiso worked out the political-cum-ideological basis of Slovakia, succinctly encapsulated in the constitutional concept of ‘Christiannational community,’ which became the wartime ideological synonym for the Slovak nation. On the political plane, it was a reflection of German Volksgemeinschaft, or the ethnolinguistically homogenous nation composed of all German-speakers. What made Tiso’s vision different from the German counterpart was his insistence on the Christian dimension of the Slovak national community, so conspicuously missing from Volksgemeinschaft. Hitler and his circle considered Christianity a veneer that stifled the ‘true’ expression of the Germans’ ‘national spirit’ (Volksgeist), best embodied by pre-Christian beliefs and heroic myths of the Germanic peoples. In Tiso’s doctrine of Christian nationalism, nations were primordial entities (organisms) created by God, and thus naturally destined to obtain freedom, equated with winning their own nation-states. (State was explicitly construed as secondary to nation, the latter’s servant. Hence, Tiso’s pronounced opposition to the cult of state, exemplified by Italian fascism.) As in the case of Volksgemeinschaft, this vision entailed

852 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

ethnic homogenization (cf. German Gleichschaltung) of the nation-state and consolidation of the entire ethnolinguistically defined nation in its own nationstate. But in line with Christianity’s Ten Commandments, one should love other nations as much as one’s own. Ergo, exclusively loving one’s own nation was chauvinistic and un-Christian. Tiso’s ‘national theology’ was marred by his authoritative identification of Roman Catholicism as the sole orthodox version of Christianity. But this allowed for the embracing of Slovakia’s German and Magyar minorities who were staunchly Catholic. On the other hand, the religious dimension let Tiso underline his opposition to liberalism, capitalism, and democracy (identified with Czechoslovakia), and to communism (equated with Soviet Bolshevism), construed as ‘godless.’ All of them were to fall, because they weakened nations and their homogeneity by placing nations at the mercy of external and internal enemies. The final victory would herald the age of Catholic universalism, when each nation would be free in its own nation-state. Tiso deftly married the contradiction of national particularism with Catholic universalism by saying that both were created by God. Later, Slovakia’s Christian nationalism was gradually compromised in the de facto subjection of Bratislava to Berlin’s political and ideological goals. In agreement with Christian nationalism, Germans were preferred in Slovakia, but Magyars and Ruthenians merely tolerated. This treatment was not extended to Slovakia’s Czechs and Jews, who, in an un-Christian way, were expelled from the country. The natural consequence of rejection of democracy and liberalism in quest of Slovak Christian national community was the introduction of authoritarianism institutionalized in the Slovak Constitution. Already in 1939, the Parliament allowed the government to do whatever was deemed necessary in the transitional period to keep order and strengthen the state. In 1943, the parliament prolonged the special powers of the executive until 1946. Hence, the legislative never controlled the executive in wartime Slovakia. This asymmetry was clearly marked in 1942, when Tiso adopted the title Vodca (Supreme Leader, though the fact was not reflected in official legislation), similar to Croatian Poglavnik, German Führer, Hindi Netaji (of the local national movement in British India), Hungarian Nemzetvezet˝ o, Italian Duce, Norwegian Fører, Polish Naczelnik, Spanish Caudillo, Romanian Capitanul, or Russian Vozhd, or Tagalog Tindis (of the local national movement in the US Philippines). Like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, Tiso was also the leader of the single Slovak party, SSNJ, which spearheaded the Slovak nation. (A single unified German party and a similar Magyar one were allowed, as well, as a bow toward wartime Slovakia’s powerful neighbors and allies.) The number of its members grew from 50,000 to 300,000 between 1939 and 1943. Domestic opposition to the regime was led by two Protestant bishops and Slovak Czechoslovakists. At least 3000 of them were imprisoned in the concentration camp in Ilava. The SSNJ rule was facilitated

The Slovak Nation

853

by the party’s strong arm, the Hlinková garda (HG, Hlinka Guard, founded in 1938), eerily reminiscent of Germany’s national socialist SA (Sturm Abteilung, or stormtroopers) and Romania’s fascist Iron Guard. The HG’s membership, which was compulsory for males between 18 and 60 years of age, peaked at 100,000, immediately in the wake of the 1939 conflict with Hungary. The guard became officially known as the ‘political army of the Slovak nation.’ As its symbol, the HG brandished the so-called ‘Svatopluk rods,’ that is, one vertical rod crossed by two horizontal ones depicted in a circle.6 The symbol was reminiscent of the German swastika and Italian fasci (literally, a bundle of rods). The Svatopluk rods symbol successfully competed with Slovakia’s official coat-of-arms (like the swastika in Germany), and the look-alike Italian fasci (less its ax) cropped up in wartime Slovak national iconography too. The lookalike fasci perhaps was the inspiration for the Svatopluk rods, which, like their Italian parallel of fasci, symbolized the truth that ‘united, we are unbreakable.’ It referred to the apocryphal story of Svatopluk’s (Sventopluk, Suatopluk, reigned 871–894) warning to his two sons that they should cooperate if Greater Moravia was to thrive. Obviously, they did not, and their realm fell prey to the Magyar onslaught. The symbol’s reference to Svatopluk, the most successful ruler of Greater Moravia, who invited Cyril and Methodius, meant that independent Slovakia fully embraced the myth of a Christian Greater Moravia put in the role of the first Slovak state. But not a single reference to this myth found its way to the 1939 Constitution, unlike to the 1992 Constitution of today’s independent Slovakia. Ironically, the symbol’s call to unity, embodied by the HG and the single-party political system, did not prevent Budapest from seizing southern and eastern Slovakia, or, even less so, the re-incorporation of Slovakia into centralized postwar Czechoslovakia (Hlinkova 2005; Kirschbaum 1999: xlv; Kováˇc 1997: 73, 1998: 217, 220; Krekoviˇc 2005: 182, 185; Lettrich 1955: 144, 149, 156; Münz 1994: 93–98). In 1938, Bratislava, wishing to embrace all the population defined as Slovaks within Slovakia’s borders, attempted to seize southeastern Moravia away from the Czech lands. (Some Moravian regionalists, led by the painter Joža Úprk, saw it as a better option than to remain within the borders of the Czech lands.) The argument was that this area was linguistically and ethnically closer to the Slovaks than to the Czechs. The Austro-Hungarian censuses had also categorized the local Slavophone population as ‘Slovaks’ (Slowaken). To this day, this Moravian subregion is known as Slovácko, which is a dialectal rendering of the name Slovensko, that is, Slovakia. But the inhabitants of Slovácko, who variably identified themselves as ‘Czechs,’ ‘Moravians,’ ‘Moravian Slovaks,’ and ‘Slovaks,’ or ‘Slováckans,’7 remained loyal to the Czechs, and did not actively support Bratislava’s project. (Although some maintain that Josef Ignác Bajza’s René mlád’enca príhodi a skúsenosti was not the first novel in Slovak, but the first one in the Slováckan language.) The project was more feverishly pursued after

854 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Hungary had seized southern Slovakia (which became known as Felvidék in Magyar). But when Germany’s Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was established, there was no willingness in Berlin to hand over Slovácko to Slovakia, so the idea was abandoned in early 1939. After the loss of easternmost Slovakia to Hungary, Bratislava found solace in September 1939. Slovakia regained Slovak sections of Spiš and Orava seized by Poland in 1938, and obtained the Polish sections of both regions divided between Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1920. These were the sole territorial gains of wartime Slovakia. The lands lost to Hungary in 1938 and 1939 amounted to 12,200 sq km with the population of 894,000. According to Slovak estimates, 0.5 million Magyars, 0.27 Slovaks, and 20,000 Ruthenians lived there. Hungarian statisticians differed, and assessed the number of Slovaks at 124,000, which automatically increased the number of Magyars to 0.65 million (the number of Ruthenians in eastern Slovakia incorporated to Hungary was not contested). As before 1918, numerous persons living in southern Slovakia remained bilingual and many remained openly pro-Hungarian, especially the Slovjak movement. For them, the choice between new small Slovakia and enlarged wartime Hungary was obvious, though Budapest tended to force the vacillating bilinguals into declaring themselves as Magyars. The situation was similar to that of Szlonzoks in interwar Poland’s Silesian Voivodeship reincorporated into Germany in 1939. After the flight and expulsion of Poles who had arrived in this region after 1922, practically all Szlonzoks declared, or were forced to declare, themselves as Germans. Czechs amounted to between 20,000 and 30,000 in southern Slovakia occupied by Hungary. Their number should be deducted from the aforementioned number of Slovaks in this area. For statistical reasons, Bratislava and Budapest treated these Czechs as ‘Slovaks,’ in line with the tradition of interwar Czechoslovakia’s statistics, which spoke of ‘Czechoslovaks,’ without distinguishing between Czechs and Slovaks. Hence, Czechs living in Slovakia were not considered a minority, and attended Slovak-language schools, which led to their speedy assimilation, with the exception of the Czech elite of administrators, teachers, and professionals. While Czecho-Slovakia still existed, some members of this elite in the occupied territories moved to the Czech lands, that is, 10,000 Czechs and 1600 Slovak members of their families. At the same time, 7600 Czechs and 600 Slovak members of their families left or were expelled from rump Slovakia to the Czech lands before and shortly after the founding of the protectorate. Hence, at least half of the usually quoted number of 20,000 Czechs, expelled from Slovakia, were those who moved away from Hungary-occupied southern Slovakia. After the founding of the protectorate, living conditions remained better in independent Slovakia and Hungary until the front and guerilla war moved in (1944). Hence, non-elite Czechs residing there preferred to stay rather than move to the protectorate, where the German regime

The Slovak Nation

855

was much harsher. The number of Czechs who remained in rump Slovakia was perhaps slightly less than 100,000. Most of them could easily pass themselves as Slovaks. Some members of Slovak intelligentsia who lost employment in administration and schools moved from the Hungary-occupied territories to rump Slovakia, but there is no reliable statistics on their number. In Subcarpathian Ruthenia incorporated into Hungary, there were 24,000 Czechs and 10,000 Slovaks. Wartime Slovakia’s population was 2.62 million. Slovaks amounted to 2.53 million (96.6 percent), Germans to 150,000 (5.7 percent), Czechs to 100,000 (3.8 percent), and Magyars to 58,000 or 65,000 (2.2 percent). The number of Roma could be credibly estimated at anything between 123,000 (4.7 percent) and 246,000 (9.4 percent). Obviously, the quoted estimates do not add up. The official share of Slovaks in the population was improbably high. Perhaps, it was around 80 to 85 percent. Simply, remaining Czechs were counted as Slovaks, estimates did not single out Roma at all, whereas official number of Germans tended to be lowered. Even taking this into consideration, the ethnolinguistic homogeneity of Slovakia increased considerably from the official 67.5 percent share of Slovaks in the population, recorded in the 1930 census. In 1940 and 1941, Bratislava passed comprehensive laws that excluded Slovakia’s 130,000 to 140,000 Jews from society. The HG justified this move by claiming that ‘Jew was not a man, that he was devil’s creation,’ which complemented Tiso’s doctrine of Catholic nationalism that extended the principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ exclusively to nations created by God. In March 1942, Bratislava organized the first deportations to Germany and the Generalgouvernement, and paid Berlin RM500 per Jew taken up. In 1942, 60,000 were deported. Under the pressure from the Vatican and the Slovak Parliament, the deportation of Jews was stopped. Bizarrely, the Slovak MP most responsible for this halt was the rabidly anti-Semitic leader of the Magyar minority, János Esterházy. He praised anti-Semitic laws, but condemned the HG’s use of force, and deportation of Jews, who were Slovak citizens, abroad. He was the only deputy who refused publicly to vote for the ‘final solution’ (Endlösung). His fear was that such blatant breach of human and civic rights of Jews would make a more totalitarian state out of Slovakia, which could eventually encroach on the tolerated status of the Magyar minority. Deportations of Jews resumed in the autumn of 1944 when Germany occupied Slovakia. At least a further 13,000 of them perished. Similar measures were extended to Roma, officially deemed as ‘potentially criminal.’ Beginning in 1941, they were sent to labor camps in Slovakia, and Germans deported them to concentration camps in 1944 and 1945. Budapest ordered transportation of Roma from Hungary-occupied southˇ ern Slovakia to Germany (Capka 2003: 114; Gebhart 1999: 16; Kamenec 2000: 356–362; Kirschbaum 1999: xlv; Kováˇc 1998: 223–224, 227–231; Mezihorák 1994; Mikuš and Kirschbaum 1971: 15; Varsik 1940: 7, 86, 88).

856 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The official Slovak monolingualism established in independent Slovakia purged Czech from public life. But Bratislava still needed numerous professionals and specialists not available among Slovaks. Thanks to the close alliance between Slovakia and Germany, German advisors filled in these positions, often vacated by their Czech counterparts. Intensifying contacts between Slovak and German politicians soon included Berlin’s direct intervention into the Slovak government and domestic affairs. This led to the replacement of Czech with German as a quasi second official language. Franz Karmasin, the leader of the Carpathian Germans, did not secure the incorporation of their homeland in northeastern Slovakia into the Third Reich, unlike Henlein in the case of the Sudeten Germans, but Berlin pressed Bratislava to grant Slovakia’s Germans the de facto exterritorial status. (This interwar reorientation of Slovakia’s Germans toward Berlin and the Sudeten Germans was conditioned by the breakup of Historical Hungary, within whose boundaries they had maintained links with the Banat Swabians and Transylvania’s Saxons.) They were perceived as an integral part of the Volksgemeinschaft, or Herrenvolk (nation of lords), and their affairs were decided in a special office in Bratislava, in direct liaison with the Sicherdienst (Security Service) headquarters in Vienna. The Deutsche Partei (German Party) of Slovakia’s Germans enjoyed its counterpart of the HG, namely the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel (Voluntary Protection Force). The German-language educational system developed rapidly. Its budget tripled between 1940 and 1943, and there were 15 German-language secondary schools already in 1940. In line with the special status of the German minority, German schools employed the unified national curricula used in Germany. In addition, German was taught in all Slovak schools as the preferred foreign language. Minority education for Slovakia’s remaining Magyars was governed by the principle of reciprocity. Understandably, the situation was tense after Hungary seized southern and eastern Slovakia, and pressed Slovaks living in these territories to declare themselves as Magyars. The 1938 act of closing Slovak minority schools and public burning of Slovak books in Hungary was extended to Felvidék to ensure its rapid Magyarization. Bratislava replied in kind limiting the Magyar-language educational system as much as possible without causing Budapest to intervene. Besides 35 elementary schools, not a single full-fledged Magyar secondary school survived. The Ruthenian minority found itself at the margin of political and social life in Slovakia, with just one deputy representing its interests in the Slovak parliament. The Slovak-Hungarian enmity practically isolated them from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and the border strip of eastern Slovakia was made into Hungary’s semiautonomous Kárpátalja (Carpathia). In Slovakia, like in late Czechoslovakia, the Ruthenian educational system operated via the medium of the Russian language. This deepened the ethnolinguistic difference between the minority and Kárpátalja, where Magyar and Hungarian Ruthenian (that is, vernacular

The Slovak Nation

857

Ruthenian) were made into co-official languages, and the Ruthenian-language educational system and cultural life developed dynamically, complete with the Podkarpatskoe Obshchestvo Nauk (Subcarpathian Scientific Society), also known as the Kárpátaljai Tudományos Társaság (Carpathian Scientific Society). The Beneš-led Czechoslovak Government in exile soon became an exclusively Czech affair after the fallout with M Hodža and Štefan Osouský in late 1942. They were the two most renowned Slovak politicians of interwar Czechoslovakia, and convinced Czechoslovakists for that matter. They wanted to recreate Czechoslovakia as a genuine federation. Beneš strongly opposed this project, convinced that only a unified Czechoslovakia would be able to effectively ‘solve the German question’ after the war. Slovakia once again proved to be of secondary importance in this issue. When Washington recognized the Czechoslovak Government in Exile on 25 October 1942, the Organization of Slovak National Unity (SNJ, Slovenská národná jednota) was founded in London. But it was no match for Beneš’s government. Meanwhile, in accordance with Beneš and Stalin’s agreement on Soviet-Czechoslovak cooperation (13 December 1943), the democratic and communist strains of domestic resistance in Slovakia formed the Slovak National Council (SNR, Slovenská národná rada) during the 1943 Christmas. The SNR wanted to renew Czechoslovakia as the common state of equal partners, the Czechs and the Slovaks. In reply, the SNJ transformed itself into the Slovak National Council in London (SNRvL, Slovenská národná rada v Londýne) on 31 December, but it was in no position to influence the Allies, the Czechoslovak Government in Exile, or the SNR. Many of the Slovak officer corps opposed the growing German presence and Bratislava’s involvement on the eastern front. They cooperated with the resistance to prepare the insurrection, now known as the Slovak National Uprising. It broke out on 28 August 1944. Tiso immediately requested German help and the Wehrmacht began to occupy Slovakia the following day. The uprising’s headquarters were located in Banská Bystrica in central Slovakia. At that time the Soviet troops were approaching the Carpathians, and the idea, worked out in cooperation with the Red Army, was that the uprising would speed up the Soviet advance across Slovakia to the Czech lands. Around 60,000 Slovak soldiers and 18,000 guerillas participated in the fighting. But the uprising was over on 27 October when German troops entered Banská Bystrica. The Slovak troops turned into guerillas and moved eastward hoping to survive long enough to join forces with the advancing Soviet troops. The Red Army burst into Slovakia on 6 October 1944. Fighting on the Slovak territory raged until the spring of the following year. On 1 April, Tiso’s government fled to Austria. Bratislava was seized from the German army 3 days later and the Slovak government surrendered to the US army. On 3 April, Beneš and his cabinet flew from Moscow to Košice (previously in Hungary’s Felvidék).

858 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Two days later, they announced the program for postwar Czechoslovakia, which defined it as a common state of the two equal nations. But in informal talks, Beneš remarked as a caveat that, according to him, there existed only a single Czechoslovak nation from the scientific point of view. Conveniently for Beneš, during the Moscow negotiations between the Czechoslovak Government in Exile and the SNR (22–29 March), the federal solution was rejected out of hand, and Slovakia was granted vague autonomy. Also, the Czechoslovak National Front was constituted in Moscow as a preliminary government with the inclusion of all the important political forces accepted by the Kremlin. (Obviously, there was no place in it for representatives of the Tiso regime, or the protectorate’s Czech administration.) Nine delegates represented the Slovaks in the governing National Front, and 13 represented the Czechs. This and Beneš’s words did not bode well for establishing genuine equality between both nations in postwar Czechoslovakia (Carpathian German History 2005; Education for Minorities in Slovakia 2004; Kirschbaum 1999: xlv–xlvi; Kováˇc 1997: 84, 1998: 214, 223–224, 232–245; Lettrich 1955: 149; Pop 2005: 147–149). Between 1938 and 1945, Slovakia moved from the official Slovak-Czech bilingualism to official Slovak monolingualism with the pronounced, though unofficial, presence of German, and back to the official Slovak-Czech monolingualism with the pronounced, though unofficial, presence of Russian. Prior to the end of World War II, Slovakia was shielded from the influence of the Russian language by Subcarpathian Ruthenia and Hungary, when Budapest incorporated this region. In June 1945, Beneš officially ceded Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Soviet Ukraine, which added the influence of the Ukrainian language felt among eastern Slovakia’s Ruthenians. The pre-1938 administrative border between Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia was reestablished and made into the state Czechoslovak-Soviet frontier, which increasingly isolated the Ruthenians of Ukraine’s Transcarpathia from their ethnic kin in eastern Slovakia. Integration of the latter, separated by the Slovak-Hungarian border during the war, was not easy either. Those who had lived in wartime Slovakia were educated in Russian and used this language in public life, while those in wartime Hungary employed Ruthenian for these purposes. After 1945, Russian became de rigueur for all of them. The pendulum of change swung back for southern Slovakia (Felvidék). In wartime Hungary the official SlovakCzech bilingualism with the pronounced presence of Magyar was replaced with the official Magyar monolingualism with the suppressed presence of Slovak. After 1945, the official Slovak-Czech bilingualism came back, but now with the suppressed presence of Magyar. The importance of the Slovak language and culture for the Slovak national project was vindicated immediately in 1939. With so much territory lost to Hungary and scant resources extended for state-building, book production immediately rose by 8 percent, that is, to 700 titles, in comparison with 1938. In 1939,

The Slovak Nation

859

the Uˇcena spoloˇcnost’ Šafaˇríková was transformed into the Slovenská uˇcena spoloˇcnost’ (Slovak Scientific Society), before the Slovak Parliament made it into the first ever Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts (Slovenská akademia vied a umení) in 1942. Significantly, when the 150th anniversary of Štúr’s codification of Slovak was celebrated in 1943, the Jazykovedný ústav (Institute of Linguistics) was founded on 1 April, as a part of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts. The institute was headed by L’udovít Novák, a Slovak scholar who, in the interwar period, had opposed on structuralist grounds the Czech and Czechoslovakist tendency to treat Slovak as a dialect of the Czech or Czechoslovak language. His wartime research proposed that Slovak was an old Slavic language whose history dated back at least to the times of Greater Moravia. On the other hand, the academy in close cooperation with the Matica slovenská developed much of the still missing but urgently needed administrative, professional, and technical vocabulary in Slovak. Before 1939, numerous Czech loanwords featured in this role. After the declaration of Slovak independence, the proponents of the puristic Bartek-Czambel-Škultéty codification gained the upper hand, which meant purging Slovak of Bohemianisms, and taking care not to allow new Germanisms into the Slovak language in the context of the intensified presence of the German language in every walk of public life in wartime Slovakia. The course of ‘purification’ was laid out by L M Jánský in his K súˇcasným i historickým otázkam slovenského jazykového purizmu (On the Contemporary and Historical Issues of Slovak Linguistic Purism, 1940, Bratislava).8 Out of the words and phrases he identified for removal from Slovak, Jánský identified 46.5 percent as Bohemianisms, 8.2 percent as Germanisms, and 3 percent as Magyarisms. Earlier, Jánský had made his allegiance to the Bartek-Czambel-Škultéty codification clear in his Hovorme správne po slovensky! (Let’s Speak Correct Slovak!, Trnava), which had gone through three editions in 1939. In 1939, Komenský University (appropriately renamed as the Slovak University to disassociate it from any pro-Czech associations) and the Ministry of Education commissioned Anton Augustín Baník (1900–1978) to write the new Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (The Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, 1940, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin). This book, aptly published by the Matica slovenská, made the Bartek-Czambel-Škultéty codification into the norm promulgated by the state. It replaced the Czechoslovakist codification enshrined 9 years earlier in Vážný’s Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu. This officially reaffirmed separateness of the Slovak language vis-à-vis Czech fortified the ethnolinguistic legitimization of the Slovak nation-state. Ján Mihál (1891–1969), a linguist active in Bartek’s circle, proposed to improve the ‘purity’ of Slovak by bringing the codification closer to the actual vernacular. He implemented this idea in his grammar of the language for secondary schools (1943–1947).

860 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

In the wake of the founding of autonomous Slovakia (1938), Bartek left for the Ústav pre zahraniˇcných Slovákov (Institute for the Study of the Slovak Diaspora), and Novák for the Slovak (formerly Komenský) University. The needs of state-building drew linguists away from research. In 1939–1940, Slovenská reˇc, ceased publication, but was soon revived when the Matica appointed Anton Jánošik (1904–1971) as a new editor. Similarly, Matica’s librarian, Baník, took over the organization’s Department of Linguistics. Bartek had no time to write the new Pravidlá on his own, but when the work was entrusted to Baník, this immediately made him into a staunch opponent of the Pravidlá, and by extension, of the Ministry of Education, which approved these new principles. In turn, Bartek proposed an even more radical form of purist codification and founded the short-lived journal Slovenský jazyk (1940). However, it was a tactical move, which was to re-establish him as the guru of the standardization of Slovak, which he had enjoyed throughout the 1930s. His ego was hurt that he was not offered the Chair of Slovak language at the Slovak University, and the task of de-Czechization of Slovak was passed to ‘lesser mortals.’ Eventually, the doyen of Slovak linguistics, Škultéty, had to step in to finish this compromising altercation. For ideological reasons, the state badly needed this new ‘pure’ codification of Slovak, but any further reforms would have destabilized it and made it useless at the very moment when Slovak replaced Czech in all spheres of official and public life. In addition to Slovenská reˇc and Slovenský jazyk, research on the Slovak language was published in the linguistics section in Sborník Maticy slovenskej (The Journal of the Matica slovenská), and in the monographs of the Linguistica Slovaca series founded in 1939 by the Slovenská uˇcená spoloˇcnost’ (soon to become a Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1942). (Jánský’s K súˇcasným i historickým otázkam slovenského jazykového purizmu was published as the volume 6 of the series.) The Matica slovenská, which had been gathering materials for compiling a multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Slovak language, cooperated closely with scholars based in Bratislava at the Slovak University and the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts. As a result, Slovak specialist, professional, and technical vocabulary developed fast. But the process was not free from friction caused by personal ambitions. In 1943, immediately after its foundation, the Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts, embarked on a similar project of compiling a multivolume authoritative dictionary of the Slovak language. If the Matica’s project had been finalized, this would have conferred the distinction of the ‘first lexicographer of Slovak’ on Jánošik, who headed the organization’s Department of Linguistics. Otherwise, this distinction would have gone to Novák, who chaired the Institute of Linguistics. In the end, the relentless competition between the Matica and the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts halved the governmental subsidies available for the dictionary projects and prevented completion of any of them before 1945.

The Slovak Nation

861

In these difficult wartime years, Slovakia extended considerable resources on the codification and elaboration of Slovak, regardless of the war effort, which sapped manpower and monies, for instance, from Magyar linguistics. But Magyar had been fully codified and elaborated by the 1870s, hence there was no need to invest heavily in this field. However, in Slovakia, language standardization was a bare necessity if administration and public life were really to be mediated via Slovak, not Czech, a Czechized version of Slovak, or even German. Since the moment when standard Slovak had been conceived in 1843, independent Slovakia afforded a unique opportunity to codify and develop this language as the Slovak elite saw fit without external interferences from Budapest or Prague. Berlin was not interested in impinging on Slovak culture and the project of codifying the Slovak language. As long as Bratislava followed the military and political goals of the Third Reich, that was enough (Jóna 1963: 248; Kaˇcala 2001: 42, 44–47; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 83).

The return of Slovak-Czech bilingualism The re-establishment of Czechoslovakia cut short the existence of independent Slovakia. But the Slovak nation-state did not appear as legitimate to all Slovaks, as evidenced by the Slovak National Uprising. On the other hand, an independent Slovakia had no chances of survival, because the Allies wanted a return of prewar political polities and borders, with the exception of the German and Polish frontiers. Prague and Moscow further delegitimized interwar Slovakia, popularly branding it ‘clerical-fascist.’ This approach agreed well with Beneš’s pet theory that the Slovaks ‘betrayed’ interwar Czechoslovakia and gave Moscow a free hand in political and social re-arranging of its sphere of influence in Central Europe. Early on, Slovak politicians had been excluded from the Czechoslovak Government in Exile. The Allies did not grant any recognition to the SNRvL that grouped Slovak émigrés opposed to Beneš. The elite of independent Slovakia became discredited. Both extradited from the West to Czechoslovakia, Slovak Prime Minister Tuka was executed on 28 August 1946 and President Tiso on 18 April the following year. High officials of the Slovak state were imprisoned, or emigrated as, for instance, Bartek. (In total, 82,000 Slovaks emigrated between 1945 and 1949. Those sought for war crimes by the Allies found safe haven in Juan Perón’s Argentina.) In 1948, these émigrés founded the Slovenská národná rada v zahraniˇcí (SNRvZ, Slovak National Council Abroad) in Rome. Despite ideological differences between the 1938–1939 and 1945 waves of Slovak émigrés, in the same year, SNRvL merged with the SNRvZ. Despite the integration of Slovak émigré politicians, they were in no position to influence the decisions of Prague and the domestic SNR in relation to Slovakia. The SNR, which saw itself as the sole representative of the Slovak nation and statehood, was unhappy with the March 1945 promise of weak autonomy to

862 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

postwar Slovakia. The Kremlin, eager to strengthen the position of communists in the SNR, pressed Prague to be more receptive of Slovak wishes, which, in turn, undermined Beneš’s position, and played into the hands of Czech communists. The first agreement between the SNR and Prague, signed on 2 June 1945, recognized the former as the sole representative of the Slovak nation and statehood. Beneš, as Czechoslovak President, could rule in Slovakia with the use of decrees only at the SNR’s discretion. Most significantly, it was decided that postwar Czechoslovakia would be reestablished as a Czecho-Slovak federation. The Second Prague Agreement (11 April 1946) limited the independence of the SNR and its commissioners, who were subordinated to the central ministries. ˇ ˇ The SNR’s counterpart in the Czech lands, the Ceská národná rada (CNR, Czech National Council), turned out to be an empty eggshell. Beneš had no intention ˇ to resign from the Czechoslovakist ideal of a centralized state, hence the CNR was not made into a republican government of the Czech lands, or the central government transformed into federal. The central government ruled alone in the Czech lands and waited for an opportune moment to eliminate the SNR as a political force in Slovakia. In 1946, communists won the elections in the Czech lands. Unlike in the deeply agricultural and traditionalist Hungary and Poland, communists were popular in the heavily industrialized Czech lands. There was no need to rig elections there. But the communist support for Slovak political autonomy did not ensure victory for communists in Slovakia. Slovak communists understood that in order to win power they have to throw their lot with the project of centralizing Czechoslovakia. The Third Prague Agreement (28 June) emasculated the SNR, but retained the formula of Czecho-Slovak federation, and Slovak nationalists still hoped it would be written into the postwar Constitution. In 1947, propaganda directed against the legacy of independent Slovakia was stepped up, including the constant denigration of executed Tuka and Tiso; there was no hope that the ban on the HSL’S would be lifted. The communist coup in February the following year terminated any possibility of the federal solution. The 1948 Constitution declared Czechoslovakia a ‘unitary state of the Czechoslovak people,’ in which full equality was guaranteed for the ‘two brotherly nations of Czechs and Slovaks.’ This ideologically moderated Czechoslovakist centralism dashed any hopes of Slovak autonomy. In addition, on 29 September 1948, the Communist Party of Slovakia was made into a mere regional branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.9 The last (largely formal) vestiges of Slovak autonomy in local self-government and civil law were done away with by 1950. The impotent SNR, which survived all the changes, played the role of the sole symbol of Slovak national statehood. The growing suppression of Slovak nationalism was offset by Prague’s policy of expelling Germans and Magyars from Czechoslovakia. By default, this made Slovakia more ethnolinguistically homogenous and transferred property and

The Slovak Nation

863

assets especially from Magyars to Slovaks. (Germans were less numerous.) Like Germans, Magyars were stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship and their property, but unlike Germans, they were not expelled en masse. The planned expulsion was limited to reciprocal population exchange, in the course of which 95,000 Magyars were moved to Hungary and 72,000 Slovaks from Hungary to Czechoslovakia. (On the contrary, 176,00010 , that is, practically all Germans were unilaterally expelled from Slovakia.11 ) The policy of ‘re-Slovakization’ assumed that most of Slovakia’s Magyars were ‘Magyarized Slovaks’ or their descendants. Drawing on this tenet, Magyars were encouraged to apply for an official change in their national status from Magyar to Slovak. The incentive was exemption from the forced population exchange with the possibility of regaining their lost property rights after having been re-assigned Czechoslovak citizenship. In the course of re-Slovakization, 282,000 Magyars were recognized as Slovaks, which lowered the number of Slovakia’s Magyars to 451,000. And 45,000 of them were sent to labor camps and dispersed around Czechoslovakia. In 1948, most of Slovakia’s remaining Magyars regained their Slovak citizenship, but in the wake of nationalization and Slovak reluctance to see past wrongdoings indemnified, many never regained their property. The situation was similar to that of Poland’s ‘Autochthons’ who were positively ‘verified’ and ‘rehabilitated’ as ethnic Poles. In addition, 50,000 Slovaks were attracted to leave their homes in Romania and Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina and resettle in postwar Czechoslovakia. However, Prague’s policies of centralization and the introduction of the Soviet communist system did not dispose the Slovaks well to communist Czechoslovakia. The same was less true of the Czechs. The collectivization of the countryside was felt more painfully in Slovakia, which was still much more agricultural than the Czech lands. Likewise, the persecution of the Catholic Church was a bigger blow to the Slovaks, because on average they remained more religious than the Czechs. Moreover, the 1950 abolition of the Greek Catholic Church and the transfer of its assets to the Orthodox Church encroached exclusively on the religious sensibilities of the Slovaks and Slovakia’s Ruthenians. The marxist theory maintained that industrialization and a hike in the living standard would produce a classless society free of social tensions and would also level any national and ethnic differences. Whatever the dislike of communism among Czechoslovakists, the latter thesis merged well with their hopes of consolidating de facto bi-national Czechoslovakia into an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state of the communist Czechoslovak people (nation), similar to the Kremlin’s ideal of the ‘communist Soviet people (nation).’ Industrialization and improvement in the standard of living did not satisfy the Slovak wish for autonomy, but made the Slovaks more quiescent. With time, they had increasingly more to lose in the line of material goods and social advancement, should they openly rebel against Czech domination that equated with

864 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

communist orthodoxy. Between 1948 and 1989, the share of the workforce employed in agriculture fell from 33.1 to 9.4 percent in the Czech lands and from 60.6 to 12.2 percent in Slovakia. The corresponding numbers for the employed in manufacturing industries rose from 38.8 to 47.4 percent in the Czech lands and from 20.8 to 43.8 percent in Slovakia. Although the rapid equalization in the level of industrial development between Slovakia and the Czech lands was ensured by the breakneck development of heavy industry in the former region, the unified command economy provided for a more balanced sharing in consumer goods throughout Czechoslovakia. Personal consumption in Slovakia as compared with that in the Czech lands (always assumed to be 100 percent) rose from 81 percent in 1948 to 95.1 percent in 1989. In the same period, GNP generated by an inhabitant of Slovakia increased from 61.2 to 85.7 percent. Prague underwrote this steep growth in Slovakia by vast transfers of capital and assets from the Czech lands, which is why the consumption of GNP per capita in Slovakia was always high and grew less steeply from 70.9 to 92.4 percent. At the turn of the 1950s, the last ‘flowering’ of Stalinism brought about the struggle against ‘bourgeois-national deviation,’ which was to complete the imposition of the homogenous Soviet system (construed as ‘international’ in its character) on the entire Soviet bloc. Purges were unleashed against communists and politicians who objected to Stalinism and favored a ‘national path’ to communism. In 1952, Vlado Clementis (1902–1952), a Slovak and Minister of Foreign Affairs, was sentenced and executed. Two years later, another significant communist of Slovak background, Gustáv Husák, received a life sentence, and was imprisoned from 1951 to 1960.12 The logic of these persecutions was not in itself anti-Slovak, but many Slovaks saw it as a Czech attack against the Slovak elite, already seriously weakened by emigration and the postwar persecutions aimed at officials of wartime Slovakia. The Slovak National Uprising was reinterpreted as a ‘struggle against bourgeois nationalism,’ and all Slovak demands, for however slight a measure of autonomy, were definitively silenced in 1954. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev commenced the process of de-stalinization in the Soviet Union and it quickly spread to the Soviet bloc as well. But the Czechoslovak leadership paid mere lip service to this process and only the most appalling ways of Stalinist governance were abandoned. No dramatic change occurred in the Czechoslovak government and communist party leadership, unlike in Hungary and Poland. The negative attitude of the Czechoslovak President, Antonín Novotný (in office 1957–1968), toward the Slovaks was well known. The new 1960 Constitution, which added the adjective ‘Socialist’ to the name of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, also abolished the Board of Commissioners (that is, the Slovak government) appointed by Prague, and limited the largely symbolic jurisdiction of the SNR to the field of culture. In the Czechoslovak coat-of-arms, the Slovak coat-of-arms was replaced at the breast of the Bohemian lion with a steep mountain (reminiscent

The Slovak Nation

865

of a Tatra summit) and a fire (symbolizing a Slovak partisan’s bonfire). The lion also lost its crown replaced with the communist star. The Constitution provided for the leading role of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which the Slovaks saw as the legal guarantee of Czech domination over the state. Clementis, Husák, and others sentenced for ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ were all pardoned in 1960, but their rehabilitation (which allowed some to return to active social and political life) was delayed until 1963. In the same year, Alexander Dubˇcek became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia and allowed for measured criticism of the central government. This did not temper Novotný’s antipathy for Slovakia and its national symbols. For instance, when visiting the Matica slovenská in 1967, he branded it as ‘nationalist,’ which in communist Central Europe meant ‘chauvinist.’ In the same year, criticism of the government and communist system voiced at June the meeting of Czechoslovak writers was not silenced. The Prague Spring of 1968 actually began in December 1967, when students demonstrated against the government and system in Bratislava. The police did not intervene. The end of Czechoslovak Stalinism was nigh. On 5 January 1968, Dubˇcek replaced Novotný as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which opened the Prague Spring with the slogan of ‘socialism with a human face.’ On 22 March, Novotný resigned from the Czechoslovak presidency. The difference between the Czechs and the Slovaks was that the former saw Czechoslovakia as their Czech nation-state, had no objections to the centralized system, and merely demanded democratization. On the contrary, the Slovaks perceived Czechoslovakia as a common state of two equal nations, and their main demand was federalization of this state into Czecho-Slovakia. On 15 March, the SNR officially demanded federalization, the Czech side accepted it, and a special commission was formed to look into how such a change could be introduced and the practical issues in implementation. Husák, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia, who chaired this commission, became Deputy Prime Minister on 8 April. On 24 June 1968, the Czechoslovak National Assembly accepted the Constitutional Law on the Preparation of the Federation. There was no Czech counterpart of the SNR, which could function as a parliament for the Czech ˇ section of the federation. This law established the CNR (Czech National Council), but its members were not elected, but merely appointed by the National Assembly. It was a travesty of democracy, but the Czechs did not object since ˇ they did not want any federation, and they saw the CNR as an unnecessary creation. Meanwhile, on 20 August, the armies of the Soviet bloc intervened in Czechoslovakia and terminated the brief political liberalization heralded by the Prague Spring. The newly formulated Brezhnev doctrine allowed the Kremlin to

866 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

intervene in any Soviet bloc state that sought to abandon its communist system or to leave the bloc. Moscow imposed the ‘normalization’ on Czechoslovakia, which entailed the widespread persecution of the Prague Spring reformists, be they officials, intellectuals, or average citizens. Leonid Brezhnev entrusted the introduction of the normalization to Husák and Vasil Bil’ak (1917–). The latter was one of the hard-line signatories to a letter inviting the Soviets to intervene in Czechoslovakia. In 1969, Husák was nominated as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and his hold on power became complete when he was named Czechoslovak President in 1975. Accordingly, Bil’ak rose to the status of the main ideologue of the normalization. In retrospection, Czechs point out that Slovaks, that is, Husák and Bil’ak, were personally responsible for the excesses of normalization. The Slovak perception of both politicians is different. Slovaks draw attention to the fact that Bil’ak is of Ruthenian/Ukrainian extraction. They do not deny that Husák was responsible for the normalization, but they are quick to add that he did not exclude the federalization of Czechoslovakia from this process. Some even hail him as bojovník za slovenskú vec (fighter for Slovak rights), whom Czechs ridiculed for the ‘broken Czech’ in which he spoke. On 27 October 1968, the National Assembly approved the Constitutional Act No 143, which changed the state into the federation of the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic, complete with the institutions of statewide Czechoslovak and republican, Czech and Slovak, citizenships. The law came into power on 1 January 1969. Czechs perceived this ‘weakening’ of ‘their’ nation-state as an unjust concession granted to ‘treacherous’ Slovaks for the Czechs’ valiant attempt to democratize Czechoslovakia, which would have benefited both the Czechs and Slovaks, if successful. The federation soon proved an illusion. The real wielder of political power was the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and it was not split into separate Czech and Slovak branches. Husák, as the party’s First Secretary and Czechoslovak President, first, strove to placate Czech anger caused by the intervention and federalization, and then represented the entire state whose demographic and economic center was located in the Czech lands. As before, Slovakia was marginalized. The center of state power was located in Prague, that is, in the west of ˇ the Czech lands, remained spatially removed from Slovakia. The CNR and the government of the Czech Socialist Republic were empty eggshell institutions, completely subjected to the federal government. The SNR and the government of the Slovak Socialist Republic were similarly emasculated, but they played the role of the symbols of Slovak national statehood. The Czechs did not need the ˇ CNR and their republic to emulate this role, because they continued to perceive the entire federation as ‘their’ nation-state. The difference in Czech and Slovak approaches to post-normalization Czechoslovakia were nowhere more evident than in their different attitudes to the Charter 77 (Charta 77 in Czech and Slovak). In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act

The Slovak Nation

867

made respect for human rights an integral part of East-West cooperation in the détente decade of the 1970s. In early 1977, Czech dissidents (among others, the writer Václav Havel and the philosopher Jan Patoˇcka [1907–1977]) formulated their support for human rights in Charter 77 (named so after the year in which it was drafted). This document and the informal movement for the politically persecuted, which developed around it, became the rallying point of democratic opposition in Czechoslovakia. In the Czech lands, almost 2000 persons signed the document by 1989, while in Slovakia, just about 20 signed it. The three initial Slovak signatories included the writer Dominik Tatarka (1913–1989), the philosopher Milan Šimeˇcka (1930–1990), and the scholar Miroslav Kusý (1931–). All three received university education in Prague, were self-declared friends of the Czechs (including Havel and other top Czech dissidents), and lived in Bratislava. They certainly were not Czechoslovakists, as proved by Šimeˇcka, a Czech from Czech Silesia, who (besides Czech) wrote in ‘excellent Slovak.’ In 1978, Miklóš Duray (1945–) joined them; unlike the three aforementioned dissidents, he graduated from the Comenius University in Bratislava. As an ethnic Magyar, he organized and led the movement for the protection of the rights of Czechoslovakia’s Magyar minority. Today, he is one of the most respected Magyar politicians in Slovakia. But most Slovaks, especially those living outside Bratislava, were content with their newly found communist prosperity, and had few illusions that the Czechs would understand, or let alone support their aspirations for genuine federation. Article 6 of the Constitutional Act No 143 (which federalized Czechoslovakia) introduced the official Czech-Slovak bilingualism not only in Slovakia, but also in the Czech lands. Obviously, the Czech language retained its de facto status of primus inter pares because the political power, and most economy and population were concentrated in the Czech lands. But Slovak penetrated the Czech lands in an unprecedented manner. Its presence was felt in legislation and state administration, but even the average Czech was exposed to this language in the press, radio, and television. They became almost fully bilingual Czech- and Slovak-language articles and programs placed side by side. Mutual comprehensibility of both languages on the plane of most communication situations (apart from artistic and dialectal use of language) produced ‘suprastandard’ or ‘passive’ bilingualism. In conversation or printed interviews, Czech interlocutors spoke in Czech and their Slovak counterparts in Slovak, with no translation provided. Constant switches between Czech and Slovak were rarely noticed by readers, listeners, and viewers due to the inherent closeness of Czech and Slovak, reinforced by the legal provisions that enforced this bilingualism and effective equality of Slovak and Czech. Thanks to this bilingualism, no minority schools for Czechs were established in Slovakia and none for Slovaks in the Czech lands. Prior to 1968, the situation was the same, but its justification was Czechoslovakism, not formal and practical equality between both nations in their common

868 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

state. One could argue that Czechs living in Slovakia were discriminated in this field given that two primary Slovak-language schools were eventually established in Prague and Karviná near Ostrava, but they never appealed for minority schools, unlike Slovaks. There were less Czech migrants in Slovakia than Slovak ones in the Czech lands. Slovak migrants felt that they were outside their nationstate, while their Czech counterparts considered entire Czechoslovakia as their nation-state. The affirmative action for Slovak language and culture, described above, was more than Slovaks had asked for in the sphere of cultural autonomy, but much less than desired in the field of political autonomy. The normalization dashed Czech hopes of democratization, but fulfilled some Slovak dreams about autonomy and equality vis-à-vis the Czech and their language. Not surprisingly, Slovaks tended to be more loyal to post-1968 communist Slovakia than Czechs. Unlike the increasingly atheistic and agnostic Czechs, the Slovaks shared their traditionalist religiosity with the Magyars and the Poles, who had been overwhelmingly rural nations until the communist takeovers in the late 1940s. Hence, Slovaks found solace in Catholicism, when the pressure of everyday life and the communist system became unbearable. In Poland, Catholic churches became the space of relative freedom where anti-communist dissent developed. It was impossible in Czechoslovakia, where the Catholic Church was totally suppressed. In its stead, the Church’s unofficial underground fostered dissent on the basis of Christian morality, construed as inherently opposed to communist disregard for people as persons. In the 1980s, opposition to the communist system and Slovak national feeling were openly expressed in annual pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in Levoˇca and Šaštín. In reply to the excess of the normalization, anti-communist émigré Slovak organizations united in 1970 in the newly founded Svetový kongres Slovákov (World Slovak Congress) in New York. But this congress was powerless to influence the situation in Slovakia. In 1987, Pope John Paul II gave a powerful impulse to the intensification of the organization of opposition-cum-religious pilgrimages, when he devoted that year to Holy Virgin Mary. The Slovaks, Magyars, and Poles recognize her as the patron saint of their countries. Similarly, religion and pilgrimages by the pope to his home country contributed to the development of a popular anti-communist movement in Poland. In Slovakia (more devastated by heavy industry than the Czech lands), the ecological movement offered a seemingly non-political platform for development of opposition, as in the Soviet Union. In the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization of the Soviet bloc, Husák lost the position of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1987, and the following year, Bil’ak was removed from the party’s Central Committee. On 25 March 1988, the underground Church organized a peaceful demonstration, whose participants held burning candles. The police dispersed it by force. In October, numerous demonstrations in Slovak and

The Slovak Nation

869

Czech cities were organized to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Soviet intervention. On 16 November 1989, students demonstrated in Bratislava, and the following day, a similar demonstration in Prague heralded the end of the communist system in Czechoslovakia. Today, hardly any international reader is aware of the Slovak contribution to the fall of communism. The images of jubilant Prague and the coinage of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ dominate the narrative (Assessment 2004; Eberhardt 1996: 136; From Minority Status to Partnership 2005; Kirschbaum 1999: xlvii–xlviii, 17; Kováˇc 1997: 84–96, 1998: 252–253, 269, 281–286, 305–310; Krekoviˇc 2005: 213–219; Kusá 2005; Musil 1995: 62, 74; Ripka 1993: 283; Rychlík 1995: 191–197; Šutaj 1999: 212). During the latter half of the 1940s, Slovakia became unusually homogenous as a result of the expulsion of Germans and Magyars and the re-Slovakization action. In official figures (often falsified), Slovaks amounted to 67.7 percent of Slovakia’s population in 1930, 96.6 percent in the first half of the 1940s, and 86.7 percent in 1950. However, Slovaks constituted more than half of Bratislava’s inhabitants only in the late 1940s. The 1950 census gave an unusually low figure of 354,500 (10.3 percent) for Magyars living in Slovakia. In the 1961 census, when no administrative pressure was exerted on Magyars to declare themselves as Slovaks, the number jumped to 519,000 (12.4 percent). Since then on, the number of Magyars in Slovakia grew slowly but their share in the population declined, 552,000 (12.2 percent) in 1970, 559,000 (11.2 percent) in 1980, and 567,000 (10.8 percent) in 1991. The assimilating pressure showed in the fact that in 1991, 608,000 persons declared Magyar (11.5 percent) as their mother tongue, meaning that 41,000 native Magyar-speakers chose Slovak nationality. Between 1961 and 1980, Slovaks amounted to 3.56 million (85.3 percent) and 4.32 million (86.5 percent). In 1991, they numbered 4.52 million, but their share in the population declined to 85.7 percent. The number of native Slovak-speakers was even smaller, 4.45 million (84.3 percent), because Magyarand Roma-speaking Slovaks had to be excluded from this number. Mainly the inclusion of the Roma, for the first time in history of Czechoslovak statistics, was responsible for this drop in the percentage of Slovaks residing in Slovakia. In 1991, 75,800 (1.4 percent) inhabitants of Slovakia declared themselves as Roma, but 77,300 as native Romani-speakers, which meant that 1500 of these speakers declared themselves as Slovaks. Due to the social exclusion and stigma, most Roma continued to declare themselves as Slovaks and Magyars. It is estimated that in the 1980 Czechoslovak census, 74 percent of Roma living in Czechoslovakia declared themselves as Slovaks, 15 percent as Magyars, and 10 percent as Czechs. Although the vast majority of Roma in postwar Czechoslovakia lived in Slovakia (the few prewar Roma living in the Czech lands were exterminated by Germans during World War II), they moved along with numerous Slovaks to Czech Silesia and northern Moravia where they found

870 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

employment in the booming heavy industry. But unlike Slovaks, most Roma were forcefully resettled there. As a result, in 1980, one-third of Czechoslovakia’s Roma lived in the Czech lands and two-thirds in Slovakia (mainly in the region’s southern and eastern section). But between 1964 and 1991, unofficial estimates of Slovakia’s Roma ranged from 0.1 to 0.5 million. Prior to the fall of communism, Roma (referred to disparagingly as ‘gypsies,’ that is, cigáni in Slovak, cikáni in Czech, cyganie in Polish, csigán in Magyar, and Zigeuner in German) were never treated as an ethnolinguistic group or minority in Central Europe. In the Soviet bloc, they were forcefully ‘sedentarized’ and ‘productivized’ as ‘lumpenproletariat’ and ‘vagrants’ during the 1960s and 1970s. No notice was taken of their Indic language because it did not have an established written form. Roma children were sent to non-Roma-speaking schools, where they were ‘found’ to be mentally retarded on account of not being able to express themselves in Czech, Magyar, Polish, or Slovak. Most either dropped out from elementary school (illegal in the light of law) or were moved to schools for the mentally handicapped. After the wave of postwar expulsions was completed in the early 1950s, Roma as a group were meted out the harshest treatment in communist Central Europe, reminiscent of the racist policies of the Third Reich, falling just short of genocide. In communist Czechoslovakia, Roma women were forcefully, or on the sly, sterilized in order to stem the high reproduction rate of ‘undesirable lumpenproletariat,’ or ‘social margin.’ (Unfortunately, this practice continues in an extralegal manner, as an expression of deeply ingrained anti-Gypsyism in the postcommunist Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia to this day.) The number of Czechs living in Slovakia after the war, dropped from 140,000 in 1930 to 40,000 (1.2 percent) in 1950. Assimilation, wartime expulsions, and voluntary flights to the Czech lands provide the explanation. In communist Czechoslovakia, Czechs and Slovaks appeared as official categories in censuses, because the state was defined as a house to two equal nations of the Czech and Slovaks. The interwar category of ‘Czechoslovaks’ never reappeared, and 3500 people, who wanted to declare themselves as Czechoslovaks in Czechoslovakia during the 1991 census, were not allowed to. While the number of Czechs living in Slovakia increased slowly from 46,000 (1.1 percent) in 1961 to 53,000 (1 percent) in 1991, the number of Slovaks living in the Czech lands grew dramatically from 44,500 in 1930 to 0.26 million (2.9 percent) in 1950, 0.28 million (2.9 percent) in 1961, 0.32 million (3.3 percent) in 1970, and 0.36 million (3.5 percent) in 1980. At least one-tenth of the number was officially constituted by Slovak Roma, 33,000 of whom declared themselves Slovak in 1991. This explains the fall of the number of Slovaks to 0.31 million in that year, when for the first time the category of Roma was introduced to a Czechoslovak census. Together with Roma and Magyars, the number of migrants from Slovakia and their descendants was 0.37 million. In reality, though, Roma constituted perhaps one-third of the overall number.

The Slovak Nation

871

Slovakia’s Germans numbered 6300 in 1961. Later, many left for West Germany as Aussiedlers, so their number sank to 2900 in 1980. This changed in the 1991 census, which registered 5400 Germans. Many of them previously preferred to conceal their German origin, and told their children about their roots after the fall of communism. The fear and memory of postwar persecutions did not die out completely either, and as in the case of Magyars, 1900 native German-speakers declared themselves as Slovaks. Between 1961 and 1991, the number of Poles, living mainly in Orava and Spiš, grew from 1000 to 2700. It did not amount to much, as immediately after the war, Warsaw, basing its claims on its prewar estimates, claimed at least 50,000 Poles in this region. But unlike in the Tˇešín area in Czech Silesia, this Polish minority never materialized as pictured by Warsaw. The Goralian ethnic character of the mountainous population made them closer to the Slovak than Polish nation. Not surprisingly, despite the Polonization pressure, 20,000 Goralians from Poland’s sections of Orava and Spiš began to declare themselves as Slovaks in postwar Poland. In Slovakia, the Slovakization process was a tangible reality as well. In 1991, 700 persons dared to declare their native language as Polish, but this pressure stopped them from announcing that they were Poles. After the postwar suppression of the Magyar-language minority education system in Slovakia, it was gradually re-established from 1948, when Magyars were re-granted Czechoslovak citizenship. But the constant, though less intensive, Slovakization process almost halved the number of Magyar minority elementary schools from 565 in 1955 to 257 in 1990. Moreover, bilingual Slovak-Magyar schools and those, where the mother tongue was taught as a subject, were included in these numbers. The 1956 uprising in Hungary and the 1968 liberalization in Czechoslovakia awoke hopes among Slovakia’s Magyars for some measure of cultural or even political autonomy in southern Slovakia. (AntiMagyar steps included Slovakization of ‘too Magyar-sounding’ place-names, an action that lasted until the end of communism.) The Slovak authorities saw these attitudes as a direct danger to Slovakdom, which further intensified Slovakization. Prague stayed aloof and seemed to approve. The Constitutional Act No 144 gave full recognition to Magyars, Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians (Ruthenians) as Czechoslovakia’s minorities. This law gave them the right to use their language in public contexts and on bilingual signposts with locality and street names. In practice, only Magyars in Slovakia and Poles in Czech Silesia enjoyed these provisions. No educational system for Germans was created in the Czech lands or Slovakia. No German versions of place-names were allowed. The 1984 Act No 29 guaranteeing minority-language elementary and secondary education merely confirmed the situation. Obviously, no Romani-language educational system was created for Czechoslovakia’s Roma. But their considerable (though officially denied) share in the population made itself felt, as in the case of Jews in interwar

872 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Czechoslovakia, who had not been included as a category in statistics. Despite the ‘sedentarization’ and ‘productivization’ policies, which aimed to assimilate Roma, in 1989, 20.4 percent spoke exclusively in Romani with family members, 32.6 percent in Romani and Slovak, and 40 percent exclusively in Slovak (or rather dialectal Slovak with numerous Romani linguistic loans). During the 1960s and 1970s, scholars produced grammars of Romani, that is, of the Carpathian, East Slovak, and Vlach (Vlax) dialects. As 80 percent of Roma in Slovakia and the Czech lands spoke in the East Slovak dialect of Romani, these scholars codified in the 1980s the written version of Romani on the basis of this dialect, employed in the bilingual Czech-Romani and Romani-Czech dictionary published in Prague in 1991. In postcommunist Slovakia and the Czech Republic, this allows for the spread of Romani-language literacy and education, but, on the other hand, the local codification distances the Slovak and Czech Roma from the world (Pan-European) Roma national movement, which strives to codify the Vlach dialect into the standard Romani language (Ambulance 2006: 42–46; A Special Remedy 1999: 8–19; Barta 2003: 574; Eberhardt 1996: 118–119, 133–138; Finger 1999: 69; From Minority Status to Partnership 2005; Horecký 1999; Šatava 1994: 51, 59, 229). The Ruthenians of interwar Czechoslovakia were treated harshly after World War II. Their 1939 independent nation-state, proclaimed in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, survived 2 days. Ukrainian was announced the state’s official language, but there was no time to replace Czech and Ruthenian with it prior to the Magyar occupation. In Hungary’s Carpathia, Magyar and Hungarian-Ruthenian (vernacular Ruthenian) functioned as official languages. In 1945, Beneš treated the Ruthenians, one of the ‘state nations’ in interwar Czechoslovakia, as an unwanted population. Without much protest, he gave in to Stalin’s pressure. No Ruthenian politicians were consulted, when Beneš stripped Ruthenians of Czechoslovak citizenship, and transferred Subcarpathian Ruthenia (administered by the Soviet military since 1944) to Soviet Ukraine.13 In 1946, the autonomy of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was liquidated and the region became known as ‘Transcarpathia,’ or ‘Transcarpathian Ukraine.’ To this day, Ruthenians denounce this Czech betrayal as their ‘Ruthenian Munich.’ Despite the experience of the unilateral and unjust treatment meted out to Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement by the Western powers, Prague did not hesitate to apply a similar approach to Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Merely 25,000 Ruthenians dared to use the official option of reapplying for Czechoslovak citizenship (which entailed the need to move from the region to postwar Czechoslovakia), though the vast majority wanted to. The pressure of the Soviet administration ‘convinced’ most to stay, and eventually, 3700 Ruthenians left for Czechoslovakia. In Transcarpathia, Ukrainian was made into the official language of administration and education. The Kremlin and Kyiv treated the Ruthenians as an

The Slovak Nation

873

unproblematic regional group of the Ukrainian nation. To this end, Ruthenian cultural institutions were dissolved and Ruthenian-language books burned as the sign of ‘bourgeois-national deviation.’ For the same ‘crime,’ former Ruthenian deputies to the Czechoslovak and Hungarian parliaments were tried and condemned to death in April 1946. In the same year, the Greek Catholic Church was liquidated in the formerly Polish territories incorporated into the Soviet Union. Although the existence of the same Church in the former Subcarpathian Ruthenia was officially prohibited 3 years later, repression against Greek Catholic hierarchs and clergy began immediately after the war. This harsh treatment was also extended to their Orthodox counterparts. In order to ensure compliance, Transcarpathia was turned into a closed military zone, which no one (apart from officers) could enter or leave without a special permit. In 1945, the university was founded in Uzhgorod (Užhorod in Czech and Slovak, Uzhhorod in Ruthenian and Ukrainian) and the educational system developed dynamically, but solely Ukrainian and Russian were used as languages of instruction. In the late 1950s, Transcarpathia was turned into the importexport corridor between the Soviet Union and the West, but this did not improve the prevailing low standard of living in the region. Educated Ruthenians were allowed only second-rank positions in Transcarpathia, forcing them to leave their region in search of social advancement. Magyars numbering 150,000 (11.7 percent) in the late 1980s, and Romanians numbering 27,000 (2.1 percent) were provided with minority education, and certain provisions in this field were also extended to 40,000 (3.1 percent) Roma as elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Russians numbering 50,000 (3.9 percent) did not need any minority provisions, as entire Ukraine was thoroughly Russified (at least in cities, administration, education, and official public life) during the Soviet period. Whatever the wishes of the Ruthenian majority (1.02 million, 80 percent), they were Ukrainized, and the category of Ruthenian nationality was prohibited in Soviet statistics. The Greek Catholic Church was revived secretly in the late 1980s and it was officially reestablished in 1989. National organizations of the Ruthenians resurfaced in early 1990 and drew on the Church’s support. (Elsewhere in Ukraine, the Greek Catholic Church became closely associated with the revived Ukrainian national movement.) In September, they demanded official recognition for the Ruthenian nation and the reestablishment of autonomy for their region. The negotiations conducted between Ruthenian leaders and the Kremlin may have produced the desired result if the Soviet Union had not collapsed in 1991. Like Poland, Ukraine was established as a unitary nation-state, and the provision of autonomy was extended to the Crimea only under Moscow’s pressure. No power sided with the Ruthenians, so to this day, Kyiv treats them as Ukrainians, and does its utmost to stem the development of the Ruthenian national movement. The situation of Ukraine’s Ruthenians resembles that of Poland’s Szlonzoks (Silesians).

874 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Slovak’s Ruthenians, concentrated in Prešov Ruthenia, suffered a similar fate. In independent Slovakia, Bratislava unilaterally replaced Ruthenian with Russian as the language of instruction in Ruthenian education. The step was taken apparently to distance the Ruthenian national movement from its Slovjak counterpart dynamically developing in Hungary-occupied southeastern Slovakia. Ruthenian-language education (with the addition of instruction in Magyar) continued in the eastern section of Prešov Ruthenia incorporated into wartime Hungary’s Carpathia. Carpathia consisted mainly from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which meant that Russian employed there in the Ruthenian schools since 1936 was supplanted with Ruthenian and Magyar. After 1945, Russian was imposed on Ruthenian education and cultural life in Prešov Ruthenia. In 1948, the Ukrainian National Council of the Prešov Ruthenia estimated that 150,000 ‘Ukrainians’ (Ruthenians) lived in Slovakia. Bratislava disagreed, as the 1940 Slovak census had recorded only 67,000 ‘Ukrainians and Russians,’ but many Ruthenians had been pressed by administrations to declare themselves as Slovaks. According to the 1930 Czechoslovak census, 96,000 ‘Ukrainians and Russians’14 had lived in Slovakia, and 23,000 in the Czech lands. In postwar Slovakia, the Ruthenians were the only minority whose education system was not liquidated. But, ironically, Russian, not Ruthenian, was employed as the language of instruction in Ruthenian schools after 1945. In 1938, there were 168 Ruthenian schools. Their number grew dynamically from 165 to 267 between 1945 and 1948. Most Ruthenians perceived the situation as one of unilateral Russification imposed by Prague. In 1950, the Greek Catholic Church was abolished in Czechoslovakia, which deprived the Ruthenians of their last independent national institution. In order to escape the brunt of the changing nationality policies aimed at them, an increasing number of Ruthenians sent children to Slovak-language schools, and declared themselves as Slovaks (or Czechs, when in the Czech lands). By 1966, the number of Ruthenia schools had sunk to 68. The 1950 census registered 48,000 ‘Ukrainians and Russians’ in Slovakia, and 19,000 in the Czech lands. In emulation of the de-Ruthenizing policies employed in Soviet Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, Ukrainian replaced Russian in Ruthenian schools in 1951. This language is closer to Ruthenian than Russian, but the change added to the confusion. Ukrainian in the Soviet (Russified) codification, differed from the Galician codification, employed in the Ruthenian schools of Subcarpathian Ruthenia prior to the introduction of Russian in 1936. In addition, Ruthenian schools in interwar Prešov Ruthenia had employed vernacular Ruthenian, and the Ukrainophile tendency had been unknown in this region, unlike in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The transfer of the buildings and assets of the liquidated Greek Catholic Church to its Orthodox counterpart alienated Slovakia’s Ruthenians even more. Due to frequent changes in the language of instruction, 47 percent of teachers in Ruthenian elementary schools did not have appropriate

The Slovak Nation

875

qualifications. In the following decades, the situation was improved somewhat by the founding of the Departments of Ukrainian language at teachers’ training colleges in Prešov, Košice, and Bratislava. But it was too little, too late. After the number of Ruthenian schools peaked in 1952 at the level of 275 elementary schools (or 355 all schools, including kindergartens), it steadily decreased thereafter, falling to 68 in 1966. In 1969, 60 Ruthenian linguistic elements were introduced to Ruthenian elementary schools in order to smooth the students’ transition from the vernacular to Ukrainian. This de facto produced language dualism, which added Ruthenian as an unofficial language of instruction to Ukrainian in Ruthenian schools. This was the last straw. Ruthenian parents en masse began to send their children to mainstream Slovak-language schools. By 1989, not a single Ukrainian-language school survived. Some classes were offered in this language but they were attended by 1500 students. Accordingly, the number of ‘Ukrainians and Russians’ registered in Czechoslovak censuses fell to 49,000 in 1970 and 47,000 a decade later. Twothirds of the number lived in Slovakia. In the 1991 census, Ruthenians were allowed to declare themselves as Ruthenians, if they wished to do so. In Slovakia, 17,200 people were registered as Ruthenians and 13,300 as Ukrainians. The corresponding numbers for the Czech lands were, 1900 and 8200. At the same time, there were 119,000 Greek Catholics in Slovakia, and 20,000 in the Czech lands. This allows for the conservative assessment of 90,000 Slovjaks living today in Slovakia, and 10,000 in the Czech Republic. Some sources assess the number of Slovakia’s ‘speakers of East Slavic dialects’ at 200,000, which makes it possible to speak of 140,000 Slovjaks. Nowadays, however, this identity is not employed by any national movement, and its boundary is as permeable vis-à-vis Slovaks as that of vis-à-vis Ruthenians. The process of voluntary Slovakization of Slovakia’s Ruthenians did not halt in 1968, when Ruthenian national life revived and the Greek Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia was restored. In the course of ‘normalization,’ Ruthenian organizations and Ruthenian-language publications were abolished and the authorities turned this Church into another instrument of Slovakization. A definitive change came after the fall of communism when the Ruthenian national organization, Rusínska obroda (Ruthenian Renaissance), was founded. But so far, no full-fledged Ruthenian-language minority education system has been established, while the number of Ukrainian-language elementary schools dwindled to 29 in 2001 (Dulichenko and Magocsi 2005; Gajdoš and Koneˇcný 1994: 30–31, 108–109, 112–114; Magocsi 2002: 213–215, 2005; Minority Education in Slovakia 2005; Pop 2005: 164–180; Rolková 2004: 700–701; Šatava 1994: 57–58, 274). The overview of the ethnolinguistic make-up of postwar Slovakia would not be complete without a short glance at the Slovak diaspora. From the perspective of language, the most important was that in Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina. They are

876 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

descendants of Slavophone settlers from Upper Hungary, who had moved to the military borderland between the Habsburg lands and the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 19th century. In 1981, they numbered 70,000 persons. A further 3500 Slovaks lived in Yugoslavia’s Banat, and 6500 in Slavonia (today, Croatia). As for the federalization of Yugoslavia after World War II, Slovak was made into a coofficial language in Vojvodina along with Serbo-Croatian (today, Serbian and Croatian), Magyar, Romanian, and Rusyn (Ruthenian). Besides Slovakia (and, after 1968, entire Czechoslovakia), it was the only place, where Slovak received official recognition. When the post-Yugoslav wars were unleashed, many members of Vojvodina’s minorities, including Slovaks, emigrated to their ‘home’ nation-states. By 1991, the number of Slovaks dropped to 64,000. Other significant Slovak minorities numbered 21,000 in Romania’s Banat (1992), 10,500 in Hungary (1990), 2000 in Poland (2002), and 2000 in Austria (1991). The official census numbers of Slovaks in Hungary and Poland are contested by Slovak minority organizations. In the former case, they set the estimate at the level of 110,000 persons (1990), and at 20,000 (2002) in the latter (Marko and Pavol 1995; Šatava 1994: 104, 149–150, 178, 256; Ondrejoviˇc 1999: 46). In communist Czechoslovakia, the standard of living, consumption, and education in Slovakia became almost equal to that in the Czech lands. By extension, the inhabitants of this region enjoyed practically the same access to the mass media and culture as their counterparts in the Czech lands (for details, please refer to the previous chapter). The boom in the development of Slovak-language culture was clearly observed in independent Slovakia. In interwar Czechoslovakia, on average, 650 Slovak-language book titles were produced. After 1939, the annual output immediately rose to 700. By 1985, this indicator grew to 3000, when at the same time only 4000 Czech-language book titles were produced. It was a clear sign that at least in the sphere of culture, the post-1968 affirmative action for things Slovak worked splendidly. Slovak-language titles accounted for 43 percent of Czechoslovak book production and Czech-language ones to 57 percent, when Slovaks amounted to 31 percent of the country’s population, and Czechs to 63.1 percent (1991). Similarly, between 1945 and 1989, nine new institutions of higher learning opened in Slovakia, and merely five in the Czech lands. Obviously, this imbalance made up for the gap that had grown between the highly developed sector of university-level education in the Czech lands, and its fledgling counterpart in Slovakia. Postwar language policy based on the codification of the Slovak language was fraught with much controversy. Prior to the communist takeover in 1948, which entailed the re-centralization of Czechoslovakia in the spirit of Czechoslovakism, the feverish activity of the codifiers and researchers of the Slovak language continued unabated as in interwar Slovakia despite Prague’s harsh retributions directed at the defunct state’s elite. Eugen Jóna, a close collaborator of A Jánošík, took over the editorship of renewed Slovenská reˇc. In 1945, the new

The Slovak Nation

877

linguistic journal, Jazykovedný sborník (Journal of Linguistics) was founded with Ján Stanislav (1904–1977) as its editor, and 2 years later, Slovak proponents of structuralism established their periodical, Slovo a tvar (Word and Form). At the same time, attempts were undertaken to continue publishing the series Linguistica Slovaca, but there were not enough Slovak linguists to maintain all these ambitious projects. Moreover, the question of the wartime codification of Slovak became a political hot potato due to its association with wartime Slovakia’s ‘clericalfascist regime,’ criticized by Czechs and Czechoslovak communists. In the period when communists, supported by Moscow, struggled for gaining control over Czechoslovakia, there were neither time or resources to be spent on a new ideologically ‘correct’ codification of Slovak. The pro-Czechoslovakist government in Prague was busy with the expropriation and expulsion of Germans and Magyars and allowed the SNR and Slovak nationalists the free rein in politics and culture. In this unusual space of postwar freedom, A Jánošík and E Jóna published the 62 fascicles of the first (A-J) volume of Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského. (The Dictionary of the Written Slovak Language, 1946–1949, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin) produced by the Matica slovenská’s Department of Linguistics. In 1949, the Matica slovenská published a revised edition of Baník’s 1940 Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (Turˇciansky Svätý Martin) without the examples of usage associated with the time and institutions of independent Slovakia. The Matica opposed communists’ proposals that the Slovak language should be radically reformed. The communist takeover changed the balance of power in favor of Czechoslovakists and proponents of centralization of postwar Czechoslovakia. In Slovakia, this meant the shift of resources and institutions from the historical and symbolical center of the Slovak nation, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin, to Bratislava, the seat of political power. This change was possible because the latter city was thoroughly Slovakized after World War II. Communists wished to weaken Turˇciansky Svätý Martin as an alternative and anti-communist power center in order to appropriate its national associations for legitimizing their rule closely associated with bureaucratic Bratislava. Tiso’s government had already taken the first steps into this direction by shifting the second interwar Slovak institution of higher learning, Slovak Higher School of Technology, from Turˇciansky Svätý Martin to Bratislava (1939),15 and founding the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts (1942) in the capital, not in Martin (in communist Czechoslovakia the Turˇciansky Svätý’ [Turˇciansky Saint] part of the town’s name was usually avoided for ideological reasons). In preparation for the revival of this Academy in a form acceptable to the communist authorities, between 1949 and 1953, most intellectual and scholarly elites left Martin for Bratislava. The new Slovak Academy of Sciences, a close emulation of the Soviet model, was founded in 1953. It was an afterthought,

878 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

following the founding of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences a year earlier. Although the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences was intended for the whole of postwar Czechoslovakia, it remained a de facto Czech institution. But the pattern of domination, which developed between it and its Slovak counterpart and closely followed that of the Communist Party of Slovakia, turned into a mere regional branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1948). Political and cultural Czechoslovakism was on the rise under the guise of Marxist rhetoric. In 1949, the publication of A Jánošík and Jóna’s Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského was terminated on the basis that it was ‘too puristic’ and ‘intolerant of Bohemianisms.’ What is more, it was tainted by following the 1940 ‘clerical-fascist’ codification of Slovak. In line with ‘marxist linguistics,’ the Czechizing basis of the postwar codification of Slovak were prepared in 1952, as outlined in Jóna’s O návrhu na nové Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (On the Project of the New Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, Martin), published by the Matica slovenská. The following year, the newly established Slovak Academy of Sciences inaugurated its activities with the publication of new Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, Bratislava). The publication’s board of editors, headed by the new star of Slovak Marxist linguistics, Štefan Peciar (1912–1989), included Jóna but not A Jánošík. The new Peciar codification of Slovak reintroduced the Czechizing tendency espoused in Vážný’s 1931 Pravidlá, without any usage examples smacking of the ‘capitalist-bourgeois’ realities of interwar Czechoslovakia, and of Slovak ‘bourgeois-national deviation.’ In 1954, the Slovak University returned to its original name, Komenský University, which reconfirmed the ideologically correct (that is, Czechoslovak) character of the institution. As a certain concession to Slovak national feeling, the second ever Slovak-language university founded in Košice (1959) was named after Šafárik. But as a scholar and a prophet of Czechoslovakism and Pan-Slavism, who had been based in Prague, he was neither antithetical to the Czechs, nor Czechoslovakists, nor Soviet-oriented communists. Between 1947 and 1956, Peciar headed the Jazykovedný ústav (Institute of Linguistics) of the practically defunct wartime Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts, which was renamed as the Ústav slovenského jazyka (Institute of the Slovak Language) in 1952, before it was incorporated into the communist Slovak Academy of Sciences the following year. In 1956, Peciar resigned from heading the Institute, because he was entrusted with the compilation of the new authoritative multivolume dictionary of Slovak. The Czechizing line, which he was required to stick to, was clearly sketched by Václav Machek’s Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Languages, 1957, Prague), which was published by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences to underline the historic Czechoslovak commonality of Czech and Slovak.

The Slovak Nation

879

Peciar was the main editor of the first ever completed dictionary of this kind, Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Slovak Language, Bratislava), whose six volumes were published between 1959 and 1968. The publication of the first volume was preceded by the final liquidation of the influential center of Slovak national culture in Martin. Between 1953 and 1958, Alexander Hirner (1911–1987), an employee of the Matica slovenská, managed the publishing house Osveta (Education) in Martin, where he headed the project of the first ever full-fledged Slovak-language universal encyclopedia, Príruˇcný encyklopedický slovník (The Reference Encyclopedical Dictionary). The thinking behind this project was the typically Central European belief that a nation cannot be recognized as ‘mature,’ unless it enjoys a multivolume universal encyclopedia in its language. But in communist Czechoslovakia, the scientific monopoly of the Czech language could never be breached so blatantly. Between 1958 and 1966, Hirner was imprisoned for ‘bourgeois-national deviation.’ The completed first (A–G) volume of the encyclopedia was prevented from being printed, and the publishing house was transferred to Bratislava. Theoretical and practical support was given to Peciar by Jóna, Stanislav Lyer, Eugen Pauliny (1912–1983), and the team of lexicographers from the tellingly named ‘Czechoslovak-Soviet Institute’ of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Obviously, in the compilation of Slovník slovenského jazyka, Peciar adhered to his 1953 Czechizing Pravidlá. The Pravidlá and the concept of his dictionary were governed by the tenets of Czechoslovakism and Marxist linguistics as worked out at the statewide conference held in Bratislava in 1952. As a kind of ‘ideological exorcism,’ Peciar enumerated in the Introduction two Czechoslovakist dictionaries of Slovak, which he chose for guidance in his work, namely M Kálal’s Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci (1924–1926) and Tvrdý’s Slovenský frazeologický slovník (1931). Peciar took care to emphasize that he would not veer far away from the Czech language, by taking Pavel Váša and František Travníˇcek’s popular Slovní k jazyka ˇceského (The Dictionary of Czech Language, 1937, Prague). He did not fail to pay obeisance to Marxist orthodoxy, either and mentioned Filozofický slovník (Dictionary of Philosophy, 1956, Bratislava), the Slovak translation of the Soviet original. These ‘exorcisms’ were enough to let Peciar use A Jánošík and Jóna’s Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského in his project. The Matica slovenská had no choice and in the mid-1950s, handed over the materials gathered for the compilation of the dictionary’s further volumes to Peciar’s Institute of the Slovak Language. Between 1943 and 1950, under the management of L’ Novák, Pauliny, and Jozef Orlovský (1908–1990), the institute’s predecessor, that is the Institute of Linguistics, had collected even more extensive lexicographic material for the compilation of an authoritative dictionary of the Slovak language in emulation of Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1935–1957, Prague). The work stopped when political purges

880 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

connected to the ‘struggle with Slovak bourgeois nationalism’ practically liquidated the institute. In 1955, the agreed upon principles of the compilation of Peciar’s Slovník slovenského jazyka appeared in an article published in Slovenská reˇc. Most significantly, the dictionary was to collect practically the entire standard Slovak vocabulary, which appeared in Slovak-language publications between 1850 and 1950. Instrumental to this end were over 20 dictionaries of specialist, technical, and professional vocabulary compiled by the Institute of Linguistics and published by the Slovak Academy of Sciences (and Arts) between 1943 and the mid-1950s. In 1957, the first volume of Peciar’s dictionary was submitted with the publishing house of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. In 1958, censors accepted the revised version of this volume, and it finally came off the press in the following year. Further work on the dictionary was almost discontinued in 1958, when the renewed wave of retribution against ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalists’ led to a purge in the Institute of the Slovak Language. Volume Two appeared in 1960, because it had been compiled before this purge, but only after numerous amendments were introduced. The ‘ideologically correct line of Slovak marxist linguistics’ was worked out in the early 1960s. The conference on marxist linguistics in the resort of Libice (Bohemia, 1960) criticized Peciar for not doing more to show the ‘natural closeness’ of Czech and Slovak. Two years later, another conference, this time held in Bratislava, strongly criticized Bartek-led Slovak opposition to Vážný’s 1931 Pravidlá, and accused Baník’s 1940 Pravidlá of ‘unreasonable purism,’ which played into the hands of ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalists.’ As a result, the official pressure pressed Peciar and his team to espouse the Czechoslovakist (Czechizing) tendency, which aimed at making Slovak closer to Czech. Volumes Three and Four (1963, 1964) clearly followed this directive. The weakening of the stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia allowed for the organization of a largely non-ideological conference on Peciar’s dictionary, held in the resort of Smolenice near Bratislava in 1965. Pauliny, Gejza Horák (1919–), and Dezider Kollár (1931–) criticized this dictionary for its Czechoslovakist tendency. The main accusation was that numerous words clearly belonging to standard Slovak were labeled as ‘dialectal,’ while many Bohemianisms were spuriously made into ‘genuinely Slovak words.’ These critiques were well taken, and subsequent corrections lessened the Czechoslovakist tendency in Volume Five (1965). In 1967, liberalization of political life in pre-1968 Czechoslovakia, allowed for changing the name of The Institute of the Slovak Language to the Jazykovedný ústav L’udovíta Štúra (L’udovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics). To this day, the institute survives so patriotically named. The supplementary Volume Six was printed during the Prague Spring (1968), which allowed Peciar to present the ideological pressures exerted on the dictionary in an unusually honest Afterward to this volume.

The Slovak Nation

881

For better or worse, Peciar’s Slovník slovenského jazyka codified the Slovak vocabulary in an imprecise manner veering between the opposed poles of the Czechizing (Czechoslovakist) and purifying tendencies symbolized by Vážný’s 1931 Pravidlá and Baník’s 1940 Pravidlá, respectively. To this day, it remains the first, and so far only, authoritative multivolume dictionary of the Slovak language. Criticism leveled at the dictionary’s Czechizing tendency found its practical expression in the famous Tézy o slovenˇcine (Theses on the Slovak Language) formulated in 1966 by Jozef Ružiˇcka (1916–1989) at the conference on language politics held in Bratislava. The main theses proclaimed, ‘The basic feature of the contemporary Slovak language is its development in accordance with the language’s own [internal] principles [of correctness]. [. . .] Artificial and forced making of Slovak similar to Czech, as well as artificial and forced making of both languages less similar to each other, is an extralinguistic tendency, which does not find any support in socialist society.’ Finally, a kind of balance acceptable for Czech Czechoslovakists and nationally-minded Slovak communists was struck with regard to the question of how to codify Slovak. Ružiˇcka became a new officially accepted guru of Slovak linguistics, and headed the L’udovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics between 1965 and 1981. The phrase ‘Slovak language’ was dropped from the second edition of Machek’s Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague). The proclaimed equality of Czech and Slovak with full recognition of their inherent differences and similarities complemented the 1968–1969 federalization of Czechoslovakia, which entailed the introduction of Czech-Slovak bilingualism throughout the state. Obviously, this officially introduced equality did not mean that numerous Czechs continued to consider Slovak a less useful language than Czech, or even disparaged it as an ‘uncultured peasant tongue.’ (Russian- and Polish-speakers often express a similar belittling attitude toward Belarusian and Ukrainian.) On the other hand, no attempts were undertaken to codify Slovak anew in the spirit of the newly found balance between it and Czech. Merely, Peciar’s Slovník slovenského jazyka, predominantly Czechizing in its spirit, was reprinted in 1971, and usage examples that smacked of Stalinism were removed from the subsequent reprints of his 1953 Pravidlá. The crowning achievement of the federal period was Jozef Stolc’s (1908–1981) four-volume Atlas slovenského jazyka (The Atlas of the Slovak Language, Bratisˇ lava) published between 1968 and 1984. A similar Ceský jazykový atlas (Atlas of the Czech Language, 1992–2006, Prague), edited by Jan Balhar and Pavel Jancák, appeared only after the breakup of Czechoslovakia. Political controversies evoked by the codification of Slovak between the 1930s and 1960s effectively froze the issue after the ‘normalization.’ Those who lost most were average users, because they received a one-volume dictionary of their native language only at the end of the communist period, when Ján Kaˇcala (1937–) and Mária Pisárˇciková’s (1937–) 500-page-long Krátky slovník slovenského

882 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

jazyka (The Short Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1987, Bratislava) was published thanks to the overall atmosphere of liberalization in the Soviet bloc. Meanwhile, Slovak students learned standard Slovak from school textbooks and orthographic dictionaries attached to the subsequent reprints of Peciar’s 1953 Pravidlá. In the first half of the 1970s, there were some radio and TV programs which commented on correct Slovak usage. But in 1975, an example of Czechizing usage was decried as ‘incorrect.’ This immediately triggered an official backlash, which branded this correction as ‘anti-Czech.’ The possibility of further comparative advice on the border usages between Czech and Slovak was banned from the mass media until the end of communist Czechoslovakia. As a result, numerous Czech linguistic loans and Czechizing influences entered formal and informal Slovak. Because many more Slovaks sought education and employment in the Czech lands than Czechs in Slovakia, the influence of Czech on Slovak was more pervasive than that of Slovak on Czech. As an exercise in the officially introduced equality between the Czech lands and Slovakia and between Czech and Slovak as well, the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences supported the compilation of the first ever, full-fledged, extensive, one-volume Slovak-Czech dictionary. Želmíra Gašparíková and Adolf Kamiš’s Slovensko-ˇceský slovník (Prague) came off the press in 1967, just in time for the 1968–1969 federalization of Czechoslovakia. Two reprints of this dictionary followed in 1984 and 1987. In 1979, the Slovak Academy of Sciences reciprocated ˇ with the similar in scope Jozef Michaláˇc and Andrej Šumec’s Cesko-slovenský slovník (The Czech Slovak Dictionary, Bratislava), which was reprinted in 1981. None of these two dictionaries became a commonplace household reference, and has remained in print. They fulfilled a largely symbolic function of emphasizing the officially promulgated equality between Czech and Slovak. Due to the suprastandard bilingualism that existed between Czech and Slovak, Slovakspeakers perusing Czech-language publications and mass media, or living in the Czech lands naturally turned to monolingual Czech dictionaries, and vice versa. There was no social or linguistic barrier between both languages, which would require the user to bridge it with the prop of a bilingual dictionary and formal foreign language study. For all practical reasons, neither was Czech ‘foreign’ to the Slovaks, nor Slovak to the Czechs. Natural comprehensibility occurring between both languages and enhanced by official and everyday practical bilingualism, really made Czech and Slovak into ‘fraternal languages’ of the constitutional ‘Czechoslovak people’ consisting of the ‘two brotherly nations of Czechs and Slovaks.’ The elements, which were different in Czech and Slovak, a Czechoslovak citizen mastered in practical use and at school, where the differences were pointed out and explained in the classroom. A learner, more interested in the issue, referred to Jaroslav Neˇcas’s Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdilných výrazu˚ (Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary of Words that are Different

The Slovak Nation

883

in Both Languages, Prague) published in four different editions in 1963, 1964, and 1989. The informal ban on compiling and publishing a universal encyclopedia in Slovak, was not lifted prior to the end of communism, but apparently was amended. Between 1977 and 1982, the Slovak Academy of Sciences published the six-volume Encyklopédia Slovenska (Encyclopedia of Slovakia, Bratislava). It was an inward looking reference, which in an extreme detail mapped all the aspects of Slovakia, including its nature, history, places of interest, and folklore. A concise one-volume version of this work, Malá encyklopédia Slovenska (The Little Encyclopedia of Slovakia, Bratislava) appeared in 1987. A Slovak user wishing to consult a regular encyclopedia had no choice but to refer to a Czech-language work of this kind. The interwar three-volume Slovak-language encyclopedia, Slovenský nauˇcný slovník, was too brief, and became hopelessly outdated after the mid-20th century (Bosák 1998: 18–21; Janich and Greule 2002: 281; Jóna 1963: 248–249; Kaˇcala 2001: 55–56; Krekoviˇc 2005: 153, 159; Magocsi 2002: 209; Peciar 1959: VI–VII, 1968: 319–323; Ripka 1993: 283; Ryznar and Croucher 1989: 44, 83–84; Šatava 1994: 52; Šmejkalová 2000: 222–223).

Confusing names: Slovakia independent again The end of communism terminated censorship and the communist party’s tight control over the mass media. Much to their surprise, the average Czech and Czech politicians found out that the Slovaks were displeased with their status and that Czechoslovakia was not a Czech nation-state. It took time before Prague grasped the difference and decided to re-negotiate the political shape of the common postcommunist state of the Czechs and Slovaks. Unfortunately, the discussion soon became the prisoner of the ‘hyphen (spojovnik in Slovak and pomlˇcka in Czech) controversy.’ Slovak leaders wanted a change in the state’s name from Czechoslovakia to Czecho-Slovakia, as proposed by American Slovaks in the Pittsburgh Agreement 1918. Czech politicians opposed this change, because they associated it with the Second Republic, that is, postMunich regionalized Czecho-Slovakia (1938–1939), which was a brief prelude to the destruction of the rump state in March 1939, when it was split into independent Slovakia and the Third Reich’s Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Slovak dissidents turned politicians considered the Czech stance unreasonable, because it pushed Slovak public opinion toward political forces centered around Vladimír Meˇciar, who wanted independence for Slovakia. Czech and Slovak dissidents active in communist Czechoslovakia and led by ˇ Václav Havel, and Alexander Dubˇcek and Ján Carnogurský (1944–), respectively, were attached to the idea of a common Czechoslovak state. There was no popular resentment against the Czechs in Slovakia, or against the Slovaks in the Czech lands. Such national tensions fuelled by politicians led to the breakup

884 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Yugoslavia that served as a warning that Czecho-Slovakia (the name change was approved in April 1991) may be next. Most Czechs considered wartime independent Slovakia as illegitimate, and most Slovaks either shared the opinion, or were dubious that it was right to make this polity a source of legitimization for a new independent Slovakia. But as in other postcommunist states of the former Soviet bloc, technocrats and former second-rank communist officials turned first-rank social-democratic leaders soon wrenched power away from former Czechoslovak dissidents who saw the federal government as their natural power base. With time, the federal government and parliament enjoyed less legitimacy and popularity than their republican, Czech and Slovak counterparts. Former dissidents failed to address this worrying trend and did not secure a steady following at the level of the Czech and Slovak Republics. In no time, the technocrat-cum-nationalist, Vaclav Klaus, emerged as an undisputed leader in the former polity, and the unabashedly nationalistic populist, Vladimír Meˇciar, ˇ in the latter. Carnogurský unsuccessfully attempted to unsettle Meˇciar from power. Havel was more successful, but at the largely symbolical plane, because he became Czech President only after the 1993 breakup of Czecho-Slovakia. The largely bloodless split-up of the Soviet Union (1991) offered Meˇciar and Klaus with a technocratic model of how middle-rank (republican) politicians can usurp power and divide a federal state, even if most citizens did not subscribe to such a project. Although the overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens did not want the splitting-up of the Soviet Union along the borders of the national republics, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–) lost effective grasp on power after a putsch in August 1991. It was Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007), the leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, who saved Gorbachev and his federal cabinet. In December, the latter together with his Belarusian and Ukrainian counterparts, Stanislau Shushkevich (1934–) and Leonid Kravchuk (1934–), announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Former Czechoslovak dissidents did not want and apparently had no power to transform Czecho-Slovakia into a viable federation. The obvious model was Belgium, which, like communist Czechoslovakia, was a dual federation of French-speaking Wallonia and Flemish-speaking Flanders, which developed between 1932 and 1980. Bilingual Brussels was given a separate status. Prague did not enjoy such status, but, for all practical reasons, was a world to itself in Czechoslovakia. The breakups of federal Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia convinced Belgian politicians that dual federations were inherently unsteady. To ameliorate the situation, the federation was re-shaped on 14 July 1993. The federal level of government was complemented by the level of regions (Brussels, Flanders, and Wallonia), and the level of language communities (Flemish, French, and German). Most significantly, the regions do not overlap with the language communities.

The Slovak Nation

885

It was not inconceivable, to add Prague as a separate, third region to the Czecho-Slovak federation consisting of the Czech and Slovak Republics. Besides the Czechs and Slovaks, southern Slovakia’s Magyars could be fashioned into a separate language community. A similar status could have been fruitfully extended to Ruthenians, who are not more numerous than Belgium’s Germans. Alternatively, the three Czech historical regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia could become separate republics. In the latter half of the 1940s and in 1968, Slovak leaders dreaded this possibility, because they were (perhaps rightly) afraid that it would allow Prague to dominate Slovakia through political institutions. But Slovakia could be divided into three republics of western and central Slovakia, southern Slovakia, and eastern Slovakia. In all the three regions, ethnolinguistic majorities of Slovaks could be secured, whereas the latter two regions would be a gracious bow to national-cum-regional aspirations of the Magyar and Rusyn (Ruthenian) minorities, respectively (Altermatt 2002: 336–337; Kirschbaum 1999: lii–liii, lxxv–lxxvi; Kováˇc 1998: 321–329). On 1 January 1993, Czecho-Slovakia was succeeded by the two new independent states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This event caused various terminological problems. To this day, neither the Czechs nor English-speakers have at their disposal a short but official one-word name for the Czech Republic. In Czechoslovakia, the past of the Czech lands was dealt together with that of Slovakia in books, which were customarily titled History of Czechoslovakia. But at the same time, monographs bearing the title History of Slovakia were published as well. No similar works devoted exclusively to the history of the Czech lands appeared before the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia. On the contrary, after 1993, it became impossible to buy a new Czech-language monograph titled History of Czechoslovakia, and the reader must content oneself with numerous books bearing such titles as History of the Czech Lands or History of the Lands of the Czech Crown. In this respect, no change was observed in Slovakia. Histories of Slovakia are still published as they were before 1993, but today, no Histories of Czechoslovakia are available in Slovak either. A Czech or Slovak reader wishing to acquaint oneself with the past of Czechoslovakia must piece it out from separate Histories of the Czech Lands and Histories of Slovakia. Alternatively one can refer to pre-1993 Histories of Czechoslovakia published in Czech or Slovak, or to foreign-language monographs. What the Slovaks had to face up to when Slovakia declared its independence, was the international confusion at the springing up of another tiny nation-state in ‘Eastern Europe.’ The confusion was deepened by the emergence of similarly named Slovenia as an independent state in 1991. Even savvy foreigners tended to mix up both states, which encouraged Slovaks to establish a plethora of websites, which aspire to explain obvious differences in name and history of Slovakia and Slovenia. But there is no denial that the names of both states, derived from the ethnonym ‘Slav,’ are extremely similar to each other. Slovakia

886 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

is Slovensko in Slovak and Slovenia Slovinsko in Slovak and Czech, Słowacja and Słowenia in Polish, Szlovákia and Szlovénia in Magyar, or Slowakei and Slowenien in German. In Slovenian, Slovakia is Slovaška and Slovenia Slovenija. A telling overlap in word forms occurs between Slovak and Slovenian when it comes to male and female versions of inhabitants of both new nation-states. ‘Slovak man’ and ‘Slovenian man’ are Slovák and Slovinec in Slovak and Slovak and Slovenec in Slovenian. ‘Slovak woman’ and ‘Slovenian woman’ are Slovenka and Slovinka in Slovak and Slovakinja and Slovenka in Slovenia. ‘Slavic man’ and ‘Slavic woman’ are Slovan and Slovenka in Slovak and Slovan and Slovanka in Slovenian. The Slovenian pair is exactly the same as in Czech, Slovan and Slovanka. The adjective ‘Slovak’ in Slovak is slovenský, and the adjective ‘Slovenian’ in Slovenian is slovenski. These two adjectives’ alternative forms used with female nouns are almost the same, slovenská and slovenska, respectively (Smolej 1976: 282). Article 6.1 of the Slovak Constitution (promulgated on 3 September 1992) provides that Slovak is the ‘state language’ on the territory of the Slovak Republic. The Czech Constitution, also enacted in 1992, did not make any specific provisions for Czech as the official language of the Czech Republic. The status of Czech in the Czech lands is regulated by various lower-rank acts issued between 1991 and 1993 that govern language use in state offices, administration, and schools. The breakup of the federation, by default, entailed the termination of the post-1968 official Czech-Slovak bilingualism. After the period of wartime Slovakia, Slovak became a sole official language in Slovakia for the second time in history. On the contrary, it was the first time in history that Czech attained the status of the sole official language in the Czech lands. However, in practice, only Czech had been employed there for official and public purposes between 1945 and 1968. In this manner, after 1993, the previously ‘fraternal languages’ of the ‘brotherly nations’ of Slovaks and Czechs began to drift away becoming increasingly ‘foreign’ to each other, especially in the minds of Slovak and Czech students, who finished their education and entered adulthood after the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia. The year 2011 will mark the real watershed in the process; the entire new generation born in 1993 will become legally adult then. New Slovakia took over the Slovak coat-of-arms and flag used in wartime Slovakia. The only alteration amounted to the mounting of a small version of this state coat-of-arms on the flag. Eerily, the Slovenians also brandish their state coat-of-arms on the Slovenian flag. What is more, the Slovenian white, blue, and red tricolor is shared by the Slovaks as well. One can also easily spot the parallel of three symbolical summits that pop up both in Slovak and Slovenian coat-ofarms. In the former case, the usually more rounded peaks refer to the Tatras, and the latter to the Alps. Article 10.1 decisively settled the long-lasting competition between Bratislava and Martin by making the former the Slovak capital. But on 24 August 1994, the Slovak Parliament passed the Act No 241, which recognized Martin to be

The Slovak Nation

887

the center of Slovak national culture. This act symbolically made up for the bureaucratic belittling of the town’s role in interwar Czechoslovakia, and for the harsh suppression of Martin as a center of Slovak national life at the beginning of the 1950s. It is people and investment that make things happen; neither flowed in any great numbers to Martin. Hence, the town remains what it used to be in communist Czechoslovakia, a backwater, which is also the seat of the Slovak National Library and of the Matica slovenská. In interwar Czechoslovakia, especially beginning in the early 1930s, Hlinka rallied for the Slovak national cause under the banner of Greater Moravia and Cyrillo-Methodian tradition. Tiso did the same, but as a proponent of constitutionally-enshrined Slovak Christian national community, he did not dare to mention in official acts (let alone the Constitution) these symbols that still somewhat smacked of paganism. Nowadays, direct references to religions are passé in Europe. But the Preamble to the 1992 Slovak Constitution unabashedly proclaims that the Slovak nation is the inheritor of the ‘spiritual heritage of Cyril and Methodius’ and the ‘historical legacy of the Great Moravian Empire,’ as if the former could not be claimed by Slavophone Christians in the Balkans, and the latter by the Moravians, Ruthenians, Czechs, and even Magyars. Naming various institutions after the saintly brothers and Greater Moravian rulers and devoting commemorative plaques and monuments to them became widespread in post-1993 Slovakia. In 1992, the newly founded university in Nitra was named after Philosopher Constantine (that is, under the ‘civil’ name of St Cyril), and 5 years later, a new university in Trnava added both St Cyril and St Methodius to its name. Under the premiership of Meˇciar prone to populism, exclusivist Slovak nationalism, and the use of extralegal measures, independent Slovakia slipped toward authoritarianism. After the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia and in the course of the systemic transition, the economic situation deteriorated much more in Slovakia than in the Czech Republic, and the improvement brought about by the changes was slower to materialize (see the previous chapter). Meˇciar made the Magyar minority into a scapegoat, numerous articles and books containing anti-Magyar propaganda followed. In this vein, Magyars tend to be accused for the destruction of the first Slovak state (that is, Greater Moravia), the ‘one-millennium-long oppression’ of Slovak nation, and for the ‘theft’ of such a famous ethnic Slovak as the composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) for the Magyar nation. Unfortunately, publications of this kind tend to appear to this day and some are regretfully published by the Matica slovenská. But, to a certain degree, it was Hungary’s mainstream politicians, who fuelled this trend. For instance, the first postcommunist Prime Minister of Hungary, József Antall (1932–1939), upon resuming office, declared that in spirit he felt himself to be the Prime Minister of all the 15 million Magyars, including the 5 million Magyars in Hungary’s neighboring states.

888 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

These negative developments and Meˇciar’s economic and security overtures to Ukraine and Russia cost Bratislava the loss of the invitation to NATO, which was extended in 1997 to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The three states became NATO members 2 years later, much to the outrage of Slovak émigrés in the United States and of the average Slovak who, like his or her Polish counterpart, often saw this state and NATO as a bulwark against ‘Asiatic despotism’ traditionally associated with Russia. These developments also endangered the prospect of Slovakia’s accession to the European Union (EU). On 15 November 1995, the Slovak Parliament passed Act No 270 on the State Language of the Slovak Republic, which came into power on 1 January 1996. This act supplanted the more tolerant Act No 428 on the Official Language in the Slovak Republic, passed by the SNR in 1990. The 1995 act emphasized the ideological significance of the Slovak language for Slovak nationalism and statehood, by consolidating the exclusivist monolingualism. The new regulations seriously limited the established use of minority languages, that is, of Magyar, which had featured on bilingual signposts with place-names in predominantly Magyar areas, and in bilingual school certificates issued to students in Magyar minority schools. The fears of forced assimilation were not alleviated by the Slovak-Hungarian Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation (1995), in which both parties reaffirmed their common border and pledged to protect and foster rights of the Magyar minority in Slovakia and the Slovak one in Hungary. This treaty was negotiated and signed under international pressure in Paris. The growing opposition to Meˇciar’s rule unsettled him from power after the 1998 elections. With support of five opposition parties, Mikuláš Dzurinda (1955–) formed the government. For the first time in history, the Magyar parties, which united prior to the elections and garnered 9.12 percent of votes, entered the government too. In order to put Slovakia back on the course to NATO and the European Union, Dzurinda carried on with economic reforms, which markedly improved the economic situation, and introduced changes, which would safeguard democracy in line with the standards of the EU and the Council of Europe. Significantly, in 1999, the Parliament passed Act No 184 on the Use of the Languages of the Minority Communities. It reintroduced the institution of bilingual school certificates and provided that in communes populated by more than 20 percent of inhabitants belonging to a given minority, the minority language can be used in administration, and signposts with place-names can be bilingual. Moreover, the notorious Article 10, prohibiting doing business and drafting contracts in any other language but Slovak, was scrapped from the Act on the State Language. In practice, only Magyar is used on signposts and in offices in southern Slovakia. The German and Rusyn/Ukrainian minorities could make use of these provisions too, but the former is little, aged, and largely assimilated, while the latter is mired in the Rusyn-Ukrainian language controversy.

The Slovak Nation

889

Between the last Czechoslovak census in 1991 and the first Slovak census in 2001, the number of ethnic Slovaks grew from 4.5 million to 4.6 million, and their share in the population from 85.7 to 85.8 percent. This slow but steady growth in the official measure of ethnolinguistic homogeneity of the Slovak nation-state was ensured by the absolute decrease in the number of the Magyar minority from 0.57 million to 0.52 million, and of the Czech from 60,000 to 45,000. The Ukrainian minority decreased from 13,000 persons to 11,000, but this partially reflected the growth of the Rusyn (Ruthenian) minority from 17,000 to 24,000. The size of the German minority remained unchanged at the level of 5000, but it is assessed that fear prevented at least 10,000 further Germans from declaring their nationality in the census. A slight lessening in the social and official stigmatization of the Romani identity caused an increase in the declaration of Romani nationality from 76,000 to 90,000. But official estimates provide that actually 0.3 to 0.4 million Roma live in Slovakia, and predict that their number will have grown to 0.52 million by 2020. Other significant minorities recorded by the 2001 census included, 2600 Poles, 2300 Moravians, 2300 Moravians, 1200 Bulgarians, 900 Croats, and 200 Jews. The case of the ethnic revival of Croats is particularly interesting. From the 16th century to the turn of the 20th century, they constituted a distinctive segment of the population in the region of Bratislava. In interwar Czechoslovakia, they became voluntarily Slovakized or Czechized. The revival of Croatian organizations after 1989, supported by Bratislava, is similar to the case of Budapest’s support for even the least numerous minorities in Hungary. Hungarian concessions for minorities are used as an argument for demanding similar ones for Magyar minorities in Hungary’s neighboring states. On the other hand, the Slovak government, accused of mistreating the Magyar minority, could point to the Croatian one as a ‘proof’ that multiculturalism is actively fostered in Slovakia. In Slovak law, there is no definition of national or ethnic minority. (The situation was the same in Poland until 2005.) For practical purposes, Slovakia’s Magyars, Germans, Rusyns (Ukrainian), and Croats are recognized as ‘autochthonous communities’ to whom full range of minority rights protection can be extended. The less privileged minorities are those whose members, according to Bratislava, moved to Slovakia after 1918, namely Czechs, Moravians, Bulgarians, Poles, and Russians. Ironically, most Russians emerged from the ranks of equally autochthonous Ruthenians. The most contentious minority, Roma, are defined by scholars as a ‘socio-cultural community’ on the basis of the fact that most declare themselves as Slovaks and Magyars, and that Central Europe’s Roma have not organized as a unified and self-conscious ethnic or national movement so far. Overwhelmingly Slovakized Jews too are defined as such a community. Like Roma, they were not distinguished in Czechoslovak statistics as a separate national category.

890 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Not surprisingly, minority education in their national language is enjoyed practically only by Magyars. In 2003, there were 295 Magyar elementary schools and 75 secondary schools. In most, Magyar was used as the language of instruction, except 35 elementary schools and 18 secondary, which were bilingual. The biggest educational achievement for the Magyar minority came in 2004, when Ján Selye University was founded in Komárno with Magyar and Slovak as languages of instruction. There have been no minority-language schools organized for other ‘autochthonous minority communities.’ The remnants of the Ukrainian-language educational system in the form of 29 bilingual schools (2001) constitute a special case. After 1989, Slovakia’s Ruthenians were divided over whether they should adhere to the Ukrainian nation or the forming Rusyn (Ruthenian) national movement. A similar dilemma was faced by Poland’s Lemkos, who variously decided to become members of the Rusyn or Ukrainian nation, or to constitute their own Lemkian nation. In postcommunist Czecho-Slovakia, the minority organization of Ukrainians transformed itself to the Union of RusynsUkrainians. Leaders of the revived Rusyn (Ruthenian) national movement grouped in the organization, Ruthenian Renaissance, criticized the proponents of the Ukrainian tendency that there is not such a thing as a ‘Rusyn-Ukrainian’ national identity. Instead of various earlier forms of their ethnonym, usually translated into English as ‘Ruthenian,’ they settled for the form ‘Rusyn’ popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by the Carpatho-Rusyn national movement active in Northern America. American and Slovak Ruthenians organized the first World Congress of Rusyns (1991), and the first Congress of the Rusyn Language in Slovakia. The unified Rusyn national movement was born. In line with the paradigm of Central European nationalism, the most momentous decision was to develop a codified standard Rusyn language. At that time, Vojvodina was the only place where Rusyn was employed as a co-official language in administration and as the medium of instruction in Rusyn schools. This was possible thanks to federalization of Yugoslavia after World War II. Vojvodina Rusyn was codified in 1923 and reformed in the first half of the 1970s. On 27 January 1995, Rusyn leaders from all over the world and representatives of the Slovak authorities attended the ceremony to celebrate the codification of the Rusyn language of Slovakia. The state television began to broadcast in this newly standardized language. The Union of Rusyns-Ukrainians protested this codification and proclaimed that Rusyns were a mere regional group of the Ukrainian nation, and their language a dialect of Ukrainian. In Ukraine’s first postcommunist Constitution (1996), Ukrainian was made into the badge of the Ukrainian nationalism and the foremost symbol of the Ukrainian national statehood. Understandably, Kyiv’s behind the scenes pressure followed in order to revert or limit Bratislava’s de facto recognition of Slovakia’s Rusyns and their language. That is why, the state

The Slovak Nation

891

radio began broadcasting Rusyn-language programs in 2002. Rusyn leaders in Slovakia demand their own national university and minority educational system. In 1998, Prešov University began to educate Rusyn-language teachers, and in 2004, Rusyn students could choose Rusyn Language as an elective subject in 15 elementary schools. In 2005, the Academy of Rusyn Culture (an offshoot of the Canada-based World Academy of Rusyn Culture) was founded in Prešov. In 2007, in emulation of the famous Czechoslovak Charter 77, the Rusyn elites presented their signatures for Charter 2007. They demand the introduction of the Rusyn language to Greek Catholic churches, as most of Slovakia’s Rusyns are of this confession, namely 35,000 according to the authors of Charter 2007. In 1968, Prague legalized the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Prešov (abolished by the communist authorities in 1950), but earlier, in 1963, the Vatican had decided unilaterally that Slovak would replace Church Slavonic as the language of liturgy in the eparchy. This commenced the thorough Slovakization of this eparchy, including the suppression of the local vernacular (now codified as Rusyn) traditionally employed in pastoral services. Another bone of contention is the absence of ethnic Rusyns in the Church’s hierarchy and the fact that Rusyn is not taught in Greek Catholic divinity seminaries. As a result, there are no priests who could attend to the spiritual needs of Greek Catholic Rusyns in their native language. Interestingly, in the course of the codification of Slovakia’s Rusyn language, the controversy flared up about whether to use the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic. The latter won, but most Rusyn publications in Northern America shifted to the former in the course of the 20th century. In 1999, the language of Transcarpathia’s Rusyns was codified, and the following year that of Poland’s Lemkos. The Rusyns of Hungary are still working on their version of the language. The Second Congress of the Rusyn Language (1999, Uzhhorod, Ukraine) decided that the five regional codifications of Rusyn (employed in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine) would be in the future, supplemented by a Rusyn koine, the standardization of which would draw on all the five varieties. Of all the states where Rusyns live, only Ukraine does not recognize them as a minority and sticks to the old Soviet doctrine that they are a regional group of the Ukrainian nation. On 1 December 1991, the inhabitants of Ukraine voted in the referendum on the independence of Ukraine. In Transcarpathia, voters answered two additional questions, on autonomy for Transcarpathia, and on establishing an autonomous region from the area inhabited by Magyars. 93 percent voters expressed their support for the independence, 78 percent for autonomy, and 81.4 percent for a Magyar autonomous region. In independent Ukraine, neither was autonomy introduced for Transcarpathia nor the autonomous region created, though the Regional Council prepared the necessary changes and even recognized the existence of the Rusyns in March 1992. Under the pressure of Ukrainian nationalists, the Ukrainian parliament

892 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

scrapped the decisions. In 1996, Kyiv issued a document, which outlined the course of action, which was to ensure the final assimilation of the ‘RusynUkrainians’ to the Ukrainian nation. In 1999, the authorities allowed for the organization of the fifth World Congress of Rusyns and the second Congress of the Rusyn Language in Transcarpathia, but this did not lead to official recognition of the Rusyns. In April 2002, a regional court decided that the Rusyns were a ‘legal nationality,’ and despite nationalist propaganda and harassment, it was not forbidden to declare oneself as a Rusyn in the 2002 census. A wide-ranging anti-Rusyn campaign discouraged many Rusyns from declaring their nationality, but at least 70,000 did. However, the number was arbitrarily lowered to 10,000 in the census’s results. Paradoxically, the Rusyn homeland, which enjoyed the recognized status of the Rusyn nation-state in interwar Czechoslovakia on par with Slovakia, officially remains without any sizeable Rusyn minority. Rusyn organizations estimate Transcarpathia’s number of Rusyns at the level of 0.7 million (Charta 2007; Dulichenko and Magocsi 2005; Ferko 2004; Kirschbaum 1999: lxxxi–lxxxiii; Koˇrenský 1998: 100–101; Krekoviˇc 2005: 155; Magocsi 1996a, 2002: 200, 2005; Pop 2005: 172–176; Rolková 2004: 191, 199, 656, 665, 675, 683–684, 689, 693, 695, 698, 704–706; Ruthenians 1997). Out of the four Central European nation-states analyzed in this study, Slovakia remains the least nationally homogenous, with Slovaks accounting for 85.8 percent of its population as per the 2001 census. With Poles amounting to 98.8 percent of its population, Poland is the most nationally homogenous polity in the region (2002 census). In this ranking, it is followed by Hungary with the 92.3 percent share of Magyars in the population (2001 census), and by the Czech Republic, where Czechs constitute 90.4 percent of the population (2001 census). Prague tends to treat the Moravians and Silesians as regional groups of the Czech nation, not as separate nations or minorities, which boosts the state’s homogeneity up to 94.1 percent. Warsaw does the same in regard of the Szlonzoks (Silesians), which pushes the homogeneity of Poland to 99.2 percent. The national linguistic homogeneity tends to be even higher as the long-lasting assimilating pressure deprived numerous minorities of the knowledge of their national languages. The most telling examples are Poland’s Germans, who practically speak exclusively in Polish and Silesian (Szlonzokian). On the other hand, the percentages given for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia have to be taken with a pinch of salt because they appear to grossly underestimate the demographic size of their Roma populations. But it seems almost sure that in the process of social inclusion encouraged by democratization and the Council of Europe, Roma are bound to lose their native language and become swiftly assimilated. Ironically, the social stigma attached to being a Rom, may speed up the process, or slow it down should the society at large continue to reject Roma even if they have been fully assimilated.

The Slovak Nation

893

Prior to the founding of nation-states in Central Europe after World War I, the region was as multilingual and multiethnic as any part of the world before modernization and state-supported linguistic homogenization intervened. The inklings of the coming ethnolinguistic homogenization could be discerned in Germanizing policies pursued in the German Empire beginning in the early 1870s; Magyarization unfolded in the same period in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary, and Russification set in during the 1880s across the Russian Empire. It was largely an innocent prelude to the notorious 20th century. The new nation-states, which replaced the empires in Central Europe did not do away with the political and social dilemmas of multilingualism and multiethnicity, but in the quest for the holy grail of ethnolinguistic ‘purity,’ merely replicated them within their own borders. In addition, in the two interwar decades, limited-scale population exchanges and expulsions followed, and stern policies of increasingly forced assimilation were applied even in democratic Czechoslovakia. Truncated Hungary became unusually homogenous, but this achievement was not appreciated by Budapest, upset that one-third of the Magyars had to live outside interwar Hungary. The 1938–1939 and wartime ‘enlargements’ of Germany and Hungary increased ethnolinguistic heterogeneity in these states. These events also reintroduced the policies of Germanization and Magyarization to Central Europe in a new totalitarian form. Forced assimilation and population expulsions followed, and soon deteriorated to the Holocaust of Jews and Roma perpetrated by the Germans. In Central Europe they were aided in this task by the administrations of wartime Hungary and Slovakia. In the region envisaged as the German Lebensraum (living space), Berlin also applied genocidal-like policies to the Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians. Within this larger framework, unilateral mutual ‘cleansings’ dictated by politicized ethnolinguistic difference developed in multiethnic areas, notably, between Poles and Ukrainians, Poles and Jews, Poles and Lithuanians, Slovaks and Jews, Slovaks and Magyars, Slovaks and Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians, Magyars and Romanians, Magyars and Serbs, and between Magyars and Jews. The unprecedented degree of spatial mobility and ethnolinguistic identity malleability achieved by this social engineering in the course of World War II became the basis for the Allies’ decision to create ‘truly homogenous nationstates’ in Central Europe. Germans were expelled from postwar Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Ethnolinguistically motivated population exchanges and expulsions followed among the three states, and between them and their neighbors. The expulsion of Magyars from Czechoslovakia and Romania, and of Slovaks from Hungary stopped after the 1947 Paris Peace Treaties, which made Hungary and Romania, former allies of the Third Reich, into accepted members of the ‘fraternal family of nations’ in the coalescing Soviet bloc. In addition, postwar Czechoslovakia, though a unitary state, it was reconstituted as a home to two ‘brotherly nations’ of Czechs and Slovaks.

894 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

These vagaries of history and politics, and inconsistencies in the application of the principle of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, leave today’s Slovakia as the most ethnolinguistically heterogeneous nation-state in Central Europe. Meˇciar and his proponents saw it as a danger to the Slovak nation and nationhood. Hence, they undertook policies that were to increase the homogeneity of Slovakia, and invariably pushed this state toward authoritarianism. Dzurinda and his followers decided to see Slovakia’s continuing heterogeneity as a positive value, for which they were rewarded. Slovakia became a member of NATO and the European Union in 2004. This saved the state’s faltering geopolitical status in Central Europe and prevented the termination of the suprastandard relations between Slovakia and the Czech Republic, had the former state failed to enter the EU. An end to the Czech-Slovak customs union, and free flow of goods, services, students, and job-seekers across this unusually permeable border would have isolated Slovakia and crippled its economy, which perhaps would have put power into the hands of Meˇciar and the proponents of authoritarian-cum-nationalist regime in Slovakia. Dzurinda’s choice of democracy and multiculturalism was not without its discontents. In 2001, the Hungarian Parliament adopted the institution of ‘Magyar identity card’ for the Magyar minorities in Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Ukraine. Short of granting them Hungarian citizenship, this card enables ethnic Magyars with no Hungarian citizenship to work in Hungary, and their minority organizations (or even families belonging to such organizations) to obtain financial support from the Hungarian state budget. Magyar deputies appealed to Dzurinda to allow this card in Slovakia and threatened to leave the government if he did not. They argued that the institution of the Magyar identity card largely emulated the decisions of the 1997 Slovak Act on expatriate Slovaks. Dzurinda’s administration did not nullify this act, though it was adopted during the last year of Meˇciar’s increasingly authoritarian regime. Unlike the Magyar identity card, the scope of this act is limited to the territory of Slovakia, but it allows for a broad definition of a Slovak, by granting this status to any person whose one grandparent at least was a Slovak. (The Hungarian status law requires applicants to declare their Magyar nationality.) However, before 1918, there were no registers of ethnic Slovaks in Hungary, thus this act deems two affidavits given by two Slovak citizens or two already recognized expatriate Slovaks as sufficient to confirm that one of the applicant’s grandparents was an ethnic Slovak indeed. Furthermore, the status of expatriate Slovak can be granted to applicants living all over the world, except Slovakia, unlike in the case of the Magyar identity card. This card’s benefits are limited to the countries with sizeable Magyar minorities, and whose territories in entirety, or in part, were included within the borders of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary prior to 1918.

The Slovak Nation

895

Under the pressure of these arguments, the Slovak governing coalition eventually passed an appropriate Act in 2003 to permit the issuing and use of Magyar identity cards in Slovakia. This triggered accusations of treason leveled by the opposition headed by Meˇciar. They also alleged that Dzurinda was a Rom, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Ivan Mikloš, a Rusyn, and concluded that not being Slovaks, Dzurinda and Mikloš do not govern Slovakia in the interest of the Slovak nation. This reminded the attempts of Poland’s ethnonational-cum-ultra Catholic opposition to discredit various conservative and social-democratic cabinets by dubbing their numerous members as ‘Jews.’ In 2002, the Hungarian referendum on granting Magyar minorities living abroad Hungarian citizenship was made invalid by too low a turnout of voters, most of whom voted against the proposal. This prevented another nationalistically-motivated crisis in Slovakia. Two years later, the eastward enlargement of the EU largely ‘solved’ the Magyar issue in Slovakia. Slovak citizens, irrespective of their ethnic background can move and work in Hungary, and their Hungarian counterparts in Hungary, and also elsewhere in the Union.16 Commentators noticed that after the breakup of the Dual Monarchy, in regard of ethnolinguistic and national diversity, Czechoslovakia emerged as an AustriaHungary in miniature. The same happened to Slovakia following the ‘velvet divorce.’ This feature also reflects the multilingual, multiethnic, and multinational character of the European Union. Slovak citizens exposed to similar diversity in their everyday life in their own country seem to be better prepared to brave the challenge of the enlarged EU. But in Central Europe, acceptance for and espousal of ethnolinguistic diversity as a positive value is not a foregone conclusion. The Roma remained the largest excluded and stigmatized group of population in the region as elsewhere in Europe. Warsaw clings to the orthodoxy of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, withholding recognition of the Silesians (Szlonzoks) and the Kashubs as national or ethnic minorities. The same course of action Prague follows toward the Moravians and the Silesians (Slunzaks). On the positive side, it seems that Budapest eventually ceased to politicize the Magyar minorities in neighboring states and introduced a very congenial minority rights protection system in Hungary when it endeavored to improve the lot of these Magyar minorities abroad. However, even this achievement is sometimes marred by official lapses into the rhetoric of pre-1918 ‘Great Hungary’ (Assessment 2004; Łodzinski ´ 2005: 94–95; Rolková 2004: 656). In the postcommunist period, Slovak society modernized and changed as its counterparts elsewhere in Central Europe. (The partial exception to this rule of thumb is Poland, where one-third of the population lives in the countryside and one-quarter remains employed in agriculture.) In 2004, 5 percent of the workforce was employed in agriculture, 30.5 percent in manufacturing and construction, and 55.7 percent in services. The emphasis on services and knowledge-based economy entailed a rapid increase in the number of

896 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

university-level students, whose number more than doubled from 67,000 to 142,000 (26,150 per one million inhabitants) between 1993 and 2003. To provide for this staggering educational aspiration, numerous new schools of higher learning were founded. In 2003, there were 26 schools of higher learning (4.8 per one million inhabitants) in Slovakia. In the same year, Poland enjoyed 364 schools of higher learning (9.4 per one million inhabitants), Hungary 104 (10.4 per one million inhabitants), and the Czech Republic 64 (6.25 per one million inhabitants). The number of Slovak students was actually higher than the number given above, because numerous Slovak citizens pursued their university studies at Czech universities, where they enjoy the same rights and privileges as Czechs thanks to the suprastandard relations between Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In Central Europe, Poland naturally produced the highest number of students, who numbered 1.78 million (46,000 per one million inhabitants) in 2003, and was followed by Hungary with 0.33 million students (33,000 per one million inhabitants), and the Czech Republic with 260,000 students (25,400 per one million inhabitants). The best use is made of the highly improved qualifications of the workforce in Hungary and the Czech Republic with 5.8 and 8.9 percent unemployment rate, respectively in 2001. In the same year, this rate topped 19.2 percent in Slovakia, and 18.2 percent in Poland. Understandably, after the 2004 EU enlargement, high unemployment and improved education drove relatively more immigrants from Poland and Slovakia to the United Kingdom17 than from the Czech Republic or Hungary. In November 2005, 138,000 Poles and 31,000 Slovaks found legal employment in the UK. They amounted, respectively, to 58 and 11 percent of all the immigrants from the new member states who registered in Great Britain. After Poles and Lithuanians (40,000), Slovaks constitute the third largest group of immigrants from the new EU member states (Magocsi 2002: 208; Musil 1995: 74; Raport 2005; Rolková 2004: 195, 199, 385). Slovakia’s book production sector stagnated and even temporarily shrank after the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia. Between the late 1980s and 2004, the annual output of book titles in the Czech Republic (that is, the Czech lands prior to 1993) skyrocketed from 4000 to 15,700. In the same period, book production in Slovakia slowly increased from 3000 titles to 4000 in 1996, but plunged to 2500 the following year. The peak of 4500 titles was reached in 1998 and leveled out afterward, oscillating between 3500 and 4000 titles per annum. In 2002, 60 book titles were published per 100,000 inhabitants in Slovakia, which does not compare well with the indicator of 140 titles for the Czech Republic. In the late 1980s, the figures were 40 for the Czech lands and 60 for Slovakia, respectively. Apparently, the privileged status of Slovak-language book production in comparison with its Czech-language counterpart was a result of the ‘affirmative action’ for Slovak language and culture, which set in after 1968 in federalized Czechoslovakia.

The Slovak Nation

897

In 1991, the Czech Republic produced 70 percent of the Czechoslovak GDP and Slovakia 30 percent. Despite the subsequent poorer performance of the Slovak economy after the 1993 ‘velvet divorce,’ the ratio still holds, and the living standard in Slovakia is only slightly lower than in the Czech Republic. Hence, the initial growth in the Czech-language book production stemmed from the termination of this ‘affirmative action,’ at least up to the level of 6000, which ensured the output of 60 titles per 10,000 inhabitants in the Czech Republic. The subsequent growth was possible thanks to the burgeoning Czech economy. On the other hand, consumption of culture per head remained almost equal in both states. Hence, Czech publishers continued to supply for the growing demand in this respect not only in the Czech Republic but also in Slovakia. This made it possible for the explosive growth of Czech-language book production. Paradoxically, after the reaffirming of the unique position of Slovak as state language in Slovakia after 1993, the presence of Czech-language publications in Slovakia did not lessen, but rapidly increased. In Slovakia, most up-todate academic textbooks in technology, natural and social sciences, and most translations of fiction and specialist literature are available in Czech only. The leading Czech dailies and news weeklies are on sale all over Slovakia. Numerous volumes in cheap series of world literature, sold together with the enterprising Slovak newspapers, are too in Czech. Czech-language publications usually make up almost one-third of the stock in Slovak bookshops. The Czech-language newspaper, Hospodárske noviny (Economic News), previously the main economic daily of pre-1993 Czechoslovakia, doubly profits from the continuing traditional Czech-Slovak bilingualism. The newspaper split into two mutations, one entirely Czech-language for the Czech Republic, and the other entirely Slovak-language for Slovakia; however, both are owned by a single company. Hospodárske noviny ranks as the second-largest daily in the latter country. It is practically natural for a Slovak student and average reader to peruse Czech-language publications on everyday basis. This is not true of their Czech counterparts. After 1993, a Slovak-language book is a rare sight in Czech bookshops18 . In a poll conducted in 2003 in the Czech Republic, 80 percent respondents claimed to understand Slovak well, 30 percent maintained they were able to speak in this language, but merely 19 percent admitted to read Slovak-language publications. (These numbers do not take into account the number of Czechs, who are of Slovak origin.) In the late 1980s, the ratio of Czech and Slovak book titles produced per annum was 4 to 3, but by 2004, it changed to 15.7 to 4 to the detriment of the Slovak-language book supply. The penetration of Czech-language publications in Slovakia is the highest in history, whereas the presence of Slovak-language books and periodicals in the Czech Republic is much smaller than before 1993.

898 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The situation is similar in the field of radio, TV, and cinematic production, but not in such a pronounced manner. The 1995 Act on the State Language was as much aimed against the Magyar minority as at preventing the growing presence of the Czech language in Slovakia. Article 5 requires all foreign TV and radio programs broadcast or sold in the form of audio and video cassettes, and DVD discs in Slovakia to be dubbed or subtitled in Slovak. In addition, Article 5.2 allows exclusively dubbing of foreign programs earmarked for children aged 12 or younger. Dubbing and subtitling of Czech programs in Slovakia triggered surprise and barely concealed outrage in the Czech Republic, but it quickly subsided. Although Czechoslovak films, in which Czech and Slovak are often interwoven, are shown in both states without translation, the CzechoSlovak suprastandard bilingualism slowly disappears in the Czech Republic, and it becomes a regular kind of bilingualism in Slovakia. For children born and educated in Slovakia after 1993, Czech is a foreign language, as for their counterparts in the Czech Republic. On the other hand, in Slovakia, Czech is the most important foreign language, followed by English or German. It is not true of Slovak in the Czech Republic, where it is considered to be a minor and hardly a useful tongue, on a par with Slovenian and Danish. Not surprisingly, not a single bilingual dictionary of Slovak was published in the Czech Republic after 1989. There was no demand or political need for such a publication. On the contrary, the disappearance of Czech from political life and schools in Slovakia, accompanied by the growing presence of this language in Slovakia’s mass media market, required compilation of bilingual dictionaries increasingly needed by Slovak users of Czech with little formal knowledge of this language. In 1997, Konštantín Horecký’s short Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdielnych výrazov (Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary of the Words That Are Different in Both Languages, Žilina) came off the press. Seven years later, it was followed by the first full-fledged bilingual dictionary published ˇ after the breakup of Czecho-Slovakia, Cesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský slovník (The Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary, Bratislava) by Tána ˇ Balcová and Štefan Gren. ˇ This dictionary is one of few Slovak books widely distributed in the Czech Republic, which is a sign of growing interest in the common CzechSlovak past. In 2005, the Slovak Academy of Sciences pledged to compile a new authoritative 800-page-long Czech-Slovak dictionary, which is badly needed. But so far, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic has not reciprocated this initiative. Not surprisingly, there is no demand for an authoritative Slovak-Czech dictionary in the Czech Republic. After the initial flurry of activity that secured the unique position of sole official language for Slovak in Slovakia and that banished Czech from official and privileged public use, few resources and attention were extended to research on and the codification of this language. Unlike in interwar Czechoslovakia or communist Czechoslovakia, hardly anybody questions the prevailing codification

The Slovak Nation

899

of Slovak steeped in Peciar’s Czechizing Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (1953), and equally Czechizing Slovník slovenského jazyka (1959–1968). The moderating effect of Ružiˇcka’s 1966 Tézy o slovenˇcine, incorporated into the new reprints of Peciar’s Pravidlá, was seen as sufficient. In 1991, the moderate de-Czechizing changes were incorporated in the new edition of Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (The Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, Bratislava) edited by Ivor Ripka (1937–) and prepared for publication by the Štúr Institute of Linguistics. Updated reprints of this over 500-page-long reference appeared in 1998 and 2000 (Kolesár 2003: 53, 65; Lakatos 2005: 8; Mandys 2005: 91; Okuka 2002: 494; Publishing 2004: 18; Rolková 2004: 373–374). No attempts were immediately undertaken to compile a new authoritative multivolume dictionary of the Slovak language that would replace Peciar’s outdated and controversial reference. Tentatively, the de-Czechizing changes, introduced by the 1991 reform, were incorporated into the third (1997) edition of Kaˇcala and Pisárˇciková’s Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka, whose size almost doubled to 950 pages. At present, this dictionary, in combination with Pravidlá, serves as the touchstone for the correctness of Slovak usage. Between 1991 and 2005, six of the seven planned volumes of Milan Majtán’s (1934–) Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (The Historical Dictionary of the Slovak Language, Bratislava) were published. It covers all the Slavic words that cropped up in manuscripts and publications produced prior to the codification of Bernoláˇctina at the end of the 18th century. In this manner, all this pre-19th-century corpus of Upper Hungary’s Slavophone vocabulary was retroactively claimed as ‘belonging’ to the Slovak language though the concept of Slovak language had not existed at that time. The sole lacuna remaining in Slovak historical lexicography is the first half of the 19th century, bracketed by the codifications of Bernoláˇctina and Štúr’s standard Slovak. So far no dictionary has recorded the vocabulary of this period. Between 1994 and 2005, two volumes of Ferdinand Buffa’s (1926–) Slovník slovenských náreˇcí (The Dictionary of the Slovak Dialects, Bratislava) were printed. This work claims for Slovak all the Slavic vocabulary current in Upper Hungary and recorded on the territory of today’s Slovakia in the 19th and 20th centuries, which have not made it into the lexicon of standard Slovak. Thus, the political-cum-linguistic process of making the national language of Slovakia in its spatial and historical dimensions has almost been completed. This process closely emulated the Central European model of how to construct a national language, standardize it, spread its use among a postulated/realized nation and throughout the nation-state, and project the imagined ‘roots’ of this language back into the past. In Central Europe this political-cum-linguistic construct mirrors and legitimizes the national use of history that focuses on a nation and its postulated/realized nation-state and projects the ‘roots’ of both entities back into the distant past. Alleged continuity and antiquity of national

900 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

statehood, nation, and its language, however tenuous, are eagerly embraced, promoted, and ‘scholarly substantiated.’ This is so because in the 19th and 20th centuries, these qualities were accepted as the ultimate foundation of political legitimacy in Central Europe. In 2001, the publication commenced of the first-ever Slovak authoritative encyclopedia, the 12-volume Encyclopaedia Beliana (Beliana Encyclopedia, Bratislava). When completed as planned in 2012, or a year later, it will give a finishing touch to the Slovak language and nation (in 2005, the encyclopedia’s fourth volume came off the press). In the Central European paradigm of ethnolinguistic nationalism, it will be a sign that the Slovak nation and its language have ‘come of age.’ (Ironically, Slovak Wikipedia, founded in 2003, at 12.6 million words in late 2006, which equates 25 traditional volumes, has already surpassed Encyclopaedia Beliana as the first truly universal encyclopedia in Slovak.) In addition, the Štúr Institute of Linguistics has just finished the preparation of the brand new eight-volume authoritative Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Slovak Language, 2006–, Bratislava), edited by L’ubica Balážová (1953–) and Klára Buzássyová (1938–). The publication of this work began with its first volume in 2006, and if completed according to the plan by 2021, it will have replaced Peciar’s Slovník slovenského jazyka, in line with the slightly de-Czechized norm of contemporary Slovak as set by Ružiˇcka’s 1966 Tézy o slovenˇcine and Ripka’s 1991 Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu. This new authoritative dictionary will also collect the Slovak vocabulary used and created in the second half of the 20th century. At that point, the single, though rather insignificant, deficiency, which the language will suffer in comparison with Czech, Magyar, or Polish, will be the lack of an etymological dictionary of the Slovak language. However, with Czech and Slovak being genetically close languages, Czech dictionaries of this kind can be fruitfully used by Slovak users. Obviously, it may hurt national pride, if one continues to believe that the standardized national language, codified and described by numerous authoritative dictionaries of various kinds, legitimizes the very existence of a nation and its nation-state. The compilers of Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka were clearly aware of this predicament and provided the words collected in this dictionary with etymological tags, which inform the user on from which language a given word is derived. This is of no help with purely Slovak lexemes. It appears that the compilers decided to walk the middle path between the descriptivist approach and the pronounced prescriptivist, read: de-Czechizing agenda, espoused by some Slovak linguists. The latter oppose Bohemianisms currently in use among the Slovaks, and, on the basis of Latin and some obsolete usages, coin neologisms for well-established Slovak words, which they deem to be ‘too Czech.’ As a result, this authoritative dictionary mixes the descriptivist and prescriptivist stance,

The Slovak Nation

901

unlike its Polish counterpart, Halina Zgółkowa’s Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (1994–2005), which assumed a descriptivist approach. Slovak linguists of the prescriptivist persuasion (as a few of their Polish counterparts) still see language as the main instrument of guaranteeing the unity of the nation and its nation-state. However, Slovak and Polish linguists, who follow such a prescriptivist-cum-nationalist urge, have no legal instruments to impose their neologisms and preferred usages on the population at large (unlike their colleagues in France). Hence, in practice, it is people who decide which words enter language and which become obsolete. The danger of walking the middle path is that Balážová and Buzássyová’s work may breach the promise of its title, The Dictionary of the Contemporary Slovak Language, and become, in part, a dictionary of obscure words and neologisms not used in contemporary Slovak. The compilation of the new authoritative Slovak dictionary is much more closely connected to the political needs than it is in the case of any lexicographic works compiled nowadays in the Czech Republic, Hungary, or Poland. On 22 January 2007, the function on the publication of the first volume of Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka was attended, among others, by the head of the Office of the Slovak President, a high-ranking representative of the Ministry of Education, and the chair of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The question of language still remains a significant focus of Slovak politics, which, perhaps should not surprise one when it is remembered that the nation-state gained its internationally recognized independence only in 1993. Apart from the aforesaid, it must be also mentioned that after Zgółkowa’s Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny, Balážová and Buzássyová’s Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka is the second authoritative dictionary of a Central European language edited by women. This is a sign that the position of woman gradually becomes equal to that of man in traditionally strongly patriarchal Central Europe. But it may also mean that because the Central European nation-states, along with their national languages, were already safely established, the dreary task of dealing with the small issues of day-to-day language use and maintenance was gladly passed on to female scholars. Their male colleagues prefer top administrative positions in academia and venture into politics, where there is more pecuniary profit and power for them than in compilation of dictionaries. Prior to 1993, the codification of the Slovak language and its official status were much more precarious and tentative than those of its Central European counterparts, Czech, Magyar, and Polish. The codified standards of all the three languages developed in the 19th century. Magyar has been continuously used as the national and official language of Hungary since 1867. Polish achieved the same political distinction in 1869 in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, and after 1918, in the newly founded Polish nation-state. Czech closely paralleled the political route of Polish. In the early 1880s, it became an official language

902 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Bohemia and Moravia, where it had to share this status with German. After 1918, though in the guise of the Czechoslovak language, Czech was established as the sole official language in the Czech lands, and the de facto official language of entire Czechoslovakia. During World War II, the official status of Polish was limited to the Generalgouvernement, and of Czech to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In the former polity, German and Ukrainian functioned as co-official languages and German in the latter. Slovak emerged as the sole official language of wartime Slovakia. After 1945, the dominance of Czech was re-established in renewed Czechoslovakia, and Polish became the sole official language in postwar Poland. The 1968–1969 federalization of Czechoslovakia, largely made away with the domination of Czech in this state, and allowed Slovak to penetrate into the Czech lands. After 1993, the official position of Slovak is unchallenged in Slovakia, like that of Czech in the Czech Republic. Both languages enjoy the same status in their respective nation-states, like Magyar in Hungary and Polish in Poland. The fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet bloc made it possible to brush aside the imposition of Russian as the preferred foreign language taught at schools in all the four polities. English and German replaced Russian in this role. Meanwhile, the 2004 enlargement of the European Union conferred on Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak the status of the Union’s official languages. (Paradoxically, one can say that Slovak has enjoyed this status at least since 1945 when it became a co-official language in federal Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina.) De jure, they became languages of international communication in the EU. This distinction is of little substance, because it is non-native speakers who, by learning and using a foreign language, make it into a genuine language of international communication. Precious few study Czech, Magyar, Polish, or Slovak. But with the security of the corresponding nation-states guaranteed by NATO, and their economic prosperity by the EU, the existence of all the four languages is as safe and ensured as never before. Sadly, the fortified dominance of these four languages seems to doom dialects, minority, and regional languages to extinction, because Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak political thought has not yet been loosened from its twocenturies-long attachment to the idea that a nation must speak a single national language, and that the nation’s legitimate nation-state must be made ethnolinguistically homogenous by gathering all the speakers of the national language within the polity’s borders, and by assimilating or expelling the speakers of other languages from the nation-state. Unless rejected or modified, this uniquely Central European norm of radical political isomorphism of the national language and the nation-state will hurt the economic and social development of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia in the increasingly multilingual, multicultural, and multiethnic European Union, and in the rapidly globalizing world.

The Slovak Nation

903

Until the founding of semi-independent Hungary in Austria-Hungary (1867) and of Central Europe’s nation-states in the wake of World War I, the inhabitants of this region were either multilingual or frequently experienced the phenomenon of multilingualism in their everyday life. The forced imposition of national languages on the inhabitants of the Central European nation-states weakened this tradition of multilingualism during the interwar period. The definitive end of this tradition came during World War II with multiple genocides, forced assimilation, forced population expulsions, and numerous border changes. The processes commenced with the Anschluβ (annexation) of Austria in 1938, and were largely over in 1950. Their result was the unprecedentedly ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-states of Central Europe. The rise of truly popular literacy in national languages and the speedy development of radio and television facilitated swift liquidation of remaining dialectal difference and pockets with speakers of various minority languages. Ironically, the hailed ‘fathers of nations’ in Central Europe, who dreamed up various nationalisms, which produced the monolingual nation-states in the region, were multilingual themselves. In the 19th century, Magyar and Czech national leaders often spoke better German than their own national languages. That was also true of their Slovak counterparts, who also shared the knowledge of Magyar and Latin with Magyar intellectuals. At the same time, Polish national leaders spoke German if they lived in the Prussian and Austrian partition zones of former Poland-Lithuania, and Russian in Russia’s partition zone. In addition, the aristocracy, and the most aspiring intellectuals and politicians excelled themselves in the command of French until World War II. The social and economic value and need for multilingualism were so acutely felt in the region of Preßburg (Bratislava) that, in the early 19th century, it caused the largely illiterate and uneducated peasants to come up with the uniquely practical system of ‘child exchange.’ Croatian-, German-, Magyar, and Slovakspeaking neighbors exchanged their children among themselves for periods of several weeks to a few months, so that they would acquire the various languages spoken in a village. This system survived well into the interwar period and Magyar parents cultivated it in Slovakia until the 1970s. Nowadays, the largest classical minority, who survived in Central Europe and retained the command of their national language, are the Magyars of Slovakia. Most of them know Slovak, but regretfully few Slovaks acquire Magyar. Observance of human rights and protection of minorities guaranteed by law, along with mastering such languages of international communication as, English, German, French, Russian, or Spanish seem insufficient to foster goodwill and social inclusion in Central Europe. To this end, learning of languages spoken by minorities should become de rigueur as it used to be prior to World War II. The litmus test is how Central Europe’s actual largest minority, Roma, is treated and if their fellow citizens endeavor to learn Romani.

904 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The Roma not having a standardized language, their own nation-state, or a concept of Romani nation for that matter, suffered greatly in the 20th-century Europe of nation-states. But should European integration and globalization transcend nationalism or at least make national borders more permeable, the Roma are best prepared to live and thrive in this post-national, or not exclusively national, era. Versed in the languages of the states and regions where they live, besides their native Romani, they are as multilingual as Central Europeans before 1918. Unfortunately, prejudice and arbitrary administrative measures made Roma into a pariah underclass in Europe. Time will soon show whether Central Europe’s Roma and Slovakia’s Magyar minority become the examples of multilingualism and multiculturalism to be followed and emulated elsewhere in Europe. I hope this chance will not be wasted (Bobrownicka 2003: 115–143; Liszka 1996; Šmihula 2007; SSSJ 2007; Tatarka 1999).

12 Conclusion

[N]ation [. . .] a wonderfully convenient word, since one makes of it whatever one wishes.1 Considerations on France (1796, chapter 4) Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) My old home, the Monarchy [Austria-Hungary], alone, was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for, there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins. ‘The Bust of the Emperor’ (1935) Joseph Roth (1894–1939) [National languages] are all huge systems of vested interests, which sullenly resist critical enquiry. (in Mandelbaum 1963: 118) Edward Sapir (1884–1939) We must give up the mental habit of assuming ‘nations,’ and of ignoring nonnational kinds of politics. We must stop thinking ahistorically. That is an important step toward understanding things as they are and were. Jeremy King (2002: 211)

The Central European languages and nationalisms in the long 19th century By the turn of the 19th century, the Czech, Polish, and Magyar languages had been made into the ideological bases of the corresponding nationalisms. These nationalisms, increasingly steeped in language and culture, soon acquired the garb of ethnicity as their main ideological principle. This development unfolded earliest in the case of Czech and Magyar nationalisms. It was a reaction 905

906 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

against the replacement of universal Latin with ethnically specific German in the Habsburg realms during the second half of the 1780s. In the Czech case, the movement for the revival of chancery Bohemian as a Czech language gradually spawned Czech nationalism during the first decades of the 19th century. Not only was the publication of Josef Jungmann’s five-volume Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (1835–1839), the main milestone in the codification of Czech, but this event also marked the transition from the Czech language movement to the Czech national movement. The backbone of both these trends was Bohemia’s Czech-speaking clergy and intelligentsia of peasant and burgher craftsman background. But it was the largely German-speaking Bohemian nobles who first urged the use of Bohemian (Czech) in publications during the latter half of the 18th century and then protected the language movement and the moderate strain of the national movement up to the mid-19th century. These nobles, as representatives of the Bohemian natio, acted in the name of their region and its population with no national or ethnolinguistic undertones. Their attitude was described as Landespatriotismus, or ‘regional patriotism.’ They could not predict that their support for the codification of the Czech language would split the regional communities of the Bohemians, the Moravians, and the (Austrian) Silesians into increasingly nationally minded Czech- and German-speakers during the second half of the 19th century. Unlike the Czechs, the Magyars were backed by their own state, the Kingdom of Hungary. One would think that in this case, the urge of the predominantly Magyarophone Hungarian natio would not be for language and ethnicity, but for their long-lasting state, reconstituted at the close of the 17th century in the wake of the Habsburgs’ successful wars with the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the example of German nationalism and the influence of Herder’s ideas proved irresistible. After the negative reaction to Vienna’s centralizing reforms and the imposition of German as the sole official language, Latin was reintroduced in Hungary in the early 1790s, but simultaneously Magyar was promoted in the role of the official language. During the 1820s, the political and cultural life of Hungary concentrated in Pest, and at that time, the Magyar language was made into the ethnocultural basis of Magyar noble nationalism. The language reform movement aimed at overhauling Magyar into a ‘modern language,’ which would be able to compete with German and French in all spheres of modern life. This resulted in the radical redefinition of the noble Hungarian natio as the ethnic Magyar nation and of the Kingdom of Hungary as the Magyar nation-state. Paradoxically, the notion of the Magyar nation was both more inclusive and more exclusive than its predecessor, the Hungarian natio. On the one hand, this novel ethnic concept reached outside the closed estate of the nobility to the Magyarophone peasantry, but on the other hand, it shut out Hungary’s nonMagyar-speaking population, thereby excluding it from the commonality of the Magyar nation.

Conclusion

907

In 1836, Magyar became the official language in Hungary and 8 years later, it finally replaced Latin in the Hungarian Diet. The 1840s saw the coalescence of an ethnic Magyar nation that transcended the traditional estates cleavages. The confrontation between the Magyars and Hungary’s non-Magyar-speakers in the course of the Hungarian War of Independence (1848–1849) provided the Magyar national movement with the enduring myth and point of historical reference, despite the Germanization that (during the 1850s) set in as Vienna’s reaction to Magyar separatist aspirations. As in Hungary, Poland-Lithuania’s political class was constituted from the noble natio. The difference was that Hungary, in spite of the separation of Transylvania and the special status of Croatia, was imagined as a unitary state. From its inception at the end of the 14th century, Poland-Lithuania had been a dual polity. Unlike chancery Bohemian or chancery Magyar, the Polish language had been in continuous official use since the 16th century. It had two serious competitors, Latin and Ruthenian, written in Cyrillic, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At the end of the 17th century, Ruthenian was phased out in the grand duchy as Polish became the sole official language with Latin in the role of an auxiliary language. At the same time, in the Kingdom of Poland, Latin dominated in education and legal documents, if not in grassroots politics. The final switch to Polish occurred in 1773 when this language superseded Latin in the reformed educational system. By default, Latin disappeared from politics and legal documents, although it was a gradual process completed at the beginning of the 1790s. Thus, during the last three decades of the 18th century, Polish became the only official language of Poland-Lithuania. At the same time, the territory of this commonwealth was seriously curtailed in the course of the two partitions in 1772 and 1793. Hence, the reforms were never applied in the areas seized by Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the first partition. The second partition limited the full thrust of these reforms to the remaining rump of Poland-Lithuania. However, the system complete with Polish as the medium of education, and Polishlanguage administration survived in Russia’s partition zone until the early 1830s. At the beginning of the 19th century, in the Russian Empire, there were more people literate in Polish (and in German in the empire’s Baltic provinces) than in fledgling Russian. Rump Poland-Lithuania, eventually erased from the map in 1795, was recreated in 1807 as the French Protectorate of Duchy of Warsaw (Duché de Varsovie) under the rule of the Saxonian monarch, which entailed the use of French and German, alongside Polish, in administration. After 1815, the duchy (less Wielkopolska) was transformed into the (Congress) Kingdom of Poland under the Russian tsar’s control, and the Free City of Cracow under the protection of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. In both polities, Polish was preserved as the official language and the medium of education.

908 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The reaction to the liquidation of Poland-Lithuania and the spread of nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars fostered the development of the Polish national movement. Apart from some minor points, after the publication of Samuel Bogumił Linde’s six-volume Słownika je˛zyka polskiego (1807–1815), the question of the modernization and standardization of the Polish language was largely settled. The Polish-Lithuanian natio took this language as its main ideological badge in the absence of its state, and redefined itself as the ‘Polish nation.’ Unlike in the Magyar case, only the erstwhile Polish-Lithuanian natio constituted this Polish nation. Here, speaking Polish was not enough. First, the Polish-speaking peasantry, who by definition did not belong to any estate, was not included in this Polish nation, which was just another name for the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. Secondly, burghers, who were a relatively weak group and did not constitute a unified estate in Poland-Lithuania, were more often than not excluded from the fold of the Polish nation. Most burghers had a working command of Polish but this was not enough to include them in the nation, as they were predominantly of Jewish and German-speaking origin. This meant that they professed Judaism and Lutheranism, respectively, which placed them outside the Polish nation, so intimately connected to Catholicism from the mid-17th century. Thirdly, the ethnolinguistically non-Polish Greek Catholic and Orthodox nobles of the Grand Duchy and Galicia, and Lutheran merchants of Royal Prussia often spoke Polish, but usually acquired it as their second language. The command of Polish helped but their status as part of the Polish-Lithuanian estates was decisive when members of these groups wished to be included in the novel political entity of the Polish nation. Conversion to Catholicism, however, was increasingly required. The ideological conflation of language, nobility, and to a degree, Catholicism, accounted for the failures of the anti-Russian uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864, staged by PolishLithuanian nobles. They were joined by a handful of burghers and Jewish artisans, but peasants shunned these ‘wars of lords.’ Simultaneously, continued avoidance of a clearly drawn ethnolinguistic definition of the Polish nation allowed for the inclusion of ethnically Lithuanian and Ruthenian (today interpreted as Belarusian and Ukrainian) nobility and intelligentsia in the ranks of the Polish national movement. It was better, however, if they spoke some Polish, or, with time, acquired this language, especially in the second half of the 19th century. Lithuanian-speaking nobles invariably professed Catholicism, which accounted for a stronger bond with the Polish nation than in the case of their Ruthenian counterparts, whose overwhelming majority belonged to the Greek Catholic Church. At the turn of the 19th century, Orthodoxy as a minor faith of the Ruthenian-speaking peasantry did not feature in this equation. The successes of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and the German Empire (1871), founded as nation-states for the ethnically construed nations of the Italians and the Germans, as well as the increasing force of various ethnic nationalisms

Conclusion

909

in Austria-Hungary tipped the balance in favor of nationalism as a significant ideology of power legitimization. In the 1880s, the Lithuanian and Ukrainian ethnonational movements came into being and in the following decade, Polish ethnonationalism finally superseded the tradition of Polish noble nationalism, then deemed obsolete. The idea of ethnolinguistically-defined nationalism took longer to spread within the Russian Empire. First, the ideology of Russian imperialism based on the Orthodox Church hindered the rise of Russian ethnolinguistic nationalism. In the last four decades of the 19th century, however, the Russian language and Cyrillic became more important than Orthodoxy in this ideological package. In emulation of the language policies pursued in the German Empire (founded in 1871), St Petersburg sought to impose Russian as the sole language of administration and education in the Russian Empire, hoping to overhaul the polity’s ethnolinguistically and religiously variegated inhabitants into an exclusively Russian-speaking and preferably Orthodox Russian nation, headed by the political-cum-religious figurehead of Tsar. The revolution of 1905 thwarted this process, allowing for reaffirming linguistic and religious differences in the empire, thus making it in this respect more similar to de facto and de jure multiethnic and multilingual Austria-Hungary than the officially ethnolinguistically homogenous German Empire. Likewise, in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution (1917), communism, not nationalism, legitimized the creation of the utopian classless proletarian society in the Soviet Union, a successor to the Russian Empire. The tension arose between the aspirations of Polish ethnic nationalists, who wished to turn the territory of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania into an ethnic Polish nation-state, and the non-Polish ethnolinguistic national movements, which had already emerged in this area at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Belarusian national movement joined its Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts. A similar tension between Magyar nationalism and non-Magyar national movements, which coalesced on the territory of historic Hungary, the Magyars felt much earlier and even more painfully. In 1849, when Vienna, with the Russian aid, suppressed the Magyar bid for independence, these non-Magyar national movements came to the succor of the Austrian emperor, who promised them a modicum of cultural and linguistic autonomy. The gradual return of Magyar as the official language in Hungary during the 1860s was the first step to the 1867 Ausgleich that transformed the Austrian Empire into dual Austria-Hungary. Only then, was the Magyar language finally codified with Gergely István Czuczor and János Fogarasi’s authoritative six-volume A magyar nyelv szótára (1862–1874). With this lexicographic instrument and full autonomy, there was no check left that could mitigate the Hungarian government’s policy of Magyarization. As the Magyarization pressure increased in the 1890s and 1900s, however, the non-Magyar national movements mobilized to develop

910 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

their languages and organizational life, and began to cooperate with one another. The case of Slovak nationalism is quite different from the Magyar and Polish national movements that credibly stemmed from their well-established traditions of continuous statehood. The Hungarian state had been immersed in the Habsburgs’ realms since the 16th century, but gained much autonomy as of 1867, while its Poland-Lithuanian counterpart was of quite precarious and checkered character between 1775 and 1918. Even Czech nationalists conflated the statehood tradition of the lands of the Czech Crown with their ethnolinguistic nationalism, despite the fact that since the 10th century the Czech lands had been continuously immersed in the Holy Roman Empire, and then in the Austrian Empire, the German Confederation, and Austria-Hungary. Out of present-day Central Europe’s recognized nations only the Slovaks could not claim a well-defined tradition of statehood. Thus, they had anachronistically to imagine Greater Moravia as ‘their’ state to legitimize the Slovak national movement in the eyes of their neighbors and Western Europe. In reality, there was no people going by the name of Slovaks prior to the 19th century. Upper Hungary’s Slavophone population had not known any other state but Hungary from the 10th century to 1918. They had no memory of Greater Moravia, which was inculcated in the Slovaks only through the Slovak national movement and the Slovak-language schools. There was also no pressure to grant this population any specific rights because, until the beginning of the 19th century, it was composed of insulated peasant communities, which did not express any awareness of belonging to a regional group, or, let alone, a nation. As peasants and shepherds, they stuck to their villages and valleys and to their Catholic and Protestant parishes, while on a broader plane they expressed their unwavering loyalty to their faith and the emperor who simultaneously served as the king of Hungary. This stasis unraveled when Magyar replaced Latin as the official language and the Magyar nation gradually replaced the old estate social structure. At that time, only Magyarophone noblemen and German-speaking burghers received education and held positions of power. Slovaks were confined to their villages, apart from Protestant and Catholic clergymen who stemmed from their ranks. Equally versed in Latin, German, Magyar, and Bohemian (Czech), Catholic priests and Protestant pastors functioned as a conduit for the spread of nationalism among the Slovaks. Until the mid-19th century, religion predominated in its ideological role among the Slovaks. Protestants who formed some 15 percent of Upper Hungary’s inhabitants cherished their links with Bohemia that dated back to the 1620s when, in the wake of religious warfare, many Bohemian Protestants left for more tolerant Hungary. These Protestant refugees from

Conclusion

911

Bohemia brought along their language, Bohemian, modeled on the language of the late 16th-century Kralice Bible. They called their language Bibliˇctina, or the Biblical Language, thus honoring this Protestant translation of the Bible. The partial replacement of universal Latin with German and Magyar at the end of the 18th century encouraged more book production in Bibliˇctina. The Catholic hierarchy also recognized the need to supply their Slavophone faithful with religious books in a language intelligible to the latter. Obviously, Catholic priests shunned Bibliˇctina as a ‘Protestant language,’ and linked historically to ‘Bohemian heretics.’ Father Anton Bernolák codified a new language based on the Slavophone vernacular of Preßburg and its vicinity. He devoted most of his life to the compilation of the six-volume dictionary, ˇ ˇ Slowár Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoNemecko-Uherski, seu Lexicon Slavicum BohemicoLatino-Germanico-Ungaricum (1825–1827). In this dictionary’s bilingual title, Bernolák called the newly codified language interchangeably ‘Slovak,’ ‘Slavic,’ and ‘Czech.’ He and his followers never settled for any specific name, hence one refers to this language nowadays as Bernoláˇctina, or Bernolák’s language. Although this dictionary was produced shortly after Linde’s Słownika je˛zyka polskiego and a decade earlier than Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký, it did not directly contribute to the codification of the Slovak language. Until the mid-19th century, only slightly more than 300 books (mostly religious) were published in Bernoláˇctina. Protestants replied with Juraj Palkoviˇc’s two-volume dictionary of Bibliˇctina, Böhmisch-deutsch-lateinisches Wörterbuch mit Beyfügung der den Slowaken und Mähren eigenen Ausdrücke und Redensarten (1820–1821), and a widening array of books and periodicals on non-religious issues produced in this language. Palkoviˇc called this language Bohemian (Czech), and considered the Slavicspeakers of the Czech lands and Upper Hungary a single people. This contributed to the development of Czechoslovakism. The Slovak Pastor L’udovít Štúr and his colleagues decided to reaffirm separateness of the Slovak language vis-à-vis Czech in the 1840s. Štúr based this language on the Slavic dialect of what today is central Slovakia. His codification is known under the name of Štúrovˇcina, or Štúr’s language. Single-handedly Štúr and his friends overhauled what had been the Protestant Czechoslovak language movement into the Slovak national movement in the latter half of the 1840s. As a reaction to Magyarization, the coalescence of Slovak nationalism was carried out mainly against Magyar nationalism. It was mostly a Protestant affair, as Catholics did not accept Štúrovˇcina and refrained from participating in the Slovak national movement. In 1852, Catholics and Protestants accepted Martin Hattala’s synthesis of Štúrovˇcina with elements of Bernoláˇctina as the Slovak language, which obtains to this day. The language question largely settled, the 1861 Slovak rally adopted the

912 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Memorandum of the Slovak Nation where, for the first time, Slovakia was defined as a specific geographic-cum-administrative region, based on the argument that mostly Slovaks lived in this area. In the mid-1870s, Budapest forcefully closed the cultural institutions and the secondary schools, which the Slovak national movement had founded a decade earlier. During the 1880s, Slovak political and cultural life came to a standstill under the Magyarizing pressure. Quite contrary to this trend, this decade marked unprecedented advances for the use of the Czech language in Bohemia and Moravia. Even under the strongest pressure of Vienna’s Germanizing policies, the network of Czech-language elementary schools, inherited from the 18th century, had never been phased out. At the beginning of the 19th century, Bohemian/Czech entered secondary schools in Bohemia, Moravia and even Upper Hungary as an auxiliary language. Secondary education in this language (as well as in Polish) developed in Austrian Silesia only beginning in the 1880s. Also at the beginning of the 19th century, the network of Czech-language cultural institutions came into being and some knowledge of Czech was demanded of civil servants and officers in law courts employed in Bohemia and Moravia. This process speeded up in the second half of the 19th century. In the 1880s, the Czech language achieved parity with German in social, cultural and political life of Bohemia and Moravia complete with the emergence of the university-level educational institutions where Czech was used as the medium of instruction. Quite on the contrary, German remained unrivalled in Austrian Silesia, where, at the beginning of the 20th century, the use of Czech and Polish was allowed only in local self-government. Bohemia’s Czechs bore a grudge against Vienna because it did not allow them Hungarian-style autonomy, which Czech politicians sought but failed to obtain at the end of the 1860s. Instead of risking losing the support of the Magyars, had the Dual Monarchy been transformed into a triple Austro-Hungaro-Czechia, Vienna conceded regional cultural and linguistic autonomy to Galician Poles. This permitted the preservation of the overall structure of Austria-Hungary as it was, thanks to the unwavering support lent by Galicia’s Poles. The prize of autonomy, complete with the status of official language for Polish in the Crown land of Galicia, came to the region’s Poles without much effort on their part. Their gaze was set on a distant and, at that time, utterly unrealistic prospect of uniting the three partition zones of Poland-Lithuania into a Polish nation-state. Thus, it was safe for Vienna to grant Poles more rights in order to ensure that the empire remained governable, despite the Czech obstructive opposition. A similar autonomy was denied to the Czechs until 1918, because unlike Poles they would have used it to build their own nation-state within the monarchy. Furthermore, the wishes of the German-speaking part of Bohemia’s and Moravia’s populaces not to de-Germanize their regions could not be utterly disregarded either, in the interest of Czech national demands. With the rise of various ethnic

Conclusion

913

national movements in the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, German-speakers remained as Vienna’s most steadfast mass political base. Their political demands for unification of the Czech lands within AustriaHungary continually rejected, the Czech national movement started projecting its newly found cultural force into Upper Hungary in the 1890s. Protestant Slovak students attending the Czech-language Prague University formed the conduit thanks to which Czechoslovakism was renewed. Catholic Slovaks spawned their first leader Andrej Hlinka only at the beginning of the 20th century. He went alongside this Czech-Slovak cooperation spearheaded by Slovak Protestants until 1913. Then he opted for a more clearly defined Slovak option and commenced the mass Catholic Slovak political movement destined to take over the leadership of Slovak nationalism in interwar Czechoslovakia. Only then did Slovak gain the status of an official language for the first time in history. In spite of this fact, the first authoritative dictionary of the Slovak language, Štefan Peciar’s six volumes of Slovník slovenského jazyka (1959–1968) were published well after World War II. Perhaps that was due to the unspoken primus inter pares status of Czech in Czechoslovakia. Also, for the first time in history, this language enjoyed the status of the only official language in the Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia. The complication was that Czechoslovakism remained the official national ideology. This entailed proclamation of the Czechoslovaks as Czechoslovakia’s nation who spoke Czechoslovak as their national language. The fine point was that this language came in two varieties, Czech and Slovak. Usually, it was Czech not Slovak, very often so even in Slovakia. This official coupling of both the languages under the umbrella of official Czechoslovak not only did stunt the lexicographic development of Slovak, but also that of Czech. The eight volumes of the first modern monolingual and authoritative dictionary of the Czech language, Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského, were published rather late, namely between 1935 and 1957. Until that time, users of the Czech language had had at their disposal Jungmann’s old-fashioned Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký and ˇ the seven volumes of Štepan František Kott’s still bilingual seven-volume Ceskonˇemecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (1878–1893). Meanwhile, the Hungarians enjoyed Czuczor and Fogarasi’s authoritative A magyar nyelv szótára, while the Poles, after the second improved edition of Linde’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (1854–1860), obtained the eight volumes of Jan Karłowicz’s modern monolingual and authoritative Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (1900–1927). After the partitions, Polish remained the language of administration and education in the Russian zone of Poland-Lithuania, while German was introduced in the Prussian section and Latin in the Austrian one. Obviously, German replaced Latin in this Polish-Lithuanian nook of the Habsburg lands after 1784. In 1807, 12 years after the final partition Polish regained its official status in the Duchy of Warsaw. After the Congress of Vienna (1815), Polish remained the official

914 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

language in the (Congress) Kingdom of Poland and in the Free City of Cracow. Following the anti-Russian 1830–1831 uprising, Russian replaced Polish as the language of administration in Russia’s section of Poland-Lithuania except the Kingdom of Poland. The same process was repeated in the kingdom (renamed as the Vistula Land) in the aftermath of the 1863–1864 anti-Russian uprising. In 1846, in the wake of the attempted anti-Austrian uprising in the Free City of Cracow and in the Austria’s zone of Poland-Lithuania, German replaced Polish in the republic. Afterward, following the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, Vienna balanced the Czechs’ staunch opposition to this new arrangement through granting wide-ranging linguistic, cultural and political autonomy in Galicia. Polish replaced German as the official language of this crownland in 1869. In 1854, Russian replaced Polish in the educational system in Russia’s partition zone of Poland-Lithuania except for the Congress Kingdom. In 1885, the same measure was applied to the kingdom’s schools. The tentative status of auxiliary language for Polish in Prussia’s partition zone of Poland-Lithuania, introduced in 1848, was scrapped in 1876 when German was announced the sole official language of the German Empire. Less than two decades later, in 1894, Polish was abolished from the educational system in this region. Hence, Galicia functioned as the sole preserve of the Polish language in offices and education at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the following century. Moreover, this crown land being an ersatz Polish nation-state, the modernization of this language took place in Galicia. During World War I, the official and semi-official use of Polish was extended by the joint Austro-Hungarian and German occupation administration to the Vistula Land seized from Russia. The German occupation administration applied a similar policy in the Land Ober Ost, that is, the rest of Russia’s partition zone of Poland-Lithuania. Yet, German was the main language of administration in the Land Ober Ost, while Polish, though usually primus inter pares in the context of the local languages, shared its semi-official status with White Ruthenian (Belarusian, encouraged by the German administration to be written in Latin letters), Estonian, Latvian, and Yiddish. German was also more important than Polish in the occupied Vistula Land until 1916 when Berlin and Vienna proclaimed the foundation of the (Regency) Kingdom of Poland (Regentschaftskönigreich Polen) on this territory, directly referring to the pre-1864 tradition of Russia’s Congress Kingdom of Poland. In sum, apart from German, Polish was the only Central European language that, between the end of the Middle Ages and 1918, enjoyed continuous official and administrative use since its emergence as a chancery language in the 16th century. After the final partition of Poland-Lithuania (1795), this continuity was quite checkered, ‘jumping’ from one region of partitioned Poland-Lithuania to another. A slight discontinuity occurred between the mid-1860s, when Russian superseded Polish in its official function in the Kingdom of Congress Poland

Conclusion

915

turned Vistula Land and with the introduction of Polish as Galicia’s official language in 1869. Except for chancery German, Bohemian (Czech) is a Central European language with the oldest tradition of literacy, which dates back to the 14th and 15th centuries. Until the 16th century, along chancery German and Latin, it had functioned as a language of diplomacy and inter-group communication in the Slavophone areas of Central Europe. During the 1620s, following the Catholic victory, Hussite Bohemia declined as the center of Bohemian-language culture. Chancery Polish took over Bohemian in its international capacity (apart from the Slavic-speaking territories, this language was used for diplomatic and written purposes also in Moldavia and Walachia), while chancery German, side by side with Latin, became the official language in the lands of the Czech crown. Although literacy in chancery Bohemian was never extinguished (as often but wrongly believed), it was limited to a trickle of publications in the 18th century. Bohemian was reinvented as modern Czech at the end of this century and at the beginning of the 19th century. From Prague, as the center of this revival, Czech spread all over Bohemia and later to Moravia, among the Slavophone Protestants in Upper Hungary, and eventually to Austrian Silesia. At the beginning of the 1880s, along German, Czech became a virtually co-official language in Bohemia and Moravia. This development was not repeated in Austrian Silesia, where German remained the crownland’s sole official language until 1918. Czech achieved the status of the only official language of the Czech lands only in 1918, and even then in the mitigating overlay of Czechoslovakia’s official Czechoslovak language. Written Hungarian (Magyar) made an appearance at the end of the 16th century, but it never replaced Latin as the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary. The partition of Hungary between the Habsburgs’ Royal Hungary, Ottoman Hungary, and the Ottomans’ fief of Transylvania lasted from the mid16th century to the end of the 17th century. Besides fossilizing the traditional linguistic situation characterized by the dominance of official Latin, the partition entailed the gradual introduction of new administrative languages in the Hungarian lands. In Royal Hungary chancery German made inroads, in southern Hungary directly incorporated into the Ottoman Empire it was Ottoman (Old Turkish) that functioned as the main administrative language, while in Transylvania chancery German spread in towns. Magyar made a comeback in the 1730s as a written language when Magyar-language publications accounted for 27 percent of Hungary’s book production. The percentages for Latin and German prints were 69 and 16 percent, respectively. The 1770s saw the initial inklings of the thought that Magyar should be made into a modern language on par with German or French. The 1784 introduction of German as the sole official language in the Habsburg lands evoked a backlash

916 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

against this measure duly revoked at the beginning of the 1790s. The reaction fortified the position of Latin as the only official language in the Kingdom of Hungary and launched the language reform movement that, by the 1820s, produced modern Magyar. At the same time, the role of German strengthened in Hungary’s towns usually inhabited by German-speaking burghers. In Hungary, Latin survived the longest in its capacity of an official language. Magyar replaced it in 1836, while Latin continued as the language of the Hungarian Diet till 1844. Five years later, in the wake of the Hungarian defeat in the War of Independence, German superseded Magyar as the official language. In 1860, Magyar returned as the official language of Hungary, and its status became unrivalled with the 1867 foundation of Austria-Hungary, when the Magyars obtained their nation-state. Since then on, there has been no discontinuity in the official status of Magyar. However, after the severe truncation of Hungary in the wake of World War I, the geographic extent where Magyar functioned as an official language shrank accordingly. Slovak emerged as a codified language in the mid-19th century. Unlike Czech, Polish, or Bohemian, it did not have any tradition of early literacy to fall back on, unless one chose to interpret the use of chancery Bohemian in Upper Hungary’s documents and publications as such tradition. In this respect, Slovak shares more features with such Central European languages as Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian. All of them were imagined as separate languages and standardized in the second half of the 19th century or at the beginning of the following century. Slovak was made into a medium of elementary and secondary education for Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Catholics and Protestants during the 1860s. In the following decade, this language was ejected from secondary schools, and by 1918, the process had been almost completely repeated in the case of elementary education. In 1918, Slovak obtained the status of an official language in Czechoslovakia’s Slovakia, but Czech tended to dominate in this polity in the guise of the official Czechoslovak language. For the first time, Slovak became the sole official language in its own right only in wartime independent Slovakia (1939–1945). After 1945, the traditional dominance of Czech was re-established in postwar Czechoslovakia, so Slovak regained its status of a full-fledged official language when again, in 1993, Slovakia emerged as an independent state. Apart from investigating the changes in the official status of the four Central European languages in the long 19th century, it is interesting to have a cursory comparative look at how well they were prepared to face the demands of modernity when a plethora of ethnic nation-states replaced the empires in Central Europe. By 1918, Czech, Magyar, and Polish had been fully standardized. The grammars of all these three languages were standardized and amply described in scholarly works and textbooks, while the same was done for the three languages’ lexicons thanks to the multi-volume authoritative dictionaries. In the

Conclusion

917

latter aspect though, only users of Magyar and Polish had at their disposal modern monolingual authoritative dictionaries (Linde’s Słownika je˛zyka polskiego and Czuczor and Fogarasi’s A magyar nyelv szótára, respectively). Czech-speakers had to rely on an old fashioned bilingual Czech-German authoritative dictionary of their language, Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký, or its more recent update, ˇ Kott’s Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický. From other kinds of monolingual dictionaries significant for the development and description of a language’s vocabulary, Magyar-speakers enjoyed exhaustive multi-volume historical, etymological, and dialectal dictionaries of the Magyar language (Gábor Szarvas and Zsigmond Simonyi’s Magyar nyelvtörténeti szótár, Zoltán Gombocz and János Melich’s Magyar etymológiai szótár, and József Szinnyei’s Magyar tájszótár). In addition, the Magyars were provided with two universal encyclopedias (Egyetemes Magyar enciklopédia and A Pallas nagy lexikona) and a dictionary that gathered the new words introduced to Magyar in the course of the 19th-century language reform (Kálmán Szily’s A Magyar nyelvújítás szótára). Also, a normative periodical devoted to the cultivation of Magyar, Magyar Nyelv˝ or, began to be published. Polish-speakers lacked any authoritative historical or etymological dictionaries of their language. However, they had at their disposal an authoritative and multi-volume dictionary of the Polish dialects ( Jan Karłowicz’s Słownik gwar polskich) as well as two universal encyclopedias (Encyklopedyja powszechna and the never completed Wielka encyklopedyja powszechna ilustrowana), and a normative periodical devoted to the Polish language ( Je˛zyk Polski). In the absence of any modern authoritative monolingual dictionary of their language, Czech-speakers had to rely on a multi-volume authoritative ˇ Czech-German phraseological dictionary, Kott’s Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický. No authoritative etymological or dialectal dictionaries of the Czech language were published in this period, while the publication of a multi-volume historical dictionary, Jan Gebauer’s Slovník staroˇceský, was terminated mid-way due to World War I. Moreover, users of Czech could refer to two Czech-language universal encyclopedias (Slovník nauˇcný and Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný) and to a normative periodical on their language (Naše ˇreˇc). Prior to 1918, Slovak-speakers did not have at their disposal any kind of a monolingual authoritative dictionary of their language, let alone Slovakophone encyclopedias or a normative periodical devoted to the cultivation of their language. Between the two World Wars, users of Slovak obtained a short, yet hardly universal, three-volume encyclopedia; a normative periodical on their language, and an extensive but single-volume phraseological dictionary of the Slovak language. Only in communist Czechoslovakia, during the 1960s, the first authoritative and multi-volume monolingual dictionary of Slovak was published. A historical dictionary of Slovak and the first truly universal

918 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Slovak-language encyclopedia began to be published at the beginning of the 1990s, after the fall of communism. Hence, in 1918, Magyar was the best researched, described, and developed of the four Central European languages, which I analyzed in this study. Interestingly, it seems that after the founding of the nation-states in Central Europe, the important role of language as an ideological instrument that co-created and defined a nation lessened. So far, no authoritative dialectal or etymological dictionaries of Czech and Slovak have been published. In 1953, the publication of a historical dictionary of Polish commenced and the work on a historical dictionary of the Czech language was resumed in 1968. The publication of a three-volume etymological dictionary of the Polish language began only in 2000. A curious aspect observed in the codification and development of the four Central European languages before 1918 is the conspicuous absence of women in this process. This indicates the long-lasting patriarchal characteristic of societies in this region of Europe. Before the end of World War I, universal and equal male suffrage had not been introduced either in the Russian Empire or the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. All male citizens enjoyed this privilege in the German Empire and the Austrian section of the Dual Monarchy introduced beginning in 1871 and 1907, respectively. The right to vote was extended to women only in the new post-1918 nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Being barred from politics, women were not allowed to dabble in such a ‘holy’ (to male nationalists) project as codification of the national language. They were grudgingly tolerated among the ranks of national writers and poets, but even in this field, males were most hailed. Let us only enumerate Sándor Petöfi and Adam Mickiewicz, the revered national poets of the Magyars and the Poles, respectively. Among the Slovaks, no clear-cut figure of a national poet emerged, but a similar position is traditionally accorded to L’udovít Štúr, though some would argue that Pavol Országh-Hviezdoslav should be recognized as the Slovak national poet. Similarly, lacking any distinctive national poet, the Czechs filled this position with the two towering writers-cum-scholars-turned-politicians, namely František Palacký and Tomaš Garrigue Masaryk. When Czechoslovakism was all the rage, the 17th-century Protestant thinker and author, Jan Ámos Komenský, functioned as the top national writer and intellectual of the Czechoslovak nation. Atypically though, the fame as the most renowned 19thcentury Czech-language writer was shared by the woman, Božena Nˇemcova (1820–1862), and the man, Jan Neruda (1834–1891). Nˇemcova is featured on the present-day 500 Czech crown banknote, Palacký on the 1000 Czech crown banknote, and Masaryk on the 5000 Czech crown banknote. No woman is depicted today on Hungarian, Polish, or Slovak banknotes that bear images of monarchs and other historical figures, including saints, politicians, scholars, and national activists. A partial exception to this rule of

Conclusion

919

thumb is the Slovak 100-crown banknote with the Madonna from the altar in St Jacob’s Church at Levoˇca. Yet, this is rather a reflection of the widespread Central European Catholic cult of Holy Virgin Mary than of any significant participation of women in the region’s politics, culture, or economy. Interestingly, she is the patron saint of Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. As in the case of the banknote with Nˇemcova, the Czech Republic does not fit the pattern with its male patron saint, St Wenceslaus, a 10th-century duke of Bohemia. In Hungary, St Stephan, the Hungarian monarch who Christianized his realm in 1000 or 1001, sometimes is posed as a more significant patron saint than Holy Virgin Mary.

The languages and nation-states of Central Europe in the short 20th century The creation of the small ethnolinguistic nation-states of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in 1918 was a chance occurrence, precipitated by the partition of Austria-Hungary and the severe territorial curtailment of the German and Russian empires. It was not a defeat of the Central Powers that triggered the subsequent border changes, because neither Austria-Hungary nor the German Empire was defeated in the military sense of this word. Much more decisive in this respect was unprecedented social and political instability caused by the economic near-collapse of the Central Powers and the westward spread of communism in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The politicization of the masses that followed precluded the recreation of the political and social status quo ante as it had been before 1914. The divine legitimization of royal power suddenly seemed hopelessly outdated, more than a century after the French Revolution, which had commenced the era of secular ideologies in Western Europe and the Americas. During the Great War, the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation forces in the East banned the Russian language and encouraged local ethnolinguistic national movements, hoping that it would make it possible to ensure the movements’ loyalty to the new power centers in Berlin and Vienna. After the 1867 Ausgleich, the Austrian authorities had extended a similar policy of toleration to various ethnolinguistic national movements, especially in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy; and St Petersburg had had no choice but to follow the same path after the 1905 Revolution. Only in the German Empire, Berlin managed to keep the course toward predicted final ethnolinguistic homogeneity, but the definite outlines of this goal were lost during the war when the policy of antiRussian multilingualism was introduced in the occupied territories in the east and when German and Austro-Hungarian administrators actually encouraged the development of fledgling national movements. The occupation administrations hoped that in this manner, the western regions of the Russian Empire

920 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

would be turned into a buffer zone between this empire and the Central Powers, a zone that would be permanently included in a Germanic Mitteleuropa (Central Europe), imagined as the Central Powers’ common sphere of political and economic influence. At the turn of the 20th century, the workers’ (social democratic, marxist) movement emerged as an important political trend in the western half of Central Europe. Most significantly, Lenin, among communist thinkers, opined that this movement, allied with peasantry, would soon sweep across the overwhelmingly rural eastern section of this region into Russia, which would lead to a worldwide communist revolution. Austro-Marxists, with their attention focused on Austria-Hungary and Western Europe, disagreed. Already at the close of the 19th century, they noted that socialism would not triumph single-handedly and that the workers’ movement would have to strike ideological compromises with various national movements. The process began prior to World War I, when socialist and social democratic parties either split along national lines or created national sections within their folds. Having noticed this phenomenon, Lenin sent young Stalin on a study trip to Austria-Hungary. In late 1912 and early 1913, Stalin sojourned in Cracow and Vienna, where he wrote his seminal essay, ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913), in which he married nationalism with communism. Stalin proposed that on the way to the global victory of communism, the ‘national particularities’ would have to be first taken into consideration, before the time was ripe for the emergence of a worldwide classless communist society. Between 1917 and 1923, in the capacity of the People’s Commissar of Nationalities Affairs, Stalin oversaw the action of transforming Russia into a Soviet Union consisting of ethnolinguistically defined union republics. In line with marxist determinism, Soviet scholars believed that it was sufficient to send research expeditions across the Soviet Union in order to find where and how many nations lived in the polity. In Soviet terminology, they were referred to as ‘nationalities’ (narodnosti), which was a direct translation of the German term Nationalität. The Austro-Hungarian administration used this term to avoid speaking of ‘nations’ (Völker, Nationen), because by definition nations had the right to their own nation-states, while this was not true of nationalities, which had to contend themselves with autonomy. With hindsight, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Kremlin was involved in the vast process of nation-building in emulation of Central Europe’s ethnolinguistic paradigm. Each recognized nationality was granted its own written language, and a system of education with this language as the medium of instruction, complete with the press and book industry publishing in this language. The most significant nationalities obtained their own national union republics and autonomous republics, provinces, districts, villages, and kolkhozes were earmarked for others. This ‘national form’ was to be subservient to the ‘communist essence’ of the Soviet system on the road to

Conclusion

921

communism. In the latter half of the 1930s, the prophesized future victory of the communist over the national was translated into a gradual Russification of the non-Russian speaking nationalities. First, Cyrillic was imposed on their languages and then Russian began gradually taking over the languages of the nationalities in administration and education. The Allies’ decision to support Austria-Hungary’s various national movements in their aspirations to territorial independence and not to negotiate a peace that would preserve this polity, sealed the breakup of Austria-Hungary. The point of no return was crossed in 1917, when the United States declared war on the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. And numerous leaders of various national movements sent delegations to London, Paris, and Washington in search of support for their planned nation-states. France and the United Kingdom eagerly backed them wishing to prevent the rise of a Germanic Mitteleuropa that could dominate Europe. Paris also hoped that Germany, burdened with heavy war reparations and without the easy recourse to an alliance with Austria-Hungary, would be easier to contain. Fearing the westward spread of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Allies, like earlier, the German and Austro-Hungarian planners of Germanic Mitteleuropa, wished to transform postwar Central Europe’s nonGerman-speaking nation-states into an anti-Soviet cordon sanitaire (literally ‘quarantine line’) that would prevent the westward spread of communism. The United States President Woodrow Wilson was a scholar-turned-politician, who genuinely shared the 19th-century belief in progress and rationality as the answer to all human needs and dilemmas, including war. The application of the novel principle of national self-determination,2 as proposed by ethnolinguistic nationalists of Central Europe, appeared a sought-for rational solution to the causes of the Great War, which had spun out from this region. He thrust the United States’ military and diplomatic might behind this project, because it also seemed congruent with the widespread criticism of imperialism evoked equally in the West and by Soviet communists. In this, Wilson joined the ideological contest with Lenin, who, drawing from Stalin’s 1913 essay, enshrined self-determination as part of the rhetoric of Soviet communism in his 1914 brochure ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination.’ In his 1917 booklet, ‘Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism,’ Lenin voiced his criticism of imperialism, and thus legitimized the planned postwar destruction of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires to be replaced with ethnolinguistic nation-states in agreement with the principle of self-determination. Lenin hoped that the attraction of his ideas in Europe ravaged by the Great War would be such that the predicted replacement of the empires with nation-states would be simultaneous with the spread of communism. Wilson replied in kind but with his eyes set on a different set of the final objectives, which were the spread of democracy and ensuring free trade. Wilson’s criticism of imperialism was also dictated by his wish of carving a

922 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

stronger position for the United States in the world, formerly dominated by the maritime empires of France and Great Britain. In his Fourteen Points speech delivered in early 1918, Wilson called, among other things, for the replacement of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire with nation-states, respect for the territorial integrity of the existing Balkan nation-states, respecting the independent development of Russia (seen by him as a prospective nation-state), the establishment of a Polish nation-state, and decolonization that would transform colonies into nation-states. Last but not least, he foresaw that the resultant global-wide network of nation-states would regulate their mutual relations via the League of Nations, construed as a ‘general association of nation-states.’ At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, it turned out, however, that there were more ethnolinguistically defined nations aspiring to independence in Central Europe than predicted or practical from the viewpoint of the great powers. More nation-states obviously meant more presidential and ministerial posts for leaders of various national movements, who before the war, had had to contend themselves with a mere seat in a parliament or a job in a local government (if any at all) when they had lived in Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, and Imperial Russian. The conference’s participants also realized that language was not an objective statistical instrument (as proposed by the Sixth International Conference of Statistics in 1872 in St Petersburg), which would allow for the unambiguous delineating of borders of nation-states, which the Allies accepted that would be established. Geographers, linguists, anthropologists, and historians could not agree on the shape of new borders. Eventually, it was left to politicians to decide where the frontiers of the freshly founded nation-states should be placed. The deterministic belief that social sciences could provide as exact solutions to posed problems as natural sciences was ill-founded and more conducive to prolonging old conflicts and generating new ones than ensuring lasting peace. Drawing from different traditions of thought, Western and Soviet leaders succumbed to the very same delusion of social determinism and thus enshrined self-determination for ethnolinguistically defined nations as the basis of state organization and politics in Central Europe. After the 1922 division of Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland, this principle fell out of use in interwar Europe because it actually bred more problems and conflicts than it solved. However, this fixation on the national ushered nationalism into the role of the sole accepted ideology of statehood legitimization in Europe, with the exception of the Soviet Union, whose existence the Kremlin legitimized with the ideology of communism. However, as remarked above, the legitimization of Soviet statehood was two-tiered with communism as a rhetorical goal to be reached in an undefined future, and nationalism as the principle of the administrative division and organization of the Soviet Union. The ethnolinguistic principle was removed from the concept of self-determination as the ideological basis of

Conclusion

923

decolonization after 1945. In the overwhelming number of cases, the colonial borders were retained by the newly independent nation-states, irrespective of numerous ethnolinguistic divisions that are dissecting the polities. In the context of intensive post-World War I ethnolinguistic nation-building, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland were founded as nation-states in Central Europe alongside Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). The only anomaly was the non-national GermanPolish condominium of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk), ´ overseen by the League of Nations. Although the new nation-states contained the westward spread of communism, in agreement with the Allies’ hopes, they also, in turn, limited and divided the previously broad Central European sphere of free trade, economic freedom, and free movement of people, which the now destroyed empires had safeguarded before the war. The insistence on elevating the ethnolinguistically-defined principle of national self-determination to the foundation of political organization bred noxious paradoxes. Czechoslovakia was proclaimed a nation-state of the Czechoslovaks, speaking their Czechoslovak language, despite the fact that the inhabitants saw the country’s three constitutive regions of the Czech lands, Slovakia, and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, as ersatz nation-states of the Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians (Rusyns). Although the constitutionally defined Czechoslovaks (that is, Czechs and Slovaks together) made up a majority of Czechoslovakia’s population, the Czechs alone amounted to a mere plurality, followed by the German minority as the second largest group of inhabitants in this country. The Slovaks were more numerous than the Magyar minority, but the minority surpassed in numbers the Ruthenians. From the perspective of Czechoslovakia’s German and Magyar minorities, the polity was not any nation-state, meaning that there was no ethnolinguistically defined nation of Czechoslovaks who would constitute the majority of Czechoslovakia’s population. Later, in the interwar period, when the dominance of Czech culture, language, and civil servants became clearly established across Czechoslovakia, many Slovak leaders also agreed with this view. The Germans and the Magyars felt wronged by the peace settlement and perceived it as an unjust and imposed ‘dictate.’ Germany was, rather baselessly, blamed for the outbreak of the Great War and was to shoulder, as the identified ‘culprit,’ massive war reparations, the payment of which was to continue until 1988 (Ambrosius and Frenzel 1930: 11). Furthermore, the Germans were explicitly excluded from the application of the principle of self-determination, for Austria and Germany were prohibited from unifying into a Greater Germany that would include the German-speaking areas of the Czech lands, or the Sudetenland. In the Magyar eyes, though Austria-Hungary disappeared from the postwar political map of Europe, it was Hungary that was made to pay for the war in the stead of the Dual Monarchy. Historical Hungary lost two-thirds of

924 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

its territory and two-thirds of its population, and was curtailed to the Magyarspeaking core. With Magyars accounting for 90 percent of the new polity’s population, it was the only Central European nation-state that did not face any significant minority problems between the two World Wars. However, onethird of Magyar-speakers found themselves outside the borders of new Hungary. Officials in Budapest used them as an instrument of perpetuating the Magyar economic and cultural influence in the border regions of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, hoping for a future recreation of a Greater Hungary. In the same manner, officials in Berlin chose to use German minorities across Central Europe to pursue policies that would produce a Greater Germany. Minorities amounted to one-third of Poland’s population and the state’s actual borders were established between 1918 and 1923 in the course of wars with each of Poland’s neighbors, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Lithuania, Soviet Russia, and Ukraine. There was no Polish-Romanian war, as Poland acquired a common border with Romania after conflicts with Ukraine and Soviet Russia. Similar wars were fought by Hungary with all its neighbors (except Austria), and by Czechoslovakia (except Romania). Prague’s military suppression of the Czech lands’ German-speaking areas, which sought unification with a future Greater Germany or Austria and Germany, could be interpreted as Czechoslovakia’s border war with Austria and Germany. All these conflicts originated from the application of the principle of self-determination as wished for and construed not by the Allies alone, but also by the interested parties. The drive to territorial aggrandizement in the quest for a Greater Poland, a Greater Hungary, and to a lesser degree, for a Greater Czechoslovakia proved irresistible. There was not territory enough in Central Europe to satisfy all the expansionist desires. When an ‘ethnolinguistic argument’ was not enough to justify a soughtfor moving of a border, past glories of medieval polities were evoked in the form of the so-called ‘historical argument.’ The difficulty of bringing about the overlapping of the ethnolinguistic and the historic in order to produce political borders of a new nation-state is best exemplified by the Polish case. The 19th-century tradition of noble Polish nationalism dictated to build a Polish nation-state from all the territories, which, before the partitions, had belonged to Poland-Lithuania. Polish ethnic nationalists begged to differ, but the influence of noble nationalism was still strong. Hence, not only the latter but also many of the former strongly disagreed that the planned nation-state could be limited to the Polish-speaking ethnic core, which would have produced a ‘tiny Poland’ in comparison to the territorial extent of former Poland-Lithuania. The uneasy compromise worked out between ethnic and noble nationalists foresaw the incorporation into a new Poland the entire Austrian and Prussian partition zones along with Russia’s Congress Kingdom of Poland, which, in general, were predominantly Polish-speaking. Warsaw limited its demands to one-third of

Conclusion

925

the lands, which St Petersburg had seized during the partitions in 1772, 1773, and 1775, because Russia’s partition zone was overwhelmingly Ukrainian-, Belarusian-, Russian-, Yiddish-, and Lithuanian-speaking. The thinking behind this decision was that non-Polish and non-Russian-speaking inhabitants did not have any national identity and thus amounted to mere ‘ethnographic mass,’ which would be easily Polonized. On the ethnolinguistic basis, ethnic nationalists also tabled demands in regard of Germany’s southern East Prussia and Upper Silesia, and the eastern half of Austrian Silesia. None of the territories had belonged to Poland-Lithuania. Noble nationalists grudgingly conceded because Poland would have acquired the significant industrial basins of Upper Silesia and East Austrian Silesia in the case of success. Eventually, Warsaw gained most of the former basin. Noble nationalists were frustrated in their effort to obtain for new Poland Danzig (Gdansk) ´ and Ermland (Warmia), which Prussia had seized during the first partition of Poland-Lithuania. When the postwar order was established in Central Europe, its foundation of ethnolinguistic self-determination introduced a high degree of uncertainty in the region. First, neither Berlin nor Budapest agreed not to challenge the new borders of Germany and Hungary, which they considered unjust. Second, the United States, as the main decision-maker on the political shape of postwar Europe, withdrew to its cave of isolationism, instead of bolstering and protecting the new order as everybody expected. Third, the communist polity of the Soviet Union was not integrated into the postwar order in Europe, and by default, did not accept it, bent on spreading communist revolution westward whenever an occasion appeared. Last but not least, the very replacement of the empires with nation-states in Central Europe increased the number of minorities. The Allies, through the League of Nations’ minority treaties system, made minorities into a prime object of international politics in the region, thus turning them into pawns in the frequently inimical relations between these nation-states. The Central European nation-states’ gradual abandonment of democracy did not facilitate maintaining stability or protecting minority rights either. Czechoslovakia, often hailed as Central Europe’s sole democracy, which survived almost until the outbreak of World War II, was not as democratic as it is popularly believed. The fig leaf of electoral democracy was preserved but the promises of wide-ranging autonomy for Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia were not kept up until 1938, when in the wake of the Munich Agreement (1938), Germany (already enlarged after the 1938 Anschluß of Austria) seized the Sudetenland, Poland the Ostrava industrial basin, and Hungary southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The devolved CzechoSlovakia of 1938–1939 was just a pale shadow of its pre-Munich old self, where autonomy for Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia had not mattered much. In early 1939, the Third Reich absorbed the truncated Czech lands and transformed into a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Hungary seized the rest

926 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and Germany made autonomous Slovakia declare independence, thus making it into a German satellite. Another criticism leveled against interwar Czechoslovakia is that the Czechs being a mere plurality of the inhabitants, nevertheless, dominated the nation-state’s politics, economy, and culture. *** The interwar period saw a novel political reorganization of Central Europe in agreement with the national principle as defined in ethnolinguistic terms. The founding of ethnolinguistic nation-states in the Balkans (where religion often played as important role as language) from the 1810s to the 1910s, and of the Italian and German nation-states in 1860 and 1871, respectively, pointed out what the most probable direction of political change would be in Central Europe. The surprise was that in the case of the Soviet Union, it was possible to contain the eastward spread of the national in its ethnolinguistic garb with the use of communist ideology. Between the World Wars, for the first time in history, Magyar became the unquestioned sole official language in Hungary. German did not challenge its unique position any more as it had done within the broader framework of the Dual Monarchy, and the same happened in the case of Croatian, which had enjoyed the status of a co-official language alongside Magyar in pre-1918 Hungary’s autonomous province of Croatia-Slavonia. Budapest’s main worry was how to maintain at least a semi-official status of Magyar among the Magyar minorities in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Understandably, in line with the logic of ethnolinguistic nationalism, Prague, Bucharest, and Belgrade embarked on the course of ethnolinguistic homogenization, and the language of the former ‘lords’ was a main target of this policy. The Hungarian government and intellectuals feared that the continued partition of the Magyar nation may be reflected in the eventual division of the Magyar language, not unlike during the 16th and 17th centuries, when the political partition of Hungary had produced different varieties of written Magyar. Interestingly, Berlin did not share this fear, though between the World Wars, the Germans were split between Germany and Austria, a substantial German minority lived in Czechoslovakia, other German minorities were scattered all around Central and Eastern Europe, and further German-speakers, though rather not defining themselves as Germans, lived in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein. Perhaps, the historical experience of the Holy Roman Empire was crucial to this calm about the future of the German language. This empire consisted of several hundred polities, which meant the rise of several varieties of

Conclusion

927

chancery German, which remained in use as written dialects even when standard German finally emerged in the 19th century. German and German-speaking leaders and intellectuals did not overly worry that political disunity or the federal organization of a state may translate into splitting a single language into several new ones. The largely unified and centralized Kingdom of Hungary survived as such for 1000 years until 1918, with the exception of the two-century-long period of partition between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Even when the polity was submerged in the complex of the Habsburgs’ lands, its unity was preserved, unlike in the case of the lands of the Czech Crown. But the ethnolinguistic insistence on keeping and furthering the unity of a language equally in its written and spoken forms among all its speakers construed as members of a given ethnolinguistic nation, irrespective of countries in which they may happen to live, so much ingrained in interwar Central Europe, also spread to Germany. Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak national leaders idolized language as the origin, spiritual state, and haven of each nation. The Allies’ post-1918 decisions on Central Europe, mostly in line with the belief (though dictated by other assumptions and long-term goals), confirmed these leaders’ fixation on language. In the same vein, in the 1930s, the leadership of the Third Reich embarked on the program of ‘gathering’ most if not all German-speaking territories and German-speakers within the borders of a future Greater Germany. To this end, Germany seized Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, which in 1939, was followed by the incorporation of the territories that had belonged to the German Empire and the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary prior to 1918. After the Third Reich and the Soviet Union divided Central Europe in late 1939, Berlin ‘brought home’ German-speakers from the Soviet zone of influence to the German zone. The overall goal of these steps was to produce a Volksgemeinschaft, or a Greater German ethnolinguistically homogenous and totally unified nation that would consist of all German-speakers contained within the borders of a Greater German nation-state, ideally not inhabited by any non-Germanspeakers. In addition, the German language was to be ‘purified’ of foreign words, and regional and dialectal differences. The program was strikingly similar to what Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak ethnolinguistic nationalists proposed in the 19th century, and strove to carry out in their respective nation-states after 1918. Hitler’s racially motivated exclusion of German-speaking Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft was not unheard of in Central Europe either. In tsarist Russia and pre-1918 Romania, all Jews (even those established in a given locality for centuries) were treated as ‘foreigners,’ and anti-Semitism formed a strong political trend in interwar Poland. The same attitude was also felt, though to a lesser degree, in interwar Czechoslovakia and Hungary. This situation pushed many Jews either to embrace their own ethnolinguistically construed nationalism (zionism), or the internationalism of socialism/communism.

928 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The requirement of presenting Czechoslovakia as an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state to the world’s public opinion necessitated the submerging of Czech and Slovak in the commonality of the constitutional construct of the official Czechoslovak language. For internal reasons, it was interpreted as consisting from two varieties, Czech and Slovak, to be employed in the Czech lands and Slovakia, respectively. In reality, Czech became the de facto lingua franca of interwar Czechoslovakia’s politics, administration, economy, and culture. Initially, Slovak leaders did not complain about this situation, because Slovak was used for most official and administrative purposes in Slovakia; the complete Slovak-language educational system, complete with the first-ever Slovak-language university, was established along with numerous Slovak-language associations and publishing houses. The status of Slovak in Czechoslovakia was much better than in pre-1918 Upper Hungary. As in Hungary and Poland, the minority treaties imposed by the Allies on Czechoslovakia, guaranteed the use of minority languages in school and as auxiliary languages in state offices. Hence, German remained a significant second language side-by-side Czech in the Czech lands, and Magyar in Slovakia. ‘The region’s own language’ was to be used in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, but Prague mostly disregarded the Ruthenian leaders’ plea for the codification of the Cyrillic-based Ruthenian language and imposed first the Galician version of Ukrainian and then Russian in the late 1930s. The employment of actual written Ruthenian was limited to plaques on buildings with names of offices and other ceremonial uses. On the Czechoslovak territories seized by Germany, Hungary, and Poland, Czech and Slovak were replaced with German, Magyar, and Polish, respectively. The partial exception to this rule was Subcarpathian Ruthenia making into Hungary’s Carpathia. Budapest, careful to regain the loyalty of Ruthenians, introduced official bilingualism with Ruthenian alongside Magyar. In the three days intervening between the liquidation of Czecho-Slovakia and the Hungarian annexation of autonomous Subcarpathian Ruthenia in March 1939, an independence of the region, renamed Carpathian-Ukraine, had been declared; and Ukrainian was made its official language. The final partition of Czecho-Slovakia also entailed the unprecedented elevation of Slovak to the position of the sole official language in Slovakia, but at the expense of broadening the public sphere in which minority German and Magyar were employed. At the same time, Czech was not only banned from Slovakia and Carpathia, but it also had to share the status of official language with German in the rump Czech lands, or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, incorporated into the Third Reich. This official bilingualism with the dominance of German was similar to the situation of Czech in Austro-Hungary’s Bohemia and Moravia prior to 1918. In interwar Poland, Polish became the sole and unchallenged official language of this new nation-state. It was a novel situation with little precedence. Previously, Polish had functioned in such a manner only in the early 1790s, prior to

Conclusion

929

the final partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1795. Then in the partition zones and various follow-up autonomous polities formed from Poland-Lithuania’s core lands, Polish was either suppressed or had to share its official position with French, German, or Russian. The sole exception to this rule was the tiny Free City of Cracow (1815–1846) with Polish as its sole official language. For all practical reasons, Polish was the sole official language in Vienna’s autonomous crown land of Galicia (1867–1918), though German remained there a significant language, and with time, the use of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) increased steeply in east Galicia’s schools. Perhaps the outbreak of the Great War prevented the recognition of Ruthenian as the crown land’s co-official language. Polish was reintroduced as a co-official language in the Central Powers’ Kingdom of Poland (1916–1918) and Land Ober Ost (1915–1918), largely coterminous with Russia’s Congress Kingdom of Poland and the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania, respectively. Unlike in post-1918 Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the founding of the Polish nation-state triggered mass exodus of Germans from the formerly German territories granted to Poland. On one hand, the emigrants feared that this new nation-state, perceived as closer to Russia than Germany, was thus, ‘Asiatic and barbarian.’ There was much less prejudice of this kind on the part of Germans and German-speakers toward Hungary and Czechoslovakia, because until 1918, the two states’ territories constituted part of Austria-Hungary. Quite on the contrary, lands of Russia’s partition zone of erstwhile Poland-Lithuania accounted for half of postwar Poland’s territory. Another factor, which coaxed many Germans and German-speakers to leave Poland, was their unwillingness to acquire Polish, because the language was perceived as the badge of ‘lower Polish culture.’ Hence for them, learning things Polish was a ‘betrayal of their higher German culture’ enshrined in the German language. The bitter standoff between Poland’s historic right to Danzig and Germany’s ethnolinguistic claim to this important Baltic port city, played out in front of the international community, produced the non-national German-Polish condominium of the Free City of Danzig. German, however, was its sole official language, while minority rights were guaranteed for Polish. In addition, Polish was the sole official language in Danzig’s institutions under Poland’s direct control. In interwar Poland, various language regimes obtained in different territories. In the core Polish-speaking territories, coterminous with the Central Powers’ Kingdom of Poland, there were no auxiliary and practically no minority language provisions. A partial exception to the rule was religious and private Jewish schools with Hebrew as the medium of instruction, though most of Poland’s Jews communicated in Yiddish. In the territories gained from Germany and in the eastern half of Austrian Eastern Silesia seized from Austria-Hungary, various regimes allowing co-official and auxiliary use of German existed during the 1920s. Later, the right to employ German in public was limited to minorities’

930 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

schools, organizations, and churches. The situation of German was better than of other minority languages in Poland, because the League of Nations’ minority treaties system mainly protected the cultural and linguistic rights of the German minority. Czechoslovakia’s German minority, however, enjoyed even more rights, including a German-language university and numerous universitylevel educational institutions. In Poland minorities could count, at best, on secondary education in their languages. In Galicia, the position of Ruthenian (Ukrainian) as a medium of school education and an auxiliary language in the eastern half of the region was severely limited in comparison to the period before 1918. The authorities allowed exclusively bilingual, Polish-Ruthenian, education with the overt hope to Polonize Galicia’s Ruthenians. Paradoxically, the situation of Little Russian (Ukrainian) in the territories incorporated from Russia improved, because prior to the Great War, only Russian-language education had been allowed for Little Russians. In Poland, bilingual education played a dual function of distancing them from the Russians and accelerating eventual Polonization. To the same end, schools with White Ruthenian (Belarusian) and Polish were established as the media of education. These schools disappeared in the 1930s because Warsaw deemed that Poland’s White Ruthenians had already been sufficiently Polonized. It turned impossible, however, to liquidate Ukrainian-language schools, as the Ukrainian national feeling, in most cases, solidified in the face of forced Polonization. Warsaw replied with the obstinate insistence on using the ethnonym ‘Ruthenian,’ instead of ‘Ukrainian,’ preferred by those concerned. Across the eastern border, Moscow founded the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine, which encouraged the development of Ukrainian language and culture in Poland, thus largely nullifying Polonization. The Soviet authorities, in their turn, feared that the continued attraction of Polish culture and language would entail further Polonization of Soviet Belarus and Ukraine, thus deported numerous Poles (or rather Catholic peasants speaking local Slavic dialects) from the border regions to Kazakhstan in the 1930s. The situation of Poland’s Lithuanians was similar to that of Little Russians, only the influence of independent Lithuania on the spread of Lithuanian national feeling among them was far stronger than that of Soviet Ukraine. The fact that Vilnius and Warsaw did not establish regular diplomatic relations until 1938, prevented the minority to have unobstructed contacts with the Lithuanian authorities and organizations. Poland did not grant minority rights to ethnic groups that did not clearly declare themselves as nations or did not have any international help to support their claim. The Polish army thwarted the Ruthenians’ (Rusyns, Lemkos) attempt either to be united with their ethnic kin in Subcarpathian Ruthenia or to proclaim their own nation-state in the Carpathians. Warsaw treated the ethnolinguistically variegated ethnic groups of Slavic Goralians, Kashubs, Mazurs, Silesians (Slunzaks), and Upper Silesians (Szlonzoks) as ‘regional groups’ of the

Conclusion

931

Polish nation. Although Prague, for instance, allowed Silesians to declare their nationality in censuses, they had to choose between Czech, German, and Polish as their language of everyday communication, which allowed the authorities to apportion them either to the Czechoslovak nation, or to the German and Polish minorities. Massaging census returns was a widespread practice in interwar Central Europe, which comes as no surprise when one remembers that the Allies took into consideration pre-1918 censuses to decide about the political shape of Central Europe. Warsaw was also partial to these practices. For instance, with the exception of one voivodeship (region), census return slips on which those concerned declared themselves as Tutejsi (local people) were reinterpreted as ‘Poles,’ ‘White Ruthenians,’ and ‘Ruthenians.’ The brevity of the interwar period did not allow for the compilation of any groundbreaking lexicographic works with an eye to the further standardization of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. On the other hand, the coupling of language with nationalism into the ultimate statehood and power legitimization basis of the corresponding nation-states entailed an unprecedented increase in the production of books and the press in these four languages. This allowed for the improved penetration of the territory of a nation-state by a corresponding national language in its material (printed) form. Radio broadcasting joined the ranks with the printed media in the 1930s, but it remained a novelty and its penetration was usually limited to urban areas (with the exception of the Czech lands) until the 1950s. The enforcement of the use of the official language in offices, education, and most other spheres of public life created a growing demand for textbooks, books, and periodicals in the language. As a result, the material visibility of minority languages in the form of publications lessened, which was interpreted as the sign of the progressing ethnolinguistic homogenization of the population of a nation-state. Only relatively rich and influential kin nation-states of some minorities could impede this trend. In Central Europe, Germany and Hungary played such a role. Determined to regain their pre-1918 historical borders, both interwar polities actively sought to prevent linguistic and identificational assimilation of German and Magyar minorities in neighboring states. Languages of other minorities were gradually limited to the sphere of spoken communication, their sought-for national unity not yet attained, but were further unraveled by the persistence and growing importance of dialects. In addition, bilingual education and the impossibility of any sensible career without the knowledge of the official language, made this kind of bilingualism into a conduit for minority secondary school leavers and university graduates at least toward the national language, if not right away toward the nation of a nation-state. In the 1930s, the collapse of the League of Nations’ minority treaties system (Germany never signed its treaty and other Central European states observed their treaties more often than not in breach) in the context of the growing authoritarian character of rule in Central

932 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Europe translated into more arbitrary measures to exert assimilatory pressure on minorities. In this atmosphere of uncertainty and increasing political instability, resources were channeled into areas other than linguistics. The political utility of national languages had already produced the Central European nation-states and legitimized their existence and the position of these national languages, in turn, had been legally and otherwise secured. Inevitably, the attention of politicians and decision-makers turned to other urgent matters such as continued border conflicts with neighbors, the growing politicization of minorities in domestic and international politics, acute economic problems spawned by the Great Depression, the penetration of Central Europe by Soviet-style communism (especially in the Czech lands), and social tensions brought about by the gradual transition from agricultural toward industrial societies (except in the Czech lands, where the transition had been largely completed before 1918). It comes then as no surprise that there were no new authoritative dictionaries of Czech, Magyar, and Polish compiled between the World Wars, and no dictionary of this kind was even attempted in the case of Slovak. Regarding the Polish language, the two final volumes of Jan Karłowicz’s eight-volume Słownik je˛zyka polskiego came off the press in the interwar period, but the work appeared outdated due to the 1918 language reform, which the dictionary could not incorporate, as most of its volumes had already been published. This shortcoming led to the compilation of a brand new authoritative dictionary, Słownik je˛zyka polskiego edited by Tadeusz Lehr-Spławinski. ´ After the publication of a few fascicles in 1938–1939, however, World War II intervened and for ideological reasons, the dictionary was not continued after 1945. In view of this situation, the contemporary standard use of Polish was most fully presented in encyclopedias, Ilustrowana encyklopedja Trzaski, Everta i Michalskiego (1927–1937), never completed Encyklopedia powszechna Ultima Thule (1927–1939), and Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna (1929–1938). In 1927, the first etymological dictionary of Polish, Aleksander Brückner’s Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego, was published. Zoltán Gombocz and János Melich embarked on the compilation of so far the most ambitious etymological dictionary in Central Europe. Their Magyar etymológiai szótár (1914–1944) was to contain all Magyar words, including dialectal ones, personal names, and place-names. Perhaps, this astounding comprehensiveness stalled the publication at the letter G. Otherwise Magyar would have received an authoritative-cum-etymological dictionary comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary or brothers Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch. As in the case of Polish, the new developments in Magyar that followed after Gergely István Czuczor and János Fogarasi’s first authoritative dictionary of Magyar, A magyar nyelv szótára (1862–1874), were captured in encyclopedias, Révai Nagy Lexikona. Az ismeretek enciklopédiája (1911–1935), Új lexikon (1936), and Új id˝ ok lexikona

Conclusion

933

(1936–1942). In 1941, the first complete, though one-volume, etymological dictionary of Magyar, Géza Bárczi’s Magyar szófejt˝ o szótár, appeared. Unlike Magyar or Polish, Czech had not received an authoritative monolingual dictionary before the interwar period. This perceived ‘deficiency’ convinced Czech politicians and linguists of the necessity of compiling one. In 1935, 100 years after the commencement of the publication of the first bilingual authoritative dictionary of Czech, Josef Jungmann’s Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký, the first volume of the first monolingual authoritative dictionary of this language, Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského, came off the press. Surprisingly, despite frequent political and ideological changes that plagued Czech history from the late 1930s to the 1950s, the compilation of this work was not abandoned, unlike in the case of Tadeusz Lehr-Spławinski’s ´ Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. The further volumes of Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského appeared after the incorporation of the Czech lands into the Third Reich and the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia (1948), until the compilation was successfully finished in 1957. The work on Jan Gebauer’s incomplete historical dictionary of Czech, Slovník staroˇceský (1903–1916), was not resumed in the interwar period, but in 1933, Josef Holub’s one-volume etymological dictionary of Czechoslovak (in reality, Czech), Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského, was published. With no authoritative dictionary of Czech to fall back on, Pavel Váša and František Travníˇcek’s two-volume Slovník jazyka ˇceského (1934–1937) had to suffice. In addition, the following encyclopedias were published, Masaryku˚v slovní k nauˇcný (1925–1933), Technicky slovník nauˇcný. Ilustrovaná encyklopedié vˇed technickych (1927–1949), Komenského slovník nauˇcný (1937–1938), and the six volumes of the Supplement (1933–1943) to Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (1888–1909), arguably the most extensive Central European encyclopedia ever published. No dictionary of the constitutionally defined Czechoslovak language was attempted in interwar Czechoslovakia. Czech and Slovak, construed as varieties of this language, were the de facto co-official languages of the Czechoslovak nation-state. In practice, the ideology of national Czechoslovakism was limited to population statistics, in which only Czechoslovaks featured, with no distinction made between Czechs and Slovaks. Numerous Czech politicians and intellectuals, however, interpreted Czechoslovakism as the necessity of bringing Slovak closer to Czech in order to produce a Czechoslovak language by submerging Slovak in Czech. This politicized conflict came to the fore in the 1930s. In 1931, the Czech linguist, Václav Vážný’s Czechizing orthographic and grammatical principles of standard Slovak, Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu, was published. In the following year, many scholars from the most important Slovak cultural-cum-political institution, Matica slovenská, rejected the Pravidlá and began publishing their periodical on the Slovak language, Slovenská reˇc, to oppose the Czechization of Slovak. In 1933, the Matica adopted Slovenská reˇc as its official journal. In practice, the official

934 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

(Czechizing, Czechoslovak) and national (de-Czechized) varieties of Slovak emerged. On the one hand, the absence of any authoritative dictionary of Slovak deepened the disunity of the language. Yet, on the other hand, the unprecedented range of official communication spheres, in which this language was employed, contributed to its improved codification, especially, in comparison to the former assimilatory pressure, which had removed Slovak practically from entire public life in Upper Hungary prior to 1918. Before the rise of Czechoslovakia, no monolingual dictionary of Slovak had been published, with the partial exception of the little orthographic dictionary incorporated in Samo Czambel’s Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (1902), a user-oriented overview of Slovak grammar and spelling. Before 1918, however, Slovak was paired in extensive dictionaries with Magyar, German, Czech, and Russian. In 1919, 1920, and 1922, three brief Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak dictionaries of words that are different in both languages appeared. From the Czech perspective, these dictionaries presented the few linguistic barriers that furtively hindered the creation of a Czech-dominated Czechoslovak language, while Slovaks saw these works as a significant confirmation of the independence of their language vis-à-vis Czech. In 1924, the first moderately extensive monolingual dictionary of Slovak, Miroslav Kálal’s Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci, came off the press. It was a stepping-stone to Peter Tvrdý’s genuinely extensive dictionary of this language, Slovenský frazeologický slovník (1931). Two further editions followed in 1933 and 1937, but numerous Slovak intellectuals did not accept this dictionary, because it followed Vážný’s Czechizing Pravidlá . They sided with the de-Czechizing usage of Heinrich Bartek, who edited Slovenská reˇc. The first Slovak-language encyclopedia, the brief three-volume Slovenský nauˇcný slovník. Priruˇcná encyclopedia vedomostí v troch dieloch (1932), was more welcome as it was published too early to fully follow Vážný’s Czechizing principles. Bartek’s usage became the norm of standard Slovak as employed in independent Slovakia during World War II. Anton Augustín Baník enshrined it in his 1940 Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu, which Bratislava officially endorsed. In 1942, the first ever Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts was established, and its Institute of Linguistics was founded a year later, on the 150th anniversary of Štúr’s codification of standard Slovak. The institute’s task was to ‘purify’ Slovak of foreign words and phrases, the vast majority of which (almost 50 percent) were identified as unwanted Bohemianisms. By 1945, when Czechoslovakia was reestablished as a unitary state, there had been no time enough to translate the ideological theses into an authoritative dictionary of Slovak, and wartime Slovakia’s ever closer cooperation with the Third Reich had meant the replacement of Bohemianisms with equally numerous Germanisms. Slovak intellectuals usually did not protest this development, for it marked more clearly the difference between their language and Czech. However, this new

Conclusion

935

trove of German linguistic loans proved an ideological liability in postwar Czechoslovakia, where until 1968, Czech (Czechoslovak) politicians mainly pursued the line of interwar Czechoslovakism in relation to Slovak culture and language. World War II reshaped Central Europe twice. First, following the dual German and Soviet attack on Poland in 1939, Berlin and Moscow divided the region into their exclusive zones of influence. The German zone, construed as the Lebensraum (living space) of the German nation, was to be thoroughly Germanized. The Kremlin’s priority was to change the social, political, and economic reality of its zone in line with the tenets of Soviet communism. In the end, however, it would have meant substantial Russification. Had the Hitler-Stalin division of Central Europe held, Czech and Polish would have been marginalized as insignificant auxiliary languages, the position of Magyar as the sole official language of Hungary would have continued largely unchanged, and the de-Czechized norm of Slovak would have speedily stabilized thanks to the language’s exclusive official position in independent Slovakia. Paradoxically, the success of the Third Reich at territorial aggrandizement made the ideal of reaching a Volksgemeinschaft ever more elusive. It meant the inclusion of vast territories with non-German-speaking populations, where it proved impossible to replace local languages with German immediately. Hence, Polish was employed alongside German in the Generalgouvernement (former Congress Poland and Galicia, with the capital shifted from Warsaw to Cracow), Czech in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and White Ruthenian (Belarusian, encouraged by the German administration to be noted in the Latin alphabet) in the Reichskommissariat Ostland (largely coterminous with the Land Ober Ost of World War I), and Ukrainian in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Had the planned Reichskommissariaten Moskau (Moscow) and Kaukasus (Caucasus) actually come into being, it would have necessitated the co-official or semi-official use of further languages alongside German. Within this Greater Germany, the authorities co-opted mutual ethnonational animosities of various populations to contain the use and popularity of those previously official languages. For instance, in the Generlgouvernement, there were Ukrainian-language secondary schools alongside German ones, but none with Polish as a medium of instruction. Adolf Hitler created not a truly ethnolinguistically defined German nationstate, inhabited by a homogenous Volksgemeinschaft of the German nation, but a Germanic empire, which in its extent and ethnolinguistic diversity rivaled the ‘First Reich’ of Charlemagne, and the ‘Second Reich’ of the Holy Roman Empire. The Third Reich, however, did not share the social and political problems of its two predecessors, but rather those previously faced by Austria-Hungary. Stalin’s system of Soviet national republics and various autonomous administrative entities, ‘communist in essence and national in form,’ proved better

936 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

suited to strike a working equilibrium between meeting some national needs of subjugated peoples and those of the Soviet hegemon. The victorious thrust of the Red Army into Central Europe under German occupation not only permitted the extension of Soviet control over the territories, which had belonged to the Russian Empire before the Great War, but even further westward into Germany, where Lenin had hoped to plant the flame of communist revolution in the wake of World War I. This was the second wartime reshaping of Central Europe that held unchallenged until the breakups of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991, respectively. First, in the wake of Soviet-inspired coups d’état between 1945 and 1948, the entire region found itself in the Soviet bloc. The Third Reich lost all its territorial gains acquired in 1938 and afterward, and was split back into Germany and Austria, which precipitated the process of the emergence of the Austrian nation. In the interwar period, the vast majority of Austria’s inhabitants identified themselves as Germans. Not only were the borders imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles fully recreated, but also in addition, Germany lost all its territories located east of the Oder-Neisse line. Czechoslovakia was re-established in its prewar shape, less Subcarpathian Ruthenia transferred to Soviet Ukraine. Ruthenian (Rusyn) politicians and intellectuals saw it as Prague’s treason of their nation. Numerous Slovak leaders and members of the Slovak elite also loathed Prague for its complicity in the liquidation of their independent nation-state, not reciprocated by any real autonomy. Stalin settled the thorny issue of the Polish borders in an ingenious manner. The Kremlin kept these eastern Polish lands, which the Soviet Union and Lithuania (in its turn annexed by Moscow alongside Estonia and Latvia in 1940) had gained in 1939. The predominantly non-Polish-speaking character of these areas the Soviets deepened by deportating Poles lining there to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Then, in the wake of the Holocaust of Jews and Roma perpetrated by the Third Reich, the ethnolinguistic diversity of the population in Poland’s former eastern territories was limited, which, in the eyes of the Western Allies, justified their apportioning between the Soviet national republics of Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. This left rump Poland limited to its ethnolinguistic core, coterminous with Russia’s former Congress Kingdom of Poland, the western half of Austria-Hungary’s Galicia, and the German Empire’s Province of Posen (Poznan). ´ Moscow ‘indemnified’ postwar Poland for its losses in the east by granting it the vast majority of the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, with the exception of the northern half of East Prussia incorporated to the Soviet Union. Polish communists and anti-communist forces in the country and abroad equally dreaded the prospect of a postwar ‘small, rump Poland.’ Hence, the new Polish western border unified all Polish political groupings and acquiesced them to Soviet control despite the staunch anti-communism of many. They had no choice because a planned postwar peace

Conclusion

937

conference was not held due to the outbreak of the Cold War, which left Moscow the sole guarantor of Poland’s new western border. Hungary and Romania, the Third Reich’s unwilling allies, were defeated in World War II. The late German occupation of Hungary in 1944 (as in the case of Slovakia) opened for this country a small gate to the camp of victors. At the end of the war in 1944, Bucharest actually switched sides and joined the Red Army in its sweeping offensive against the Third Reich. Soon, Moscow decided to treat Hungary and Romania as ‘victims of nazism’ in order to make them into docile members of the Soviet bloc. But the price they had to pay was the loss of any territories acquired in 1938 and later. In the case of Romania, the Soviet Union kept its 1940 territorial acquisitions of Northern Bukovina (incorporated into Ukraine) and Bessarabia made into the Soviet Republic of Moldavia. Uniquely, the only country (apart from the Soviet Union) allowed keeping a wartime territorial gain was Bulgaria, which after 1945 did not have to return southern Dobruja to Romania. As in the case of its other gains from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Budapest had to return northern Transylvania to Romania, but once again, quite uniquely in postwar Central Europe, local Magyars were allowed to keep their Magyar-language university in Cluj (merged in 1956 with its Romanian-language counterpart into a bilingual university) and in addition, they received a Magyar Autonomous Region, which existed between 1952 and 1956. The Kremlin imposed these solutions to weaken postwar Romania and its ethnolinguistic homogeneity. Otherwise, the considerable territorial and demographic size of the country could have allowed Bucharest to try to wriggle out of the Soviet bloc. Post-1945 Hungary, cut down to its interwar size, was humiliated enough, with Czechoslovakia and Romania always at the ready to intervene alongside the Red Army, should Hungary decide to leave the Soviet bloc. The Kremlin deftly played out interwar and wartime animosities and differences, which divided its European satellites in order to put itself in the position of the ultimate arbiter and guarantor of order in the Soviet bloc. The Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and the Soviet-led intervention of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia in 1968 graphically showed the impossibility of breaking free from the Soviet sphere of dominance in Central Europe. In post-1945 Central Europe, Moscow decided not to introduce the Soviet system of multi-layered territorial autonomies. This did not imply that Stalin became blind to the social and political force of the national in its ethnolinguistic garb. He stuck to his idea of using nationalism to progress on the way to communism. During the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (as World War II became known in Soviet historiography), he harnessed rehabilitated Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church for the sake of war effort. The draft, mass movement of military forces, and evacuations and deportations of Soviet citizens in their millions spread the knowledge of Russian as the polity’s lingua

938 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

franca. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the number of territorial autonomies was drastically limited in the Soviet Union when all autonomous villages and kolkhozes lost their elevated status and the number of autonomous districts was limited. These changes pointed to the direction of a sought-for merger of nationalities, which was to produce a classless Soviet nation/people (narod ), unified in their equally classless (read ‘universal’) Soviet language of Russian. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet nomenklatura opined that the goal had been almost achieved, hence the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union along ethnonational lines came as a complete surprise to them and Soviet citizens themselves. The Kremlin tacitly equated communism with ethnolinguistic homogenization (that is, Russification), and the new elites in the Soviet bloc states were partial to this idea, because it perfectly merged with the ethnolinguistic legitimization of power and statehood. The entire interwar period was plagued by the inability of the concerned states to achieve this ideal of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, which made them increasingly illegitimate in the eyes of neighbors, minorities, other actors of international relations, and eventually, their own inhabitants. Because the communist regimes set to carrying out the prewar national program of ethnolinguistic homogenization, this acquiesced predominantly anti-communist populations. In a calculated manner, the theoretical point of producing a worldwide communist classless nation (perhaps united through the use of the utmost communist language of Russian) was not pushed too aggressively. Ethnolinguistic homogenization entailed liquidation of minorities, which had complicated relations between Central European nation-states between the World Wars. This development would also be a bonus to the Kremlin enabling it to deal with its European satellites as singular entities, not dependent on some sub-state forces of international significance. The way to ethnolinguistic homogenization led through mass flights before advancing fronts, mass deportations, dispersals, and expulsions. Berlin and Moscow employed these instruments of radical social engineering in the 1930s and perfected them during the war. They even tried annihilation of entire human groups as in the case of the Holocaust and state-evoked Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine (1932–1934). After 1945, the Western Allies approved mass ‘transfers’ (that is, expulsions) from the German territories east of the OderNeisse line, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, which were emptied, of its German-speaking inhabitants by the late 1940s. Ironically, this process, combined with the unprecedented truncation of Germany, and making Austria into a separate nation-state, complete with its separate nation of Austrians, produced a new Germany that was so much ethnolinguistically homogenous than ever before. The problem was that until 1990, postwar Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, under the respective control of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. In light of the Potsdam Agreement and West

Conclusion

939

Germany’s Basic Law, Bonn continued to speak of a single German nation and persisted in its hope to reunify both Germanys into a German nation-state. On the other hand, the East German authorities strove to prod into being a separate and Soviet-style East German socialist nation. This intent was presented expressis verbis in the 1968 Constitution of East Germany (Palmowski 2004). All this intensive post-1945 nation-building on the territory of the former Third Reich increasingly detached nationalisms there from the ethnolinguistic paradigm. Their separate states, not ethnicity or language, keep apart the Austrians from the Germans, and in the case of the East German nation, it was this polity and socialism, which made the postulated East German nation different from the (West) Germans and Austrians. Although the reunified German nation is still defined in ethnolinguistic terms, the influence of this legitimizing and identificational element is moderated by Verfassungspatriotismus, or the civic in its character utmost loyalty to the Basic Law (Constitution) before language or ethnicity. A policy similar to that of expelling Germans was directed at Slovakia’s Magyars, but eventually it was stalled based on the exchange of population between Czechoslovakia and Hungary. New Poland’s empty western half was populated with ‘repatriates,’ that is, Polish expellees from the Soviet Union and the former Polish eastern lands seized by Moscow. Many Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians who found themselves in postwar Poland, were ‘sent back home’ to their national republics in the Soviet Union. Poland’s remaining Ukrainians and Lemkos were dispersed in western Poland. Czechs from Volhynia were also pressed to leave the Soviet Union for their ‘home’ in Czechoslovakia. The detachment of Subcarpathian Ruthenia from postwar Czechoslovakia further limited the polity’s ethnolinguistic diversity. In addition, in the 1950s, the authorities of the Soviet satellites (except Poland) pressed most of Central Europe’s surviving Jews to emigrate to Israel or the West. This process was rounded up with the expulsion of the remaining Jews from Poland in 1968. The withholding of expulsion of Magyars and Germans from postwar Romania was the only serious breach in this policy of ethnolinguistic homogenization as conducted in the Soviet bloc. This social engineering made Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland practically devoid of any significant minorities, and the existence of the remaining minorities was routinely denied in the communist period. The partial exception to this rule was Czechoslovakia. Despite promises of wide-ranging autonomy to the Slovaks, Czechoslovakists gained an upper hand in communist Czechoslovakia and declared it a nation-state of the Czechoslovak people (národ ) consisting of the fraternal nations (národy) of Czechs and Slovaks. There was no official attempt to replace Czech and Slovak with a Czechoslovak language, but the interwar situation was repeated. Slovak was used in its official capacity in Slovakia, while Czech was the actual official language of entire Czechoslovakia. With time, a modicum of minority rights was extended to Poles in Czech

940 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

Silesia and Magyars in southern Slovakia. Apart from elementary and secondary education in Polish and Magyar, respectively, both minorities enjoyed bilingual road and street signs, a thing unheard in Poland until 2005. In Poland, a modest system of minority languages-schools developed in the 1950s, but especially after 1956. Between that year and the beginning of the 1960s, most Germans, recognized as such by Warsaw, left mostly for West Germany. From the beginning of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s, they were followed by hundreds of thousands of Germans officially classified as Poles, most of them stemming from the ethnic groups of Upper Silesians (Szlonzoks), Mazurs, and Kashubs. The official insistence on considering Poland an ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state, especially after the expulsion of Jews in 1968, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Increasingly more members of Poland’s minorities acquired Polish and passed for Poles, concealing their ethnonational identity from everybody else but their closest relatives. In turn, the Polish authorities chose not to notice any minorities in Poland. The system of schools for minorities waned into utter insignificance during the 1970s. After 1945, no language other than Polish enjoyed official status in communist Poland. Obviously, Russian was the sole language of communication in Soviet bases in Poland, but like elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, they were hermetically isolated from the outside world, and in practice, functioned as exterritorial islets of the Soviet Union. Out of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the second country attained the highest degree of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, close to 99 percent, if Magyarspeaking Jews and Roma were included. While minorities were insignificant in Hungary, Magyar minorities in the neighboring states remained an urgent issue for Budapest. An exercise at Soviet-style autonomy for Transylvania’s Magyars in Romania was extinguished in 1956, at the pretext of ‘bourgeois counterrevolution’ in Hungary. Hence, a sole territory, where Magyar enjoyed an official status outside Hungary, disappeared. From 1945, Magyar enjoyed a certain degree of co-official status in Serbia’s autonomous province of Vojvodina within communist Yugoslavia. Finally, in 1974, the province was granted full autonomy, complete with co-official status for Magyar, Slovak, Romanian, and Rusyn alongside Yugoslavia’s state language of Serbo-Croatian. In this manner, Vojvodina became a region, where Magyar and Slovak enjoyed official status outside Hungary and Czechoslovakia, respectively. In addition, the Soviet Union failed to absorb Yugoslavia into the Soviet bloc, which made this state an actual bridge between the West and the East. Magyar and Slovak writers and intellectuals in Yugoslavia had largely unrestricted access to Western Europe and much more freedom of expression than their colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The multi-layered structure of territorial national autonomies in Yugoslavia was similar to the Soviet system of administrative division, but being placed outside the Soviet bloc, it did not have any direct influence on the Soviet Union’s

Conclusion

941

European satellites. In 1968, the dynamics of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia necessitated a Soviet-style federalization of this country. A new Constitution, done on behalf of ‘Czech and Slovak people’ (a shadow of Czechoslovakism again), guaranteed full equality for both Czech and Slovak nations, and their mutual respect for each other’s sovereign development within the borders of their shared federal state. The Czech lands were organized into a Czech Socialist Republic, and Slovakia into a Slovak Socialist Republic with separate republican citizenships for Czechs and Slovaks. These citizenships gave one right to the common Czechoslovak citizenship. As a result, Czechoslovakia became a bi-national federation consisting of the de facto national republics of the Czechs and the Slovaks. In this organization of the state, Czechoslovakia became more similar to the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia than other Central European polities, which remained straightforward ethnolinguistic nation-states. The momentous change also entailed the de jure and de facto equality between Czech and Slovak with a tacit affirmative action for Slovak-language publications, mass media, and culture. Bilingualism became the norm in the press, radio, and television; and for that matter even within a single program or periodical. However, some Slovaks remained discontented on the ground that the federal institutions were placed in Prague, which encouraged the predominance of Czech in the federal institutions, despite the obligation to issue all federal laws and documents in both languages. From the perspective of the entire Soviet bloc, until 1956, the Kremlin pressed for the homogenization (or stalinization) of political, economic, and social realities and systems in its European satellites in line with the Soviet model. The direct subjugation of Central Europe to the Soviet Union was announced through the rhetoric of internationalism. As in the earlier case of the national republics in the Soviet Union, the goal was to turn the Soviet bloc into a collection of polities national in form but communist in essence. In 1956, the anti-communist riots in Poland and the full-fledged Hungarian Uprising against Soviet domination made the Kremlin rethink its policy of how to keep its European satellites relatively content and safely under Soviet control. The deStalinization of the Soviet Union, which unfolded in the same year, permitted resignation from the Stalinist dogma of internationalism, in favor of less direct control over the Soviet bloc. The bloc’s countries were allowed to follow their own specific and national paths to communism. This ideological roundabout meant the introduction of Yugoslav-style national communism (or rather communist nationalism) in the Soviet bloc. Hungary and Poland seized this unique opportunity for preserving and broadening the sphere of freedom in economy and culture, which was not congruent with the Soviet model. The Stalinist leadership of Czechoslovakia distanced itself from the changes, afraid that following this path would entail the necessity of resigning from maintaining the centralized character of the state, legitimized through a moderate version

942 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

of Czechoslovakism. Finally in 1968, the dramatic events of the Prague Spring and the subsequent military intervention enforced the change toward national communism, which left Czechoslovakia a bi-national federation. In the latter half of the 1980s, an attempted reform of the Soviet Union (perestroika) further loosened the Kremlin’s control over the Soviet bloc. This also allowed for the rise of increasingly separatists communist nationalisms in the Soviet Union’s national republics in emulation of a similar process, which had developed 30 years earlier in Central Europe. The unthinkable became possible. Hungary and Romania, though ‘fraternal members’ of the Soviet bloc, played out their animosity over the national ownership of Transylvania by publishing conflicting announcements on this issue in Western leading newspapers. Eventually, the center ceased to hold, the Soviet bloc broke up in 1989, and the Soviet national republics chose independence as full-fledged nation-states in 1991. The ideological uniformization of sciences in the service of marxist dogma, as required by the Kremlin, most thoroughly permeated social sciences and humanities in the Soviet bloc countries, though it impinged on natural sciences too, especially prior to 1956. Marxists believed that they discovered the linear, teleological, and deterministic laws of history, which would allow them to predict and manipulate the future in order to quicken the coming of communism. Bearing this tenet in mind, a series of statewide conferences of historians were organized across the Soviet bloc at the turn of the 1950s, in order to bring the practice of historiography and interpretations of the past in line with the Soviet vision of history. The dialectic of incessant class conflict, as the instrument of change from one mode of production to another until the emergence of a paradise-like worldwide classless communist society became the dogma, and the very legitimization of communist regimes in the Soviet bloc. National histories were speedily rewritten in agreement with the Soviet version of Marx’s historical materialism, known as Marxism-Leninism. In the interwar period, the authorities of the Soviet Union came to the conclusion that full literacy was necessary for communist propaganda and bureaucracy to function efficiently. In the Soviet bloc, only the Czech lands had attained the goal of full literacy before World War II (or more exactly, by the turn of the 20th century). This necessitated an intensive and broad literacy campaign elsewhere in the bloc. The national languages of Central Europe were made into the conduit of communist dogma and a significant instrument of social change. Unsurprisingly, marxist conferences of linguists and philologists followed in the region mainly to decide of which concepts and words, labeled as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist,’ the Central European languages had to be purged, and how to incorporate in them the lexicon of Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet system. To this end, each of the languages was provided with a brand new authoritative dictionary, which was to replace any earlier ones, tainted as a product of capitalism and a bourgeois society.

Conclusion

943

The first of these authoritative dictionaries to begin publishing was of the Czech language, Bohuslav Havránek’s Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (1957– 1971). It followed immediately into the footsteps of the more extensive Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (1935–1957), the completion of which as the first-ever monolingual authoritative dictionary of Czech was allowed, but on the ideological grounds, users were discouraged from referring to it. This dictionary was to remain an academic affair, a necessary basis for the compilation of ‘ideologically correct’ dictionaries of the Czech language. Therefore, it was Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského that was reprinted in 1989, just before the collapse of communism, not the more extensive and detailed Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského. Between 1958 and 1969, Polish users received a brand-new authoritative dictionary of their language, Witold Doroszewski’s Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (1958–1969), which has first and fully incorporated the interwar and postwar language reforms. It was the third authoritative dictionary of Polish. Havránek’s Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského was also the third authoritative dictionary of Czech. Almost at the same time, the second authoritative dictionary of Magyar, Géza Bárczi and László Országh’s A Magyar nylev értelmez˝ o szótára (1959– 1962), came off the press. Finally, between 1959 and 1968, the Slovak language received its first-ever authoritative dictionary, Štefan Peciar’s Slovník slovenského jazyka. The compilation of Peciar’s dictionary was preceded by an earlier attempt at an authoritative dictionary of Slovak. Drawing on the lexical material gathered in wartime Slovakia, between 1946 and 1949, Anton Jánošík and Eugen Jóna managed to publish the fascicles of the first volume of their Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského. Because they followed in this dictionary Baník’s de-Czechizing 1940 Pravidlá of the Slovak language, in the wake of the 1948 communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, Prague terminated the compilation and further publication of this work. The authors were accused of being intolerant of Bohemianism and sticking too much to the Slovak version of linguistic purism. The liquidation of the last vestiges of democracy in postwar Czechoslovakia allowed for an improved enforcement of Czechoslovakism, most fully reflected in official and cultural dominance of Czech. Obviously, Štefan Peciar in his Slovník slovenského jazyka was obliged to follow more closely his own, officially endorsed, 1953 Czechizing Pravidlá, for which he had to apologize in 1968, when the Czechizing character of his dictionary was openly criticized during the Prague Spring. The ‘normalization’ that followed the military intervention and the federalization of Czechoslovakia, allowed for the unopposed reprinting of Peciar’s dictionary in 1971. For better or worse, this Czechizing dictionary of Slovak decided about the current character of the standard of this language. In 2006, 13 years after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the publication of a new de-Czechizing authoritative dictionary, titled Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka, commenced.

944 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The 1968 federalization of Czechoslovakia and the introduction of official bilingualism across the state cried out for the compilation of authoritative dictionaries that would pair Czech and Slovak. The extensive Slovak-Czech dictionary, Želmíra Gašparíková and Adolf Kamiš’s Slovensko-ˇceský slovník, came off the press in 1967, and was reprinted in 1984 and 1987. The Czech-Slovak dicˇ tionary, Jozef Michaláˇc and Andrej Šumec’s Cesko-slovenský slovník, followed in 1979, and its reprint was published in 1981. Both dictionaries marked the symbolical border between Czech and Slovak, but never became popular references. The two languages being mutually intelligible, Jaroslav Neˇcas’s Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak dictionary of words that are different in both languages, Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdilných výrazu˚, (1964), sufficed for school and everyday uses. Its further editions appeared in 1963, 1964, and 1989. Although between the World Wars, no authoritative dictionaries of Czech, Magyar, Slovak, and Polish were published, relatively numerous multi-volume encyclopedias made up for this deficiency. On the contrary, in the communist period, very few encyclopedias in these four languages came off the press. The first obstacle was meticulous censorship, which, on ideological grounds, was bound to bog down any large publishing project. And even more significantly, encyclopedias proved a double-edged instrument of ‘ideological warfare’ in communist countries. In the case of a momentous ideological change, like that brought about the de-Stalinization in 1956, previously published encyclopedias remained on bookshelves presenting now an ‘incorrect’ picture of reality. In communist Central Europe, the first postwar encyclopedias were published after 1956, when the introduction of national communism lent the Soviet bloc a degree of stability and permanence. Between 1959 and 1962, a Magyar encyclopedia, Új magyar lexicon, came off the press. It was followed by its Czech counterpart, Pˇriruˇcní slovník nauˇcný (1962–1967). Both were tiny in size. The ideologically motivated timidity of publishers was amply justified. The more extensive Polish encyclopedia, Wielka encyklopedia powszechna (1962– 1970), triggered numerous ideological controversies. For this reason, it was never reprinted, unlike Új magyar lexicon. Pˇriruˇcní slovník nauˇcný could not be reprinted either, for the publication of this work finished in 1967, at the threshold of the Prague Spring, which precipitated the federalization of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The situation necessitated a brand new encyclopedia, Malá ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie (1984–1987). Because the adjective ‘Czechoslovak’ featured in the work’s title, and thanks to the official bilingualism, there was apparently no need to compile a separate Slovak-language encyclopedia. Slovaks were expected to use the Czech-language encyclopedia intended for all the citizens of Czechoslovakia. Obviously, Slovak intellectuals disagreed. Many still remembered the sad case of Alexander Hirner. Between 1953 and 1958, he oversaw the compilation of the first volume of an intended universal Slovak-language encyclopedia, Príruˇcný encyklopedický

Conclusion

945

slovník. In accordance with the Czechizing line of official Czechoslovakism, the office of censorship prevented the publication of the volume, and its editor was imprisoned until 1966, on charges of ‘bourgeois-national deviation.’ Finally, the Slovaks were allowed their own encyclopedia, Encyklopédia Slovenska (1977– 1982); however, its scope was narrowed exclusively to Slovakia and matters Slovak. Other fields of research on Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak remained relatively neglected as of no immediate utility for the ideological needs of the communist regimes, and even potentially harmful to them. For instance, delving into etymology and historical lexicons could bring back meanings, associations, and memories reminiscent of the already exorcised ‘bourgeois past.’ The authorities did not lavish resources on such projects. Anyway, between 1952 and 1982, the fascicles of the never completed new etymological dictionary of Polish, Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego, were published. Its editor, Franciszek Sławski, attempted to improve on Brückner’s Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego. In 1957, in line with Czechoslovakism, the joint etymological dictionary of Czech and Slovak, Václav Machek’s Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského, came off the press. In reality, it was a Czech-language work only. In the two further editions of this dictionary, which appeared in 1968 and 1971, after the Prague Spring, the fig leaf of Slovak was dropped from the title, producing the straightforward etymological dictionary of Czech, Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského. Stanislav Lyer applied the same procedure to the new edition of Holub’s 1933 dictionary of the Czechoslovak language, leaving just the Czech language in the title, Struˇcný etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (1967, 1978). No separate etymological dictionary of Slovak has been published so far, though the compilation of one is said to be progressing. So far, out of the four Central European languages analyzed here, Magyar has received the most exhaustive etymological dictionary, Benk˝ o Loránd’s A Magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára (1967–1976), which was also published in a German-language version as Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen (1993– 1997). The research on the Magyar language is better developed than in the case of Czech, Polish, and Slovak; and frequently made available to international public in major Western languages, English, French, and German. This tradition commenced at the turn of the 19th century when language gained political significance. At that time, Magyar intellectuals wondered where the ancestors of Magyars came from and to what other languages Magyar could be related. They strove to follow the pattern of thinking on language and of its politicization as set by European scholars and leaders, who, in the 19th century, began to refer to the ‘kindred families’ of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages. In the context of the cultural-cum-political Pan-movements (Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, especially), the Magyars felt isolated, the future existence of their nation endangered by simultaneous Germanization and Slavicization.

946 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

The finding of linguists that Magyar is related to Estonian, Finnish, Saami and languages of various north Russian and north Siberian ethnic groups of nomads and hunter-gatherers did not appear glorious enough and was rejected. The task of political philology was to ‘prove,’ on an ethnolinguistic basis, that the Magyars were as much an antique people worth the label of ‘Europeans’ as the French or the Germans. The Finno-Ugric link to ‘primitive peoples’ and Asia, then a major symbol of backwardness and an antithesis of Europeanness in Western European political thought, was unacceptable. The proponents of the politically correct theory that Magyar was related to the Turkic language became more influential. The Ottoman Empire with which Hungary had warred from the 16th century to the 18th century appeared a more glorious partner with which to form a nascent Pan-movement. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Turkic activists and intellectuals from the Russian Empire developed the theoretical and ideological basis of the Turanian (literally, ‘not-Aryan,’ that is, non-Indo-European) family of peoples and languages, in which they included those, nowadays, labeled as ‘Turkic,’ ‘Finno-Ugric,’ and ‘Altaic.’ This politicized and glorious enough pedigree spawned a Pan-Turanian movement, which became increasingly popular among the Magyars at the turn of the 20th century and in the interwar years. Also, Japanese ideologues jumped onto the bandwagon and their Chinese counterparts included the self-declared Turanians in the concept of ‘yellow race,’ obviously headed by the Chinese themselves. On this platform of Pan-Turanianism, interwar Magyar politicians legitimized the need of a lasting union between Turanian and Germanic ‘warrior nations’ in order to alter the decisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which Budapest and Berlin found humiliating and unjust (Harrison 2001: 107; Klimó 2003: 141–142, 280, 292). As language is an integral part of Central European politics, Magyar intellectuals felt their nation to be at a serious disadvantage in comparison to Germanic and Slavic nations, whose voice was easily heard by ‘kindred nations’ belonging to the Pan-Germanic and Pan-Slavic families, respectively. The Magyar elite’s insecurity increased between the World Wars, when the stunning successes of Magyarization were speedily reversed in these areas of historical Hungary, which were not included in post-Trianon Hungary. This necessitated publishing works on various aspects of Magyar language and culture in Western languages. Hence, today, it is relatively easy for a non-Magyar-speaker to become acquainted with these issues, while a non-Slavic-speaker has no choice but to painstakingly learn one or more Slavic languages to attain a similar degree of knowledge on Slavic cultures and languages. In communist Hungary, the myth of Turanian commonality had to be abandoned in favor of communist internationalism, but the tradition of publishing books on matters Magyar in Western languages (and from 1945, in Russian too) persisted. After the fall of communism, a limited kind of

Conclusion

947

Pan-Turanianism revived in the garb of more ethnolinguistically justified Finno-Ugric cooperation. However, at the lunatic and politicized fringe of scholarship, works appear to ‘prove’ that Magyar is, for instance, the direct descendant of the Sumerian language, which makes Magyar into the oldest (written) language on Earth. The post-1918 truncation of historical Hungary to its current size and the post-1945 dismantling of enlarged wartime Hungary channeled the efforts of scholars to the task of describing the entire Magyarophone language community, irrespective of actual political borders. To this end, an extensive dictionary of the Magyar dialects, Éva L˝ orinczy’s Új magyar tájszótár (1979–2002), was published. Furthermore, numerous linguistic atlases covered the Magyarspeaking areas outside Hungary, in Romania (László Murádin’s A romániai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza, 1995–2003), Slovakia (Anna Sándor’s A Nyitra-vidéki magyar nyelvjárások atlasza, 2004), or Ukraine (Petro M Lyzanec’s A kárpátaljai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza, 1992–2003). With one-third of the Magyars living outside the current Hungarian borders, the Magyar language became an ersatz ‘true nation-state’ for the entire Magyar nation, like the Polish language used to for the Polish-Lithuanian nobility (redefined as a Polish nation) between the final partition of Poland-Lithuania (1795) and the founding of modern Poland (1918). This politicization of Magyar triggered a wave of linguistic purism, reflected in dictionaries that identified non-Magyar words, for instance, stemming from Slavic languages (István Kniezsa’s A magyar nyelv szláv jövevényszavai, 1955), or Romanian (Ferenc Bakos’s A magyar szókészlet román elemeinek története, 1982). Dictionaries, like other scholarly studies, are often a result of scholarly curiosity. But research and its financing are also dictated by current political needs. The end result, even if objective, can be put to ideological uses, which the author might not intend. Irrespective of Kniezsa’s or Bakos’s wishes in this respect, their dictionaries delimited the border between ‘truly’ Magyar words and ‘foreign’ Romanian and Slavic loans, abstractly reflecting the ethnolinguistic boundary between the Magyars and their Romanian and Slavic neighbors. Their dictionaries would not be employed to such a political end, provided ethnic nationalism had not been so much steeped in language as its foundation in Central Europe. Gábor Szarvas and Zsigmond Simonyi’s historical dictionary of the Magyar language, Magyar nyelvtörténeti szótár (1890–1893), had not been paralleled by any comparable work of this kind devoted to Czech, Polish, or Slovak until the communist period. Gebauer’s historical dictionary of Czech, Slovník staroˇceský, stalled at the letter N in 1916. It was resumed in 1968 under a slightly changed title, Staroˇceský slovník, and by 2004, had covered entries from N to P. In 1953, Stanisław Urbanczyk ´ commenced his historical dictionary of Polish covering the attested 15th-century and earlier vocabulary, Słownik Staropolski. The work was completed in 2002. In 1966, Maria Renata Mayenowa

948 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

began her historical dictionary of 16th-century Polish and reached the letter P in 2005. Symptomatically, a historical dictionary of Slovak, Milan Majtán’s Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (1991–2005), came off the press after the fall of communism, following the deepening of the federalization of postcommunist Czechoslovakia into Czecho-Slovakia (1990), and the subsequent dissolution of this polity (1993). Besides their usual scientific function, all the historical dictionaries established the appropriate ‘oldness’ of all the four national languages. Despite its innate illogicalities and the danger of being overbid, the historical argument of ‘my-nation-was-here-first’ type still remains a useful instrument of legitimizing a nation-state’s ownership of a given territory or its claim to an area outside its current borders. The ethnolinguistic method of pursuing domestic and international politics seems to be old-fashioned today, but one can disregard it only at one’s peril. It was in constant use in the 19th and 20th centuries, so this tradition will not disappear any time soon although the ethnolinguistically defined national principle might be dethroned from its privileged position of the ultimate instrument of statehood and nationhood legitimization after the breakup of the Soviet bloc. The post-1945 rise of a civic nation of Austrians and of a civic-cum-communist nation of East Germans dented the monolith of the ethnolinguistic paradigm of Central European nationalisms. On the other hand, the 1968 federalization of communist Czechoslovakia into a bi-national state and its 1993 breakup into the separate nation-states of the Czechs and the Slovaks reconfirmed the vibrancy of ethnolinguistic nationalism, like the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union along the ethnolinguistic lines had done and the aftermath of the post-Yugoslav wars in the form of new ethnolinguistic nation-states still does. The breakup of Czechoslovakia finished the division of Central Europe among ethnolinguistic nation-states in line with the process, which had commenced in 1918. This event finished the period of official bilingualism in Czechoslovakia, which had begun in 1968. For the first time in history, the Czech nation lives in exclusively its own nation-state and no other language rivals the official position of the Czech language. By the same token, Slovak became the sole official language in Slovakia for the second time, perhaps permanently in contrast to its official position in short-lived wartime Slovakia. The 2 + 4 negotiations between both Germanys and the wartime Allies amounted to a peace conference that had never taken place after 1945. They also opened the way for the 1990 reunification of Germany, which reaffirmed the ethnolinguistic principle in Central Europe by doing away with the communist nation of East Germans, submerged in West Germany’s ethnolinguistic nation of Germans. In the wake of these developments, Warsaw received Germany’s final recognition of the Polish western border. On one hand, this freed Poland from the Kremlin’s blackmail that only the Soviet Union could guarantee this border, while on the other allowed Bonn to fit better the political borders of the German

Conclusion

949

nation-state to the actual territory populated by the members of the German nation. The regaining of full sovereignty by the Soviet bloc countries, after the Kremlin’s 1989 decision to let them go, was paralleled by the Allies’ return of full sovereignty to Germany and Austria. The nation-states freed from the straitjacket of Soviet dominance and the Allies’ supervision did not embark on a course of playing out their old national conflicts with their neighbors. The ethnolinguistically motivated post-Yugoslav and post-Soviet wars cooled hot tempers. The model of economic and social development dissociated from the need of territorial aggrandizement, as proposed by the European Union, proved more attractive for Central Europe’s citizenries than the national trope of sacrificing one’s life for one’s country and language. The partial exception to this principle was Slovakia under Vladimír Meˇciar’s premiership (1993–1998), when in a Pan-Slavic vein, Bratislava sought a closer alliance with Russia and Ukraine, and pursued the policy of heavy-handed ethnolinguistic assimilation directed at the Magyar minority. Later, both trends were reversed but the flirt with authoritarianism cost Slovakia a delay in its accession to NATO until 2004. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland had joined this military organization in 1999. All the four countries became members of the European Union in 2004. This and their membership in NATO guaranteed for Central Europe the same level of security and conditions of economic development, as enjoyed by Western Europe. The package came complete with the elevation of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak to the status of official languages of the European Union. In this manner, it seems that language from the preferred instrument of nation- and nation-state-building, and of ethnolinguistic homogenization, has become a mere national symbol comparable in its ideological passivity to national flags and anthems. Perhaps, it was also possible thanks to the fact that all the four nation-states attained an unprecedented degree of ethnolinguistic homogeneity, which silenced the traditional ethnonational forces redirecting their attention to a ‘struggle with the Brussels bureaucracy.’ National minorities account for negligible percent of the inhabitants in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Only the Magyar minority accounts for one-tenth of Slovakia’s population. On the other hand, at the turn of the 21st century, Hungary’s mainstream politicians largely ceased to evoke Magyar minorities to exert political pressure on the country’s neighbors. In addition, during the 1990s, the rights of national minorities were mostly guaranteed by the unprecedented series of bilateral treaties contracted among the Central and Eastern European nation-states. In this context, it is not surprising that after the fall of communism, there was no urge to produce authoritative dictionaries of Czech, Magyar, Polish, or Slovak. Such projects lost their ideological edge, and it was preferred to channel sparse funds to the fields, the overhauling of which was crucial for carrying out a systemic reform, without which the four Central European states could not

950 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

hope to join either NATO or the European Union. Besides, the dictionaries and encyclopedias that were produced from the 19th century to 1989 had already sufficiently standardized the corresponding four national languages, with the slight exception of Slovak. The sole multi-volume authoritative dictionary, which had been published in Central Europe by 2006, is of Polish, Halina Zgółkowa’s Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (1994–2005). An attempt at an extensive etymological dictionary of this language, Andrzej Bankowski’s ´ Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (2000), is bound to remain incomplete with the final (third) volume remaining to be published. Since the turn of the 21st century, there have been rumors that the first etymological dictionary of Slovak will be published alongside the first multi-volume authoritative dictionary of this language free from Prague’s Czechizing control. Yet, by 2005, the publication of none of the two dictionaries had commenced. (The first volume of L’ubica Balážová and Klára Buzássyová’s eight-volume authoritative dictionary of Slovak, Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka, came off the press in late 2006, and will not have been completed earlier than by 2021.) In contrast to the communist period, the market demand, unfettered by censorship any more, allowed for the production of multi-volume encyclopedias. Poland, as the most populous of the four analyzed countries, has been able to make it economically viable for the production of the largest number of encyclopedias of this kind, namely, Popularna encyklopedia powszechna (1994–1998), Nowa encyklopedia powszechna (1995–1996), Wielka encyklopedia powszechna (2001–2005), and Encyklopedia Gazety Wyborczej (2005). In Hungary, a single extensive encyclopedia was completed, Magyar Nagylexikon (1993– 2004), which seemingly makes the country a worse performer in this field than the Czech Republic. However, the three Czech-language encyclopedias, Encyklopedia (1998), Všeobecná encyklopedie (1999), and Universum. Všeobecná encyklopedie (1999–2001) are small or medium-sized. In addition, most of their articles were translated from a German encyclopedia, Das Bertelsmann Lexikon. The attempt at a large and original Czech-language encyclopedia, Velká všeobecná encyklopedie (2000–2006), stalled at the fourth volume in 2001. The national motivation and support for the compilation of the first full-fledged multi-volume Slovak-language encyclopedia bore fruit in 2001, when the publication of Encyclopaedia Beliana began. Interestingly, the strong bond between Catholicism and culture of Magyar and Polish made it possible for a Magyarlanguage Catholic encyclopedia to be published, Magyar Katolikus Lexikon (1993–), and the publication of a Polish encyclopedia of this type, Encyklopedia katolicka (1973–), begun already in the communist period, continues to this day. After the fall of communism, in the social context of full literacy with no censorship, and broad access to radio, terrestrial, satellite and cable television, and

Conclusion

951

the internet, language has been freed from its servitude to nation. People seized the ownership of language from ideologues and state agencies. The centralized control over the use and correctness of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak, as practiced during the communist years, effectively disappeared. Attempts to regain such control by passing acts intended to ‘defend’ the languages against the perceived ‘invasion of English’ and ‘barbarisms’ proved futile. Apart from the standards of use as established and enforced via the school system prior to 1989, nowadays the biggest number of users who settle for employing a given usage decides what is the norm in the case of new coinages. This new phenomenon moderates the prescriptivist urge previously so popular in Central Europe (and appreciated by ethnonationalists), and with time, is bound to convince linguists and compilers of dictionaries that they irrevocably lost their elevated position of demiurges, who shaped national languages to their liking and in line with political needs. What is now left to linguists is to describe Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak as users at large employ these languages for their own needs. The novel political and social situation seems to enforce a descriptive approach to all the four Central languages. What mars this trend to depoliticize the four Central European languages is upholding their elevated status of official language to the detriment of other languages spoken in the corresponding nation-states. The situation is most pronounced in postcommunist Poland, where Kashubian was officially recognized as a language separate from Polish only in 2005, while no such recognition has been granted to Silesian (Szlonzokian) yet, despite the interested party’s repeated requests to this end. In addition, the progressing codification of Goralian as a written dialect of Polish is frowned at, and bureaucratic hurdles are put in the way of national minorities aspiring to use their languages in state offices and on road signs with place-names. Prague, in line with the Czechoslovak tradition of tolerance for bilingualism in offices and road signs, displays a more relaxed attitude to the official use of national minority languages. In the present-day Czech Republic, it practically means guaranteeing various provisions of this kind for Polish. In addition, the authorities neither implicitly nor explicitly discourage various attempts at codifying such new languages as Moravian, Prussian (of the Hluˇcínsko), or Silesian (Slunzakian of the Tˇešínsko). In the 1990s, Budapest established the most generous Central European system of minority (including linguistic) rights for Hungary’s even tiniest minorities, but with an eye to demanding similar concessions for numerically much larger Magyar minorities in the neighboring states. This unnecessarily reintroduced tension between Hungary and its neighbors, and also between the Magyar minorities and the authorities in the countries of the minorities’ residence. Until 1998, Bratislava had the dubious distinction of the worst record in observing minority rights, because during the time, the Czechoslovak liberal system of various minority privileges (including linguistic) was progressively dissolved, especially

952 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

after 1995. The process was reverted at the turn of the 21st century, making Poland again the most prominent laggard at observing minority rights in Central Europe. As elsewhere in postcommunist Europe, the Roma are the minority group that has fared worst in Central Europe since 1989. During the communist period, the status of a specific ethnic group was customarily denied to them. The authorities deemed them ‘parasite lumpenproletariat,’ who had to be ‘productivized’ through forced sedantarization without any respect for their culture or language. As a result, the Romani language has not been standardized to this day, and no minority educational system with Romani as a medium of instruction has been established. During the late communist period, however, efforts were undertaken to codify Romani in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. They bore fruit in the form of two bilingual dictionaries pairing Magyar and Romani. After the fall of communism, further six dictionaries of this kind came off the press and were followed by one, which paired Romani and Czech. No dictionaries pairing Romani and Polish or Slovak have been published so far. Ironically, the Romani employed in the Czech-Romani dictionary is based on Slovakia’s Romani dialects. Today, the official status of the four analyzed Central European languages is guaranteed only in the Constitutions of Poland and Slovakia. In the Czech Republic, numerous acts of lower rank create the same effect for Czech, which is a radical breach with the Czechoslovak tradition of guaranteeing this status for the language (alongside Slovak) in the Constitution. In this respect, the de-politicization of language has occurred more in the Czech Republic in comparison to Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. In Hungary, a parallel can be observed with the Czech case, because the Hungarian Constitution does not mention the subject of official language. This parallel is deceiving, however. Hungary, like the United Kingdom, did not have any formal Constitution until the communist takeover after World War II. Hence, everyday practice and a plethora of regulations and documents issued in the 19th century and until the 1940s sufficiently guaranteed the elevated position of Magyar in close emulation of a formal constitutional guarantee. In communist Hungary, the tradition of such a systemic guarantee of the exclusive official status for Magyar continued and lasts to this day. Furthermore, the politicization of language is indirectly visible in the constitutional obligation of the Hungarian state to take care of Magyars living outside its boundaries. The overwhelmingly ethnolinguistic definition of the Magyar nation as considerably larger than its actual nation-state impinges on the neighboring states. Wisely, Budapest and the Hungarian citizenry largely refused to act on this ticket not to endanger peace and the prospects of European integration in Central Europe. Apart from its political and national significance, the policy of ethnolinguistic homogenization as applied in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland,

Conclusion

953

and Slovakia produced an unusual uniformity of language use in all the four nation-states. The 19th-century ethnolinguistic vision of nation defined what should be the ultimate goal of nationalism in Central Europe, namely, ethnolinguistic purity, that is, the tight overlapping of a state with its ethnolinguistic nation. It was foreseen that no members of the nation would remain outside their nation-state and no members of other nations would reside in this state, which by definition would not be theirs. Afterward, the radical 20th-century social engineering, as instituted in the name of nation and at the instigation of the two totalitarian ideologies of fascism and communism, strove to achieve this aim. Frequent border changes, forced assimilation, forced emigration, expulsions, and the Holocaust produced the ideal of such ethnolinguistic homogeneity, the rise of which was crucially facilitated by full literacy, universal educational, and the ubiquitous mass media. In Germany and Italy, where ethnolinguistic nationalism originated, the rule of law and the prevailing of democracy with the exception of the brief national socialist and fascist interludes of totalitarianism prevented the full and unrestrained implementation of the ethnolinguistic ideal. Moreover, German and Italian function as official and national languages outside Germany and Italy, as well. Although regional dialects or languages wane in both nation-states due to the unprecedented uniformizing impact of the mass media, there are still significant numbers of speakers who use them alongside or even in preference to standard Italian and standard German. On the other hand, in the Soviet Union, the Kremlin attempted to harness ethnolinguistic nationalism in service of communism. As a result, the polity’s administrative division was constructed from national republics, but the establishment of numerous autonomous national republics and districts frustrated the attainment of ethnolinguistic homogeneity within the territories of these republics. Furthermore, the ethnolinguistic make-ups of all the ethnolinguistically defined national territories changed due to the forced and free movement of people within the Soviet Union. In line with the principle of divide et impera, Moscow set various ethnolinguistic nationalisms against one another to be able to steer their predicted social impact in agreement with the needs of policies, perceived as leading toward communism. Unsurprisingly, all post-Soviet nation-states are highly multilingual and multiethnic. In the case of Central Europe, there were almost no social, political, internal or external forces, which would hamper or oppose the introduction of ethnolinguistic homogeneity. Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak enjoy the full status of official and national languages only in their respective nation-states. (Slovak and Magyar function as co-official languages in Serbia’s Vojvodina, but Serbian is official, which in practice, makes the two former languages into minority or regional ones.) The steamroller of ethnolinguistic homogenization almost stamped out any regional and dialectal differences, leaving (apart from

954 Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe

insignificant exceptions) present-day speakers of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak with the standard versions of the languages. Bilingualism in a standard and local dialect, so common in Germany and Italy, has been lost, though the remnants of this practice can be observed in some Czech regions (Moravia and Czech Silesia), Polish (Kashubia, the Carpathians, and Upper Silesia), and Slovak (the Carpathians and Prešov Ruthenia). Bilingualism in a national standard and a minority language is equally uncommon, with the exception of the Roma, and the sizeable Magyar minority concentrated in southern Slovakia. Other minorities lost or by force were deprived of the command of their national or ethnic languages, like Poland’s 0.3 million Germans, out of whom merely 10,000 of those aged 70 and more know German and sometimes communicate in it. The communist ideal of classlessness also left a significant imprint on language in Central Europe by leveling outstanding social differences. Up to the 1940s, the wide class cleavages between elite (gentry, nobility, proprietors, industrialists, administrators, doctors, university graduates), workers, and peasantry were clearly reflected in language, custom, and dress. These groups spoke standard languages and dialects (and sometimes different languages altogether) as the clear badge of their social difference. The communist regimes of Central Europe pauperized the old elites, enabled and enforced the vast population shift from the countryside to the cities, and created new elites from persons of worker and peasant origin. As a result, today, class distinction is not reflected in the use of Czech, Magyar, Slovak, and Polish. The better educated or richer than the rest can try to display their status by speaking the most official and stilted version of their standard languages reserved for scholarly books or public speeches. However, more often than not, it makes them the laughing butt of the population at large, thus the growing social stratification so characteristic of the postcommunist period does not find its reflection in language, which remains quite democratic. Hence, Central Europeans find it most surprising that classbased varieties of English should be of such social significance in the United Kingdom, which they see as a paragon of democracy. Last but not least, although, at present, more women than men tend to graduate from Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak universities, the tradition of patriarchy still bears heavily on Central Europe to the exclusion of women from the actual decision-making in politics, economy, and culture. In the long 19th century, when women had no right to vote and on average were less educated than men and in most cases, were barred from enrolling in universities, they did not participate in the decisive language codification projects such as the compilation of multi-volume authoritative dictionaries. The closest they could approach the process of language standardization was to try their hand at writing fiction or poetry. With the exception of the Czech writer, Božena Nˇemcova, however, no female author from Central Europe gained the popularity and respect lavished on their top male counterparts.

Conclusion

955

Despite granting women the same political and educational rights and opportunities after 1918, and especially during the communist period, the traditional vision of woman as mother and housewife prevents females from pursuing careers and achieving positions enjoyed by their male colleagues with similar educational background and professional experience. Many female writers, however, managed to get the upper hand in literature, as amply exemplified by the Polish Nobel Prize winner, Wiesława Szymborska (1923–). Linguistics does not remain a sole domain of males either, though still the top positions and projects seem to be reserved exclusively for them. Thus, to this day, no female head editors have overseen the compilation and publication of multivolume authoritative dictionaries of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak. The sole two exceptions to this rule and the probable harbinger of change to come in the course of the 21st century are Halina Zgółkowa, who edited the first postcommunist authoritative dictionary of Polish, Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny, and since 2006, L’ubica Balážová and Klára Buzássyová busy editing the first postcommunist authoritative dictionary of Slovak, Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka.

Notes

Epigraph 1. Je˛zyk. Je˛zyk, to dzikie mie˛so, które ro´snie w ranie, w otwartej ranie ust, zywia ˙ ˛cych sie˛ skłamana˛ prawda˛, [ . . . ] je˛zyk, [ . . . ] to zwierze˛ oswajane z ludzkimi ze˛bami, to nieludzkie, co ro´snie w nas i nas przerasta, to czerwona flaga, która˛ wypluwamy razem z krwia˛ [ . . . ]. “Je˛zyk to dzikie mie˛so’’

Preface 1. In late 2007 independent Montenegro adopted its first Constitution, which made Montenegrin the sole official language of the country, and provided for the equality of Cyrillic and the Latin script in official use. 2. The young American historian, Alexander Maxwell, analyzed in depth the ideologized constructedness of this notion in his 2006 enlightening article, ‘Why the Slovak Language has Three Dialects: A case study in historical perceptual dialectology,’ published in the Austrian History Yearbook. To this end, he employed the American linguist Dennis Preston’s novel concept of ‘perceptual dialectology’ (1993). Preston, unlike his colleagues, focuses on the popular perceptions of languages and dialects as a sociohistorical force in the wake of which professional linguists willy-nilly follow, while, presumably, attempting to describe linguistic reality objectively. 3. In 1957, Kohn decided to devote a monograph to his adopted state, but his American Nationalism is of quite a laudatory character. He played it safe and did not attempt to debunk any myths dear to the Unites States’ national project. 4. In the Soviet Union scholarship was limited by the straitjacket of ideological prerequisites. This meant that the study of language politics had to be applicable in line with the theory that all the nations and ethnic groups living in the communist state would supposedly converge, and then merge into a single Soviet communist nation (people), also united in its communist national language of Cyrillic-based Russian. That is why, with a few negligible exceptions, all languages used for writing in the Soviet Union had to be committed to paper in Cyrillic after the turn of the 1940s. Inevitably, the handful of scholars who were allowed to research the Soviet language politics had to toe this official line, as implicitly explained by the Soviet ethnolinguist of Ossetian origin, Magomet I Isaev (1928–), in his 1969 article, ‘Problemy razvitiia natsionalnykh iazykov v SSSR v osveshchenii burzhuaznykh avtorov’ (The Problems of the Development of National Languages in the USSR, as Analyzed by Bourgeois Authors), published in Voprosy istorii. Understandably, Isaev’s numerous works on the Soviet language politics, as, for instance, Izykovoe stroitelstvo v SSSR (Language Construction in the USSR, 1979, Moscow) or similar by authors not so much championed 956

Notes

957

by the communist leadership as he (for example, B S Asimova’s Iazykovoe stroitelstvo v Tadzhikistane [Language Construction in Tajikistan, 1982, Dushanbe]) were published in few copies, and thus were condemned to obscurity. 5. Specialists from other disciplines also open novel vistas on language, for instance evolutionary psychologists (sociobiologists). Their hypothesis (that draws from physical anthropology as well) is that the modern language ability appeared with the emergence of anatomically modern humans, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago. However, at that time, their hypothetical ‘protolanguage’ was largely uniform and, perhaps, quite rudimentary. The face-to-face recognition of all the members in a group ceased to be a viable strategy with the rise of population densities, for instance 50,000 to 45,000 years ago in Europe and Western Asia. In order to protect growing groups against ‘freeloaders,’ language was selected for to become the main instrument of creating social boundaries around the groups, which entailed the rapid differentiation of protolanguage into an increasing multitude of gradually incomprehensible languages. At that time, cultural evolution replaced its biological counterpart as the chief force, which alters man and his societies; hence, the subject matter of social sciences was born (Dunbar 1999: 188–189, 224–225).

1

Introduction 1. Parts of this Introduction appeared earlier as articles; see Kamusella (2004, 2006a). 2. Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio (Schlösser 2005: 51; Trabant 2006: 114). 3. Nebrija’s grammar was the first one of any vernacular Romance language. He dedicated it to Queen Isabel I the Catholic (reigned 1474–1504), and the grammar was published in the year when she and her consort and co-monarch, Ferdinand V the Catholic (reigned 1474–1504), completed the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, and when Spanish overseas imperial expansion began in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s (1451–1506) ‘discovery’ of America. Significantly, Nebrija also published the first Spanish-Latin dictionary (1495) and Regles de ortografia española (The Principles of Spanish Orthography, 1517, Madrid). His works written in an early spirit of linguistic nationalism were espoused by both Spanish co-monarchs and thus contributed to the replacement of Latin by Spanish as the official language of Spain. 4. Die Sprache also macht die rechte Grenze der Völker. 5. Jedes gesunde Staatsvolk, jeder gesunde Volksstaat muß wollen, daß seine Volkssprache die Staatssprache und seine Staatssprache die Volkssprache ist. 6. [A] shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot. 7. In its technical sense, the term ‘codification’ means to ‘systematize’ or to ‘collect existing laws into a coherent code.’ It is derived from Latin codex for a ‘bound book’ consisting of separate rectangular leaves sewn together at one edge. The meaning of ‘standardization’ is similar, though with the emphasis of making ‘something uniform.’ Although when applied to language-building both terms are largely synonymous, I prefer to employ codification for the process in the course of which a language is reduced to writing, that is, codex-like books in the Western tradition. In contrast, I tend to reserve standardization for denoting the political-cum-academic process, which thoroughly uniformizes orthography, grammar, pronunciation, and accepted usages of a language, and imposes the resultant standard lanaguage on a population (usually organized as a nation) with the means of a political decision enforced by administrative measures.

958 Notes

8. The term Mitteleuropa emerged in the German-speaking world during the first half of the 19th century (cf. Blasius 1857). It superseded the earlier usage of ‘Northern Europe’ for Poland-Lithuania, Prussia, Russia, and the Czech lands, or the theater of the Great Northern War, during the first two decades of the 18th century. 9. I do not give any references in this section, as the political panorama presented consists of well-known facts. Should the reader, however, wish to double-check them, I used, among others, the following works in writing this section, Magocsi (2002), Sugar and Treadgold (1974–), Sukiennicki (1984), and Wandycz (1992). 10. The Roman province of Dacia (106–271 CE) extended, however, to what is presently western Romania. 11. I use the term ‘Kievan Rus’ as popularly accepted in English-language literature, but stick to the Ukrainian-language version of the name of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The name of Kievan Rus is derived from Kiev, or the Russian version of the city’s name. 12. I use the linguistic forms of place names that were official at the time that the narrative focuses on. At the first mentioning, I provide the modern name in parenthesis. However, when a town or other geographical object is known by its anglicized name I stick to it (for instance, Warsaw, not Warszawa). The only major exception to this rule is the Slovak capital Bratislava. In the period before 1918, I use either the German name, Preßburg, or its Magyar counterpart, Pozsony, because the seemingly invented Slovak form, Bratislava, was imposed on the city from above in 1918 in order to distance it from its German and Magyar past. Earlier, Slavic sources had referred to Bratislava as Prešporok or Prešpurk. Never did such an imposition take place in the case of Budapest (Magyar and German forms of the name are the same, though, prior to the unification of Buda and Pest, German-speakers referred to the former as Ofen), Prague (Praha in Czech, Prag in German), or Warsaw (Warszawa in Polish, Warschau in German, and Varshava in Russian). 13. It is worthwhile noting that the German occupation administration set the basis for the speedy creation of its Polish counterpart in 1918, while Germany’s occupation quasi-state of das Land Ober Ost (Upper East) was instrumental for the founding of the nation-states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus (Anon. 1917; Sukiennicki 1984: 137–172). 14. On the temporal plane, the oral always precedes the written. So written, standard, or national languages emerged from dialects, however defined, not the other way round. 15. The dialect continuum is a geographical area in the confines of which closely related dialects shade into one another. In Central Europe one can distinguish the West Germanic, North Slavic, and South Slavic dialect continua. The first extends from Great Britain, via the Netherlands and Germany to Switzerland and Austria. The North Slavic continuum goes from Poland and the Czech Republic via Russia to the Pacific, while the South Slavic one mainly coincides with the territories of Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Creole continua happen to open between variegated dialect continua (Crystal 1987: 25). 16. This attitude toward language use has existed since the emergence of the first polities. It was always the elite concentrated in the power center (capital, royal court) that decided which language or which dialect of a language was ‘civilized,’ ‘cultivated,’ or ‘developed’ enough to be employed by them as an official language. More often than not it was the dialect or language, which most of the elite conventionally employed. Hence, different languages and dialects spoken by the non-elite population at large in the polity’s other regions always appeared to them as ‘funny,’ ‘backward,’ or

Notes

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

959

‘uncultivated.’ Accordingly, the elite ridiculed these languages and dialects as ‘peasant talk.’ In Western and Central Europe the Roman politician and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero’s (106–43 BCE) model of language cultivation (‘eloquence,’ or power of persuasion) was accepted as the ‘norm’ to which written languages should aspire. In his De oratore (About Oratory, 55 BCE), he proposed that ‘good Latin’ should be characterized by, the correct use of language, clarity in use of language, ornatus (distinction, ornamentation) in use of language, and the appropriate use of language. In the 15th and 16th centuries, humanists revived this Ciceronian model bent on ‘renewing’ Medieval Latin, which they saw as ‘corrupt.’ Later, in the course of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, vernacular writers adopted this program for ‘developing’ their own languages (Haugen 1976: 361; Patten 2006: 225, 230; Trabant 2006: 139–156). I put the words ‘their,’ ‘abroad,’ and ‘re-settle’ in inverted commas to problematize their seemingly unambiguous meaning. Many nation-states appeared as a surprise to those concerned. Not all of those defined as speaking the national language identified with supposedly ‘their’ nation-state. Likewise, the postulated co-nationals remaining outside the new polity’s frontiers did not feel themselves living abroad. In addition, ‘repatriation’ (‘re-settlement’) of minorities undertaken in the course various population exchanges was anything but ‘going back home’. Those supposedly ‘repatriated’ were forced to leave localities where they had lived since their birth, like their parents, and long lines of ancestors. In reality, ‘repatriation’ (‘re-settlement’) was forced emigration or expulsion. Those who agree that England was the first nation-state ever, which spontaneously emerged in the 16th century, remark that Queen Elizabeth I of England (reigned 1558–1603) could be seen as the ‘mother of the English nation.’ Curiously, in the names of the League of Nations and United Nations only the term ‘nation’ features, though membership in both organizations has been opened exclusively to nation-states. The confusion stems from the fact that in English and French the word ‘nation’ is also a synonym for state. This usage reflects the history of English and French nationalism, in the course of which pre-national polities transformed their populations into nations, and themselves, by default, into nation-states. This usage spread to former English and French colonies turned independent nationstates. It also spawned another terminological confusion in both languages, that is, the synonymy of the terms ‘nationality’ (the fact of being a member of a nation) and ‘citizenship’ (the fact of being a member of the citizenry in a given polity). Significantly, only ethnic nations, that is, united around a shared language, religion, customs or any other cultural variable, can be stateless. A stateless civic nation is a contradiction in terms. Any civic nation is secondary to its state. It was the state that transformed its population into a nation united by shared citizenship. The state constitutes the legal and practical basis of the institution of citizenship, which unites the population into a nation. Should such a state disappear, the institution of citizenship would disappear, as well, which would mean the dissolution of the civic nation. Obviously, the ethno-cultural commonality produced during the time when this population lived in the same state, could be used for transforming the civic nation deprived of its nation-state into a stateless (thus, necessarily ethnic) nation. Understanding what another person says is a multifaceted cognitive process. I use here percentages as a figure of speech, because in reality it is impossible to reduce the phenomenon of intelligibility to such a simplistic mathematical formula (cf. Haugen 1966a).

960 Notes

22. It is not true of social dialects that mark one’s social position in a given locality. However, it seems that social dialects stem from regular territorial dialects, whose speakers, at one point, migrated to the locality, and preserved language differences as a reflection of their different social statuses and origin. 23. The role of language being so pronounced in Central and Eastern European nationalisms, numerous linguists active in the region also doubled as national leaders. This was especially true of these national movements, which could not credibly and unambiguously claim long-standing continuous traditions of statehood and culture that bound with their national languages. Hence L’udovít Štúr (1815–1856) combined his role as the first undisputed leader of the Slovak national movement with that of codifier of the modern Slovak language. Josef Jungmann (1773–1847), the codifier of standard Czech, was one of the first leaders of the Czech national movement. But Samuel Bogumił Linde (1771–1847), who codified standard Polish, was in the service of the Polish magnate, Józef Maksymilian Ossolinski ´ (1748–1826). Ossolinski ´ clearly realized the political significance of Linde’s lexicographic work and sponsored it, but it was Ossolinski, ´ not Linde, who was one of the leaders of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, who gradually transformed itself into the Polish national movement in the first half of the 19th century. 24. Having probed into the political nature of the concept of ‘a language,’ it is interesting to reflect on the popular estimates on the number of languages spoken in the world. The most trusted reference on this subject, Ethnologue, established the number at 6912 in 2005. It corresponds well to the number of discrete ethnic groups as identified by anthropologists. When it comes to written languages, in 2003 there were ‘adequate translations’ of the Bible into 405 languages, of the New Testament into 1034 languages, and fragments of the Scriptures into further 883 languages. Altogether more or less the Christian Holy Word was available in 2200 languages in 2003. But the number of fully codified written languages is much smaller. The world’s largest library, the Library of Congress, has holdings in about 450 languages. On this basis, jointly with Infoterm Vienna, this library maintains the ISO 639 standard of granting international codes to languages. This is as close as it gets to international recognition of a language. In the IT age, such a recognition of a language amounts to the fact that its script can be displayed on a computer screen. The Unicode/ISO 10646 standard supports the character sets of about 600 languages. But the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available in over 300 languages. Perhaps, in the world there are no more than 350 written languages of some political significance, around which ethnonational movements or ethnolinguistic nations have coalesced, or could coalesce (Ethnologue 2005; ISO 2000; Submitting New Characters or Scripts 2005; Translation Perspectives 2004; Universal Declaration of Human Rights 2005). 25. In the case of Ukraine and Byelorussia, I speak rather of non-Ukrainians and non-Belarusians rather than non-Ukrainian-speakers and non-Belarusian-speakers, because numerous Ukrainians are monolingual in Russian, and the majority of Belarusians chose to speak rather in Russian than in Belarusian. 26. In 2008 Kosovo (Kosova in Albanian) was granted independence, on the tacit condition that it would not join Albania to form a Greater Albanian nation-state. The prospect of permanent separation of Albania and Kosova may translate into the emergence of a separate Kosova nation (as in the case of the Austrians who emerged from the German national commonality after 1945), which may be reinforced by the linguistic difference. The current standard Albanian language is based on the Tosk (southern) dialect, though in the interwar period it was the Gheg (northern)

Notes

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

961

dialect which constituted the basis of standard Albanian. The Kosovans may choose Gheg Albanian as their national language. Unlike Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian which are fully mutually intelligible and for the time being almost identical, Gheg and Tosk are only partially mutually intelligible and more different from each other than Czech from Slovak. I give the percentages for comparative reasons only. The reader is advised to take them with a grain of salt, because to this day statistics remains one of the favorite instruments of nation-building, and significant forced and voluntary population movements continue across the post-Yugoslav polities. Until the late 17th century, Latin, Polish, and Ruthenian brushed sides as co-official languages in Poland-Lithuania, and for various official purposes Arabic, Ottoman (Old Turkish), and Persian were employed in the Ottoman Empire. In modern-day Europe, three official languages are used in Luxembourg (German, French, and Lëtzebuergesch). Switzerland with its four co-official languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansch) is quite exceptional, but the speakers of Romansch accounting for less than 1 percent of the Swiss, so the country is de-facto tri-lingual (Schlösser 2005: 101). The language was known to its users as ‘our language,’ or ‘Slavonic.’ It was the Austrian civil servant and linguist of Slovenian background, Bartholomäus (Jernej) Kopitar (1780–1844), who coined the term ‘Old Church Slavonic’ in the 1820s (Schenker 1980: 4). The historical exigencies of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, construed as the Caliphate of the entire ‘House of Islam,’ required the official use of Osmanlıca (Ottoman, Old Turkish) for administrative purposes, Arabic for religious and judicial, and Persian for court life and literary pursuits. Graphically, all the three languages were united by the Arabic script, which they shared. Considerable exchange of linguistic loans among these languages ensued, too. Literally, ‘whose power, his religion,’ or the principle that it is the ruler who decides the official religion(s) of his polity. Historians of the Holy Roman Empire and German nationalism tend to speak of Bildungsbürgertum (literally, ‘educated city dwellers’) rather than of intelligentsia. The Bildungsbürgertum was a narrower social stratum than Western Europe’s middle class, but broader than the intelligentsia of East Central and Eastern Europe. By contrast, the urban character emphasized in the name of the Bildungsbürgertum, pointed to the relative dearth of cities and towns in the overwhelmingly rural areas east and south of the empire’s borders. Cf. the revival of the solely religious language of Hebrew as the official language and the vernacular of everyday communication in modern-day Israel. Initially, the official status of Magyar in Hungary was short-lived. German (and sometimes Latin) replaced it in 1849, and the situation continued until 1867 when Magyar regained its full official status in historical Hungary. In these English colonies, where English settlers tended not to arrive, the use of local administrative languages persisted. For instance, English replaced Persian in British India in 1835 (Ostler 2005: 502–503). Latinization was also an instrument of carrying out Lenin’s promise of national self-determination for non-Russians, and, by default, suppressing colonial in its nature ‘Great Russian chauvinism.’ For this purpose, Latinization was construed as de-Russification, since the Russian language was so closely associated with Cyrillic.

962 Notes

37. Armenian, Georgian, and Yiddish preserved their specific scripts, and there was no need for ‘re-Cyrillification’ of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian because they had not been Latinized. Interestingly, the reversal of Latinization in the case of the Indo-European language of Ossetian (1937) meant ‘re-Cyrillicization’ in Russia’s North Ossetia, but the imposition of the Georgians script in Soviet Georgia’s South Ossetia. Cyrillic finally repaced the Georgian alphabet for writing Ossetian in South Ossetia in 1954 (Arys-Djanaieva 2004). 38. But the idea of English as the de facto sole official language of the United States was not absent from everyday practice. For instance as early as 1794, the United States House of Representatives dismissed the request of German-speaking farmers from the Virginian county of Augusta to translate the United States laws into German (Ostler 2005: 492). 39. ‘Nationality’ is an ambiguous term. It may either mean the fact of one’s belonging to a nation, or a stateless nation. In this book, I employ this word exclusively for expressing the former meaning. 40. Women tended to receive full voting rights later than men, for instance, in 1928 in the United Kingdom, in 1945 in France, and in 1971 in Switzerland. Full citizenship and suffrage was withheld to Black Americans until 1964, Australia’s Aborigines until 1967, and South Africa’s non-whites until 1994. On the other hand, popular elementary education and full literacy has not been achieved in most post-colonial states yet. 41. The first widely influential and imaginative student of nationalism was Hans Kohn (1866–1972). Although a historian, like Gellner he was a Jew of the Austro-Hungarian background. Perhaps, the breakup of the Dual Monarchy due to the centrifugal force of ethnic nationalisms made them both more perceptive of the dynamics and nature of nationalism as a distinctive phenomenon. From a similar milieu, the Czech Marxian historian Miroslav Hroch originated. His Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (1985) provided the first empirically grounded theory of the formation of stateless ethnic nations. 42. The term ‘Indo-European’ was coined in 1814 by the British scholar, Thomas Young (1773–1829), but until the second half of the 20th century it was rivaled by another term ‘Indo-Germanic’ (indogermanisch), popular especially in the German-speaking states. The Danish geographer, Conrad Malte-Brun (Malte Conrad Bruun, 1775– 1826), who worked in revolutionary France, proposed the term indo-germanique in 1810. He developed it by noticing that the Indo-European peoples lived in a largely unbroken belt from India in the East to Germanic-speaking Iceland in the West. This term began to appear in German and English texts beginning in the late 1820s. Other coinages to refer to the Indo-European language family, such as Japhetic, Sanskritic, Indo-Celtic, Ario-European, or Aryan, never gained similar widespread use (Simpson and Weiner 1991: 840; Trabant 2006: 332). 43. For the first time explicitly formulated by Humboldt, this theory of linguistic relativism in the 20th century was developed by the United States linguists Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) and Edward Sapir (1884–1939). 44. Jedes gesunde Staatsvolk, jeder gesunde Volksstaat muß wollen, daß seine Volkssprache die Staatssprache und seine Staatssprache die Volkssprache ist. 45. In the case of the Soviet Union’s non-European republics such national languages were often created from scratch in the 1920s by Russian revolutionary linguists and replaced established official languages such as Indo-European Persian (Farsi) or Turkic Chaghatay. Both languages were widely employed outside the Soviet Union and identified as a badge of ‘Asian feudalism,’ which made them ‘suspicious’ to the

Notes

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

963

isolationist Bolshevik regime. The newly created languages included Azeri and Turkmen (very close to Turkish), Tajik (practically identical with Persian), Kazak, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek. In addition, in the European autonomous republic of Soviet Moldavia, the Moldavian language (practically identical with Romanian) was constructed (Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001; Martin 2001; Smith 1998). Interestingly, the Allies did not apply similar provisions to their own nation-states or elsewhere in Western Europe. The experiment in carving ethnolinguistic nationstates in Central Europe was to be limited to this region. In retrospect, the entire action appeared to be a latter-day mission civilizatrice directed at the ‘Wild East,’ that is, somehow ‘un-European’ Central and Eastern Europe. The transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union, though largely home-grown, also was conducted in line with the Western ideals of marxism. However, the specifically Soviet system of national republics and multilevel autonomies for minorities stemmed from the reflection of Austro-Marxists on the national question in Austria-Hungary. For percentages of non-national language-, and national language-speakers in the Central and Eastern European polities in the post-war period, see the end of the section entitled ‘The normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state, today.’ Interestingly, even in the monumental, eight-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (The Basic Concepts of Historiography) there is no article devoted to the concept of ‘language,’ or ‘a language,’ though the work is subtitled Historische Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (The Lexicon of Political and Sociological Language Used in German Historiography) (Brunner et al. 1972–1997). The status of Hungary and Slovakia as through and through ethnolinguistic nationstates is slightly weakened by the fact that Magyar and Slovak belong to the group of the six co-official languages used in Serbia’s autonomous region of Vojvodina (others include Croatian, Romanian, Ruthenian, and Serbian). But the populations using Magyar and Slovak there are relatively small (292,000 and 57,000, respectively) in comparison to the Serbian majority, which accounts for 65 percent (1.32 million) of Vojvodina’s inhabitants. What is more, neither Magyar nor Slovak are construed as national languages of Vojvodina (2006). All the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish) emerged from Norse as separate written languages at the end of the Middle Ages. Therefore, the degree of mutual (though variously limited in different pairings) intelligibility among them is as large as that among the contemporary Turkic languages, which came into their own between the 14th and the 20th centuries. The degree of mutual intelligibility, though high, in general, is lower among the Slavic languages, which began to diverge between the 6th and the 9th centuries, and produced variegated written languages between the 14th and the 20th centuries (Haugen 1966a). Most Norwegians use Bokmål, the users of Nynorsk constitute around 15 percent of the nation’s population. The policy of creating a Samnorsk (Common Norwegian) by combining these two varieties, popular from the interwar period to the mid-1960s, was officially abandoned in 2002. The case of the Netherlands is additionally complicated by the official concept of the Netherlandish language construed as consisting of Dutch spoken in the Netherlands, and of Flemish used in Belgium’s Flanders. Maltese is a Semitic language, a close cognate of Tunisia’s vernacular Arabic, but infused with numerous Italian (Romance) and English loanwords. The spreading use of English, in emulation of the Indian and Nepalese examples, however, limit Bhutan’s claim to fulfill all the restrictive requirements of the isomorphism of language, nation, and state.

964 Notes

55. The non-native and non-national language-speaking population is less than 1 percent of the inhabitants in Japan and Poland. In Iceland, recent immigrants amount to 6 percent of the population, but virtually all of them speak Icelandic. This may change, however, with the latest, quite rapid and sizeable arrival of immigrants from Poland and other new member states of the European Union. 56. Although the majority of Indonesia’s population speak Indonesian (almost identical with Malay), the language’s native-speakers amount only to 17 million. In Indonesia, native-speakers of Javanese add up to 75 million, and of Sundanese to 27 million (Ostler 2005: 532–533). 57. In Slovenia, Slovenian-speakers make up 91.1 percent of the population, and Macedonian-speakers amount to two-thirds of Macedonia’s inhabitants (World Factbook 2005). 58. In Bhutan, Dzongkha-speakers constitute half of the population. The percentage is considerably higher, however, if the Bhutanese census of 2005 is right and the state’s population is 0.67 million, not 2.23 million (Population and Housing Census of Bhutan 2006; World Factbook 2005). 59. I do not attempt to extend the genetic classification of the national languages to the ethnolinguistic nation-states located outside Central Europe, since there is still no consensus to which classificatory groups (language families) certain languages should belong.

2

Language in Central Europe: An overview 1. [L]a lingua umana per voci convenute da’ popoli, della quale sono assoluti signori i popoli. 2. [Z]usammenlebenden und in fortgesetzter Mittheilung ihre Sprache fortbildenden Menschen ein Volk [...]. Die [...] natürlichen Grenzen der Staaten sind [...] ihre innern Grenzen. Was dieselbe Sprache redet [...]. 3. The ‘Byzantine Empire’ or ‘Byzantium’ is a 16th-century Western European coinage, which became popular in the 19th century. The Byzantines referred to themselves in Greek as ‘Romans’ (Romioi) and to their polity as ‘Roman Empire’ (Basileía Romaíon), or the ‘country of Romans’ (Romanía). All the sobriquets stemmed from the Latin name of the Roman Empire, Imperium Romanorum. This empire’s short Latin name, Romania, evolved into Old French Romanie and spawned Early Modern English ‘Romany’ for the ‘Roman Empire.’ In 212, all free people in the Roman Empire were granted Roman citizenship and thus became ‘Romans.’ In 395, the empire was permanently divided into the Western and Eastern Roman Empires with their capitals in Rome and Constantinople, respectively. The tradition of the Western Empire was extinguished with the deposition of the last western emperor in 476. His insignia of power were sent to Constantinople. Hence, the Eastern Empire became the sole Roman Empire. In 772, the city of Rome ceased to commemorate the Roman emperor ruling from Constantinople and the Pope crowned Charlemagne as Roman Emperor in 800. The Holy Roman Empire (founded in 962) originated from this event and Western authors, instead of referring to Byzantium by its official name of ‘Roman Empire,’ called it the ‘Greek Empire’ (Imperium Graecorum), Greece (Graecia), the Greek Land (Terra Graecorum), or even the Constantinople Empire (Imperium Constantinopolitanum). Obviously, the Byzantines strongly disagreed and denied the title of ‘Roman Emperor’ to the Holy Roman Empire. The demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 settled this ideological contest in favor of the West. So today, even to Greeks, the eastern Roman Empire is known as the ‘Byzantine Empire’ (Byzantini Autokratoria).

Notes

965

‘Byzantium’ was the original name of Constantinople, named so after its founder, the Greek King Byzas (Byzantas). Constantine I the Great (reigned 306–337), who made Christianity into the semi-official religion of the Roman Empire (313), also moved his empire’s capital to Byzantium (330), renamed as ‘New Rome.’ After his death, the city became known as ‘Constantinople.’ In the 15th century, classicizing Greek authors preferred the name ‘Byzantium’ to ‘Constantinople,’ unambiguously associated with Christianity, and as such opposed to Antique culture, which the Christian Church considered ‘pagan.’ Drawing on this usage, Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580) coined the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ in his Corpus Historiae Byzantinae (History of Byzantium, 1537) (Byzantine Empire 2006; Honzák et al. 2001: 553–559; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 1609). 4. The Soviet language-planners developed quite similar Komi and Komi-Permiak into separate languages in order to split the Komi-speakers into two separate ethnic groups. In statistics, this made them into a tinier minority than they actually were vis-à-vis Russians (Nyirady 2006). 5. Between the 1st and the 2nd centuries, Germanic groups migrated from Scandinavia to Central Europe, or the region extending from the modern-day Low Countries to the mouth of the Don River flowing into the Black Sea. In the 2nd or 3rd century, the Runes developed in this area, perhaps on the territory of today’s Bohemia (where the Marcomanni lived and whose area of settlement bordered directly on the Roman Empire) or in the northern Alps (where Italic and Germanic populations intermingled). It seems the Marcomanni and/or other Germanic groups borrowed the technology of writing from the Romans and other northern Italic ethnic groups along with their alphabets as the model. However, the origin of some Runic characters is traced back to the Greek script. The Runes spread among the Germanic peoples. The Goths, who lived north of the Danube and along the northern shores of the Black Sea, came into direct contact with Turkic peoples, which might have caused the transfer of the Runic script to the latter, especially after the Huns defeated the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) in 375 and swept across Central Europe. The Visigoths (Western Goths) sought refuge in the Roman Empire and were allowed to enter Thracia, which exposed them to the Greek language. Ulfilas (Wulfila, 311–383), a missionary bishop to his fellow Visigoths, who was consecrated in 341, translated the Bible into Gothic, the script he invented. He derived Gothic from the Greek script, and perhaps enriched it with five Latin letters and one Runic character. In the first half of the 5th century, the Huns’ vast empire extended from the Caucasus to the Rhine. In the 420s, they moved the power center of their realm to Pannonia. Pax Hunnica facilitated the tapping of Germanic, Roman, and Greek cultural practices and technologies, the knowledge of which spread eastward to ethnic groups that followed the Huns after the latter’s empire collapsed in 453. This traditional theory of cultural diffusion of the Runes and Greek- and Latin-style writing to the East is currently countered by the more widely accepted proposal that the Magyar ‘Runes’ are an offshoot of the Old Turkic script derived from the Sogdian writing system, which, in turn, developed from the Aramaic script. Between the 4th and the 9th centuries, the Indo-European language of Sogdian (a cognate of Persian) and its script were in wide use between the Caspian Sea and the Pamirs. (Sogdian was one of the Silk Road’s linguas francas.) In the 6th century, a Turkic population entered this area and mingled with the Sogdians, which contributed to the rise of the Old Turkic script, also known as the Siberian ‘Runes,’ employed in the vast territory from the Caspian Sea to Lake Baikal and even beyond. The Magyars rubbed with Turkic

966 Notes

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

groups, while migrating from the Upper Volga to the northern shores of the Black Sea (5th to 6th centuries), and thence to Pannonia in the 9th century. The Magyar ‘Runes’ surviving among Transylvania’s Magyarophone Szeklers also gave rise to a theory that they were a Turkic group, which became Magyarized. This Magyar alphabet is supposed to have been developed in the 9th century, also under the influence of the Greek, Slavic, and Latin literacies. Perhaps these influences and both theories on the rise of the script account for its extensive borrowing of characters from the Old Turkic (Siberian), Greek, Glagolitic, Cyrillic, and (Germanic) Runic scripts (Balázs 2000: 84–85; Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 83; Faulmann 1880: 161–164; Hasenmayer et al. 1981: 22–23; Magocsi 2002: 5–7; Mojdl 2005: 62–64, 70, 134–137; Tryjarski 1995: 116–122). It is probably a coincidence that the Caucasian language of Albanian (Aghvanian) shares its name with the Indo-European language spoken in the Balkan nationstate of Albania. The Caucasian Albanians (Aghvanians) referred to their kingdom as Aghbania, whose territory coincides with present-day Azerbaijan and Russia’s Dagestan. Their language is defunct, though some identify it with the modern Caucasian language of Udi, spoken by 8000 persons in Georgia and Azerbaijan. The probability of some Aghvanian influence among the Balkan Albanians is underscored by Byzantium’s 9th-century action of resettlement of heretical Paulicians from the Caucasus to the Balkans. Most Paulicians were ethnic Armenians, but some could have been Aghvanians, too (Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 15; Grimes 1996: 469; Majewicz 1989: 56). The actual official name of the polity is unknown. The first surviving written document, in which the country was mentioned, is in Greek and dates back to the mid-10th century. The Byzantine author spoke of he Megale Morabia (‘Great Moravia’). This usage was reflected in the Latin name of Moravia Magna. At the turn of the 19th century, German scholars were the first in modern times to become interested in early Slavic. They referred to it as Großmähren (‘Great or Greater Moravia’) or Großmährisches Reich (‘Great Moravian Empire’). I employ the term ‘Greater Moravia’ rather than ‘Great Moravia’ to emphasize that this state grew out from the territorial basis of the region of Moravia (Großmähren 2006). Some identify the medieval Avars with the modern-day Caucasian Avars living mainly in Russia’s Dagestan. However, the former perhaps spoke Turkic language, while the latter spoke Caucasian. A tentative link between these two groups is offered by the theory that a small group of original Avars remained in their homeland on the Black Sea’s eastern shores after most, threatened by Turkic invaders, moved westward in the late 560s. Those who stayed in the Caucasus assimilated with the Caucasian-speaking population, but passed their ethnonym ‘Avar’ onto one group of the Caucasian-speakers. 0.6 million persons speak Caucasian Avar (Damm and Mikusinska ´ 2000: 29; Grimes 1996: 468, 504; Tryjarski 1995: 49, 51). The term ‘Bible’ is derived from Greek biblía hagía for ‘holy books’ (Bankowski ´ 2000 vol. 1: 46). Dobrovský referred to Old Church Slavonic as lingua slavica dialectus vetus (the old dialect of the Slavonic language), Kopitar as Kirchenslavisch (Church Slavonic), and the Russian scholar, Konstantin Kalaidovich (1792–1832), proposed the term ‘Old Church Slavonic’ in 1822 (Moszynski ´ 2006: 346–347). The East Slavic bukva for ‘letter,’ is derived from buk (‘beech’). As parchment was expensive and paper still unknown, most early texts in Kievan Rus were carved on beech bark. Earlier, the same technology was employed for carving Runic inscriptions

Notes

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

967

by Germanic Goths and numerous Turkic groups (including the Finno-Ugric Magyars), who roamed the vast territory from the Danube to the Caspian Sea between the 2nd and the 10th centuries. Swedish Vikings, who established Kievan Rus in the 860s, also knew how to carve Runes on beech bark and found extensive beech forests in the new polity. ‘Beech’ is buche in Germanic, and hence German Buch for ‘book,’ and indeed the very English word ‘book’ (Mackensen 2005: 86; Mojdl 2005: 157–158). Despite their ethnonym, the ancestors of this group arrived from the Rhineland, not Saxony, hence their dialect most similar to Luxembourg’s national language of Luxembourgish. The current correlation between the group, its ethnonym, dialect, and the presumed region of origin arose at a later date, and was based more on hearsay and in-group mythology rather than the historical reality of migration, soon forgotten among the original settlers’ grandchildren. On the other hand, in some regions of Eastern Europe, the term ‘Saxon’ was a generic name for any Germanspeaker (Magocsi 2002: 104). The ethnonym ‘German’ comes from Latin Germani. Roman writers perhaps took this name from Gauls (Celts), who applied it to their Germanic neighbors. The etymology is unclear but may stem from Old Irish garim for ‘to shout,’ gairm for battle cry, or gair for ‘neighbor.’ ‘Teutonic,’ often used as a synonym of ‘Germanic,’ is derived from Latin Teutones. Originally, it was the self-ethnonym of a Germanic ethnic group who lived on the seacoast of present-day Germany and devastated Gaul between 113 and 101 BCE. This ethnonym ultimately derives from Germanic or Indo-European *teuta for ‘people.’ The German self-ethnonym Deutsch and ‘Dutch’ also stem from the same root. The etymology of French Allemande for Germans goes back to the self-ethnonym ‘Alemanni’ of a Suebic (Germanic) ethnic group or confederation of such groups that settled in Alsace and part of present-day Switzerland. The name might have been derived from Proto-Germanic *Alamanniz for ‘all-man,’ denoting a wide alliance of ethnically related ethnic groups. Bulgarian Nemets, Croatian Njemac, Czech Nˇemec, Magyar Német, Polish Niemiec, Russian Nemets, Slovak Nemec, or Ukrainian Nimets stem from Slavic niemy for ‘mute.’ It is a reflection of the Slavs’ inability to understand the speech of Germanic-speakers. Hence, Slavic-speakers perceived the latter as ‘mute,’ or ‘blabbing incomprehensibly’ (Etymological Dictionary 2001; Mackensen 2005: 98; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 34, 667, 2034). Although the German terms Niederdeutsch and Plattdeutsch both are translated as ‘Low German’ (Niederdeutsch is sometimes rendered as ‘Lower German’), linguists prefer the former German term, while the latter is more colloquial. Usually Niederdeutsch denotes the area of the Low German dialects, and Plattdeutsch the dialectal speech of a Low German-speaker, a local Low German dialect, or a Low German Kultursprache (language of a regional culture, whose speakers do not aspire to become a separate nation on this linguistic basis), idealized to be spoken by all the Low German-speakers. In colloquial usage, Plattdeutsch is often rendered as Platt. The self-ethnonym ‘Saxons’ comes from Germanic Sahsun (Sachsen in German), in turn perhaps derived from Germanic sax, seax for ‘short sword,’ a weapon preferred by Saxons (Etymological Dictionary 2001; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 1662). The self-ethnonym ‘Franks’ is derived from Germanic *frankon for ‘javelin,’ a preferred weapon of this ethnic group. In Old French franc meant ‘free,’ ‘sincere,’ or ‘genuine,’ and in Medieval Latin franc denoted a ‘freeman.’ Hence, it became popular to claim that the ultimate etymology of the ethnonym ‘Franks’ is ‘free.’ However, the reverse seems to be true, for the Old French and Medieval Latin franc (dated not

968 Notes

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

earlier than the 10th century) seems to be derived from the much older ethnonym (Etymological Dictionary 2001; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 631). The oldest extant texts produced by wood block printing (xylography) were discovered in Korea. They date back to the mid-8th century. The movable type and the movable type iron printing press were invented in China in 1041 and 1234, respectively. The oldest extant book published with the use of such a press in 1377 was discovered in Korea (Johann 2006). Until the mid-16th century, publications in the Gothic script dominated, but Antiqua made its initial appearance as early as 1464 in Subiaco and 1469 in Venice. In the first half of the 16th century, the use of Antiqua spread in the Romancephone areas of Western Europe (the Apennine Peninsula, France, and the Iberian Peninsula) and in the other half of the continent, for printing in Polish and Magyar. Until the 19th century, Gothic had dominated in Germanic-speaking areas, as well as for printing in Bohemian (Czech), Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian, or Latvian. Prior to the rise of German ethnolinguistic nationalism at the beginning of the 19th century, Catholic printers operating in these areas and producing in these languages gradually tended toward using Antiqua. Exceptionally, Antiqua penetrated into English-language books in the 16th and 17th centuries. Otherwise the final supplanting of the Gothic script by its Antiqua counterpart took place in the second half of the 19th century with the exception of the Germanophone states, where Gothic persisted until the early 1940s (Faulmann 1880: 204–205). The task of identifying in which language a book was written prior to the codification of standard languages is always vexed with ambiguity, especially in the context of close cognate languages. In addition, the retroactive (and usually anachronistic) decision that an early book was published in this or that language is a reflection of ‘a much later ethnolinguistic nationalism.’ Not surprisingly, the dates of the ‘first printed book in a given language’ vary. What is more, much of the meager early book production in Central Europe’s vernaculars was lost and unexpected findings surface from time to time. Hence, I note alternative dates for the first book in Polish (1522), Magyar (1527), or Bulgarian (1566) (Burke 2004: x–xi). The emergence of standard German was a slow, gradual process, whose many stages were officially negotiated. This contributed to the broader awareness among the German-speaking intellectuals of the constructedness of standard German, an awareness that is usually absent even among the educated users of other standard languages. Not surprisingly, the German linguistic term Überdachung, or ‘bringing various, usually closely related, dialects under a common roof of an agreed upon standard language,’ aptly describes the process. In other national traditions of linguistics in Europe, it is usually maintained that a set of dialects (usually corresponding to the past or current territory of a polity, construed as a ‘nation-state’) belongs to this or that language, without accounting for how this was effected. The approach breeds the anachronistic conviction that standard language is the ‘mother tongue’ from which dialects emerged by ‘corruption’ or ‘dirtying influence’ of other languages, spoken in the neighboring states. Komitat was the highest unit of administrative division in historical Hungary, which was divided into 64 komitats. The term is derived from Latin comitatus, but in Magyar it is rendered as megye, which comes from common Slavic medja for balk delimiting neighboring fields (cf. meja in Croatian, medza in Slovak or miedza in Polish). Presentday Hungary is comprised of 19 komitats. Here, I adopted the German rendering of comitatus, Komitat, since German is genetically closest to English out of other Central

Notes

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

969

European languages. Another justification of the choice is the fact that after the waning of official Latin, German was the official language of Hungary between 1849 and 1866, and the most important foreign language from 1867 to 1918. In Englishlanguage publications, the forms ‘comitat’ and ‘comitatus’ also appear alongside the confusing term ‘county.’ For the clarity of argument, I refrain from analyzing other important Romance languages (for instance, Catalan, Francoprovençal, Friulian, Gascon, Occitan [Provençal], Rhaeto-Romance, Sardinian, or Sicilian), which today do not enjoy the status of official language of a nation-state. The official name of the Ottoman Empire in the Ottoman (Old Turkish) language is the Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniyye, or the ‘Sublime Ottoman State,’ but the Western influence transformed it to the Osmanli I˙mparatorlu˘gu (‘Ottoman Empire’) in present-day Turkish. Obviously, the Turkish word imparatorlu˘gu is derived from Latin imperium, in preference to Arabic devlet for ‘country, state.’ In Western diplomatic dispatches, the Ottoman Empire and its government used to be referred to as the ‘Sublime Porte,’ which is French for ‘Lofty Gate.’ This traditional name of the court of the sultan, as led by the grand vezir, Bab-i Ali in Ottoman, was derived from the sobriquet of the gate, which led in the imperial Topkapi Place to the headquarters of the grand vezir. ‘Boyar’ functioned in Orthodox Slavophone lands as a designation for the members of the native nobility, or earlier, for ‘knights.’ It also entered the Lithuanian language as bajoras. The word stems from Old Turkic bai for ‘elegant, distinguished,’ and was introduced by Turkic-speaking Bulgars in the 7th century. Probably, it became conflated with Slavic *bolЬjЬ for ‘bigger, better,’ before entering the Slavic speech of the Bulgarian Empire in the 8th century. In the 9th and 10th century, the word spread to Central and Eastern Europe from this empire. Byzantine writers coined the Greek word boilades, or boliades, which became often a derogative term for Bulgarian boyars. On the contrary, in the 15th century, the term szlachcic was adopted for Catholic ‘nobleman’ in Poland-Lithuania from Middle High German slaht(e) for ‘kin, lineage,’ today rendered as Geschlecht. The Polish word spread to the Czech lands as šlechtic (Brückner 1927: 34, 550; Sawaniewsko-Mochowa 2002: 15; Rejzek 2001: 633). After the 1806–1812 war with the Ottoman Empire, Russia gained the eastern half of historical Moldavia located beyond the Prut River. It became known as Bessarabia. Today, western Moldavia is part of Romania, while Bessarabia, molded as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia, became independent Moldova in 1991. ‘Moldavia’ is the traditional Slavic rendering of the region’s name, as opposed to the Romanian/Moldovan form of Moldova (Magocsi 2002: 75). ‘Transylvania’ is a useful shorthand for this vassal polity. In fact, it comprised Transylvania proper (a semi-autonomous region gradually incorporated into Hungary in the 11th and 12th centuries) and the easternmost lands of historical Hungary, known as Partium, which means ‘the Parts’ in Latin (Részek in Magyar). In the 1570 agreement contracted between the Habsburgs and the Zápolyas in Speyer, Transylvania and Patrium were elevated to the status of principality under the official Latin name of Transylvaniae et partium regni Hungariae principatus (Kontler 1999: 142, 148; Kopy´s 2001: 147; Középiskolai történelmi atlasz 1996: 41; Tornow 2005: 223). The Koran (or Qur’an in scientific transliteration from Arabic) is derived from the Arabic verb qara’a, which means ‘to read’ and ‘to recite.’

970 Notes

28. The percentages do not add up to 100, because books in other languages were produced in Hungary too, for instance, in Church Slavonic and Greek. 29. Aramaic always remained a very specialized pursuit, so very few theologians knew it. 30. After the final partition of Poland-Lithuania, St Petersburg wavered over whether to liquidate or to preserve the Uniate Church. The roller coaster of intermittent scrapping and reinstating of Uniate metropolinates was over in 1839, when all of them but the Kholm (Chełm) eparchy, located within the borders of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, were abolished. It, too, was finally suppressed in 1875 and the remaining Uniates were forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity. The situation differed in the Austrian Empire and Hungary. Vienna, eager to stem any Orthodox influence in these territories, fostered the development of the Uniate Church in Galicia, Upper Hungary, and Transylvania. As the name ‘Uniate’ by then was perceived as derogatory, the 1774 imperial decree renamed this Church ‘Greek Catholic.’ As a result, today the designation of ‘Greek Catholic’ remains in use in the territories that used to belong to Austria-Hungary, while ‘Uniate’ refers to the re-founded Uniate Churches in the areas that were part of the Russian Empire, mainly in today’s Belarus. The same is true for Belarusian and Ukrainian communities of emigrants, who carried the designations of ‘Uniate’ and ‘Greek Catholic,’ respectively, to Western Europe and Northern America (Magocsi 2002: 113). 31. It is more of an antiquarian interest that a famous Slavophone Mevlud (ode on the birth of the Prophet Muhammad) was published in Arabic fonts in Yugoslavia as late as 1974 (Riedlmayer 2004).

3

The broader linguistic and cultural context of Central Europe 1. The term tsar, widespread among Orthodox Slavs writing in Cyrillic, is derived from Caesar, the surname of the early Roman emperors, the first of whom was Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE). The same source spawned another term for ‘emperor’ among Catholic Slavs writing in the Latin script; for instance, cisaˇr in Czech, cesarz in Polish, or cisár in Slovak. The Magyars borrowed this term, császár, from Slavic. German Kaiser for ‘emperor’ also stems from Caesar. Similarly, the title ‘king’ in the Slavic languages (král in Czech, król in Polish, král’ in Slovak, or korol in Russian), in Magyar (király), or Romanian (crai) comes from Karl, the Germanic version of the name of Charlemagne (ruled 768–814, crowned emperor 800). However, English ‘king’ or German König stems from Germanic kuni for ‘clan’ or ‘nobility’ (Bankowski ´ 2000: I 117–118, 824). 2. The Orthodox Patriarchate remained largely undisturbed with its seat in the Ottoman capital Konstantiniyya (Constantinople), but its power was limited to matters ecclesiastical, the internal administration and jurisdiction of the Rum (Roman) millet (Orthodox population organized as a non-territorial politico-religious entity in the Ottoman Empire), and self-government of Christians in their villages and city districts. Similar arrangements were extended to Jews and Armenians. The monastic republic of Orthodox and exclusively male monasteries at Mt Athos, founded in the 9th century, continued to flourish in the Ottoman Empire as the scholarly and ecclesiastical center of Orthodox Christianity. But the Byzantine tradition of caesaropapism, that is, the ideological merger of Orthodox ecclesiastical authority with temporal power was achieved exclusively in Muscovy. At that time, it was the sole independent Orthodox polity (Lewis 1963: x; Sugar 1977: 45–47).

Notes

971

3. Zeta, a semi-independent polity centered on Cetinje, was dominated inland by Serbia, and by Venice on the coast. In 1499, the Ottomans seized this polity, but they failed to establish their control in the mountainous section of the territory, over which the Orthodox bishop of Cetinje extended his joint ecclesiastical and temporal power as Vladika (prince). He unilaterally separated his realm, known as Montenegro, from the Ottoman Empire in 1688. But this empire and other European powers recognized the independence of Montenegro only in 1878 (Honzák et al. 2001: 153–154, 743). 4. The translation is known as the Ostromir Gospel, because it was translated for Ostromir, the Governor of the city of Novgorod, by deacon Grigorii (Fojtíková et al. 1989: 465). 5. Besides these Ruthenian lands (south of the Pripet River, and extending from Volhynia to the borders of the Crimean Khanate), which the Kingdom of Poland received from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569, this kingdom had already conquered Halych (Halicz) Ruthenia in the 1340s. The region, centered on the city of Lwów, is known as Galicia, which is the Latinate rendering of the name Halych. 6. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the etymology of Rus was a subject of heated discussion colored by nationalism. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Byzantines began to use Ros, Arabs ar-Rus, and Latin authors Rusios for ‘Norsemen.’ As proposed by the Westphalian scholar, Gerhardt Friedrich Müller (1705–1783), in his 1749 speech in the Russian Academy of Sciences, all the terms stem from the Finno-Ugric name for Swedes, preserved to this day as Finnish Ruotsi and Estonian Rootsi for ‘Sweden.’ (The ultimate etymology of the ethnonym may be Old Norse rods for rowing or the name of the Swedish province of Roslagen, from where most Varangians [perhaps from Old Norse várar for ‘pledges’] came to Kievan Rus.) Slavic-speakers in what today is northwestern Russia were neighbors of Finno-Ugric-speakers, who separated the former from Germanic-speakers in central and western Scandinavia. Hence, when Germanicspeaking Varangians from what today is southern Sweden penetrated future Kievan Rus in the 860s, they became known to Slavic-speakers by the name applied to these Norsemen by the Slavs’ Finno-Ugric neighbors. Slavicized Rus’ became the official name of Kievan Rus. However, this obviously Germanic origin of the statehood of Kievan Rus became an anathema to Russian nationalists, who claimed this polity as the beginning of modern-day Russia. In the ethnolinguistic paradigm of Central European nationalism, the nation-state and its history have to be ethnolinguistically homogenous. Otherwise, the legitimacy of a national polity could be compromised. Russian and Slavic researchers preferred to deny the Germanic origin of Kievan Rus in order to ‘prove’ that Slavs were not ‘culturally less developed or delayed’ vis-à-vis Germanic peoples (Ilarion 1994: 208–209; Moszynski ´ 2006: 81; Vasmer 1971: 522). 7. The term ‘White Russian’ is the direct translation of Russian belorusskii, like ‘Little Russian’ of malorusskii. Following the establishment of the Soviet Union, ‘Little Russia’ and ‘Little Russian’ were dropped in favor of ‘Ukraine’ (Ukraina) and ‘Ukrainian’ (ukrainskii). But the Russian designations of Belarus (White Russia) and belorusskii (White Russian) remained unchanged in the Soviet Union. This usage spawned the English semi-transliterations of ‘B(y)elorussia’ and ‘B(y)elorussian.’ When Belarus gained independence in 1991, Mensk/Minsk requested the international community to employ the forms ‘Belarus’ and ‘Belarusian,’ as distanced from the aforementioned Russified transliterations. 8. The Soviet authorities almost seamlessly took over the imperial policy of anti-Polonism. St Petersburg was afraid that the lasting domination of Polish in administration, education, and culture of the western provinces would entail gradual

972 Notes

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

Polonization of the White and Little Russian peasantry. The officially espoused policy of Russification was a reply to this perceived danger. Similarly, the Soviets feared that the shared past, and cultural and linguistic proximity between the Poles, and the Belarusians and the Ukrainians would make Soviet Byelorussia and Ukraine vulnerable to Polish bourgeois influence and to ‘creeping Polonization’ (Rodkiewicz 1998: 221–222). Actually, two Ukrainian states existed during the period 1918–1920, with the capitals at Lviv and Kyiv. Poland crushed the former, and Soviet Russia the latter. The legend of the Roman origin of the Lithuanians, and certain similarities between Lithuanian and Latin, prompted some patriots of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to label the official language of Ruthenian as ‘foreign,’ hence they looked favorably upon its 1697 ban from official use. These patriots also despised encroaches made by Polish in the grand duchy, thus, the re-establishment of the dominance of Latin as the de facto official language was perceived by them as becoming the ‘true RomanLithuanian’ character of their patria (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 12; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 73). The German linguist, Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (1811–1881), from the University of Königsberg was the first to propose naming the language family of Lithuanian and Latvian as ‘Baltic languages’ and the peoples speaking these two languages as ‘Balts’ in his 1845 book, Die Sprache der alten Preussen (The Language of the Old Prussians). Meanwhile, in the same role the term ‘Aestii’ (‘Aestian,’ ‘Aistian’) emerged, derived from an ethnic group mentioned by Tacitus (55–120). With time, it became an ambiguous designation, since Finno-Ugric Estonians tended to identify the Aestii as early Estonians and claimed that the name ‘Estonians’ was derived from that of Aesti. At the end of the 19th century, the term ‘Balts’ won this terminological competition, though not until the 1920s in Lithuania itself (Zinkeviˇcius et al. 2005: 27). Some see Karelian as a dialect of Finnish, while others a language in its own right. This is a reflection of inconsistency in Soviet imperial politics. In the course of the disastrous Winter War (1939–1940), Moscow failed to conquer Finland. But in 1940, a swath of Finnish territory seized by the Red Army was joined with the prewar Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to form the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic. The republic’s national language was changed from Cyrillic-based Karelian to Latin script-based Finnish, accordingly. (The situation in the Finnish territories seized by the Soviets was similar to that in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which after their annexation by the Soviet Union were allowed to keep the Latin script for writing in their national languages.) Moscow resigned from its designs on Finland in 1956, when the Karelo-Finnish SSR was demoted to a Karelian ASSR, but Finnish remained the republic’s national language until 1985. Today in Russia’s Karelian Republic Karelian is the national language, but the republic’s authorities consider it a dialect of Finnish. On the other hand, Finnish linguists, in line with Helsinki’s acceptance of the postwar borders, deem Karelian to be a language separate from Finnish, though until the interwar period, the popular view had been that Karelian was a Finnish dialect (Grenoble 2003: 79; Mertelsmann 2006). Although a clear regional Samogitian identity survived well into the 20th century, Samogitia’s Lithuanian-speakers developed a common ethnic/national identity with Lithuania’s Lithuanian-speakers on the ethnolinguistic basis, in the 19th century at the latest. (The Lithuanians Christianized the Samogitians in 1418.) However, the linguistic separateness of Samogitian-speakers revived recently, as, for instance, emphasized by the Samogitian-language Wikipedia (Subaˇcius 2007).

Notes

973

14. The historian, Simonas Daukantas (1793–1864), and the Bishop of Samogitia, Motiejus Valanˇcius (1801–1875), were the first to write and publish scholarly works in Samogitian. Daukantas’s history of Lithuania, published in 1850, was the first one in the Lithuanian language (Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 264–265). 15. The overwhelmingly Polish-speaking Polish-Lithuanian natio resorted to the semiofficial use of Samogitian-based Lithuanian in the times of need, when they hoped to mobilize Lithuanian-speaking peasants and commoners for the natio’s political goals. Thus, Samogitian-based Lithuanian was employed in such a capacity in the first half of the 1790s, prior to the final partition of Poland-Lithuania, and during the anti-Russian uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864 (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 333, 560; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 265–266). 16. The Polish-style orthography was replaced with its Czech counterpart in the periodical in 1884, beginning in the 15th issue (Łossowski 2001: 22). 17. Juška was the first scholar to describe the Lithuanian dialects in 1861. He proposed the now conventional division of these dialects into Samogitian (Central dialect), Prussian Lithuanian (western Aukštaitijan), the dialect of the Ariogala area, and Eastern Lithuanian (eastern Aukštaitijan). (The town of Ariogala is centrally placed in the Lithuanian dialect area.) Because there was no single standard of Lithuanian accepted by all at that time, Juška urged Lithuanians to write in their local dialects but in the unified spelling, which he developed (Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 269). 18. The Poles alongside the Lithuanians and the Belarusians consider Mickiewicz ‘their’ national poet. He wrote in Polish, but never visited Warsaw or Cracow, and considered Lithuania (that is, the grand duchy) as his homeland. Mickiewicz’s family lived in what today is Belarus, and his mother was of Jewish origin, which allows to claim him also as a Jewish poet. Significantly, the systemic change in Lithuania began in earnest after the demonstration against the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which was held at the monument of Adam Mickiewicz in Vilnius on 23 August 1987 (By prior agreement, on the same day, similar demonstrations took place in Riga and Tallinn) (Kiaupa et al. 2002: 200; Zinkeviˇcius 1996: 326). 19. The long-lasting close relationship between Lithuanian- and Slavic-speakers in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania resulted in the uniquely Lithuanian name of Gudija for Belarus. Earlier, the ethnonym Gudai was employed by ethnic Lithuanians to refer to any Slavs, Ruthenians (that is, Orthodox and Uniate Slavic-speaking inhabitants of Poland-Lithuania), Russians, or sometimes even Poles. (The term even appeared in Polish, Gudowie, as a rare alternative name for the Belarusians.) It is believed to have originated from the Goths’ self-ethnonym Gutans, *Ghudas, probably meaning ‘inhabitants of the Baltic island of Gotland.’ In the 1st century BCE, Goths settled along the southeastern littoral of the Baltic and came into contact with the Balts. The latter apparently transferred the name of Goths onto Slavs who made home in these previously Gothic areas. Today, in official Lithuanian use Baltarusija (literally, ‘White Russia’) is preferred to Gudija, though the latter term remains popular with Lithuanian historians. On the other hand, puristically-minded Lithuanian linguists reject the ethnonym Baltarusiai (‘Baltic Ruthenians,’ Rusiai for ‘Russians’ is derived from Lithuanian Rusenai for ‘Ruthenians’) for Belarusians, as imposed during the Soviet occupation, and propose Baltgudžiai, instead, literally, ‘Baltic Gudai.’ Interestingly, until the partition of Poland-Lithuania, in Muscovy (and later Russia) the Slavophones of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were commonly referred to as Litviny (‘Lithuanians’), since they lived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Ališauskas et al. 2006: 637, 640–641; Zinkeviˇcius et al. 2005: 70–71).

974 Notes

20. The Gothic script was employed for official purposes and publishing literature in Germany and Austria until officially banned in the Third Reich in 1941. To this day, few publications, intended for the stalwarts of this script, appear in Gothic characters in Germany and Austria. 21. Due to their historical, economic, cultural, and religious links with Scandinavia and northern Germany, the Lutheran inhabitants of Russia’s Baltic provinces (Courland, Estland, Finland, and Livonia) enjoyed almost full male literacy in German or Swedish and local languages (Estonian, Finnish, and Latvian), unlike elsewhere in the empire. 22. Incorrectly, the Romance language of Dalmatian is sometimes referred to as ‘Veglian’ or ‘Vegliote’ (Veclisun). The name is derived from the Adriatic island of Veglia (today, Krk in Croatia), where the last known speaker of Dalmatian passed away in 1898. It appears more appropriate to construe Veglian as a northern dialect of Dalmatian, and Ragusan (lingua ragusea) as southern (Breton 2003: 75; Price 1998: 121–122). 23. The institution of the slavery of Roma in Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia became established between the mid-14th century and the turn of the 16th century. In Transylvania, slavery was abolished by the beginning of the 1790s. In 1855, a similar process commenced in Walachia and Moldavia, but was not completed until 1864. In both principalities, the number of slaves was estimated at 0.6 million at the time of their emancipation. Some authors claim that Roma left Walachia and Moldavia fearing re-enslavement, but it seems that other factors were of more significance (Hancock 2002: 18, 23–25; Marushiakova and Popov 2006a). 24. The group name ‘Roman’ is derived from the city of Rome. The etymology of the word is uncertain; some propose it stems from the unattested Old Latin *urosma for ‘hill,’ others side with the opinion that its source is the Etruscan name Rumon for the Tiber River (Etymological Dictionary 2001). 25. The English name ‘Transylvania’ is derived from Latin Transsilvania for ‘the country beyond the forests,’ which Magyars supposedly encountered when crossing the Carpathians. The Magyar translation of this place-name, Erdély, was adopted into Walachian as Ardealu, but in the course of the planned ‘re-Latinization’ of this language standardized as Romanian, the decision was taken to adopt the Latin name, spelled as Transilvania. In German, Transylvania is known as Siebenbürgen, literally ‘the seven cities.’ It is a translation from official Latin name of Septemcastrensis pagus, also rendered as Septem urbium regio. This name is connected to the arrival of Germanic-speaking settlers, who established their seven main cities in Transylvania. Until recently, the Czech and Polish translations of this place-name (Sedmihradsko, Siedmiogród) were more popular than respective Transylvánie and Transylwania (Honzák et al. 2001: 585). 26. The specious theory of the Iranian (Aryan) origin of the Croats was built mainly in opposition to the Orthodox Serbs. After the end of communism, it gained quite a popularity similar to that enjoyed in postcommunist Hungary by the hypothesis of the Sumerian origin of the Magyars and their language. Some Croatian intellectuals seriously date back the ethnogenesis of the Croats to a Hittite kingdom, extant almost 4000 years ago. In the scheme of equating the non-Slavic with ‘higher civilization,’ Iranian origin is also accorded to the Slovenians, Bosnians, and Montenegrins. With an obvious racist undertone, the Serbs are singled out as said to be of Semitic and Negroid origin. The question of the Croats’ Slavic language is explained by emphasizing that language is not the definite identification factor of each nation (Wrocławski 2002: 242–246).

Notes

975

27. Mount Athos, Hágion Oros in Greek, is a mountain at the end of Acte, the easternmost peninsula protruding from the larger Chalcidice Peninsula. This mountain gave its name to the monastic polity, whose territory overlaps with that of Acte. The first hermits settled in this mountainous area in the mid-9th century. The first monastery surviving to this day was founded in 963 and the last one in 1540 (though it seems that the construction of another actually commenced in 2003). In 1045, the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine IX Monomachus (reigned 1042–1052) granted the monks with autonomy under imperial protection. The polity’s status includes the prohibition of entry for women and female animals, and monasteries could not accept enuchs or beardless youth as monks. The Ottoman sultans preserved the autonomous status of Mt Athos, which was formalized in the monastic regulations of 1783. The Treaty of Berlin (1878) confirmed the autonomy of Mt Athos, and Greece annexed southern Macedonia, including Chalcidice, in 1913. In the same year, Mt Athos declared its independence as a monastic republic under Greece’s protection. The republic adopted the crowned imperial double-headed eagle of Byzantium, rendered in black against golden background, as its flag. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne on the relations between Greece and Turkey made the former state into the protector of Mt Athos, which adopted its current Constitution the following year on the basis of the 1783 regulations. In 1926, the Athos Constitution was incorporated into the Greek Constitution, and a year later, Mt Athos became an autonomous part of Greece, but preserved the Julian calendar, which Athens had replaced with the Gregorian counterpart in 1924. All the recognized Orthodox patriarchates and the autocephalous Orthodox Churches (provided, they are dominant in a given state) enjoy monasteries in Mt Athos, which are related to them. Hence, the Bulgarian and Serbian monasteries preserved Church Slavonic literacy and were responsible for the rise of the early 19th-century Slavic national movements in the Balkans. When Greece joined the European Communities in 1981, Brussels recognized the special autonomous status of Mt Athos. However, to this day, some Athos monks have contested the 1972 decision of the Constantinople (Ecumenical) Patriarch to establish diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and consider the European Union a Catholic, thus heretic, organization (Honzák et al. 2001: 59; Jelavich and Barbara 1977: 78; Müller 2005: 34–35, 65–66, 69–70, 73; Šourek 2006: 69). 28. The labels of (I)jekavian, Ekavian, and Ikavian indicate that the earlier Slavonic /ˇe/ (jat’) may be variably pronounced as /(i)je/, /e/, or /i/. 29. Ivo Andri´c (1892–1975), Yugoslavia’s sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1961), is symbolic of the evolution of Yugoslavism from pluralism to exclusivist Serbianism. He was born in Bosnia to a Catholic Croatian family. As an AustroHungarian subject, Andri´c received education in Cracow, Graz, Vienna, and Zagreb. Upon the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, like many Croats at that time, he resigned from his native (I)jekavian Štokavian in favor of exclusively Serbian Ekavian Štokavian, and switched from the Latin script to Cyrillic. In addition, he purged his language of words and grammatical constructions, which were associated as Croatian. After the instituting of the royal dictatorship, most Croatian writers returned to Latin script-based (I)jekavian Štokavian, but Andri´c stuck to his choice, and was rewarded with the post of Yugoslav Ambassador to Germany. Before and after World War II, Andri´c identified himself as Serb/Yugoslav, which won him favor of Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). This communist leader of postwar Yugoslavia, being of mixed Croat-Slovenian parentage, hoped to turn the country into a genuine nation-state of the Yugoslavs. Andri´c became one of the symbols and

976 Notes

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

instruments of Tito’s project (Andri´c 2006; Motyl 2001: 540; Pynsent and Kanikova 1993: 15). The case of Macedonian and Bulgarian is similar to that of Romanian and Moldovan. Macedonian and Bulgarian are written in Cyrillic but with the use of several different letters (unlike in the homogenous version of the Latin alphabet employed for writing Romanian and Moldovan). Standard Macedonian is also based on the western dialect of Macedonia that is as far removed from Bulgarian as possible, and close to the Serbian dialectal area. A Bulgarian-Macedonian dictionary was published in 1968, but a Moldovan-Romanian one followed only in 2003 (Mladenov et al. 1968; Stati 2003). However, the situation of script use is more complicated than that in present-day Serbia. Cyrillic is the official Serbian alphabet in all the state, except Vojvodina where one can officially employ the Latin alphabet for writing Serbian. On the other hand, advertisers and Western-oriented scholars, publishers, and periodicals prefer to use Latin characters as well; Belgrade’s influence on the choice of script does not extend beyond the official sphere. Hence, citizens, who loath to allow this encroachment of the ‘foreign script’ on the ‘Serbian alphabet,’ founded numerous organizations and committees for ‘defence of Cyrillic’ (Gil 2005: 144). The polemic on the ‘ethnic belonging of Bosanˇcica (Bosanica, Bosnian), which commenced in the mid-19th century, has become the subject of heated controversy beginning in the mid-1990s. The Serbs claim Bosanˇcica as a variant of Serbian Cyrillic because in the past, not only Orthodox but also Catholics (in Bosnia and Ragusa) referred to it as ‘Serbian letters.’ In addition, today, neither Bosniaks nor Croats, but only Serbs use Cyrillic in Bosnia. Although, one can come across the denotation ‘Croatian Cyrillic’ for Bosanˇcica, most Croatian scholars dub it ‘Western Cyrillic,’ thus somewhat distancing this script from the tradition of Croatian literacy. Bosniak scholars claim that first documents in Bosanˇcica were produced in the 10th century, but the actual use of this distinctive script began in the second half of the 13th century in Ragusa and Dalmatia. The tradition of Bosanˇcica writing flowered from the 14th to 17th century, the script used by Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox. Few isolated families and individuals continued to write in Bosanˇcica until the 20th century (Bosanˇcica 2006; Bosnian 2006). The ethnonym Montenegrin stems from Venetian Italian Monte Nero (‘Black Mountain’), which is the translation of the Slavic name of the country, Crnagora (Simpson and Weiner 1991: 1111). The name of the ancient region of Macedonia and the ancient self-ethnonym ‘Macedonians’ come from Greek Makedones, meaning ‘highlanders’ or ‘the tall ones,’ related to makednos for ‘long’ or ‘tall,’ and makros for ‘long’ or ‘large’ (Etymological Dictionary 2001). For instance, Herodotus (485–425 BCE) recorded that seven ethne (ethnic groups) inhabited the Peloponnesus, and enumerated them, the Arcadians, Kynourians, Achaens, Dorians, Aetolians, Dryopes, and Lemnians (Drews 1988: 219). Today, the remnant of Graecia Magna is the 15,000 Greek-speakers living in Italy’s Apulia (Stegner 2006: 61). The religious ban on translating the Koran was so strong in the Muslim world, the earliest published translations of the Holy Book were into European languages, English (1515 selection; 1648 whole text), Latin (1543), Italian (1547), German (1616), Dutch (1641), and French (1647) (Qarai 2004).

Notes

977

38. In recognition of his achievements for the Turkish nation-state, the national Parliament granted Mustafa Kemal the surname ‘Atatürk’ (‘Father of Turks’) in 1934, and simultaneously prohibited the use of this unique surname by any other person (Motyl 2001: 30). 39. The name of the Crimea was mediated via Greek from the Turkic name of town of Qırım (Stary Krym), which used to be the capital of the Golden horde’s province of Crimea. Literally, qırım is Turkic for ‘my hill.’ 40. Its founders, Turkic Bulgars, initially passed the ethnonym ‘Bulgarian,’ onto the medieval Bulgarian Empire. The etymology of their name is uncertain, but may mean the ‘people from the Bolg,’ or the River Volga. In the period from the 4th to the 6th century, the Turkic Bulgars were established in the territory between this river and the Dniester (Gagova et al. 1996: 6; Etymological Dictionary 2001). 41. The ethnonym ‘Bavarian,’ or Baj(u)varii in Latin, probably comes from the Celtic group of Boii, whose ethnonym also gave rise to the name of Bohemia (Honzák et al. 2001: 81). 42. In the second half of the 9th century, in the East Frankish Kingdom, the Slavophone lands between the rivers Elbe and Saale were organized into the Sorbian Mark, which was absorbed into Saxony in the 910s. 43. The ethnonym ‘Jew’ is derived from Latin Judaeus and Greek Ioudaios, which both ultimately stem from Hebrew Yehudhah for ‘Judah,’ which was a Jewish kingdom. In 922 BCE, the Israelite Kingdom was divided into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah. The same Greco-Latin etymology spawned similar ethnonyms in Central European languages, Žid in Czech, Slovak, and Serbo-Croatian, ˙ Juudi in Estonian, Jude in German, Žyd in Lithuanian, Zsidó in Magyar, or Zyd in Polish. Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian Evrei and Bulgarian Evrein for ‘Jew’ comes from Hebrew. Zhid in all the four languages functions as a pejorative term for a Jew (Simpson and Weiner 1991: 894). 44. The term ‘Haskalah’ was coined from the Hebrew word sekhel, meaning ‘reason,’ ‘intellect,’ or ‘common sense.’ ‘Maskilem,’ literally the ‘enlightened ones,’ also stems from this word. The Haskalah petered out in the 1880s, gradually replaced by socialism and zionism (Jewish nationalism) among European Jewery. 45. As in the case of other renowned Armenian personalities, in Western literature, there are numerous versions of the name of Mekhitar of Sebastia, which is a result of different methods of transliteration from the Armenian to Latin script, from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, and from one Western language to another; for instance, Mekhitar Sebastatsii, Mkhitar Sebastaci, Mxitar Sebastatsi, or Mekhitar de Sebástia. 46. This policy was also extended to the Baltic languages after the Soviet annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in 1941. The literacies in these three languages were so vibrant that Moscow could not hope to impose Cyrillic on them. 47. As the Orthodox Church in the case of Greekness, it is one’s membership in the Armenian Apostolic Church that makes one into a ‘true Armenian,’ even if one is agnostic or an outright atheist. The Greeks failed to incorporate to their nationstate Constantinople, the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, who heads the Orthodox world. The Armenians were more fortunate in this respect, and the seat of the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians is located in Etchmiadzin, near the Armenian capital of Yerevan. The memory of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia survives in the form of the Catholicate of Cilicia with the seat in Antelias (Lebanon) with its jurisdiction over Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, the Persian Gulf states, Iran, and the Americas; and the tradition of the Armenian millet in the Ottoman Empire

978 Notes

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

is preserved in the shape of the Armenian Patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem. There are four basic dialect groups of Romani, Balkan (Greece, Turkey, Albania, the post-Yugoslav states, and Bulgaria), Vlax (Romania), Central (Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic), and Northern (the rest of Europe). Dialects from all these groups are spoken side by side in Central Europe and the Balkans, and pockets of the speakers of Balkan, Vlax, and Central dialects are spread all around Europe. In Western Europe and Scandinavia, where many Roma groups lost command of Romani, they use numerous Romani words and expressions in local languages, the effect being similar to Ladino, that is, Jewish Spanish infused with specifically Jewish Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary. In a similar manner, para-Romani languages emerged, in which entirely Romani lexicon is grafted on the syntax of other languages. In a way, English is a ‘para-Germanic language,’ because despite its Germanic syntax, most of its vocabulary is of Romance origin (Bakker and Kyuchkov 2000: 70–71, 76–79; Courthiade 1998). The authorities of the Third Reich had ideological problems with earmarking the Roma for the ‘final solution,’ because in the racist vocabulary of national socialisms they were ‘Aryans.’ First, it was decided that no more than 10 percent of the Roma are ‘pure Aryans,’ and they were to be granted their own nation-state in Austria’s Burgenland. Later, these technical niceties were brushed away clearing the way for the extermination of all Roma, irrespective of their perceived ‘racial purity’ (Marushiakova and Popov 2005: 438–439). The term ‘Porajmos’ has been contested as unintelligible to the average Rom, and even of obscene meanings in some varieties of Romani. Perhaps, with time, the new coinage, Samudardipen (‘widespread killings,’ ‘massacres’), will replace it (Marushiakova and Popov 2006). Although traditionally Roma intellectuals have employed either the Latin script or Cyrillic for writing in Romani, the Romani Wikipedia is available in two parallel scriptural versions, in the Latin alphabet and Devanagari (literally, Sanskrit for ‘divine city’), or India’s national script. Only the insignificant few Roma intellectuals are actually literate in Devanagari, but it is a symbolical bow toward India, popularly seen by Romani national activists as the ancestral homeland of the Roma since the 1960s. From the mid-1970s, the Roma International Union began to receive political and symbolical support from the Indian government, which fortified the ideological link between the Roma national movement and India (Marushiakova and Popov 2005: 439–440). Johann Martin Schleyer (1831–1912), a German Catholic priest, thought that God told him in a dream to construct an international language. In 1879–1880, he presented to the world his project, which mostly drew from English with some additions from German, French, Italian, and Spanish. Unlike, Zamenhof in Esperanto, he changed words beyond easy recognizability, which lessened the immediate appeal of Volapük (Price 1998: 19). During and after World War II, London and Washington strongly supported the development and use of Basic English, in whose name the word ‘Basic’ is an acronym for British, American, Scientific, International, and Commercial. In 1928, Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979) proposed this constructed language of 850 English words with a simplified syntax. Its defining grammar and dictionary came off the press in 1934 and 1940, respectively. Much educational and propaganda material has been published and

Notes

979

broadcast in Basic English; many books and booklets were published in this language, including even the translation of the Bible. The United States governmental radio station, Voice of America, employs Basic English in its broadcasts and Simple English Wikipedia (begun in 2001) is entirely in this language. Basic English was intended as an international lingua franca in its own right, an introduction to regular English, and a sort of plain English, especially for the functionally illiterate. Interestingly, Gerge Orwell (1903–1950) created Newspeak, as employed in his famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by merging Esperanto grammar ˙ with the limited lexicon of Basic English (McArthur 1992: 107–109; Zelazny 1990: 130–131). 54. Southern Azeri, spoken in Iran, has not been touched by Latinization or Cyrillicization, and continues to be written and printed in Arabic characters. 55. According to the 1999 census, Kazakhs constituted 53.4 percent of Kazakhstan’s 15 million-strong population, and Russians 30 percent. In 2005, it was estimated that the respective figures were 58–60 percent and 25–27 percent.

4

The Polish case: from Natio to Nation 1. Before the revolution, France was a multilingual state where less than one quarter of the inhabitants spoke the language known as ‘French’ (that is, the dialect of Paris). Initially, the universalism of the French Revolution provided for the translation of the most significant acts of the new government into local languages. But soon the revolutionaries required the non-standard French-speaking citizens to ‘resign from persisting in their linguistic error’ (that is, their native languages and non-standard dialects), and saw eagerness to follow this line as the main instrument of distinguishing between ‘friends and enemies of the revolution,’ because the counterrevolutionary movements brewed in provinces, and thus, frequently did not share language with the revolutionary capital. While reinventing monarchical France as a civic nation-state, the revolution also equated the standardized French language of Paris with progress and civilization, and other languages with counterrevolution and backwardness. This translated into the national policy of radical linguistic homogenization that continues in France to this day. Most of France’s population was taught to speak standard French by World War I (Higonnet 1980; Martel 1992: 119; ˙ Schlieben-Lange 1996; Weber 1976: 67–94; Zelazny 2000: 12–15). 2. It seems that in Europe the first system of popular education was created in Prussia by the royal decrees of 1736 and 1763. The actual enforcement of elementary school attendance for all children began in earnest only in the 1820s. Poland-Lithuania did not manage to achieve this goal before its final partition in 1795 (Volksschule 1890: 270). 3. In the 16th century, the Polish-Lithuanian nobility spoke Polish, Ruthenian, and German as their native tongues endowed with writing systems. But in the following century most of the nobility became Polonized or successfully acquired Polish as a second language indispensable for full participation in political and economic life of the commonwealth (Kizwalter 1999: 68). 4. The flowering of French-language writing in the Polish-Lithuanian noble tradition came in the scholar and aristocrat, Jan Potocki’s (1761–1815) popular picaresque novel, The Memoir Found in Saragossa (1803–1815). 5. Interestingly, when the Russian Academy of Sciences was established in St Petersburg in 1724, there was no agreement among its members on whether the

980 Notes

6.

7.

8.

9.

proceedings should be conducted in Russian (that is, vernacularized Church Slavonic) or in German, so they decided on Latin as a compromise (Picchio 1999: 102). Perhaps, the shape of standard Polish would be significantly different, had the Piarist Alojzy Osinski ´ (1770–1842) managed to have his 24-volume dictionary, Bogactwo mowy polskiej (The Riches of the Polish Language) published. As Linde, he was a member of the TPN. Between 1806 and 1824, Osinski ´ taught in a university-like Polish-language secondary school in the Volhynian town of Krzemieniec, and later, he headed the Catholic divinity academy in Vilnius (1833–1839). This authoritative dictionary, with headwords illustrated by appropriate quotations drawn from popular authors, would have outshone Linde’s work. However, Osinski’s ´ dictionary remained in manuscript, and ten of its volumes went missing. The original term ‘language question’ dates back to the 14th century. Around 1305, the Florentine poet Dante Alghieri (1265–1321) completed his De vulgari eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular). Although the book was published in Paris in 1577, rewritten copies had already circulated widely. In this Latin-language treatise, Dante introduced the seminal distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ languages. Latin could be identified as an example of the latter and the ‘Florentine tongue’ (future Italian) as an example of the former. Between the 14th and the 16th the centuries, the discussion fomented by this work and Dante’s vernacular poetry led to the accepted emergence of vernacular languages throughout Western Europe. Soon they eclipsed Latin in importance, and set the European paradigm of language codification. In the wake of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, this paradigm developed and spread to all Catholic and Protestant areas of the Old Continent (Dante 1996: xiii–xviii; Picchio 1999: 89). In 1840, the adjective ‘Lithuanian’ was dropped from the official names of the gubernias of Vilnius and Grodno (Hrodna), and later, one began to distinguish between the Northwestern and Southwestern gubernias, also dubbed the Northwestern Land and Southwestern Land, respectively. The former denotation corresponds to present-day Lithuania and Belarus, while the latter to the northern section of present-day Ukraine, extending from the Dniester to the Dnieper (Aleksandraviˇcius and Kulakauskas 2003: 84; Ališauskas et al. 2006: 634). This conservative ideology was the opposite of that of the French Revolution, encapsulated in the similarly triadic slogan liberté, égalité, fraternité. With this newly formulated official ideology, the tsar sought to ensure stability, centralization, gradual modernization, and homogenization of the Russian Empire without compromising the absolutist nature of the monarchy, legitimized through Orthodoxy (represented by the Russian Orthodox Church which, in turn, was subjugated to the tsar’s political will). By the way, Russian narodnost though popularly translated as ‘nationality’ does not share its meaning with the English term, which denotes either ‘stateless ethnic group’ or ‘the state of belonging to a nation.’ Narodnost refers to ‘a people’ (narod) as a positive value grounded in soil (that is, a ‘fatherland’) and a religion (Orthodox Christianity). This people was perceived as naturally loyal to their batiushka (father), or the tsar; and by default they was expected to speak Russian, too. In a nutshell, this ideology was to produce the istnyi russkii chelovek (genuine Russian person). After 1864, this quality became the basic prerequisite to be fulfilled before one could be even considered for employment in Russia’s civil service. From this basis, ethnolinguistic Russian nationalism emerged in the two last decades of the 19th century (Davies 1982: II 90; Riasanovsky 1959).

Notes

981

10. Prussia forged the ethnolinguistic in its character Kleindeutsch nation-state, which effectively excluded Austria from the German national project. This meant the failure of the Habsburgs’ Großdeutsch (Great German) solution, which sought a recreation of the Holy Roman Empire as a federal polity that would have been ruled from Vienna, not Berlin. A Großdeutsch polity could be a civic nation-state only, because apart from Germans, it would embrace numerous non-German-speaking groups. Both Berlin and Vienna loathed the third solution, favored by liberal nationalists in 1848, which urged the gathering of Central Europe’s German-speaking areas in a German nation-state, irrespective of established borders (Müller 1996: 159–169). 11. The first holder of the Chair of Ruthenian Language and Literature (founded in 1848) at the University of Lemberg, Iakiv Holovats’kyi (1814–1888), set for himself the task of proving that Ruthenian/Little Russian was neither a dialect of Polish nor Russian (Magocsi 1980: 9). 12. In 1897, the rate of literacy was 21.1 percent in the Russian Empire, though 22.9 percent in European Russia, and 30.5 percent in the Vistula Land. In cities, the percentage was higher, 48.9 percent in European Russia and 44.7 percent in the Vistula Land, and the corresponding indicators for male urbanites were 58.5 and 50.5 percent, respectively. The later modernizing efforts did not significantly alter these levels of literacy, and it is estimated that 20 to 25 percent of the empire’s population was literate in 1917 (Johnson 1950: 197, 283). 13. Two chairs in Ruthenian law established at the University of Lemberg in 1862 were multilingual, and another Chair of Ruthenian Language and Literature was founded in 1875 at the German-language University of Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in the Crownland of Bukovina (Magocsi 1980: 10). 14. The French-language edition of this encyclopedia was prepared just in time for the Peace Conference in Paris. The English-language edition followed thanks to the support of the Polish organizations in the United States. The foreign language editions comprised more volumes than the Polish-language original (Polish Encyclopaedia 1922: VI). 15. Bucharest obtained a common border with Poland, when in November 1918, the Austrian Crownland of Bukovina was incorporated into Romania. The Western Ukrainian National Republic also claimed the region, which made Romania into a potential enemy of Ukraine, and hence facilitated Warsaw’s suppression of the republic, while Bucharest, besieged with other border problems, observed this development gladly. 16. It appears that in the mid-19th century, even the majority of Polish noblemen could hardly write in standard Polish, let alone speak in it (Stomma 2006: 138–139).

5

The Hungarian case 1. I use German-language versions of Hungarian place-names, as until the mid-19th century the population of Hungarian towns was overwhelmingly German-speaking. As a result, these towns used German as the language of administration, which fortified the usage of Germanophone place-names in the Kingdom of Hungary. The reversal of this tradition commenced with the rise of ethnic Magyar nationalism in the first half of the 19th century. Urban populations became gradually Magyarized. As of the 1867 Ausgleich (compromise), Magyarophone versions of place-names replaced the German ones in official usage. Accordingly, when referring to events

982 Notes

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

after 1867, I employ Magyar place-names. In every case, when a place-name is mentioned for the first time, I append its current official linguistic form (unless it is the same). From 1563 to 1830, 11 Hungarian kings were crowned in Preßburg. However, some argue that de jure Preßburg remained the coronation town for Hungarian monarchs until 1867 when the coronation of the Hungarian king (Francis Joseph) took place in Buda. Da sind sie jetzt unter Slaven, Deutschen, Wlachen und anderen Völkern der geringere Teil der Landeseinwohner, und nach Jahrhunderten wird man vielleicht ihre Sprache kaum finden (Herder 1800: 476; Herder 1966: 429). In the forming autonomous Principality of Serbia, most experienced and educated administrators such as Dositej came from the Austrian Empire. The locals called them nemˇckari, that is, ‘lovers of all things German’ (Markovich 2004: 90). The first Magyarophone literary and historical journal Tudományos Gy˝ ujtemények (Scientific Collections) published since 1817 (Fodor 1983: 60). Literally, matica means ‘queen bee’ in Serbo-Croatian, and it is derived from the Slavic word matka, or ‘mother.’ The conflict between nobles from Croatia and Hungary about which language they should use to do official business in the Hungarian Diet was not ethnic yet. Both group of nobles were multilingual, and a change in the official language did not hinder much their ability to make their voices heard. Otherwise, Croatian nobles would have stood for the replacement of Latin with Magyar and Croatian. But at that time, they simply sought to maintain the traditional privileges of administrative autonomy, which Croatia had enjoyed within in the Kingdom of Hungary for centuries. In the second half of the 19th century, when mass national movements gradually wrested politics away from the hands of the privileged few, the 1844 supersession of Latin by Magyar in the Diet became an important argument in ethnolinguistic conflicts played out in the kingdom. The English word ‘race’ until the 1930s also meant an ‘ethnic group’ or German Volk, that is, ‘ethnic nation.’ Because the word also denoted ‘species,’ this biological meaning reinforced the biologizing (absolutizing) view of ethnicity and nationalism. Tatrin , literally, an inhabitant of the Tatra Mountains in the north of Upper Hungary. Vojvodina, today an autonomous republic in Serbia, belonged to Hungary, but passed onto the Ottoman hands in the 16th century. Following the Habsburg reconquest, at the end of the 17th century, Vojvodina originated as a region within the administrative framework of Vienna’s Military Frontier poised as a bulwark of the Habsburg lands against the Ottoman Empire. Neusatz (Újvidék in Magyar, and Novi Sad in Serbian) has remained Vojvodina’s capital to this day. The region comprised the historical Hungarian komitat of Syrmia (Szerém in Magyar, and Srem in Serbian) located between the Danube and the Sava, the komitat of Baˇcka (Bács in Magyar) located between the Danube and the Tisza, and the Banate (Banovina in Slavic, and Bánság in Magyar) of Temeschwar-Josephstadt (Temesvár in Magyar, and Timi¸soara in Romanian) bounded by the Mure¸s, the Tisza, the Danube, and the Transylvanian border. Later, this banate became known as the region of ‘Banat.’ This name is derived from the Persian title of Ban (master, lord, keeper). It was brought to Central Europe by the Avars in the 6th century, and became popular among the Balkan Slavs. The title was customarily used by virtually autonomous rulers of various regions in Croatia, and then, by leaders of some districts in the Military Frontier.

Notes

983

Following the suppression of the Hungarian War of Independence in 1849, Vienna created the Crownland (District) of the Serbian Voivodeship and the Banate of Temeschwar from the aforesaid territories with the capital in Temeschwar. This crownland survived until 1867, when it was split into five komitats. The banate was divided into three komitats. From the administrative term voivodeship (Woiwodschaft in German, vajdaság in Magyar, and vojvodina in Serbian) the name of the region of Vojvodina sprang up. ‘Voivodeship’ stems from the Slavic ‘voivode’ for a ‘commandant of a military division or a region.’ Serbia’s present-day Vojvodina, detached from Hungary after 1918, consists of Baˇcka, Syrmia, and the westernmost sliver of Banat. The ethnolinguistic heterogeneity of Vojvodina was triggered by the Ottoman expansion. Most of the Croatian and Magyar population fled northward. In the wake of the Habsburg reconquest, between 1691 and 1718, Orthodox Slavic refugees (Serbs) from Ottoman-held Serbia and Macedonia settled in the region. Croatian and Magyar adventurers from the nearby districts followed. Later, the Habsburg administration populated Vojvodina with German, Czech, Slovak, and Ruthenian (Rusyn) settlers (Honzák et al. 2001: 711; Középiskolai történelmi atlasz 1996: 30–31, 46, 62–63; Simpson and Weiner 1991: 103; Sugar 1977: 145). 11. Honvédség, literally ‘territorial army,’ translation of the German term ‘Landwehr’ for reserve forces drawn from a region or state. 12. The uprising created great excitement among young, liberal minded Magyars, as it also did across Prussia and elsewhere in the German Confederation. 13. From the Hungarian government’s earlier experience, Jelaˇci´c understood that he needed the support of Croatian peasantry in this new age of mass politics. Otherwise his troops would not have stood any chance against the Hungarian armies. Thus, despite Vienna’s vocal opposition, he proclaimed the abolition of serfdom in Croatia on 18 May 1848.

6 The Czech case: from the Bohemian Slavophone Populus to Czech Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation 1. [E]iusdem nobilis slavici idiomatis participatio, eiusdem generosae linguae sublimitas. 2. Palacký expressed his opinion in German: Wahrlich, existierte der österreichische Kaiserstaat nicht schon längst, man müßte im Interesse Europas, im Interesse der Humanität selbst sich beeilen, ihn zu schaffen. 3. I use the adjective ‘Bohemian’ exclusively to refer to the region of Bohemia, while the adjective ‘Czech’ I reserve for talking about Bohemia, Moravia, and sometimes Silesia as a single political entity. I introduced this somewhat anachronistic usage to avoid confusion, because in Czech, German, Magyar, and Polish the region and the latter entity are referred to with the same adjective, ˇceský, böhmisch, cseh, and czeski, respectively. Sometimes it is difficult to discern if the region or the larger entity is meant. This terminological confusion stems from the usage proposed by 19th-century Czech nationalists who, in the interest of building a future Czech nation-state consisting at least of Bohemia and Moravia, propagated the myth that Bohemia and Moravia had been a unified single political entity from times immemorial. The myth justified their aspirations, and highlighted the continuing separateness of the crownlands of Bohemia and Moravia in Austria-Hungary as ‘unnatural’ and ‘against historical law.’

984 Notes

4. This development paralleled the earlier replacement of the Czech plural term for Hungary, Uhry, with the singular Uhersko, as in Rakousko-Uhersko, that is, AustriaHungary. On the other hand, the Czech terms for Lower and Upper Austria, Horní Rakousy and Dolní Rakousy, retain their plural form to this day, though Austria in Czech is singular, Rakousko. 5. The German original reads: ‘so werdet auch ihr so tief versunkene, einst fleißige und glückliche Völker, endlich einmal von eurem langen Schlaf ermuntert, von euren Sklavenketten befreit, eure schönen Gegenden vom Adriatischen Meer bis zum Karpatischen Gebirge, von Don bis zur Mulda als Eigentum nutzen’ (Herder 1966: 435). 6. The ethnonym ‘Horak’ is derived from Czech and Slovak hora for ‘mountain.’ The Horaks lived in the range of low mountains, which separates Moravia from Bohemia. ‘Hanak’ and ‘Slováckan’ stem from the respective regions of Hana and Slovácko. Slovensko is both Czech and Slovak for ‘Slovakia,’ but it shares with Slovácko the same root, which means ‘Slavic.’ Hana (or Hanna in German) originated from the River Hana (Hanna in German), which flows across the region. The ethnonym Valach is directly connected to the Walachian population engaged in transhumant economy, who, between the 13th and the 16th centuries, spread northward along the entire arch of the Carpathians, including its northwestern terminus in Moravia. In the process, the originally Romance-speaking population became Slavicized west of Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) (Hannan 1996: 56, 69–71; Rejzek 2001: 194, 697). 7. Another Czech-language university was established at the Moravian capital of Brno in 1919 after the establishment of Czechoslovakia. This university was named after Masaryk, the main ideologue of Czechoslovak nationalism and the first president of Czechoslovakia. In the same year, the very first Slovak-language university was founded at Bratislava, and was named after Bohemia’s famous Protestant thinker and writer John Amos Comenius. Proponents of Czechoslovakism presented him as a ‘father’ of Czechoslovak commonality.

7 The Slovak case: from Upper Hungary’s Slavophone Populus to Slovak Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation 1. The Soviet Union recognized independent Slovakia until the German attack in 1941, and France and Great Britain also briefly offered a modicum of recognition to this new nation-state until they threw their weight behind Beneš’s project of the re-establishing Czechoslovakia after World War II. 2. The method of genetic classification of languages is quite arbitrary, and oftentimes its verdicts are dictated by political (national) needs rather than linguistic research. Variously, choosing certain features of Slovak, one could classify this language as belonging either to the East, West, or South Slavic languages. In addition, talking about genetic relations between closely related languages before they were even written or codified is an anachronism in service of politics. When there were no written or standard languages, Slavic dialects changed gradually from village to village, and there is no scientific basis for deciding where the linguistic border between Czech, Slovak, and Polish was. Nationally minded linguists usually overcome this obstacle by equating the political borders of polities identified as the Czech state, Poland, or Slovakia with the presumed geographical extent of Czech, Polish, and Slovak (Kamusella 2005).

Notes

985

3. The central geographic location of Slovak among the Slavic languages makes it the easiest to be understood at a basic level by Slavic-speakers. In a way, it is a reflection of the single Slavic dialect continuum before the Magyar incursion split it into the Northern and Southern Slavic continua that obtain to this day. However, it is politics and economic might that predisposes a language to the role of lingua franca, not linguistic features, however favorable for swift communication they could be. 4. This scholar from Upper Hungary nowadays popularly dubbed as a ‘Slovak’ in Slovak history textbooks was a Slavophone Lutheran pastor who wrote in Latin and German. Regarding his identity, he famously remarked that he was ‘lingua Slavus, natione Hungarus, eruditione Germanus,’ or a Slav by language, a Hungarian by natio, and a German by education (Brock 2005: 39). 5. Papánek drew on Johann Christoph Jordan’s work De originibus slavicis (On the Origin of the Slavs, 1745) (Sundhaußen 1973: 103). 6. In this term, ‘cultural’ means ‘written.’ Hence, Cultural Western Slovak denotes a written language that arose on the basis of dialects associated with what today is western Slovakia. 7. This Catholic priest and proponent of Bernoláˇctina should not be confused with the Protestant pastor Juraj Palkoviˇc (1769–1850) who supported Bibliˇctina. 8. He preferred the Bibliˇctina/Czech spelling of his name, Pavel Josef Šafaˇrík, but, in line with the contemporary practice, signed his writings and documents in other languages with appropriate linguistic variants of his name, that is, Paul Joseph Schaffarik in German, Paulus Josephus Schaffarik in Latin, or Pál József Saf(f)arik in Magyar. He knew nothing of the modern-day standard Slovak version of his name, Pavel Jozef Šafárik, because the Slovak language was standardized in earnest long after Šafárik’s death. 9. Ivan Prach came to St Petersburg from Austrian Silesia, where he signed his name in German as Johann Gottfried Pratsch and in Bohemian as Jan Bohumir Prac. 10. Beginning in 1845, the Slavophone Calvinists in the region between the Upper Hungarian towns of Käsmark (Kežmarok, Kesmárk) and Eperjs (Prešov) developed their own Slavophone ‘sariskij jazik’ (language of the Komitat of Sáros) written in Magyar orthography in opposition to Catholic Bernoláˇctína and Lutheran Bibliˇctina. Books appeared in this self-proclaimed ‘csiszta szlovenszka recs’ (pure Slavic/Slovak language) until 1923, and a newspaper started publication in 1886 in Pittsburgh PA (Dulichenko 1981: 88–90). 11. Standard Slovak is one of few European languages, whose ‘birth’ can be exactly pinpointed in time. Štúr came to the decision to standardize Slovak on the basis of the Central Slovak dialect at 3:30pm on 14 February 1843 (Brock 2005: 88). 12. Apart from the Slovaks, Štúr recognized ten more tribes of the Slavic nation that spoke their specific dialects of the Slavic language, namely, the Great Russians (Russians), Little Russians (Ukrainians), Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Upper Sorbs, and Lower Sorbs (Štúr 1943: 19). 13. Historians of the Slovak language maintain that the first text in modern Slovak, a fable, was published in 1832. It was authored by Samo Chalupka (1812–1883), a student in the Preßburg Protestant secondary school who became a pastor in 1836. He wrote this fable in the Tatra dialect, which a decade later Štúr termed ‘Central Slovak dialect’ and made into the basis of modern Slovak. Also in the 1830s, another ˇ Lutheran pastor, Andrej Corba, wrote in the dialect of Eperjes, or what today is known as the ‘Eastern Slovak dialect.’ But none of his writings was published. Thus, unlike Bernoláˇctina associated with the Western Slovak dialect, the Eastern Slovak dialect

986 Notes

never entered the tradition of Slovak literacy. In the written form, it survived as the Sáros/Šariš language. But because this language was employed by pro-Magyar Slavophone Calvinists, only recently did some Slovak linguists claim it as part of the history of Slovak literacy. To this day, eastern Slovakia and its inhabitants appear ‘strange’ to the average Slovak, who marks this difference by calling eastern Slovaks by the specific ethnonym ‘Slovjak’ (The ethnonym ‘Slovak’ in the Slovak language is ‘Slovak’) (Brock 2005: 66, 135–136). 14. The Matica slovenská was not only the early achievement of and rallying point for Slovak nationalism; it was also an inspiration for the Ruthenian national movement. In the emulation of this example, in 1866, the Obshchestvo svatego Vasiliia Vilikago (St Basil the Great Society) was founded in Ungwar (Ungvár in Magyar, today Uzhhorod in Ukraine). It published the first Ruthenian newspaper, Svet (Light, 1867–1871), and the first Ruthenian educational periodical Nauka (Science, 1897– 1914). In 1902, Budapest dissolved the society, and replaced it with the publishing house Unió (Union). Unió published textbooks and religious titles for Ruthenians in Ruthenian and Magyar with an eye to their eventual Magyarization (Pop 2005b: 226, 250, 253). 15. Between 1865 and 1871, the adjective ‘national’ in the title was rendered as ‘narodné,’ but later it was perceived as too much Czech-sounding, and changed to ‘narodnie.’

8 The Polish nation: from a multiethnic to an ethnically homogenous nation-state 1. This, a bit confusing term, is a usual English-language shorthand for German Regierungsbezirk, or ‘government district.’ 2. The confessional divide separated Lutheran Kashubs from their Catholic counterparts so effectively that by the turn of the 20th century, the former had abandoned their language in exchange for the Low German dialect of their Lutheran neighbors. The location of the Lutheran Kashubian villages near Stolp (Słupsk), west of the Catholic Kashubs, accelerated this process. In 1856, the Russian linguist, Aleksandr Hilferding, dubbed the Lutheran Kashubs as ‘Slovincians’ (Slavs). (Likewise, the ethnonyms of the Slovaks and Slovenians are also slightly altered versions of the ethnonym ‘Slavs.’) From that time, it became popular to consider the Slovincians as an ethnic group distinct from the Kashubs, though Slovincians referred to themselves as ‘Kashubs.’ By extension, scholars made the idiom of the Slovincians into a Slovincian language separate from Kashubian, and the German linguist, Friedrich Lorentz (1870–1937) completed the process by publishing his German-language grammar of Slovincian (Slovinzisch) in 1903 in St Petersburg. The Kashubian national activist, Florian Ceynowa (1817–1881), who cooperated with Hilferding, disagreed and maintained that the Kashubs and the Slovincians spoke a single Kashubian-Slovincian language (kaszébsko-słovjinskô móva), in the scope of which Slovincian was a dialect. After 1945, the German-speaking descendants of the Slovincians were retained in Poland as ‘Polonizeable,’ but almost all of them had left for West Germany by the mid-1980s (Okuka and Krenn 2002: 509–512). 3. In these minorities treaties, minorities concerned were defined as ‘ethnic (ethniquesracial), religious or linguistic’ (Da˛browski 1922: 100).

Notes

987

4. Ironically, the broad popular support, which Narutowicz obtained from ethnic Poles and national minorities as well, would have made him into a perfect president for Poland, if the state had been really a recreation of multiethnic Poland-Lithuania, as Polish nationalists claimed it to be in their propaganda. 5. Poland-Lithuania’s Royal Prussia coincided with Germany’s Province of West Prussia. In interwar Poland, most of the region was transformed into the Voivodeship of Torun, popularly known as ‘Pomerania.’ In reality, the voivoideship was the easternmost section of the historical region of Pomerania, which had extended from Stralsund to Danzig (Gdansk). ´ This easternmost section, known as Pommerellen (Lesser Pomerania) in German and Eastern or Gdansk ´ Pomerania in Polish, emerged as a semi-independent duchy in the 12th century. 6. In 1921, Ukrainians amounted to 42.9 percent of the Orthodox Christians living in Poland, Belarusians and Tutejsi to 34.1 percent, and ethnic Poles to 19.4 percent. (Adamczuk and Zdaniewicz 1991: 41) 7. Between 1923 and 1938, the share of Jewish students in Polish universities declined from 24.9 percent to 9.9 percent, that is, to the level slightly less than the 10 percent of Jews in Poland’s population. ‘Superfluous’ Jewish students sought university education abroad (Horak 1961: 114). 8. Article 17 of the Polish-Czechoslovak agreement of 1925 obliged Warsaw to facilitate the establishment of minority schools with Czechoslovak as the language of instruction in Volhynia. The language is referred to as ‘Czechoslovak,’ in line with Czechoslovak legislation, but the actual medium of education was Czech, which was duly reflected in Polish statistical yearbooks that described these minority schools as ‘Czech-language’ ones. The 31,000 Czechs residing in Volhynia stemmed from the 1860s emigration of Bohemian and Moravian farmers to this then-Russian region, where they had been lured by cheap land. A further 4100 Czechs resided in the Voivodeship of Łód´z. They were descendants of the Czech Brethren who had emigrated to Poland-Lithuania in the mid-17th century (Ogonowski 2000: 51; Tomaszewski 1985a: 158–159). 9. 139,000 Russian-speakers lived in these Polish territories, which had belonged to Russia before 1914. 80,000 of them were descendants of the Old Believers, who, in the wake of the 17th-century reform of the Orthodox Church in Muscovy, had emigrated to Poland-Lithuania and settled in the vicinity of Białystok and Vilnius. The rest were tsarist civil servants and their families who decided not to return to Soviet Russia (Tomaszewski 1985: 148–149). 10. The last Polish-Lithuanian noble poet, who wrote exclusively in Latin, was Mathiae Casimri Sarbievii (Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, 1595–1640). Perhaps he was also Europe’s last genuinely Latin-language poet, rewarded for his poetry by Pope Urban VIII, and known as the ‘Christian Horace.’ His works were translated, emulated, and lauded, especially in France, England, and the Netherlands. 11. The disparity in percentages for 1922 and 1938 was caused by the lowering of the overall number of deputies in the Sejm from 444 in 1922 to 208 in 1935, in line with the new 1935 Constitution. 12. Interestingly, in the Polish national master narrative, Panna Maria in Texas is identified as the first Polish town established in the United States (1854), and Wilno in Ontario as the first Polish town established in Canada (1858). Ironically, Szlonzokian immigrants founded the former and Kashubian ones the latter. To this day, the Szlonzokian (Silesian) and Kashubian (not Polish) languages, though heavily Anglicized, survive in both localities as the vernacular of the inhabitants.

988 Notes

13. Ironically, the recent influx of Polish immigrants to Ireland made their language the second largest in the country, after English. In 2002, only 34,000 spoke Irish (Gaelic) on everyday basis (Crowley 2005a: 189). 14. This high number of declarations of German as a language spoken at home is clearly of a compensatory or symbolic nature, as the group of German native-speakers among Poland’s German minority is actually limited to the oldest generation (around 10,000 persons in 2007), who finished at least several years of German elementary school before 1945. 15. It is interesting to note that by 2006, the parliaments of 18 Central and Eastern European nation-states have adopted such acts on minorities. They include the post-communist, post-Yugoslav, and Europe’s post-Soviet states. No similar comprehensive acts on the protection of minorities are in force in Western Europe, meaning the area from Germany, Italy, and Greece to Spain. In Italy, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, or Belgium, the protection of minorities is limited to specific regions, and regulated by regional legislation or acts of lower rank. The protection of the Basques, Catalonians, and Galicians in Spain, and of the Irish, Welsh, and Scots in the United Kingdom is ensured within the respective federal frameworks, which granted these stateless nations quasi nation-states in the form of autonomous regions. Especially, France and Greece remain relentless in pursuing centralization of the state, which entails the administratively enforced assimilation of minorities. 16. In addition, non-Polish national and ethnic groups, to be eligible for official recognition, had to have resided continuously on the territory of the Polish state for at least 100 years. 17. A leading activist of EBLUL’s Polish branch, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz (1967–), not only translates into Kashubian, but wrote his doctorate on the Wilamowicean language, which was the vernacular of the Galician town of Wilamowice (near Bielsko-Biala) until the late 1940s. The communist authorities identified this language as ‘German,’ and banned it from public use until 1956. At present, there are about 70 users of Wilamowicean (all of them older than 70), which they refer to as Wymysojer, because the name of their locality in this language is Wymysoj. Although the language is a dialect of Middle High German, the most famous Wymysojer poet, Florian Biesik (1849–1931?), claimed that it was derived from Dutch, Frisian, or possibly AngloSaxon. The native inhabitants of Wilamowice also reject any German identity and maintain that they stem exclusively from Dutch and Scottish settlers. On the contrary, German and Polish scholars defined Wilamowicean as a German(ic) dialect through the 1990s. Wicherkiewicz was the first one to label it as a language in its own right, and he is responsible for the current revival of interest in Wymysojer, which, among others, spawned a glossary of this language at Wilamowice’s official website (Wicherkiewicz 2003). 18. Although it is the first Polish-language genuine Catholic universal encyclopedia, it was preceded by two more theology-oriented, but quite universal in their outlook, Polish Catholic encyclopedias, both published prior to 1918. Michał Nowodworski’s (1831–1896) 33-volume Encyklopedja ko´scielna (Church Encyclopedia, 1873–1933 [only the last volume came off the press after 1918], Warsaw) was a substantially enlarged translation of Heinrich Joseph Wetzer (1801–1853) and Benedikt Welte’s (1805–1885) 13-volume Kirchen-Lexikon oder Encyclopädie der katholischen Theologie (Church Lexicon or Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology, 1847–1860, Freiburg im Breisgau). Stanisław Gall’s (1865–1942) 22-volume Podre˛czna encyklopedya ko´scielna (Reference Church Encyclopedia, 1904–1916, Warsaw and Cracow) was the first original Polish Catholic encyclopedia.

Notes

9

989

The Hungarian nation: from Hungary to Magyarország 1. The dictionary’s title was given in Magyar and also in Latin, Lexicon criticoetymologicum linguae Hungaricae (The Critical-Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language). This aptly reflected the tight official and social connection that existed between both languages for a millennium until 1844. 2. Tellingly, Magyar insurrectionists attacked Soviet bookstores and burned their Russian-language wares, both perceived as the symbol of the imposed subjugation of Hungary to the Soviet Union. For a Magyar with no command of the language, it was easy to spot a Russian publication; the presumption was that if it was in Cyrillic, it had to be in Russian (Deák 2007: 46). 3. It is rarely forgotten that prior to his glorious moment in the 1956 Revolution, Nagy was a convinced communist and inner-party schemer. In the latter half of the 1930s, when young and in the Soviet Union he was an NKVD (secret police) informer (Lendvai 2006: 51). 4. There were strong centers of émigré Magyar-language research and publishing in Western Europe and Northern America. Magyar exiles and refugees, who left Hungary during the war, after the communist takeover, and in the wake of the 1956 uprising, set them up. Their Polish-, Czech-, and Slovak-language counterparts paralleled these centers. The Czech and Slovak ones were given a new lease of life by the 1968 emigration, and the Polish by the 1981 emigration. Unlike in the Czech, Polish, and Slovak cases, a strong center of independent Magyar-language culture and publishing developed in Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina, beginning in the late 1960s. 5. In 2007, however, the Polish identity card (Karta Polaka) for ethnic Poles from the post-Soviet states was adopted, perhaps, to alleviate the demographic gap left by close to 3 million Polish citizens who, since 2004, had left Poland for the old EU member states. Because in December 2007, Poland, along with eight other new EU members (except Cyprus), was included in the passport-free Schengen area, the visa requirements for citizens of the post-Soviet states (except the Baltic republics that are part of the European Union and the Schengen Area) became more stringent. Naturally, the Polish identity card makes the task of obtaining a Polish/Schengen visa for ethnic Poles easier, like the Magyar identity card in the case of Hungarian/Schengen visas for ethnic Magyars from Ukraine or Serbia.

10 The Czech Nation: Between Czechoslovak and Czech Nationalism 1. This procedure of the so-called ‘national option,’ the Treaty of Versailles guaranteed for the inhabitants of these Upper Silesian territories, which were transferred to Poland and Czechoslovakia, and on which the plebiscite was conducted. Hence, the phenomenon of national option mainly led to population exchanges between Germany and Poland. 2. The official numbering of the dictionary’s volumes add up only to eight, but the volume four was split into two parts, each in excess of 1100 pages, like the rest of the regular volumes. Hence, I count these two parts as separate volumes. 3. This wartime German Academy of Sciences was the continuation of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen (Society for the Advancement of German Science, Art, and Literature in Bohemia), established in 1891

990 Notes

in reply to the Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art, founded the previous year. 4. To a degree, Czech Wikipedia, founded in 2002, may become the universal encyclopedia for the modern Czech user, because at 14.4 million words in late 2006, it amounted to 30 conventional volumes, thus, rivaling the famous Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný. 5. The 40,000-strong Morawec population of the Hluˇcínsko (Hultschiner Ländchen) transferred with their region from Germany to Czechoslovakia in 1920, reacted with the shift in their self-identification by adopting the pro-German identity of ‘Hultschiners,’ as they were known in international literature of the interwar period. They referred to themselves as Prajzáci (‘Prussians’). During World War II, though predominantly Slavophone, they unambiguously declared themselves as ‘Germans.’ After 1945, when Germans were expelled from postwar Czechoslovakia, the Hultschiners were retained in Czechoslovakia as ‘ethnic Czechs,’ even if they wanted to leave for Germany. (In Poland, the same fate was meted out to over 1 million so-called ‘Autochthons,’ who were mostly Slavic-speaking as well.) After the fall of communism, the pro-German ethnic Prussian identity revived among the Hultschiners and most of them applied for and received German citizenship (complete with the German passport), like ‘Autochthonous’ Silesians (Szlonzoks) in Poland’s Upper Silesia. Today, it is ‘cool’ to be a Prajz (Prussian) in the Hluˇcínsko, and even some poetry is published in the local Slavic dialect (written in Czech orthography), which is often dubbed as ‘our language,’ or the ‘Prussian language’ (prajzská mova). Numerous German(ic) linguistic loans (including the article) differ this dialect/language from Czech, as they do the dialect/language of the Silesians (Plaˇcek 2000; Rumanová 2005).

11

The Slovak nation: from Czechoslovakia to Slovakia

1. At the turn of the 19th century, in Transylvania, the first generation of Walachian (Romanian) national scholars propounded a similar theory of a treaty, which made the Walachians into an ally of the Magyars upon the coming of the latter into the region. Hence, the Walachians were entitled to enjoy the same political status as Transylvania’s other nationes, Magyars, Szeklers, and Saxons (Hitchins 2002: 93–94). 2. Ironically, východniari (Slovjaks) are sometimes eulogized as the ‘first Slovaks,’ who emigrated to the United States in the 1870s. Similarly, the settlement, which was established in 1854 in Texas by ancestors of Poland’s oft-disparged Szlonzoks (Silesians), is reinterpreted by Polish historians as the ‘first Polish town’ in the United States (Gursky 2000). 3. Russia supported conversion to Orthodox Christianity in eastern Upper Hungary in 1913–1914, and Masaryk encouraged this trend in Subcarpathian Ruthenia and eastern Slovakia in the interwar period. Between 1921 and 1930, the share of Orthodox Christians among the Ruthenians grew from 3 percent to 29 percent. But the final ‘success’ came only in 1949 when the Greek Catholic Church was liquidated and supplanted by its Orthodox counterpart in eastern Slovakia and Soviet Ukraine’s Transcarpathia in 1949 (Gajdoš and Koneˇcný 1994: 113, Yuhasz 1929: 25; Ogonowski 2000: 253–254). 4. Symptomatically, ‘Šafaˇrík,’ that is, the Czech version of Pavol Jozef Šáfarik’s surname, was used in the society’s name, in line with the tenets of Czechoslovakism, which

Notes

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

991

was to make Slovak closer to Czech. For instance, the Czech letter [ˇr] is the single one not employed in Slovak. Tvrdý’s dictionary was published by the Spolok sv. Vojtecha (St Adalbert Society), which had been established as a Slovakophone but religious organization in Nagyszombat (Trnava) in 1879, that is, four years after the abolishment of the Matica slovenská (1875). HG members brandished the Svatopluk rods band on their left arms, like German officials who wore swastika in the same manner. The HG uniform was a curious replication of the Horal (Goralian, Highlander) folk costume in the popular Slovak mind closely associated with the ‘Slovak national hero’ Jánošík. Similarly, Warsaw also drew on the same Tatra folklore sources when the troops of Podhalanian shooters were added to the Polish army in the interwar period. The term Podhale refers to the region at the northern feet of the Polish Tatras. The uniform of the shooters, who survive to this day, is reminiscent of the Góral (Goralian, Highlander) folk dress (Krekoviˇc 2005: 189). In Slovak and Czech, Slovák means the male inhabitant of Slovakia or Slovácko, and the difference arises only in the female counterpart, that is, Slovenka (Slovak woman), and Slovaˇcka (Slováckan woman). Interestingly, the Polish word for a Slovak woman, Słowaczka, is derived from Slovaˇcka. A Slovak is Słowak in Polish. Furthermore, Slovenka is an extremely close cognate of Slovanka (Slavic woman), which is not true of Slovák, as the Slavic man is Slovan in Slovak and Czech. The book was co-written by Imrich Kotvan (1910–1984), an official in the Slovak Ministry of Education (1938–1945) and Ján Vladimír Ormis (1903–1993), the author of books on Slovak diaspora, and Slovak national literature, language, and history. In its organization and function, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia closely resembled that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Both were earmarked to be the unitary leading forces of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, respectively. In the former state, the Slovaks were allowed their own national branch of the party, similar to the union national republics’ own national communist parties in the latter. However, no separate branch of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was set aside for the Czechs, just as no separate communist party was allowed for the Russians. At the first sight, this looked like discrimination of both states’ leading nations, but the mystery was solved quickly when one realized that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was de facto Czech, not unlike the state dominated by the Czechs. Similarly, the Russians dominated the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union became the instrument for projecting their power (mitigated by rhetoric of communist fraternity and internationalism) statewide. The number is larger than the estimates of Germans in interwar and wartime independent Slovakia. First, this is the case because in independent Slovakia numerous persons of mixed (German-Slovak and German-Magyar) parentage declared themselves as ‘Germans.’ Second, some Germans lived in the Slovak territories that were reincorporated into wartime Hungary, and returned to Czechoslovakia after 1945. In the course of their expulsion, numerous Carpathian Germans lost their lives, like Sudeten Germans. Earlier during the Slovak National Uprisings, insurrectionists had killed 2000 local Germans merely because of their ethnicity. But, uniquely in Germandominated Central Europe, 250 Carpathian Germans joined Slovak guerilla groups (Carpathian 2005).

992 Notes

12. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Kremlin removed from power these communist leaders in the Soviet bloc satellites, who had survived the war in their own countries, and replaced them with those, who in the wartime had stayed in Moscow. In this manner, Stalin hoped to clamp the uniform Soviet system onto the subjugated polities. The post-1956 process of de-stalinization supplanted ‘Moscow communists’ with ‘local communists.’ Because the latter promised specific ‘national paths to communism,’ they became known as ‘national communists.’ Husák was the first national communist leader of Czechoslovakia, János Kádár of Hungary, and Władysław Gomułka of Poland. Because of his Slovak national and communist ideological background, Husák was known as ‘red l’udák,’ or a communist supporter of Slovak nationalism, as symbolized by the HSL’S. 13. Slovak leaders were glad to let Subcarpathian Ruthenia go, because the Ukrainian National Council of Prešov Ruthenia (eastern Slovakia), established in March 1944, appealed to Moscow to detach this region from Czechoslovakia alongside Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and to incorporate both as a united Transcarpathian Ruthenia into Soviet Ukraine (Pop 2005b: 435). 14. In interwar Czechoslovak statistics, Ruthenians were referred to as ‘Russians,’ ‘Little Russians’ (Ukrainians), and more rarely as ‘Ruthenians.’ 15. The Higher School was originally founded in Košice, but had to be evacuated to Turˇciansky Svätý Martin after Hungary’s annexation of southern Slovakia in 1938. 16. The last derogation periods and limits on the free movement of Czech, Magyar, Polish, and Slovak job-seekers from within the old member states will have disappeared by 2011. 17. The United Kingdom was the sole large member state from the EU’s old 15 to immediately open its employment market to immigrants from new member states on the moment of the 2004 enlargement. 18. The surprising exception is an odd book or two by the famous Slovak dissident writer, Tatarka, whose works are permanently out of print in independent Slovakia, though Czech publishers sporadically bring them out in the Slovak. It seems that to Slovaks, Tatarka is too otherworldly and pro-Czech, while Czechs value him as a Slovak representative of late Czechoslovakism, construed as an ideology for preserving Czechoslovakia as a slightly Czech-dominated union.

12

Conclusion

1. [P]ar la nation; grand mot infiniment commode, parce qu’on en fait ce qu’on veut. 2. The political concept of national self-determination emerged in the mid-19th century. In 1843, Karl Marx (1818–1883), in his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ reacted against the absolutism of monarchical rule by proposing that divine legitimization of power in democracy is supplanted with constitution, which is the ‘self-determination of the people.’ Marx used Volk for ‘people,’ which is also the German term for ‘ethnolinguistic nation,’ though obviously he meant the population of a country construed as a civic nation. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini (1817–1888), who prepared the legislative unification of the Italian nation-state in 1861, claimed in 1851 that nationality (nazionalitá, or the fact of belonging to a nation) is the source and foundation of international law. The Swiss jurist Johan Caspar Bluntschli (1808–1881) agreed and thus famously proposed in 1866 that each nation should

Notes

993

obtain its state, and each state ought to be national in character, hence a nationstate. He employed the German word Nation, which usually refers to ‘civic nation’ or the population of a state construed as a nation. However, it is apparent from the context that Bluntschli meant ‘ethnolinguistic nation.’ Such Austro-Marxists as Karl Renner (1870–1959) and Otto Bauer (1881–1938) wavered whether it was possible to contain the social and political effects of the freshly minted principle of national self-determination as the ultimate legitimization of statehood and power within multinational Austria-Hungary, or rather this non-national polity had to be divided into ethnolinguistic nation-states (Brunner 1997: 889; Selbstabstimmungsrecht 1998: 22).

Bibliography

Abizadeh, Arash. 2005. Was Fichte an Ethnic Nationalist? On Cultural Nationalism and Ist Double (pp. 334–359). History of Political Thought. vol. 2, Summer. Abondolo, Daniel, ed. 1998. The Uralic Languages (Ser: Routledge Language Family Descriptions). London: Routledge. Abrams, Brad. 1996. The Politics of Retribution: The Trial of Jozef Tiso (pp. 255–292). East European Politics and Societies. vol. 2, Spring. Adamczuk, Lucjan and Zdaniewicz, Witold, eds. 1991. Ko´sciół katolicki w Polsce 1918–1990. Rocznik statystyczny. Warsaw: GUS and Zakład Socjologii Religii SAC. Adler, Hans and Menze, Ernest A., eds. 1997. On World History: Johann Gottfried Herder. An Anthology. Armonk NY and London: M. E. Sharpe. Agnew, Hugh LeCaine. 1986. Josephinism and the Patriotic Intelligentsia in Bohemia (pp. 577–597). Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 3–4. Agnew, Hugh LeCaine. 1992. Czechs, Slovaks, and the Slovak Linguistic Separatism of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (pp. 21–37). In: John Morison, ed. The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. Agnew, Hugh LeCaine. 2002. Dilemmas of Liberal Nationalism: Czechs and Germans in Bohemia and the Revolution of 1846 (pp. 51–71). In: Sabrina P. Ramet et al., eds. Nations and Nationalisms in East-Central Europe, 1806–1948. A Festschrift for Peter F Sugar. Bloomington IN: Slavica. Albijani´c, Aleksandar. 1985. The Demise of Serbian Church Slavic and the Advent of the Slaveno-serbski Literary Dialect (vol. 2, pp. 115–124). In: Gerald Stone and Dean Worth, eds. The Formation of the Slavonic Literary Languages (Ser: UCLA Slavic Studies, vol. 11). Columbus OH: Slavica Publishers. Aleksandraviˇcius, Egidijus and Kulakauskas, Antanas. 2003. Pod władza˛ carów. Litwa w XIX wieku. Cracow: Universitas. Alexander, Ronelle and Elisa-Bursa´c, Ellen. 2006. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Alexander, Ronelle and Elisa-Bursa´c, Ellen. 2006a. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Ališauskas, Vytautas et al., eds. 2006. Kultura Wielkiego Ksie˛stwa Litewskiego. Analizy i obrazy. Cracow: Universitas. Alter, Stephen G. 1999. Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Altermatt, Urs. 2002. Language and Nation: Is Switzerland a Model for Europe? (pp. 323–351). In: Andrei Ple¸su, ed. Nation and National Ideology: Past, Present and Prospects. Proceedings of the International Symposium held at the New Europe College, Bucharest, 6–7 April 2001. Bucharest: The Center for the Study of the Imaginary and New Europe College.

994

Bibliography

995

A magyar helyesírás szabályai. 1954. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia. Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. 1955. Thoughts on Linguistic States. Delhi. Ambrosius, Ernst and Frenzel, Konrad, eds. 1930. Das Bild der Erde. Bielefeld and Leipzig: Verlag von Velhagen and Klasig. Ambulance Not on the Way: The Disgrace of Health care for Roma in Europe. 2006. Budapest: European Roma Rights Centre. Americans Discover the Bulgarians: 1834–1871. 2006. http://www.geocities.com/muntzer2/ AmericaBG.htm, 4 May. Ammon, Ulrich, ed. 1987–1988. Soziolinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Sprachund Kommunikationswissenschaft Soziolinguistik (Ser: Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, vol. 3). Berlin: de Gruyter. Analfabetismo in Italia dal 1861 al 1991. 2006. http://www.bibliolab.it/scuola/analfabeti_ italia.htm, 28 Nov. Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Charles Arnold. 1965. Literacy and Schooling at the Development Threshold. In: Charles Arnold Anderson and Mary Jean Bowman, eds. Education and Economic Development. London: Frank Cass. Andrea, Alfred J. and Overfield, James H., eds. 1994. The Human Record: Sources of Global History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Andri´c, Ivo. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Andric, 4 May. Anichenka, U. V. 1969. Belaruska-ukrainskiia pis´mova-mounyia suviazi. Minsk: Navuka i tekhnika. Annuaire statistique de la République Polonaise. 1924. Warsaw: Publication de l’Office Central de Statistique. Anon. 1917. Das Land Ober Ost. Deutsche Arbeit in den Verwaltungsgebieten Kurland, Litauen und Bialystok-Grodno. Kaunas: Verlag der Presseabteilung Ober Ost and Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt. Antohi, Sorin. 1998. Sprachnationalismus in Rumänien (pp. 301–318). In: Krista Zach, ed. Rumänien im Brennpunkt. Sprache und Politik, Identität und Ideologie im Wandel (Ser: Veröffentlichungen des Südostdeutschen Kulturwerks, B: Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, vol. 83). Munich: Verlag Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk. Antonovich, A. K. 1968. Belorusskie teksty, pisannye arabskim pismom. Vilnius: Ministerstvo vysshego spetsialnogo obrazovaniia Lit. SSR, Vilniuskii gosudarstviennyi universitiet im. V Kapsukasa, Kafiedra russkogo iazyka. Aptroot, Marion. 1989. Bible Translation as Cultural Reform: The Amsterdam Yiddish Bibles (1678–1679). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Armenian Versions of the Bible. 2004. http://reference-guides.com/isbe/A/ARMENIAN_ VERSIONS_OF_THE_BIBLE, 10 Feb. Armstrong, John A. 1982. Nations Before Nationalism. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Arnautovi´c, Aleksandr. 1912. Štamparije u Srbiji u XIX veku. Belgrade: Državnaja šstamparija Kraljevini Srbiji. Arndt, Christian Gottlieb von. 1818. Ueber den Ursprung und die verschiedenartige Verwandtschaft der europäischen Sprachen. Frankfurt am Main: bey Heinrich Ludwig Brönner. Arys-Djanaieva, Lora. 2004. Parlons Ossète. Paris: L’Harmattan. Asimova, B. S. 1982. Iazykovoe stroitelstvo v Tadzhikistane. Dushanbe: Donish. A Special Remedy: Roma and Schools for the Mentally Handicapped in the Czech Republic (Ser: Country Reports Series). 1999. Budapest: European Roma Rights Center.

996 Bibliography

Assessment for Hungarians in Slovakia. 2004. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/ assessment.asp?groupId=31701, 19 Nov 2005. Astle, Thomas. 1784. The Origin and Progress of Writing [. . .]. London: By the Author. Atanasov, Petur. 1959. Nachalo na bulgarskato knigopechatane. Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo. Augustín, Marko and Martinický, Pavol. 1995. Slovak-Hungarian Relations: History and the Present in Facts. Bratislava: Slovenská spoleˇcnost’ na obranu demokracie a humanity. Aus Lauluraamat. Kirikus, koolis ja kodus tarwitada. 1926. Tallinn: Estimaa Ew.-Luth. Usu Õpetajate Seltsi kirjastus. Autonomist. 1935. Slovakia’s Pleas for Autonomy. Middletown PA: Slovak Literary Society. Auty, Robert. 1973. The Role of Purism in the Development of the Slavonic Literary Languages (pp. 335–343). Slavonic and East European Review. vol. 51, No. 124. Auty, Robert. 1980. Czech (pp. 163–182). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Avanesau, R. I., ed. 1961. Khrestamatyia pa historyi belaruskai movy (vol. 1). Minsk: Akademiia navuk BSSR, Instytut movaznaustva. Babejová, Eleonóra. 2003. Fin-de-Siècle Pressburg: Conflict and cultural coexistence in Bratislava 1897–1914 (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 617). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Baedeker, Karl. 1943. Das Generalgouvernement. Reisehandbuch. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker. Baerlein, Henry. 1929. In Search of Slovakia. London: Brentano’s. Bagin, Anton and Hložník, Vincent. 1987. Apoštoli Slovanov Cyril a Metod a Vel’ká Morava. Bratislava: Církevné naklad. and Trnava: Vyd. Spolok sv. Vojtecha. Bagin, Anton. 1992. Spolupatróni Európy/Co-Patrons of Europe. Banská Bystrica: Mabuto press. Bagin, Anton. 1993. Cyrilometodská tradícia u Slovákov. Bratislava: Slovak Academic Press. Bahlcke, Joachim. 1996. Schlesien und die Schlesier (Ser: Studienbereihe der Stiftung Ostdeutscher Kuturrat, vol. 7). Munich: Langen Müller. Bajerowa, Irena. 2003. Zarys historii je˛zyka polskiego 1939–2000. Warsaw: PWN. Bajt, Veronika. 2004. Slovenian Nationalism (pp. 9–32). Sprawy Narodowo´sciowe. vol. 24–35. Bakker, Peter and Kyuchkov, Hristo, eds. 2000. What is the Romani Language? Hatfield, Hertfordshire: Gypsy Research Center and University of Hertfordshire Press. Bakos, Ferenc. 1982. A magyar szókészlet román elemeinek története. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Bakoš, Vladimír. 1994. Two Concepts of Nation and Two Forms of Nationalism (pp. 77–92). In: Tibor Pichler and Jana Gašpariková, eds. Language, Values and the Slovak Nation (Ser: Slovak Philosophical Studies, vol. 1). Washington DC: Paideia Press and The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Balassa, József. 1940. A magyar nyelv szótára. Budapest: Grill. Balážová, L’ubica and Buzássyová, Klára et al., eds. 2006–. Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka. Bratislava: Veda. Balázs, Géza. 2000. The Story of Hungarian: A Guide to the Language. Budapest: Corvina. ˇ Balcová, Tána ˇ and Gren, ˇ Štefan. 2004. Cesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský slovník. Bratislava: Kniha-Spoloˇcník. ˇ Balhar, Jan and Jancák, Pavel, eds. 1992–2006. Ceský jazykový atlas. Prague: Academia. Banac, Ivo. 1984. The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Bibliography

997

Baník, Anton Augustín. 1940. Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu. Turˇciansky Svätý Martin: Matica slovenská. Bankowski, ´ Andrzej. 2000. Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (2 vols). Warsaw: PWN. Banniard, Michel. 1995. Geneza kultury europejskiej, V–VIII w. (Ser: La Nouvelle Marianne [Nowa Marianna]). Warsaw: Volumen. Barany, George. 1971. Hoping Against Hope: The Enlightened Age in Hungary (pp. 319– 357). The American Historical Review. vol. 2, April. Bárczi, Géza. 1941. Magyar szófejt˝ o szótár. Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda. Bárczi, Géza and Országh, László. 1959–1962. A Magyar nyelv értelmez˝ o szótára. Budapest: Akademiai kiadó. Barker, Peter. 2000. Slavs in Germany: The Sorbian Minority and the German State Since 1945 (Ser: Studies in German Thought and History, vol. 20). Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Barta, Róbert. 2003. The Hungarian-Slovak Population Exchange and Forced Resettlement in 1947 (pp. 565–574). In: Steven Béla Várdy and Hunt T. Tooley, eds. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Boulder CO: Social Sciences Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Barth, Frederik. 1969. Introduction (pp. 9–38). In: Frederik Barth, ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget and London: Allen & Unwin. Bartoš, František. 1891. Rukovˇet’ správné ˇceštiny. Teltsch: Emil Šolc. Basaj, Mieczysław. 1999. O uwarunkowaniach odrodzenia narodowego w Czechach (pp. 159–165). In: Halina Mieczkowska and Teresa Z. Orło´s, eds. Odrodzenie narodowe w Czechach i na Słowacji. Ksie˛ga ku czci Profesora Zdzisława Niedzieli. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagielonskiego. ´ Baumgarten, J. et al., eds. 1994. Mille ans de cultures ashkénazes. Paris: Liana Levi. Beauvois, Daniel. 1996. Walka o ziemie˛. Szlachta polska na Ukrainie prawobrzeznej ˙ pomie˛dzy caratem a ludem ukrainskim, ´ 1863–1914. Sejny: Pogranicze. Beauvois, Daniel. 2005. Trójka˛t ukrainski. ´ Szlachta, carat i lud na Wołyniu, Podolu i Kijowszczy´znie, 1793–1914. Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii CurieSkłodowskiej. Bechný, Jaroslav et al. 1992. Slezsko. Opava: Matice slezská. Bednarczuk, Leszek. 2005. Losy wyrazu pan na Litwie i Rusi (pp. 133–148). In: Maria Teresa Lizisowa, ed. Kultura i je˛zyki Wielkiego Ksie˛stwa litewskiego (Ser: Biblioteka Tradycji, vol. 30). Cracow: Collegium Columbinum. Bˇelina, Pavel et al. 1993. Dˇejiny zemí Koruny ˇceské (vol. 2). Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka. Belzyt, Leszek. 1998. Sprachliche Minderheiten im preußischen Staat 1815–1914 (Ser: Quellen zur Geschichte und Landeskunde Ostmitteleuropas, vol. 3). Marburg: Herder-Institut. Bemporad, Elissa. 2007. The Yiddish Experiment in Soviet Minsk (pp. 91–107). East European Jewish Affairs. No 1. Bem-Wi´sniewska, Ewa. 1998. Funkcjonowanie nazwy Polska w je˛zyku czasów nowozytnych ˙ (Ser: Res Humanae. Studia, vol. 6). Warsaw: DiG. Benda, Kálmán. 1980. A Magyar nemesi mozgalom, 1790–1792 (pp. 425–472). In: Gyula Mérei and Károly Vörös, eds. Magyarország története, 1790–1848. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Benedikz, Benedikt S. 1969. Iceland (Ser: The Spread of Printing: Western hemisphere). Amsterdam: Vangendt & Co, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and New York: Abner Schram.

998 Bibliography

Benk˝ o, Loránd and Imre, Samu, eds. 1972. The Hungarian Language (Ser: Practica, vol. 134). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Benk˝ o, Loránd et al., eds. 1967–1976. A Magyar nyelv törtenéti-etimologiai szótára (4 vols). Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Benk˝ o, Loránd et al., eds. 1993–1997. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Berˇciˇc, Branko. 1968. Tiskarstvo na Slovenskem. Zgodovinski oris. Lubljana: Odbor. Berˇci´c, Joanne. 1859. Chrestomathia linguae veteroslavicae charactere glagolitico. Prague: Theophil Haase. Berdychowska, Bogumiła.1994. Mniejszo´sci narodowe w Polsce w 1993 roku. Biuletyn. Warsaw: Biuro do Spraw Mniejszo´sci Narodowych przy Ministerstwie Kultury i Sztuki. Berezowski, Cezary. 1934. Powstanie panstwa ´ polskiego w s´wietle prawa narodów. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo „Themis Polska“. Berlin, Isiah. 2000. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Berndt, Rolf. 1984. A History of the English Language. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie. ˇ ˇ Bernolák, Antonio. 1825–1827. Slowár Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoNemecko-Uherski, seu Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-Latino-Germanico-Ungaricum (6 vols). Buda: Typis et Sumtibus Typogr. Reg. Univers. Hungaricae. Bible in Modern Greek, The. 2004. http://www.watchtower.org/library/w/2002/11/15/ article_ 01.htm, 3 Feb. Bibliˇcne družbe in Slovenci. 2006. http://www.drustvo-svds.si, 23 May. Biblija. 2006. http://www.biblija.net/razstava/razstava_2.html, 24 May. Bibó, István. 1991 [1946]. The Distress of the East European Small States (pp. 13–88). In: István Bibó, ed. Democracy, Revolution, Self-Determination: Selected Writings (edited by Károly Nagy) (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 317). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs and Highland Lakes: Atlantic Research and Publications (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Bienkowska, ´ Barbara and Chamerska, Halina. 1990. Books in Poland: Past and Present (Ser: Publishing, Bibliography, Libraries, and Archives in Russia and Eastern Europe, vol. 1). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Biro, Sandor. 1992. The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania 1867–1940 (Ser: Eastern European Monographs, vol. 333; Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, vol. 66). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs and Highland Lakes NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Blanke, Richard. 1993. Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918–1939. Lexington KY: The University Press of Kentucky. Blanke, Richard. 2001. Polish-Speaking Germans? Language and National Identity Among the Masurians Since 1871 (Ser: Ostmitteleuropa in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, edited by Herder-Institut, Marburg, vol. 24). Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. Blasius, Johann Heinrich. 1857. Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere Deutschlands und der Angrenzenden Länder von Mitteleuropa. Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn. Bloch, Howard R. 1990. New Philology and Old French (pp. 38–58). Speculum. vol. 1, Jan. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language (pp. 153–164). Language. vol. 2. Bluntschli, Johann Caspar. 1870. Die nationale Staatenbildung und der moderne deutsche Staat. Ein öffentlicher Vortrag. Berlin: Lüderitz. Bobrownicka, Maria. 2003. Pogranicza w centrum Europy (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas.

Bibliography

999

Bobula, Ida. 1961. A summer-magyar rokonság kérdése. Buenos Aires: Ed. ESDA. Böckh, Richard. 1863. Die geschichtliche Entwickelung der amtlichen Statistik des Preussischen Staates. Eine Festgabe für den internationalen statistischen Congress in Berlin. Berlin: Königliche geheime Ober-Hofbuchdruckerei (R. Decker). Böckh, Richard. 1866. Die statistische Bedeutung der Volksprache als Kennzeichen der Nationalität (pp. 259–402). Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. vol. 4. Bogdan, Henry. 1989. From Warsaw to Sofia: A History of Eastern Europe (edited by Istvan Fehervary). Santa Fe NM: Pro Libertate Publishing. Boia, Lucia. 1977. Relationships Between Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks (1848–1914) (Ser: Bibliotheca Historica Romaniae, vol. 54). Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România. Bolzano, Bernard. 1849. Verhältniß der beiden Volkstämme in Böhmen. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller. Boncza-Tomaszewski, ´ Nikodem. 2001. Demokratyczna geneza nacjonalizmu (Ser: Biblioteka Frondy). Warsaw: Fronda. Borowski, Andrzej, ed. 2001. Słownik sarmatyzmu. Idee, poje˛cia, symbole. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Bory´s, Wiesław. 2005. Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Bosák, Ján. 1998. Slovenský jazyk (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Uniwerstet Opolski and Instytut Filologii Polskiej. Bosanˇcica. 2006. http://bs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosan%C4%8Dica, 25 Apr. Bosnian Cyrillic. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Cyrillic, 25 Apr. Bougarel, Xavier. 2003. Bosnian Muslims and the Yugoslav Idea (pp. 100–114). In: Dejan Djoki´c, ed. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992. Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press and London: Hurst. Boyen, Professor and Massoch, S. 1851. The War of Races in Hungary. New York and Newark NJ: Printed at the office of The Daily Advertiser. Bradley, John F. N. 1984. Czech Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 157). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Bratislava. 2004. http://www.fact-index.com/b/br/bratislava.html, 28 Jul. Bray, Reginald George Arthur de. 1951. Guide to the Slavonic Languages. London: Dent and New York: Dutton. Breton, Roland. 2003. Atlas des langues du monde. Una pluralité fragile (Ser: Collection Atlas/Monde). Paris: Éditions Autrement. Breza, Edward, ed. 2001. Kaszubszczyzna/Kaszëbizna (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski and Instytut Filologii Polskiej. Brief History of Hungarian Universities. 2005. http://www.om.hu/main.php?folderID=566 &ctag=articlelist&iid=1&articleID=3901, 24 Jul. Brock, Peter. 1976. The Slovak National Awakening: An Essay in the Intellectual History of East Central Europe. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Brock, Peter. 2002. Slovenské národné obrodenie 1787–1847. K vzniku modernej slovenskej identity. Bratislava: Kalligram. ´ ˛sku po II wojnie Bronsztejn, Szyja. 1993. Z dziejów ludno´sci zydowskiej ˙ na Dolnym Sla s´wiatowej. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. Brown, L. Carl, ed. 1996. Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press.

1000 Bibliography

Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Brückner, Aleksander. 1927. Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego. Cracow: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza and Warsaw: M. Arct. Bruk, Solomon I. et al., eds. 1964. Atlas narodov mira. Moscow: Glavnoe upravlenie geodezii i kartografii. Brunner, Otto et al., eds. 1972–1997. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 vols). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Brunner, Otto et al., eds. 1997. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland (vol. 1). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ˇ Brus jazyka ˇceského, jejž sestavila komisse širším sborem Matice Ceské zˇrízená. 1877. Prague: T. Mourek. Bryce, James. 1919. The Holy Roman Empire. London: Macmillan. ´ Brzezinski, ´ Andrzej M. 2002. Grecja (Ser: Historie Panstw ´ Swiata w XX Wieku). Warsaw: Trio. Buc, B. S. 1960. Slovak Nationalism. Middletown PA: Slovak League of America. Buchdruckerkunst (pp. 547–560). 1888. In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encyklopädie des allgemeinen Wissens (vol. 4). Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts. Buck, Carl Darling. 1916. Language and the Sentiment of Nationality (pp. 44–69). The American Political Science Review. vol. 1. Budzyk, Kazimierz. 1956. Pochodzenie polskiego je˛zyka literackiego (Ser: Studia Staropolskie, vol. 3). Wrocław: Ossolineum. Buffa, Ferdinand, ed. 1994–. Slovník slovenských náreˇcí (3 vols). Bratislava: Veda. Bulei, Ion. 1998. A Short History of Romania. Bucharest: Meronia. Bulgaria: Turks. 1992. http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-1912.html, 9 May 2006. Bunjevaˇcke novine. 2005. vol. 1. http://www.bunjevci.org.yu/site/bunjevacke-novine/, 24 Aug. Bunjevaˇcke novine. 2006. vol. 5. http://www.bunjevci.org.yu/site/bunjevacke-novine/, 28 Aug. Burke, Peter. 2004. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burszta, Wojciech. 1986. Je˛zyk a kultura w my´sli etnologicznej. Wrocław: Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze. Bystron, ´ Jan Stanisław. 1995. Megalomania narodowa. Warsaw: KiW. Byzantine Empire. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire#The_term_.22 Byzantine_Empire.22, 24 May. Calvet, Louis-Jean. 1974. Linguistique et colonialisme. Paris: Payot. Calvet, Louis-Jean. 1998. Language Wars and Linguistic Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ˇ Capka, František. 2003. Morava (Ser: Struˇcná historie státu˚). Prague: Libri. Caraus, Tamara. 2003. About the ‘National Policy’ in the Republic of Moldova: Between Bilingualism and Unilingualism. Moldova Azi. 15 Sep. http://www.azi.md/print/ 25759/En, 18 Mar 2004. Carmichael, Cathie. 2000. Language and Nationalism in the Balkans (pp. 221–239). In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, eds. Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carmichael, Cathie. 2005. Personal E-mail Communication. Norwich: University of East Anglia. 8 Jan.

Bibliography

1001

Carpathian German History. 2005. http://ourworld.cs.com/ycrtmr/history.htm, 30 Aug. Castellan, Georges. 1989. A History of the Romanians (Ser: Eastern European Monographs, vol. 257). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Charta 2007. http://www.rusynacademy.sk/slovak/sl_nabozenstvo.html#Charta_rus% 25EDnskych_veriacich, 15 Mar. Chaszar, Edward. 1982. Trianon and the Problem of National Minorities (pp. 479–490). In: Béla K. Király, Peter Pastor, and Ivan Sanders, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 6: Essays on World War I: Total War and Peacemaking. A Case Study on Trianon) (Ser: Atlantic Studies, vol. 15; East European Monographs, vol. 105). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Chászár, Edward. 2003. Ethnic Cleansing in Slovakia: The Plight of the Hungarian Minority (pp. 559–564). In: Steven Béla Várdy and Hunt T. Tooley, eds. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Boulder CO: Social Sciences Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Chlebowczyk, Józef. 1979. O prawie do bytu małych i młodych narodów. Warsaw: PWN. Chlebowczyk, Józef. 1980. On Small and Young Nations in Europe. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Chmel, Rudolf, ed. 1997. Slovenská otázka v 20. storoˇci. Bratislava: Kalligram. Chocholatý, František. 1991. Slezsko (Part 4) (pp. 76–97). Stˇrední Evropa. vol. 20. ´ Chojnowski, Andrzej and Bruski, Jan Jacek. 2006. Ukraina (Ser: Historia Panstw ´ Swiata w XX Wieku). Warsaw: Trio. Chrysoloras, Nikos. 2004. Why Orthodoxy? Religion and Nationalism in Greek Political Culture (pp. 40–61). Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. vol. 1. Cienkowski, Witold. 1983. Trends in the Development of Contemporary Polish Vocabulary (pp. 321–350). In: István Fodor and Claude Hagège, eds. Language Reform: History and Future / La réforme des langues. Histoire et avenir / Sprachreform. Geshichte und Zukunft (vol. 1). Hamburg: Buske Verlag. Ciesielski, Stanisław et al. 1992. Naród i narodowo´sc´ polska lat 1795–1945 w badaniach historycznych (pp. 7–29). In: Wojciech Wrzesinski, ´ ed. Polska – Polacy – mniejszo´sci narodowe (Ser: Polska My´sl Polityczna XIX i XX Wieku, vol. 8). Wrocław, Warsaw and Cracow: Ossolineum. Clark, Charles Upson. 1927. Russia and Romania on the Black Sea. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. http://depts.washington.edu/cartah/text_archive/clark, 18 Mar 2004. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Cobarrubias, Juan and Fishman, Joshua A., eds. 1983. Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton. Comrie, Bernard; Stone, Gerald; and Polinsky, Maria. 1996. The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Constitution of Slovakia. 2004. http://www.legacyrus.com/library/Constitutions/Slovak sconstit.htm, 17 Jun. Constitution of the Republic of Poland. 1997. http://www.sejm.gov.pl/english/konstytucja/ kon1.htm, 24 Jun 2006. Cook, Michael. 2000. The Koran: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cornwall, Mark. 1994. The Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1990–1940 (pp. 914–951). The English Historical Review. vol. 433, Sep. Coudenhove-Kalergie, Richard. 1998 [1953]. Naród europejski (Ser: Przekłady, vol. 1). Torun: ´ Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek.

1002 Bibliography

ˇ Courtenay, Jan Baudoin de. 1972. Listy Jana Baudoina de Courtenay do A. Cernego. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Courthiade, Marcel. 1998. The Gypsy Language (pp. 9–14). Interface. vol. 31, Aug. Cox, John. 2002. The History of Serbia (Ser: Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations). Westport CN and London: Greenwood Press. Crampton, R. J. 1997. A Concise History of Bulgaria (Ser: Cambridge Concise Histories). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crowe, David M. 1996. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: St Martin’s Griffin. Crowley, Tony. 2005. Encoding Ireland: Dictionaries and Politics in Irish History (pp. 119–139). Éire-Ireland. vol. 3–4, Fall and Winter. Crowley, Tony. 2005a. Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537–2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csáky, Moritz. 1982. Die Hungarus-Konzeption. Eine ‘realpolitische’ Alternative zur magyarischen Nationalstaatidee? In: Anna M. Drabek, Richard G. Plaschka, and Adam Wandruszka, eds. Ungarn und Österreich unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II. Neue Aspekte im Verhältnis der beiden Länder (Ser: Texte des öster.-ungarischen Historiktreffens, vol. 2; Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geeschichte Österreich, vol. 11). Vienna: Österreichisch Akademie des Wissenschaften. Cs˝ ury, Bálint. 1935–1936. Szamosháti szótar. Budapest: M. nyelvtud. Tars. Culture. 2005. http://www.karpatok.uzhgorod.ua/english/culture.html, 31 Jul. Curta, Florian. 2004. The Slavic Lingua Franca (Linguistic Notes of an Archeologist Turned Historian) (pp. 125–148). East Central Europe – L’Europe du Centre-Est. Eine wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift (vol. 31, pt 1). Budapest: Institute of Sociology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Cyganski, ´ Mirosław and Leszczynski, ´ Rafał. 1997. Zarys dziejów narodowo´sciowych Łuzyczan ˙ ´ ˛ski. (vol. 2: Lata 1919–1997). Opole: Instytut Sla Czambel, Samo. 1887. Príspevky k dejinám jazyka slovenského. Budapest: By the Author. Czambel, Samo. 1890. Slovensky Pravopis. Budapest: By the Author. Czambel, Samo.1902. Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej. Turˇciansky Sv. Martin: Vydanie Knihkupecko-nakladatel’ského spolku. Czaplinski, ´ Władysław; Galos, Adam; and Korta, Wacław. 1990. Historia Niemiec. Wrocław, Warsaw and Cracow: Ossolineum. Czaplinski, ´ Władysław and Ładogórski, Tadeusz, eds. 1993. Atlas historyczny Polski. Warsaw and Wrocław: PPŁK. Czesak, Artur. 2006 [Typescript]. Góralski i s´la˛ski – mikroje˛zyki literackie in statu nascendi? Cracow. Czuczor, Gergely Istaván and Fogarasi, János. 1862–1874. A Magyar nyelv szótára (6 vols). Pest: Emich Gusztav Magyar Akademiai Nyomdásznái. Da˛browska, Anna. 2004. Je˛zyk polski (Ser: A to Polska wła´snie). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolno´sla˛skie. Da˛browski, Włodzimierz. 1922. Zbiór praw konstytucyjnych i administracyjnych Województwa ´ ˛skiego. ´ ˛skiego. Katowice: Nakładem Urze˛du Województwa Sla Sla Damm, Krystyna and Mikusinska, ´ Aldona, eds. 2000. Ludy i je˛zyki s´wiata (Ser: Leksykony PWN). Warsaw: PWN. ˇ Daneš, František et al., eds. 1997. Ceský jazyk na pˇrelomu tisíciletí. Prague: Academia.

Bibliography

1003

Dante. 1996. De vulgari eloquentia (edited and translated by Steven Botterill) (Ser: Cambridge Medieval Classics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danylenko, Andrii. 2006. On the Language of Early Lithuanian Tatars, or Have Lithuanian Tatars Ever Written in Ukrainian? (pp. 201–236). The Slavonic and East European Review. vol. 2, Apr. Darasz, Zdzisław. 2000. Je˛zykowy polimorfizm słowenskiej ´ kultury a narodowa tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ Słowenców ´ (pp. 143–154). In: Maria Bobrownicka, ed. Je˛zyk a tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ narodowa (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas. Das Land Ober Ost. Deutsche Arbeit in den Verwaltungsgebieten Kurland, Litauen und BialystokGrodno. 1917. Stuttgart and Berlin: Verlag der Presseabteilung Ober Ost and Deutschen Verlags-Anstalt. Daukantas, Simonas [Szymon Dowkont]. 1993–1996. Simono Daukanto raštai. Didysis lenku˛-lietuviu˛ kalbu˛ žodynas (edited by Giedrius Subaˇcius). Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopediju˛ leidykla. Davies, Norman. 1982. God’s Playground: A History of Poland (2 vols). New York: Columbia University Press. Deák, István. 1987. Historical Foundations (pp. 36–65). In: Klaus-Detlev Grothusen, ed. Ungarn (Ser: Südosteuropa-Handbuch, vol. 5). Götingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Deák, István. 2007. Did the Revolution Have to Fail? (pp. 46–49). New York Review of Books. vol. 3, 1 Mar. Deák, Ladislav. 1996. Hungary’s Game for Slovakia. Bratislava: Veda. Dedes, George. 2000. Was There a Greek Aljamiado Literature? (pp. 83–98). In: Çi˘ gdem Balim-Harding and Colin Imber, eds. The Balance of Truth: Essays in Honor of Professor Geoffrey Lewis. Istanbul: The Isis Press. Deditskii, Bogdan A. 1859. Spor o ruskuiu azbuku. Lemberg: Tipom Instituta Stavropigianskogo. DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaii Press. Dejna, Karol et al., eds. 1998–2002. Atlas gwar polskich (4 vols). Warsaw: Upowszechnianie Nauki – O´swiata. Dell’Agata, Giuseppe. 1984. The Bulgarian Language Question from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (pp. 157–188). In: Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt, eds. Aspects of the Slavic Langauge Question (vol. 1: Church Slavonic – South Slavic – West Slavic) (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 4-a). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Deme, László and Kövés, Béla. 1957. Magyar nyelvhelyesség. Budapest: Tankönyvkiado. Deme, László and Fábián, Pál, eds. 1961. Helyesírásí tanácsadó szótár. Budapest: Terre. Deme, László and Fábián, Pál, eds. 1999. Magyar helyesírásí kéziszótár. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Deszkiewicz, Jan Nepomucen. 1843. Rozprawy o je˛zyku polskim i o jego grammatykach. Lemberg (Lviv): Wydawnictwo zakładu naukowego imienia Ossolinskich ´ we Lwowie. Deutsch, Karl. 1953. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Deutsche Sprache (pp. 780–790). 1889. In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encyklopädie des allgemeinen Wissens (vol. 4). Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts. Dimitrovski, Todor et al., eds. 1978. About the Macedonian Language. Skopje: Institute of the Macedonian Language. Dinekov, Petr. 1985. Aspects of the History of the Bulgarian Literary Language in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (vol. 2, pp. 125–132). In: Gerald Stone and Dean

1004 Bibliography

Worth, eds. The Formation of the Slavonic Literary Languages (Ser: UCLA Slavic Studies, vol. 11). Columbus OH: Slavica Publishers. Dmowski, Roman. 1902. Półpolacy. Przegla˛d Wszechpolski. vol. 11. Dmowski, Roman. 1938. Pół-Polacy. In: Roman Dmowski, ed. Pisma (vol. 3: Dziesie˛c lat walki). Cze˛stochowa: Gmachowski. Dobrijevi´c, Irinej. 1997. Moj prvi bukvar. Crkevna azbuka [A Children’s Primer: The Church Alphabet]. Svetigora : Mitropolija Crnogorsko-primorska. Dobrowsky, Joseph (Dobrovský, Josef). 1936 [1791, 1792, 1818]. Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache (Dˇejinz ˇceské ˇreˇci a literatury) (Ser: Spisy a projevy Josefa Dobrovského, vol. 7). Prague: Melentrich and Státná tiskárna. Doležálek, Jiˇrí. 2006. Slovácko: region s identitou, samospráva bez identity. Stˇredoevropské politické studie [Central European Political Studies Review]. vol. 2–3, Spring–Summer. http://www.iips.cz/seps/clanek.php?ID=280, 30 Oct. Donev, Dony K. 2003. The Story of the Bulgarian Bible (863–2003 AD): [A] brief historical overview. www.cupandcross.com/news/2002-03/03_bible.pdf, 4 Feb 2004. Doroszewski, Witold, ed. 1958–1969. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (11 vols). Warsaw: PWN. Doroszewski, Witold and Kurkowska, Halina, eds. 1973. Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny. Warsaw: PWN. Dorul’a, Ján. 1995. On the Slovak Language and Historical Development (pp. 41–46). In: Pavol Števˇcek, ed. Slovaks & Magyars: Slovak-Magyar Relations in Central Europe. Bratislava: Správa kultúrnych zariadení MK SR pre Ministerstvo kultúry Slovenskej republiky. Dralle, Lothar. 1991. Die Deutschen in Ostmittel- und Osteuropa. Ein Jahrtausend europäischer Geschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Drews, Robert. 1988. The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Drsatova, Marta. 2005. Budapešt’ská výstava o pˇrekladech bible do cˇeštiny. http://www. soumar.cz/?q=cs/node/105, 17 Sep 2006. Drucki-Podbereski, B. 1929. Podre˛czny białorusko-polski słownik / Padruchny belaruska-polski slounik. Wilno: „Wydawnictwo Wilenskie“ ´ B Kleckina. ˇ Druhá Cítanka a Mluvnice pro katolické školy v císaˇrství Rakouském. 1860. Vienna: Od c. kr. nakladatelstva školních knˇeh. Drukarstwo. 1983. (p. 640). In: Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN (vol. 1). Warsaw: PWN. Dubisz, Stanisław, ed. 1903. Uniwersalny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (4 vols). Warsaw: PWN. Dudík, Beda. 1860. Mährens allgemeine Geschichte (vol. I: Von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Jahre 906). Brünn (Brno): Georg Gastl. Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. 1981. Slavianske literaturnye mikroiazyki. Voprosy formirovania i razvitiia. Tallinn: Valgus. Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. 2003. Slavianskiie literaturnyie mikroiazyki. Obraztsy tekstov (vol. 1). Tartu: Izdatelstvo Tartuskogo universiteta. Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. 2004. Slavianskiie literaturnyie mikroiazyki. Obraztsy tekstov (vol. 2). Tartu: Izdatelstvo Tartuskogo universiteta. Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. and Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2005. Language Question. http://www.utpublishing.com/detail.asp?TitleID=2451, 10 Apr. Dunbar, Robin et al., eds. 1999. The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dunham, Vera S. 1976. In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ˇ Durica, Milan S. 1989. Slovenský národ a jeho štátnost’. Cleup and Padova: Cooperativa Libraria Editrice Università di Padova.

Bibliography

1005

ˇ Durica, Milan S. 1996. Dejiny Slovenska a Slovákov. Bratislava: Media Trade and Slovenské pedagogické nakladatel’stvo. ˇ Duroviˇ c, L’ubomír. 1980. Slovak (pp. 211–228). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Dvornik, Francis. 1949. The Making of Central and Eastern Europe. London: Polish Research Center. Dubrovs’kyi. 1918. Slovnyk moskovs’ko-ukrainskyi. Kyiv: Ridna Mova. Dyer, Donald L. 1999. The Romanian Dialect of Moldova: A Study in Language and Politics (Ser: Studies in Linguistics and Semiotics, vol. 1). Lewiston NY, Queenston ONT and Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press. Dying Fish Swims in Water, The (pp. 53–54). 2005. The Economist. 24 Dec. Dzhukeski, Alexandar. 1981. The Macedonian Literary Language (pp. 289–298). Macedonian Review. vol. 3. Dziwisz prosi: bez przesady z folklorem. 2005. Gazeta Wyborcza. 30 Dec. http://serwisy. gazeta.pl/wyborcza/2029020,68586,3089193.html. Eberhard, Winfried; Lemberg, Hans; Heimann, Heinz Dieter; and Luft, Robert, eds. 1992. Westmitteleuropa, Ostmitteleuropa: Vergleiche und Beziehungen : Festschrift für Ferdinand Seibt zum 65. Geburtstag. Munich: R. Oldenburg. Eberhardt, Piotr. 1996. Mie˛dzy Rosja˛ a Niemcami. Przemiany narodowo´sciowe w Europie ´ Srdkowo-Wschodniej w XX w. Warsaw: PWN. Eberhardt, Piotr. 1997. Przemiany narodowo´sciowe na Litwie. Warsaw: Przegla˛d Wschodni. Eberhardt, Piotr. 2006. Przemiany struktury etnicznej Polski w XX wieku (pp. 53–74). Sprawy Narodowo´sciowe. vol. 28. Eckert, Eva, ed. 1993. Varieties of Czech: Studies in Czech Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language (Ser: The Making of Europe). Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Education for Minorities in Slovakia. 2004. http://www.fm.uniba.sk/projekty/cmis/ english/default.htm, 22 Apr. Eðvardðsson, Ingi Rúnar. 1994. Prent eflir mennt: saga bókagerðar frá upphafi til síðari hluta 20. aldar (Ser: Safn til Iðonsögu Íslendinga, vol. 8). Rejkiavik: Hið íslenska bókmenntafélag. Edwards, John. 1994. Multilingualism. London and New York: Routledge. Egger, Carolus, ed. 1992–1997. Lexicon recentis latinitatis: editum cura operis fundati cui nomen “Latinitas’’. Vatican: Libr. Ed. Vaticana. Eisler, Rudolf. 1904. Volksgeist. In: Rudolf Eisler, ed. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe. Berlin: Mittler. http://www.textlog.de/5373.html, 24 Aug 2006. Elle, Ludwig. 1995. Sprachenpolitik in der Lausitz. Eine Dokumentation 1949–1989. Buatzen: Domowina. Emigracja w Polsce. 2006. http://www.emigrantletters.com/PL/output.asp?ArticleID=0& CategoryID=6617&LanguageID=32&ArticleOutputTemplateID=0, 26 Jan. Encyklopedia Gazety Wyborczej. 2005. Cracow: Mediasat Poland (with cooperation of PWN, Warsaw). Encyklopedia katolicka. 1973. Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubleskiego. Encyklopedia powszechna Ultima Thule. 1927–1939. Warsaw: Ultima Thule. Encyclopaedia Beliana. Slovenská vseobecná encyklopédia v dvanástich zväzkoch. 2001–. Bratislava: Encyklopedický ústav Slovenskej akademi vied.

1006 Bibliography

Encyklopédia Slovenska (6 vols). 1977–1982. Bratislava: Veda and Encyklopedický ústav Slovenskej akademi vied. Encyklopedie. 1998. Prague: Diderot. Encyklopedya polska. 1915. (vol. II, pt 3: Je˛zyk Polski i jego historya z uwzgle˛dnieniem innych je˛zyków na ziemiach polskich). Cracow: Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci. Erkanian, V. S. 1985. Armianskaia kultura v 1800–1917 gg. Yerevan: Izdatelstvo Sovetkan grokh. Esposito, John L. et al., eds. 1995. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (vol. 1). New York: Oxford University Press. Esposito, John L. et al., eds. 1995a. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (vol. 2). New York: Oxford University Press. Essential Facts about the Czech Book Production in the Year 2004. 2005. http:// www.sckn.cz/ckt/fakta2004.php?lang=eng, 6 Sep. Estraikh, Gennady. 1999. Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Ser: Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ethnic Groups of Vojvodina. 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic-groups_of_ Vojvodina, 23 Jul. Ethnologue. 2003. http://www.ethnologue.com, 12 Dec. Ethnologue. 2005. http://www.ethnologue.com, 28 Sep. Etymological Dictionary. 2001. http://www.etymonline.com, 4 May 2006. Evans, Robert J. W. 1998. The Language of History and the History of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ewangelie w przekładzie Marii Matejowej Torbiarz na gware˛ Górali Skalnopodhalanskich ´ z Zakopanego. 2002. Poznan: ´ Pallottinum and Zakopane-Krzeptówki: Sanktuarium Matki Bozej ˙ Fatimskiej. Fac, Bolesław. 1994. Martin Opitz. Eine Anthologie. Gdansk: ´ Wydawnictwo im. Joachima Lelewela and Towarzystwo Polska-Niemcy. Faulmann, Carl. 1880. Das Buch der Schrift enthaltend die Schriftzeichen und Alphabete aller Zeiten und aller Völker des Erdkreises. Vienna: Druck und Verlag der kaiserlischköniglichen Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. Fellman, Jack. 1973. The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Elizer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (Ser: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 6). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Ferko, Jerguš. 2004. Mad’arské (seba)klamy. Martin: Vydavatel’stvo Matice slovenskej. Ferko, Milan et al. 1998. Slovak Republic: Old Nation – Young state. Bratislava: Print-servis. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1845 [1808]. Reden an die deutsche Nation. In: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ed. Sämmtliche Werke (vol. 7: Zur Politik, Moral, und Philosophie der Geschichte; edited by Immanuel Hermann von Fichte). Lepizig: Mayer & Müller. Ficowski, Jerzy. 1985. Cyganie na polskich drogach. Cracow: WL. Filipec, Josef and Daneš, František, eds. 1978. Slovník spisovné ˇceštiny pro školu a veˇrejnost. Prague: Academia. Finger, Zuzana. 1999. Jazyk vidickeho obyvatel’stva na južnom Slovensku (pp. 67–74). In: Slavomír Ondrejoviˇc, ed. Slovenˇcina v kontaktoch a konfliktoch s innými jazykami (Ser: Sociolinguistica Slovaca, vol. 4). Bratislava: Veda. Finnish Historical Newspapers Library, 1771–1890. 2004. http://digi.lib.helsinki.fi/digi/ aurora/browser.jsp?lang=en, 18 Mar. Fischer-Galati, Stephen. 1994. National Minorities in Romania: International Aspects (pp. 130–141). In: Valeria Heuberger et al., eds. Nationen, Nationalitäten, Minderheiten.

Bibliography

1007

Probleme des Nationalismus in Jugoslawien, Ungarn, Rumänien, der Tschechoslowakei, Bulgarien, Polen, der Ukraine, Italien und Österreich 1945–1990 (Ser: Schrieftenreihe des Österreichischen Ost- und Südosteuropa-Instituts, vol. 22). Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik and Munich: R. Oldenboug Verlag. Fishman, Joshua. 1973. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Rowley MA: Newbury House Publishers. Fishman, Joshua. 1993. The Tschernovits Conference Revisited: The First World Conference for Yiddish, 85 Years Later (pp. 321–332). In: Joshua A. Fishman, ed. The Earliest Stages of Language Planning: The ‘First Congress’ Phenomenon (Ser: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 65). Berlin and New York: Mouton. Fishman, Joshua A. 1997. In Praise of the Beloved Language: A Comparative View of Positive Ethnolinguistic Consciousness (Ser: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 76). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Flajšhans, Václav. 1924. Náš jazyk mateˇrský. Dˇejiny jazyka ˇceského a vývoj spisovne slovenštiny. ˇ Prague: Nákladem Ceske grafická unie. Fodor, István. 1983. Hungarian: Evolution – Stagnation – Reform – Further Development (pp. 49–84). In: István Fodor and Claude Hagège, eds. Language Reform: History and Future (vol. 2). Hamburg: Buske Verlag. Fojtíková, Eva et al., eds. 1989. Staroruská ˇcítanka. Bratislava: Slovenské pedagogické nakladatel’stvo. Forgács, Tamás. 1998. Sprachkultur des Ungarischen. Ein Überblick (pp. 101–132). In: Albrecht Greule and Franz Lebsanft, eds. Europäische Sprachkultur und Sprachpflege. Akten des Regensburger Kolloquiums, Oktober 1996 (Ser: Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik, vol. 434). Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Forgács, Tamás. 1999. Zur Entwicklung der ungarischen Sprachpflege und Sprachkultur (pp. 135–148). In: Jürgen Scharnhorst, ed. Sprachkultur und Sprachgescichte, Herausbildung und Förderung von Sprachbewußtein und wissenschaftlicher Sprachpflege in Europa (Ser: Sprache System un Tätigkeit, vol. 30). Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris and Vienna: Peter Lang. Fox, Jonathan et al. 2001. Hungarians in the Vojvodina Region of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/data/yughung.htm, 31 Jul 2005. Franoli´c, Branko. 1994. Croatian Glagolitic Printed Texts Recorded in the British Library General Catalogue. Zagreb, London, New York, Toronto and Sydney: Croatian Information Center. Fras, Zbigniew. 1999. Galicja (Ser: A to Polska Wła´snie). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolno´sla˛skie. Fraser, Angus. 1995. The Gypsies (Ser: The Peoples of Europe). Oxford UK and Cambridge US: Blackwell. Friedman, Mikuláš. 1964. Mad’arsko-ˇcesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇcesko-mad’arský technický slovník. Bratislava: Slovenské vydavatel’stvo technickej literatúry. Friedrich, Karen. 2000. The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569–1772. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. From Minority Status to Partnership. 2005. http://www.hhrf.org/egyutt/AD-PARTN.HTM, 31 Jul. Frucht, Richard, ed. 2000. Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe: From the Congress of Vienna to the Fall of Communism (Ser: Garland Reference Library of Social Sciences, vol. 751). New York: Garland Publishing. Frýdecký, František and Kompiš, Petr. 1919. Pˇríruˇcní slovník ˇcesko-slovenský a slovenskoˇceský. Prague: Bursík a Kohout.

1008 Bibliography

Gafarov, Numandzhon. 2002. Istoriia kulturno-prosvetitelskoi deiatelnosti dzhadidov v Bukharskom Emirate (nachalo XX veka). Khojent: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo imienii Rakhima Dzhalila and Tadzhikskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet Prava, Biznesa i Politikii. Gagova, Krasimira et al., eds. 1996. Atlas istoriia. 11 klas. Sofia: Kartografiia and EOOD. Gajda, Stanisław, ed. 2001. Je˛zyk polski (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski and Instytut Filologii Polskiej. Gajdoš, Marián and Koneˇcný, Stanislav. 1994. Postavenie Rusínov-Ukrajincov na Slovensku ˇ v rokach 1848–1953. Prague: Ústav pro sodobné dˇejiny AV CR. Galustian, Dzh O. 1981. Kulturnaia zhizn armianskikh kolonii srednovekovoi Polshi (XVI– XVIII vv.). Yerevan: Izdatelstvo AN Armianskoi SSR. Gašparíková, Želmíra and Kamiš, Adolf. 1983. Slovensko-ˇceský slovník. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. Gaster, M[oses]. 1891. Chrestomathie Roamine/Chrestomatie Românˇa (2 vols). Leipzig: Brockhaus and Bucharest: Socea˘ u. Gawrecká, Marie. 1997. Šlonzácké hnutí a Josef Koždon ˇ (pp. 164–176). Acta historica et museologica Universitatis Silesianae Opaviensis. vol. 3. Geary, Patrick J. 2002. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Gebauer, Jan. 1890. Mluvnice ˇceská pro školy stˇrední a ústavy uˇcitelské. Prague and Vienna: F. Tempský. Gebauer, Jan. 1902. Pravidla hledící k ˇceskému pravopisu a tvarosloví s abecedním seznamem slov a tvaru˚. Prague: Školní knihosklad. Gebauer, Jan. 1903–1916. Slovník staroˇceský. Prague: Unie. Gebhart, Jan. 1999. Migrace cˇeského obyvatelstva v letach 1938–1939 (pp. 11–20). In: Detlef Brandes, Edita Ivaniˇckova, and Jiˇrí Pešek, eds. Vynútený rozchod. Vyhnanie a ˇ vysídlenie z Ceskoslovenska 1938–1947 v porovnaní s Pol’skom, Mad’arskom a Juhosláviou. Bratislava: Veda. ˙ Geller, Ewa. 1994. Jidysz – je˛zyk Zydów polskich. Warsaw: PWN. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1994. A Non-Nationalist Pole (pp. 74–80). In: Ernest Gellner, ed. Encounters with Nationalism. Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Gellner, Ernest. 1998. Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Germanistische Linguistik (issue on 100 Jahre “Deutscher Sprachatlas’’). 1978. vol. 1. Gil, Dorota. 2005. Prawosławie, historia, naród. Miejsce kultury duchowej w serbskiej tradycji i współczesno´sci. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. ´ Giza, Antoni. 2000. Słowacki ruch narodowy w XIX i pocza˛tkach XX wieku (do 1914) (Ser: Rozprawy i Studia, vol. 351). Szczecin: Uniwersytet Szczecinski. ´ Glagolitic. 2003. Catholic Encyclopedia. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06575b.htm. Glinert, Lewis. 1993. The First Congress of Hebrew, or: When is a Congress not a Congress (pp. 85–116). In: Joshua A. Fishman, ed. The Earliest Stages of Language Planning: The ‘First Congress’ Phenomenon (Ser: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 65). Berlin and New York: Mouton. Gluhak, Alemko. 1993. Hrvatski etimološki rjeˇcnik. Zagreb: August Cesarec. Golczewski, Frank and Pickhan, Gertrud. 1998. Russischer Nationalismus. Die russische Idee im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Darstellung und Texte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Goldstein, Ivo. 1999. Croatia: A History. London: Hurst. Golinski, ´ Cezary. 2006. Wojna je˛zykowa (pp. 104–106). Wprost. 8 Oct.

Bibliography

1009

Gombocz, Zoltán and Melich, János. 1914–1930. Magyar etymologiai szótár. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia. Gombocz, Zoltán and Melich, János, eds. 1914–1944. Magyar etymológiai szótár/Lexicon critico-etymologicum linguae Hungaricae. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia. Górny, Grzegorz. 2005. Spór o hrabiego. Przewodnik Katolicki. vol. 5. Gorove, István. 1842. Nemzetiség. Pest: Kapható Heckenast Gusztáv’ s Általa Minden Hiteles Könyvárusnál. Grafton, Amthony T. 2006. Rediscovering a Lost Continent (pp. 44–50). The New York Review of Books. vol. 15, 5 Oct. Grant, W. Leonard. 1954. European Vernacular Works in Latin Translation (pp. 120–156). Studies in the Renaissance. vol. 1. Graus, František. 1980. Die Nationenbildung der Westslawen im Mittelater (Ser: Nationes, vol. 3). Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag. Gray, Edward G. and Fiering, Norman, eds. 2000. The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800 (Ser: European Expansion & Global Interactions, vol. 1). New York: Berghahn Books. Greenberg, Robert D. 2001. Language, Nationalism and the Yugoslav Successor States (pp. 17–43). In: Camille C. O’Reilly, ed. Language, Ethnicity and the State (vol. 2: Minority Languages in Eastern Europe Post-1989). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave. Greenberg, Robert D. 2004. Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Greguš, Peter. 2001. Slovjaci – výtvor mad’arónskej propagandy. Slovo. vol. 30. http://www.noveslovo.sk/archiv/2001-30/ominulosti.html, 7 Nov 2005. Grenoble, Lenore A. 2003. Language Policy in the Soviet Union (Ser: Language Policy, vol. 3). Dordrecht: Kulwer. Grétsy, László. 1996. Nyelvm˝ uvel˝ o kéziszótar. Budapest: Auktor Könyvk. Grétsy, László and Kovalovszky, Miklós. 1980–1985. Nyelvmuvel˝ ˝ o kézikönyv (2 vols). Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Grimes, Barbara F., ed. 1996. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Gromada, Thaddeus V. 1969. Pilsudski and the Slovak Autonomists (pp. 445–462). Slavic Review. vol. 3. Großmähren. 2006. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fm%C3%A4hren#Name, 9 May. Grothusen, Klaus-Detlev, ed. 1987. Ungarn (Ser: Südosteuropa-Handbuch, vol. 5). Götingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Guentcheva, Rossitza. 2001. Debating Language: The Bulgarian Communities in Romania After 1989 (pp. 44–65). In: Camille C. O’Reilly, ed. Language, Ethnicity and the State (vol. 2: Minority Languages in Eastern Europe Post-1989). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave. Guenther-Swart, Imma von. 1940. Die Schlonsakenfrage (pp. 371–375). Nation und Staat. vol. 11–12. Guenther-Swart, Imma von. 1941. Die Goralen (pp. 110–116). Nation und Staat. vol. 4. Gumowski, Marian. 1975. Hebräische Münzen im mittelalterlichen Polen. Graz: Akadem. Druck- u. Verlagsanst. Gursky, Bartolomej. 2000. Východniari ako prví v USA. Korzár. 19 Jul. http://www.cassovia. sk/korzar/archiv/clanok.php3?sub=19.7.2000/10929&title=V%FDchodniari%20ako% 20prv%ED%20v%20USA%0D%0A, 26 Jan 2006.

1010 Bibliography

Gut, Violetta. 2005. Józef Franczak ps. “Lalek’’. Ostatni partyzant poakowskiego podziemia. Torun: ´ Wydawnictwo Naukowe Adam Marszałek. Guzicki, Artur. 2004. Zdrada wolnego Łemka (pp. 68–71). Polityka. vol. 40. Gyáni, Gábor; Kövér, György; and Valuch, Tibor, eds. 2004. Social History of Hungary from the Reform Era to the End of the Twentieth Century (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 652; Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, vol. 113). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs and Highland Lakes NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Gyarmati, György. 1999. Odsun Nˇemcu˚ z Mad’arska 1945–1947 (pp. 217–220). In: Detlef Brandes, Edita Ivaniˇckova, and Jiˇrí Pešek, eds. Vynútený rozchod. Vyhnanie a vysídlenie z ˇ Ceskoslovenska 1938-1947 v porovnaní s Pol’skom, Mad’arskom a Juhosláviou. Bratislava: Veda. Haarman, Harald. 1975. Soziologie und Politik der Sprachen Europas. Munich: dtv. Habovštiak, Anton, ed. 1984–. Atlas slovenského jazyka. Lexika. Bratislava: Veda. Hafner, Stanislaus. 1987. Kirche, Staatlichkeit, Sprache und Volkstum im Vielvölkerstaat und das Entstehen der slowenischen Nationalkultur (pp. 1–22). In: Christian Hannick, ed. Sprachen und Nationan im Balkanraum. Die historischen Bedingungen der Entstehung der heitigen Nationalsprachen. Cologne: Böhlau. Hajdu, Peter. 1975. Finno-Ugrian Languages and Peoples. London: Andre Deutsch. Hancock, Ian. 1995. A Handbook of Vlax Romani. Columbus OH: Slavica. Hancock, Ian. 2002. Ame sam e Rromane džene [We Are the Romani People] (Ser: Interface Collection). Hatfield, Hertfordshite: University of Hertfordshire Press and Paris: Centre de Recherches Tsiganes. Hancock, Ian et al., eds. 1998. The Roads of the Roma: A PEN anthology of Gypsy writers. Hatfield, Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press. Hankins, James. 2001. A Lost Continent of Literature. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/itatti/ neolatin_lit.html, 29 Sep 2006. Hannan, Kevin. 1993. The Language Question in 19th-Century Moravia (pp. 116–125). Czechoslovak and Central European Journal. vol. 2. Hannan, Kevin. 1996. Borders of Language and Identity in Teschen Silesia (Ser: Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics, vol. 28). New York: Peter Lang. Hannan, Kevin. 2005. The Historical and Linguistic Background of Lachian Regionalism and ‘Separatism.’ (pp. 471–496). In: Wojciech J. Burszta, Tomasz Kamusella, and Sebastian Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms in State-Endowed and Stateless Nations (vol. 1: Europe). Poznan: ´ School of Humanities and Journalism and Institute of Western Affairs and Warsaw: Slavic Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Hannan, Kevin. 2005a. Experiencing the Divine Conversation: Liturgical languages of Eastern Christians in contemporary Poland (pp. 263–293). The Polish Review. vol. 3. Hannan, Kevin. 2006. Dary zbiorowej pamie˛ci [Bounties of Collective Memory] (Ser: Rzecz poetycka). Łód´z: wydawnictwo biblioteka. Haretski, M. 1919. Nevialichki belaruska-maskouski slounik. Vilnius. Haretski, M. and Haretski, H. 1920. Maskouska-belaruski slounik. Vilnius. ˇ Harna, Josef and Fišer, Rudolf. 1998. Dˇejiny Ceských zemí (vol. 2: Od poloviny 18. století ˇ do vzniku Ceske republiky). Prague: Fortuna. Harris, Tracy K. 1994. Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish. Newark: University of Delaware Press and London and Toronto: Associated University Press. Harrison, Henrietta. 2001. China (Ser: Inventing the Nation). London: Arnold and New York: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

1011

Hartmann, Silvia. 1998. Fraktur oder Antiqua. Der Schriftsreit von 1881 bis 1941 (Ser: Theorie und Vermittlung der Sprache). Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris and Vienna: Peter Lang. Hartmanová, Dagmar. 2001. Diderot, nebo Universum. Vesmír. Oct. Hartweg, Frédéric. 1999. Sprach-, Kultur- oder Willensnation? Über den beliebigen Umgang mit sprachgeschichtlichen Argumenten (pp. 397–410). In: Andreas Gardt et al., eds. Sprachgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Hasenmayer, Herbert et al., eds. 1981. Atlas zur allgemeinen und österreichischen Geschichte. Vienna: Ed. Hölzel. Hattala, Martin. 1852. Krátka mluvnica slovenská. Preßburg: Tiskom predtým Schmidovym. Haubrichs, Wolfgang. 1996. Der Krieg der Professoren. Sprachhistorische und sprachpolitische Argumentation in der Auseinandersetzung um Elsaß-Lothringen zwischen 1870 und 1918 (pp. 213–249). In: Roland Marti, ed. Sprachenpolitik in Grenzregionen. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag. Haugen, Brit Bakker et al. 2001. Norsk-bosnisk/kroatisk/serbisk ordbok. Oslo: Sypress. Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, Language, Nation (pp. 922–935). American Anthropologist. vol. 68. Haugen, Einar. 1966a. Semicommunication: The Language Gap in Scandinavia (pp. 280–297). Sociological Inquiry. 36. Haugen, Einar. 1966b. Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Haugen, Einar. 1976. The Scandinavian Languages: An Introduction to Their History. London: Faber & Faber. Havlík, Lubomír E. 1993. Moravské letopisy. Brno: Jota. ˇ Havránek, Bohuslav. 1940. Poznámka k cˇlánku ‘O puvodu˚ jména Cech’ (pp. 104–107). Slovo a slovesnost. vol. 6. ˇ Havránek, Bohuslav and Jedliˇcka, Alois. 1951. Ceská mluvnice. Prague: Slovanské nakladatelství. Havránek, Bohuslav and Trávníˇcek, František. 1957. Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu. Prague: ˇ CSAV. Havránek, Bohuslav and Weingart, Miloš, eds. 1932. Spisovná ˇceština a jazyková kultura. Prague: Melantrich. Havránek, Bohuslav et al., eds. 1957–1971. Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (4 vols). ˇ Prague: CSAV. Havránek, Jan. 2002. Nebeneinander zweier Prager Universitäten, 1882–1918 (pp. 71– 78). In: Sabrina P. Ramet et al., eds. Nations and Nationalisms in East-Central Europe, 1806–1948. A Festschrift for Peter F Sugar. Bloomington IN: Slavica. Heck, Roman and Orzechowski, Marian. 1969. Historia Czechosłowacji. Wrocław, Warsaw and Cracow: Ossolineum. Heidler, Ján and Wiengart, Miloš. 1922. Slovenským cˇitatel’om (pp. V–XIII). Sborník filozofickej fakulty university Komenského v Bratislave. vol. 1. Helfferich, Adolph. 1868. Turan und Iran. Ueber die Entstehung der Schriftsprache. Frankfurt/M: Christian Winter. Henlein, Konrad. 1936. The German Minority in Czechoslovakia (561–572). International Affairs. vol. 4, Jul–Aug. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1966. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Darmstadt: Joseph Melzer Verlag. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. 1800. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. London: Printed for J. Johnson, by L. Hansard.

1012 Bibliography

Herkel, Joanne Pannonio. 1826. Elementa Universalis Linguae Slavicae. Buda: Typis Regiae Universitatis Hungaricae. Herod, Charles C. 1976. The Nation in the History of Marxian Thought: The Concept of Nations with History and Nations Without History. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Herrity, Peter. 1973. The Role of the Matica and Similar Societies in the Development of the Slavonic Literary Languages (pp. 368–386). Slavonic and East European Review. vol. 51, No. 124. Herzl, Theodor. 1997. The Jews’ State: A critical English Translation (translated and introduced by Henk Overberg). Northvale NJ and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson. Hetzer, Armin. 1984. Geschichte des Buchhandels in Albanien. Prolegomena zu einer Literatursoziologie (Ser: Balkanologische Veröffentlichungen, vol. 10). Berlin: OsteuropaInstitut an der Freien universität Berlin and Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Heyd, Uriel. 1954. Language Reform in Modern Turkey (Ser: Oriental Notes and Studies, vol. 5). Jerusalem: The Israel Oriental Society. Higonnet, Patrice L.-R. 1980. The Politics of Linguistic Terrorism and Grammatical Hegemony During the French Revolution (pp. 41–69). Social History. vol. 5. Hirner, Alexander. 1958. [Prepared for publication, but never printed] Príruˇcný encyklopedický slovník (vol. 1: A–G). Martin: Osveta. Historický slovník slovenského jazyka. 1991–. Bratislava: Veda. History of Bratislava. 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bratislava, 9 Nov. History of the Moldovan Language. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_ Moldovan_language, 8 Mar. Hitchins, Keith. 1986. Religious Tradition and National Consciousness Among the Romanians of Transylvania, 1730–1780 (pp. 542–558). Harvard Ukrainian Studies. vols. 3–4, December. Cambridge MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. Hitchins, Keith. 2002. The Idea of Nation Among the Romanians of Transylvania, 1700– 1849 (pp. 78–109). In: Andrei Ple¸su, ed. Nation and National Ideology: Past, Present and Prospects. Proceedings of the International Symposium held at the New Europe College, Bucharest, 6–7 April 2001. Bucharest: The Center for the Study of the Imaginary and New Europe College. Hlinkova garda. 2005. http://mujweb.atlas.cz/spolecnost/1900/hg.htm, 15 Nov. Hobsbawm, Eric John. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hochman, Jiˇrí. 1998. Historical Dictionary of the Czech State (Ser: European Historical Dictionaries, vol. 23). Lanham MD and London: The Scarecrow Press. ˇ Hodža, Milan. 1920. Ceskoslovenský rozkol. Príspevky k dejinám slovenˇciny. Turˇciansky Svätý Martin: By the Author. Hoensch, Jörg K. 1991. Ungarn. Handbuch. Geschichte, Politik, Wirtschaft. Hannover: Fackelträger. Hohm, Franziska and Frisch, Stephan, eds. 2004. TaschenAtlas Europäische Union. Gotha and Stuttgart: Klett. Holloway, Julia Bolton. 2004. Geoffrey Chaucer: Black and Red Letter. http://www.florin. ms/Black.html, 18 Mar. Holub, Josef. 1933. Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského. Prague: Státní nakladatelství. Houlb, Josef and Lyer, Stanislav. 1967. Struˇcný etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského. Prague: SPN.

Bibliography

1013

Houlb, Josef and Lyer, Stanislav. 1978. Struˇcný etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského. Prague: SPN. Holy, Ladislav. 1996. The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: National Identity and the Post-Communist Transformation of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holywood Bible Translation for Bosnia. 2003. http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/ articles/29/75/acns2978.html, 22 Dec. Holzer, Jerzy. 2004. Wielonarodowa prowincja Galicji w panstwie ´ K. und K. (pp. 451– 477). In: Jerzy Holzer, ed. Dwa stulecia Polski i Europy. Teksty pisane w róznych ˙ porach wieku. Poznan: ´ Wydawnictwo Poznanskiego ´ Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk. Honzák, F. et al., eds. 2001. Evropa v promˇenách staletí. Prague: Libri. Horak, Stephan. 1961. Poland and Her National Minorities, 1919–39: A Case Study. New York, Washington and Hollywood: Vantage Press. ˇ Horák, Gejza. 1979. Cesko-slovenský slovník. Bratislava: Veda, vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akadémie vied. Hoˇrec, Jaromír. 2003. Poˇcátky ˇceské knihy. Prague: Votobia. Horecký, Ján. 1999. K otázke literárnej rómˇciny (pp. 165–171). In: Slavomír Ondrejoviˇc, ed. Slovenˇcina v kontaktoch a konfliktoch s innými jazykami (Ser: Sociolinguistica Slovaca, vol. 4). Bratislava: Veda. Horecký, Konštantín et al. 1997. Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdielnych výrazov. Žilina: Knižne centrum. Hösler, Joachim. 2006. Sloweniens historische Bürde (pp. 31–38). Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (An insert in the weekly Das Parlament). vol. 46, 13 Nov. ˇ Hradeˇcný, Pavel. 1999. Rekové a Turci. Nepˇrátelé nebo spojenci? (Ser: Knižnice Dˇejin a souˇcasnosti). Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Hroch, Miroslav. 1985. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hroch, Miroslav. 1999. Na prahu národní existence. Touha a skuteˇcnost. Prague: Mladá fronta. Hroch, Miroslav. 2003. Małe narody Europy. Perspektywa historyczna (Ser: Zrozumie´c Europe˛). Wrocław, Warsaw and Cracow: Ossolineum. Hrushevsky, Michael. 1965. The Traditional Scheme of ‘Russian’ History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the East Slavs (Ser: Slavistica). Winnipeg: Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences and Ukrainian Canadian University Students’ Union. Hrvatska Enciklopedija [Encyclopaedia Croatica] (vol. 1). 1941. Zagreb: Naklada Konzorcija Hrvatske Enciklopedije. Hrycak, Jarosław. 2000. Historia Ukrainy, 1722–1999. Narodziny nowoczesnego narodu ´ ´ (Ser: Dzieje krajów Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej). Lublin: Instytut Europy SrodkowoWschodniej. Hukovi´c, Muhamed. 1986. Alhamijado knijževnost i njeni stvaraoci (Ser: Bibliotekan kulturno nasljed¯e Bosne i Hercegovine). Sarajevo: Svjetlost, OOUR izdavaˇcka djelatnost. Hudson, R. A. 1996. Sociolinguistics (Ser: Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hungary. 2003. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://search.eb.com./eb/article?eu= 114802. Hungary. 2005. http://www.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/easteurope/hungary.htm, 1 Aug. Hutterer, C. J. 1990. Die germanischen Sprachen. Ihre. Geschichte in Grundzügen. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

1014 Bibliography

ˇ Hýsek, Miloslav. 1909. Dˇejiny t. zv. Moravského separatismu (pp. 24–51, 146–172). Casopis Matice moravské. vol. 33. Ilarion, Matropolitan. 1994. Etymolohichno-semantychnyi slovnyk ukrains’koi movy [Etymological and Semantic Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language] (revised and enlarged by Magdalena Laszlo-Kutiuk) (vol. 4) (Ser: Instytut doslidiv Volyni, vol. 39). Winnipeg: Society of Volyn. Illich, Ivan and Sanders, Barry. 1988. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco CA: North Point Press. Ilustrowana encyklopedja Trzaski, Everta i Michalskiego. 1927–1938. Warsaw: Trzaska, Evert i Michalski. Informationen zur politischen Bildung (Tschechien). 2002. vol. 3, No. 276. Inoue, Koichi, ed. 1999. „Dear Father!’’: A collection of B Pilsudski’s letters, et alii (Ser: Pilsudskiana de Sapporo, vol. 1). Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University. Ioffe, Grigory. 2003. Understanding Belarus: Questions of Language (pp. 1009–1047). Europe-Asia Studies. vol. 7 (London: Carfax Publishing). Ionchev, Vasil and Ioncheva, Olga. 1982. Dreven i suvremenen bulgarski shrift. Sofia: Bulgarski khudozhnik. Isaev, Magomet I. 1979. Iazykovoe stroitelstvo v SSSR (Protsessy sozdania pismiennostei narodov SSSR). Moscow: Nauka. Isaev, Magomet I. and Gobeti, O. B. 1969. Problemy razvitiia natsionalnykh iazykov v SSSR v osveshchenii burzhuaznykh avtorov (pp. 38–51). Voprosy istorii. vol. 10, Oct. Isakovi´c, Alija. 1990. Biserje. Antologija muslimanske knijževnosti. Opatija: Otokar Keršovani. Isakovi´c, Alija and Popadi´c, Miloslav, eds. 1982. Pisana rijec u Bosni i Hercegovini od najstarijih vremena do 1918. godine. Sarajevo: IRO ‘Veselin masleša’ and OOUR Izdavaˇcka djelatnost. Isayev, M. I. 1977. National Languages in the USSR: Problems and solutions. Moscow: Progress. ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee: Working principles for ISO 639 maintenance. 2000. http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/iso639jac_n3r.html, 23 Sep 2005. Issatschenko, Alexander V. 1980. Russian (pp. 119–142). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Ivic, Pavle and Pesikan, Mitar. 2004. Serbian Printing. http://www.suc.org/culture/history/ Hist_Serb_Culture/chh/Serbian_printing.html, 16 Mar. Jääts, Indrek. 2000. Ethnic Identity of the Setus and the Estonian-Russian Border Dispute (pp. 651–670). Nationalities Papers. vol. 4. Jagodzinski, ´ Grzegorz. 2006. Koncepcje pochodzenia Słowian. http://grzegorj.w.interia.pl/ lingwpl/pochoslo5.html, 9 May. Jahi´c, Dževad. 1999. Bošnjaˇcki narod i njegov jezik (Ser: Trilogija o bosnanskom jeziku, vol. 1). Sarajevo: Linguos. Jähnig, Bernhart and Biewer, Ludwig. 1991. Kleiner Atlas zur deutschen Territorialgeschichte. Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen. Jakó, Zsigmond. 1976. Írás, könyv, értelmiség. Bucharest: Kriterion. Jakowenko, Natalia. 2000. Historia Ukrainy od czasów najdawniejszych do konca ´ XVIII ´ ´ wieku (Ser: Dzieje Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej). Lublin: Instytut Europy SrodkowoWschodniej. Jakubovich, Emil and Pais, Dezs˝ o, eds. 1929. Ó-magyar olvasókönyv. Pécs: Danubia. Janák, Jan et al. 2005. Dˇejiny správy v ˇceských zemích od poˇcátku˚ státu po souˇcasnost. Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny.

Bibliography

1015

Janaszek-Ivaniˇckova, Halina, ed. 1994. Literatury zachodniosłowianskie ´ czasu przełomów ´ ˛sk. 1890–1990 (vol. 1: Literatura łuzycka ˙ i słowacka). Katowice: Sla Janeˇcek, Pavel. 2005. Ostravsko-ˇceský slovník. Ostrava: Repronis. Janich, Nina and Greule, Albrecht, eds. 2002. Sprachkulturen in Europa. Ein internationals Handbuch. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. Janicki, Artur. 2006. Personal E-Mail Communication on the Attempts to Cyrillicize the German Language in the Baltic Provinces of the Russian Empire. Gdansk: ´ University of Gdansk. ´ Janos, Andrew C. 1997. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict and the Dissolution of Multinational States (Ser: Exploratory Essays, vol. 3). Berkeley CA: International and Area Studies, University of California at Berkeley. Jánošik, Anton and Jóna, Eugen. 1946–1949. Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského. Turˇciansky Svätý Martin: Matice slovenská. Janowicz, Jarosław. 2004. Likwidacja oficjalnego nazewnictwa miejscowo´sci Białostocczyzny pochodzenia białoruskiego przez administracje˛ rza˛dowa˛ w latach 1921–2004. Dokumenty. Komentarze. (Sytuacja białoruskiej mniejszo´sci narodowej w Polsce w s´wietle sprawy oficjalnego i dwuje˛zycznego nazewnictwa miejscowo´sci Białostocczyzny). Białystok: Scripta Manent. Janowicz, Sokrat. 2006. Białoru´s: cóz˙ to takiego? Naród z polsko-litewskiego pogranicza (pp. 16–19). Pomocnik Historyczny. vol. 1, Feb (an insert in Polityka. vol. 7, 18 Feb.). Jánský, L. M. 1939. Hovorme správne po slovensky! Trnava: Spolok sv. Vojtecha. Jánský, L. M; Ormis, Ján V; and Kotvan, Imrich. 1940. K súˇcasným i historickým otázkam slovenského jazykového purizmu (Ser: Linguistica Slovaca, vol. 6). Bratislava: Slovenská uˇcená spoloˇcnost’. Jaroszewicz, Henryk. 2004. Nowe tendencje normatywne w standardowych je˛zykach chorwackim i serbskim (Ser: Studia i Monografie, vol. 342). Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski and Opolskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciól Nauk. Järv, Harry, ed. 1983. Den Svenska boken 500 år. Stockholm: Liber Förlag. Jaskułowski, Krzysztof. 2003. Mityczne przestrzenie nacjonalizmu. Historia i mit w walijskiej ideologii narodowej. Torun: ´ Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek. Jastrze˛bski, Włodziemierz. 1995. Ludno´sc´ niemiecka i rzekomo niemiecka na ziemiach polskich wła˛czonych do Rzeszy Niemieckiej (pp. 11–26). In: Włodzimierz Jastrze˛bski, ed. Ludno´sc´ niemiecka na ziemiach polskich w latach 1939–1945. Bydgoszcz: WSP. Jászi, Oskar. 1929. The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Jaworski, Tomasz and Ostrowski, Mieczysław, eds. 1995. Łuzyce ˙ w nowozytnych ˙ i ´ najnowszych dziejach Europy Srodkowej (Ser: Zielonmogórskie Studia Łuzyckie, ˙ vol. 1). Zielona Góra: Verbum. Jedlicki, Jerzy. 2002. Jakiej cywilizacji Polacy potrzebuja˛. Studia z dziejów idei i wyobra´zni XIX wieku (Ser: Seria z Waga˛). Warsaw: wab and Cis. Je˛drzejewicz, Wacław. 1982. Piłsudski: A life for Poland. New York: Hippocrene Books. Jelavich, Charles and Barbara. 1977. The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 8). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. Jelinek, Yeshayahu. 1982. The Treaty of Trianon and Czechoslovakia: Reflections. In: Béla K. Király, Peter Pastor, and Ivan Sanders, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 6: Essays on World War I: Total War and Peacemaking. A Case Study on Trianon) (Ser: Atlantic Studies, vol. 15; East European Monographs, vol. 105). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). ´ ˛ska. ´ ˛skiego. Zabrze: Narodowa Oficyna Sla Jerczynski, ´ Dariusz. 2006. Historia Narodu Sla

1016 Bibliography

Jeszenszky, Géza. 2003. From ‘Eastern Switzerland’ to Ethnic Cleansing: Is the Dream Still Relevant? (pp. 11–30). In: Steven Béla Várdy and Hunt T. Tooley, eds. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Boulder CO: Social Sciences Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Jezernik, Božidar. 2004. Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers. London: Saqi Books and the Bosnian Institute. Jocher, Adam Benedykt. 1895. Harmonja mów, albo zlanie sie˛ w jedna˛, to jest polska˛, za po´srednictwem fenickiej, powróconej do familji mów słowianskich. ´ Wilno (Vilnius). Jodłowski, Stanisław. 1979. Losy polskiej ortografii. Warsaw: PWN. Johann Gutenberg. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gutenberg, 7 Jul. Johnson, Lonnie R. 2002. Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Owen V. 1985. Slovakia 1918–1938: Education and the Making of a Nation (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 180). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Johnson, William H. E. 1950. Russia’s Educational Heritage. Pittsburgh PA: Carnegie Press, Carnegie Institute of Technology (distributed by Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ). Jóna, Eugen. 1952. O návrhu na nové Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu. Martin: Matica slovenská. Jóna, Eugen. 1963. Práca Matice slovenskej v oblasti jazykovedy a spisovného jazyka po roce 1919 (pp. 240–259). In: Július Mésároš and Miroslav Kropilák, eds. Matica slovenská v našich dejinách. Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akadémie vied. Jovanovich, Nebojsha et al., eds. 2004. Istorijski atlas. Belgrade: Zavod za uchbenike i nastavna sredstva and Preduzedze za kartografju “Geokarta’’. Judge, Anne. 2000. France: ‘One state, one nation, one language?’ (pp. 44–82). In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, eds. Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juhász, Dezs˝ o and Murádin, László. 1995–2003. A romániai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza (8 vols). Budapest: Magyar Nyelvtudományi Társaság. Juhász, József, ed. 1972. Magyar értelmez˝ o kéziszótár. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Junga, V. A. 1920. Slovník anglicko-ˇceský. Prague: J Otto. Jungmann, Josef. 1835–1839. Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (5 vols). Prague: W knjžecj arcibiskupské knihtiskárnˇe, u Josefy wdowy Fetterlowé, ˇrjzenjm Wáclawa Špinky. Jussila, Osmo et al. 2001. Historia polityczna Finlandii 1809–1999. Cracow: Universitas. Kaˇcala, Ján. 2001. Spisovná slovenˇcina v 20. staroˇcí. Bratislava: Veda. Kaˇcala, Ján and Pisárˇciková, Mária, eds. 1987. Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka. Bratislava: Veda. Ka˛cka, Bozena ˙ and Ste˛pka, Stanisław. 1994. Repatriacja ludno´sci polskiej z ZSRR 1955–1959. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo SGGW. ˇ Kálal, Karel. 1919. Slovensko, zemˇe budoucnosti (Ser: Propagaˇcní knihovna Ceskoslovenského ˇ cizinického úˇradu). Prague: Ceskoslovenský Cizinecký Úˇrad. Kálal, Miroslav. 1924–1926. Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci. Banská Bystrica: Slovenská Grafie. Kamenec, Ivan. 2000. Hl’adanie a blúdenie v dejinách. Bratislava: Kalligram. Kamler, Marcin, ed. 2000. Europa. Regiony i panstwa ´ historyczne (Ser: PWN Leksykon). Warsaw: PWN. ´ ˛sku w Kamusella, Tomasz. 1998. Wyłanianie sie˛ grup narodowych i etnicznych na Sla okresie 1848–1918 (pp. 35–72). Sprawy Narodowo´sciowe. vol. 12–13.

Bibliography

1017

Kamusella, Tomasz. 1999. Ethnic Cleansing in Silesia 1950–89 and the Ennationalizing Policies of Poland and Germany (pp. 51–73). Patterns of Prejudice. vol. 2. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2001 [Unpublished PhD dissertation]. The Emergence of the National and Ethnic Groups in Sielesia, 1848–1918. Poznan: ´ Instytut Zachodni. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2003. The Szlonzoks and Their Language: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian nationalism (Ser: EUI Working Papers, no HEC 2003/1). Florence: European university Institute. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2003. Dual Citizenship in Opole Silesia in the Context of European Integration (pp. 699–716). Faculta Universitatis. Niš: University of Niš. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2004. On the Similarity Between the Concepts of Nation and Language (pp. 107–112). Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism. vol. 31. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2005. The Triple Division of the Slavic Languages: A linguistic Finding, a Product of Politics, or an Accident? (Ser: IWM Working Papers Series, vol. 2005/1). Vienna: Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, http://www.iwm.at/publ-wp/wp-0501.pdf. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006. Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918. West Lafayette IN: Purdue University Press. Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006a. The Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State: The Case of Central Europe (pp. 57–92). In: W. Burszta, T. Kamusella, and S. Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms of State-Endowed and Stateless Nations (vol. 2: The World). Poznan, Poland: Wyzsza ˙ Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i Dziennikarstwa. Kann, Robert A. 1960. A Study in Austrian Intellectual History: From late baroque to romanticism. New York: Praeger. Kann, Robert A. and Zdenˇek, David V. 1984. The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526–1918 (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. VI). Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press. Kapr, Albert. 1993. Fraktur. Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften. Mainz: Verlag Hermann Schmidt. Kara, Gail. 2001. The Spark and the New Leaf: The Aromanians of Macedonia. The Newsletter of the Society Farsarotul. vol. 2, Spring, http://www.farsarotul.org/nl23_1.htm. Kara´s, Mieczysław and Madejowa, Maria. 1977. Słownik wymowy polskiej. Warsaw: PWN. Kardos, Gábor. 2001. Legal Protection of Minority Rights in Hungary (pp. 349–357). In: Karen Phalet and Antal Örkény, eds. Ethnic Minorities and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Context. Aldershot UK: Ashgate. Karlík, Petr; Nekula, Marek; and Pleskalová, Jana, eds. 2002. Encyklopedický slovník ˇceštiny. Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Karłowicz, Jan. 1900–1911. Słownik gwar polskich (6 vols). Cracow: Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci. Karłowicz, Jan et al. 1900–1927. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (8 vols). Warsaw: Nakładem prenumeratorów. Karulis, Konstant¯ıns. 2001. Letviešu etimoloˇgijas v¯ardn¯ıca. Riga: Avots. Kasper, Martin. 1987. Cultural Identity and Intercultural Relationships in the History of the Lusatian Sorbs (pp. 7–24). In: Martin Kasper, ed. Language and Culture of the Lusatian Sorbs Throughout Their History. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Katz, David. 2004. Words on Fire: The unfinished story of Yiddish. New York: Basic Books. Kaunas, Domas. 1996. Mažosios lietuvos knyga. Lietuviškos knygos raida, 1547–1940. Vilnius: Baltos lankos.

1018 Bibliography

ˇ Kavulok, Jiˇrí, ed. 1942. Pˇrehled hospodaˇrského a kulturního života Protektorátu Cechy a Morava. Moravská Ostrava: Melantrich. Kedourie, Elie, ed. 1971. Nationalism in Asia and Africa. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Kenrick, Donald and Puxon, Grattan. 1995. Gypsies Under the Swastika. Hatfield, Hertfordshire: Gypsy Research Center and University of Hertfordshire Press. Ker, William Paton. 1987. Wczesne s´redniowiecze (zarys historii literatury). Wrocław: Ossolineum. Kerner, Robert Joseph, ed. 1940. Czechoslovakia: Twenty Years of Independence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Keyser, Jason. 2001. A Decade Later, Russian Jews and Israel Have Profoundly Changed Each Other. http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/5602-3.cfm, 23 May 2006. Khudaverdian, K. S., et al., eds. 1990. Armeniia. Entsiklopedia putishestvennika. Yerevan: Glavnaia redaktsiia Armianskoi sovietskoi entsiklopedii. Kiaupa, Zigmuntas; Kiaupiene, J¯ urate; and Kunceviˇcius, Albinas. 2000. The History of Lithuania Before 1795. Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History. Kiaupa, Zigmuntas; Mäesalu, Ain; Pajur, Ago; and Straube, Gvido. 2002. The History of the Baltic Countries. Tallinn: Avita. Kinder, Hermann and Hilgemann, Werner. 1978. The Penguin Atlas of World History (vol. 1: From the Beginning to the Eve of the French Revolution). Harmondsorth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. King, Charles. 1999. The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Ser: Studies of Nationalities). Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press. King, Jeremy. 2002. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kinsky (p. 744). 1888. In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encyklopädie des allgemeinen Wissens (vol. 9). Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts. Kirschbaum, Joseph M. 1960. Slovakia: Nation at the Crossroads of Central Europe. New York: Robert Seller & Sons. Kirschbaum, Stanislav, J. 1999. Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (Ser: European Historical Dictionaries, vol. 31). Lanham MD and London: The Scarecrow Press. Kiss, Jen˝ o and Nagy, Gábor Tolcsavi. 1999. The Hungarian Language (pp. 33–106). In: László Kósa, ed. A Companion to Hungarian Studies. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Kizwalter, Tomasz. 1999. O nowoczesno´sci narodu. Przypadek polski. Warsaw: Semper. Klaniczay, Tibor et al. 1964. History of Hungarian Literature. New York: Frederick Ungar. Klemenˇciˇc, Matjaž and Zupanˇciˇc, Jernej. 2004. The Effects of the Dissolution of Yugoslavia on the Minority Rights of Hungarian and Italian Minorities in the Post-Yugoslav States (pp. 853–896). Nationalities Papers. vol. 4, Dec. Klemensiewicz, Zenon. 1974. Historia je˛zyka polskiego. Warsaw: PWN. Klemensiewicz, Zenon. 1976. Historia je˛zyka polskiego. Warsaw: PWN. Klimó, Arpad von. 2003. Nation, Konfession, Geschichte. Zur nationalen Geschichtskultur Ungarns im europäischen Kontext (1860–1948) (Ser: Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, vol. 117). Munich: Oldenburg. Klimowicz, Mieczysław. 1980. O´swiecenie (Ser: Historia Literatury Polskiej). Warsaw: PWN. Kloch, Zbigniew. 1995. Spory o je˛zyk. Warsaw: Instytut Badan ´ Literackich. Kloss, Heinz. 1967. Abstand languages and Ausbau languages (pp. 29–41). Anthropological Linguistics. vol. 9. Kloss, Heinz and McConnell, Frant C., eds. 1974–1984. Composition linguistique des nations du monde. Quebeck: Presses de l’Université Laval.

Bibliography

1019

Kloss, Heinz. 1978. Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800 (Ser: Sprache der Gegenwart. Schriften des Instituts für deutsche Sprache, vol. 37). Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann. Kneževi´c, Anthony. 1989. A Short History of the Croatian Nation. Philadelphia PA: Croatian Catholic Union, Lodge “Croatia’’. Kniezsa, István. 1955. A magyar nyelv szláv jövevényszavai (2 vols). Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. ´ Kochanowski, Jerzy. 1997. We˛gry (Ser: Historia Panstw ´ Swiata w XX wieku). Warsaw: Trio. Kohn, Hans. 1944. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. New York: Macmillan. Kohn, Hans. 1957. American Nationalism: An Interpretative Essay. New York: Macmillan. Kohn, Hans. 1962. The Age of Nationalism: The First Era of Global History. New York: Harper & Row. Kókay, György. 1990. Geschichte des Buchhandels in Ungarn (Ser: Geschichte des Buchhandels). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ˇ Kolesár, Peter, ed. 2003. Cesko-slovenské vztahy deset let po rozpadu federace. Brno: Masarykova univerzita and Mezinárodní politologický ústav. ˇ Kollár, Ján, ed. 1846. Hlasowé o potˇrebˇe jednoty spisowného jazyka pro Cechy, Morawany a Slowáky. Prague: Sobor Musejní pro ˇreˇc a literatury cˇeskau. Kollar, Johann (Kollár, Ján). 1837. Über die Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation. Pest: Trattner. Kollár, Karol. 1994. The Idea of Nation in the Work of Milan Hodža (pp. 61–76). In: Tibor Pichler and Jana Gašpariková, eds. Language, Values and the Slovak Nation (Ser: Slovak Philosophical Studies, vol. 1). Washington DC: Paideia Press and The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Kósa, László, ed. 1999. A Companion to Hungarian Studies. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Komenského slovník nauˇcný (10 vols). 1937–1938. Prague: Nakladatelství a vydavatelství Komenského slovníku nauˇcného. Komissarova, E. V. 2002. Serboluzhitskie izdaniia XVIII-pervoi poloviny XIX vv. v Slavianskom fonde Biblioteki Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Katalog kollektsii. St Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi akademii nauk. Koneˇcný, Jan Nepomuk. 1846. Theoretisch-praktische Anleitung zur schnellen und gründlichen Erlernung der ˇcechisch-slawischen Sprache/Theoreticko-praktické Nawedení k rychlému a du˚kladnému nauˇcení se jazyku ˇceskoslowanskému. Vienna: Im Verlage von Peter Rohrmann. Koneski, Blaze. 1981. Istorija na makedonskiot jazik. Skopje: Kultura. Koneski, Blaže. 1980. Macedonian (pp. 53–64). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. König, Werner. 2005. dtv-Atlas Deutsche Sprache. Munich: dtv. Konstytucja 3 maja, 1791. 2004. http://www.polonica.net/Konstytucja_3Maja1791.htm, 14 Apr. Kont, Ignace. 1909. Geschichte der ungarischen Literatur. Lepizig: Amelang. Kontler, László. 1999. Millennium in Central Europe: A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz. Kopczynski, ´ Onufry. 1817. Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego. Warsaw: w Drukarni Xie˛zy ˙ Piiarów.

1020 Bibliography

Kopecký, Milan. 1978. Úvod do studia staroˇceských rukopisu˚ a tisku˚. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. ´ ˛ tego Stefana w latach Kopy´s, Tadeusz. 2001. Kwestia narodowo´sciowa na ziemiach Korony Swie 1867–1918. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Promocji Powiatu, Miasta i Gminy „Promo“. Korbel, Josef. 1977. Twentieth-Century Czechoslovakia: The Meaning of its History. New York: Columbia University Press. ˇ Koˇrenský, Jan, ed. 1998. Ceský jazyk (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Instytut Filologii Polskiej and Uniwersytet Opolski. Kornhauser, Julian. 2000. Literatura dialektalna i tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ chorwacka (pp. 155–168). In: Maria Bobrownicka, ed. Je˛zyk a tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ narodowa (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas. Korolevsky, Cyril. 1957. Living Languages in Catholic Worship: An Historical Inquiry. London: Longmans. Korovytsky, I. and Vavryk, M. 2003. Bible. In: Encyclopedia of Ukraine, http://www. encyclopediaofukraine.com/pages/B/I/Bible.htm. Kosáry, Domokos. 1987. Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary. Budapest: Corvina. Kostický, Bohuš. 1963. Zrušenie Matice slovenskej a dal’šia mad’arizácia (pp. 168–184). In: Július Mésároš and Miroslav Kropilák, eds. Matica slovenská v našich dejinách. Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akadémie vied. ˇ Kott, Štepan František. 1878–1893. Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (7 vols). Prague: Knihtiskárna Josefa Koláˇre. Kotvan, Imrich. 1957. Bibliografia Bernolákovcov. Martin: Matica slovenská. ˇ Kováˇc, Dušan. 1997. Slováci a Cesi. Dejiny. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press. Kováˇc, Dušan. 1998. Dˇejiny Slovenska (Ser: Dˇejiny statu˚). Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Kováˇc, Dušan. 2002. The Slovak Political Agenda in the 19th and Early 20th Century (pp. 93–110). In: Sabrina P. Ramet et al., eds. Nations and Nationalisms in East-Central Europe, 1806–1948. A Festschrift for Peter F Sugar. Bloomington IN: Slavica. Kováˇc, Michal and Vongrej, Pavol. 1963. Matice slovenská. Obrazová pamätnica. Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Osveta. Középiskolai történelmi atlasz. 1996. Budapest: Cartographia. Krajˇcoviˇc, Rudolf. 1988. Vývin slovenského jazyka a dialektológia. Bratislava: Slovenské pedagogické nakladatel’stvo. Krajˇcoviˇc, Rudolf and Žigo, Pavol. 1999. Priruˇcka k dejinám spisovnej slovenˇciny. Bratislava: Univerzita Komenského. ¯ Krastin‚š, Ziedonis et al., eds. 1942. Das lettische Buch. Riga: Zelta Abele. Krátka mluvnica slovenská. 1852. Preßburg: Tiskom predtým Schmidovym. Kravetskii, Aleksandr Genadevich and Pletneva, Aleksandra Andreevna. 2001. Istoria tserkovnoslavianskogo iazyka v Rossii (konets XIX – XX v.). Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kultury. Krejˇcí, Jaroslav and Velímský, Vitˇezslav. 1981. Ethnic and Political Nations in Europe. London: Croom Helm. Krekoviˇc, Eduard; Mannová, Elena; and Krekoviˇcová, Eva, eds. 2005. Mýty naše slovenské. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press. Kreplin, Klaus-Dieter. 2001. Über Kaschuben. Ein Reader. www.studienstelleog.de/ download/SV.pdf, 30 Oct 2006. ˇ Kritika & Kontext. Casopis krytického myslenia. 1997. vol. 2–3. Krofta, Kamil. 1946. Dˇejiny ˇceskoslovenské. Prague: Sfinx.

Bibliography

1021

Król, Marcin. 1977. Idea narodu w polskiej my´sli konserwatywnej XIX w. przed powstaniem styczniowym (pp. 136–152). In: Janusz Go´ckowski and Andrzej Walicki, eds. Idee i koncepcje narodu w polskiej my´sli politycznej czasów porozbiorowych. Warsaw: PWN. ˇ Kubín, Josef Štefan. 1920. Slovník slovenskoˇceský (diferenciální). Ceská grafické unie. Kuˇcera, Karel and Kamiš, Adolf. 1979. Malý staroˇceský slovník. Prague: SPN. ˇ Kulísek, Vladimír. 1964. O cˇinnost a význama cˇeskoslovenské jednoty pˇred vznikem CSR. Historický ˇcasopis. vol. 3. Kultúrnost’. 2005. FILIT. Otvorená filozofická encyklopédia. http://dent.ii.fmph.uniba.sk/∼filit/ fvk/kulturnost.html, 22 Aug. Kuran. 2003. http://quranm.hypermart.net/autor.htm, 22 Dec. Kusá, Dagmar. 2005. Personal Communications. Vienna and Bratislava. September. ˇ Kuzmin, Michail. 1981. Vývoj školství a vzdˇelání v Ceskoslovensku. Prague: Academia. Łabyncew, Jurij and Szczawinska, Łarisa. 2006. Jak burzono sobór s´w. Aleksandra Newskiego (pp. 19–21). Przegla˛d Prawosławny. vol. 7, Jul. Laitin, David D. 1977. Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali Experience. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Laitin, David D. 1992. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (Ser: Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakatos, Judit et al., eds. 2005. A könyvkiadás adatai (2000–2004). Budapest: Központi statisztikai hivatal. Lakó, György, ed. 1967–1978. A magyar szókészlet finnugor elemei. Etimológiai szótár. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row. Landau, Jacob M. and Kellner-Heinkele, Barbara. 2001. Politics of Language in the ExSoviet Muslim States: Azerbayjan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. London: Hurst. Langevelde, Ab van. 1999. Bilingualism and Regional Economic Development: A Dooyeweerdian Case Study of Fryslân (Ser: Netherlands Geographical Studies and Berier Foar it Frysk, vol. 15). Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Lanstyák, István and Szabómihály, Gizella. 1996. Contact Varieties of Hungarian in Slovakia: A Contribution to their Description (pp. 111–130). International Journal of the Sociology of Language. vol. 120. Lastauskas, V. 1924. Rusiškai-gudiškas žodynas / Padruchny rasiiska-kryuski (belaruski) slounik. Kaunas: A Bako spaustve˙ and Gudu˛ Reikaiu˛ Ministerijos Lietuvoje Ieidinys. Lastouski, Vaclau. 1924. Padruchny rasiiska–kryuski (Belaruski) slounik. Kaunas: Drukarnia A Ba˛ka. Latest Population Figures for Israel. 2006. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ Society_&_Culture/newpop.html, 23 May. Latin Today: Roman Rebound. 2003. The Economist. 18 Dec. http://www.economist.com/ diversions/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2281926 Latvian Bible Society. 2004. http://www.bibelsbiedriba.lv/eng/kas%20ir%20Biibeles%20 biedr.htm, 14 Apr. Latoszek, Marek, ed. 1990. Kaszubi. Monografia socjologiczna (Ser: Socjologiczne Problemy Społeczno´sci Lokalnych). Rzeszów: Towarzystwo Naukowe Organizacji i Kierownictwa, Oddział Rzeszów. Laut, Jens Peter. 2000. Das Türkische als Ursprache? Sprachwissenschaftliche Theorien in der Zeit des erwachsenden türkischen Nationalismus (Ser: Turcologica, vol. 44). Wiessbaden: Harrassowitz.

1022 Bibliography

Le Page, Robert Brock. 1964. The National Language Question: Linguistic Problems of Newly Independent States. London: Oxford University Press. Lehr-Spławinski, ´ Tadeusz, ed. 1938–1939. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. Warsaw: Trzaska, Evert i Michalski. Lehr-Spławinski, ´ Tadeusz, ed. 1949. Chrestomatia słowianska ´ (vol. 1: Teksty południowosłowianskie) ´ (Ser: Biblioteka Studium Słowianskiego ´ Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, ´ ser C, vol. 3). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Studium Słowianskiego ´ Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego ´ and Ossolineum. Lehr-Spławinski, ´ Tadeusz. 1953. Je˛zyk polski jako współczynnik formowania sie˛ narodu polskiego (pp. 57–62). In: Pierwsza konferencja metodologiczna historyków polskich. Przemówienia, referaty, dyskusje (vol. 2). Warsaw: PWN. Leisering, Walter, ed. 2004. Historischer Welttlas. Wiesbaden: Marixverlag. Lemberg, Eugen. 1964. Nationalismus (2 vols) (Ser: rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie). Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt. Lemberg, Hans. 1993. Haben wir eine “Tschechei“, oder wie soll das Kind heissen? (pp. 106–114). Bohemia. vol. 34. Lemtsiugova, V. P. 1980. Ukrainska-belaruski slounik / Ukrains’ko-bilorus’kyi slovnik. Minsk: “Vysheishaia shkola’’. Lemtsiuhov, V. P., ed. 2003. Slounik movy ‘Nashai Nivy’ (vol. 1: A-D). Minsk: Tekhnalohiia. Lencek, Rado. 1984. The Modern Slovene Language Question: An Essay in Sociolinguistic Interpretation (pp. 297–319). In: Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt, eds. Aspects of the Slavic Langauge Question (vol. 1: Church Slavonic – South Slavic – West Slavic) (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 4-a). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Lendle, O. C. 1935. Die Schreibung der germanischen Sprachen und ihre Standardisierung. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, Ejnar Munksgaard. Lendvai, Paul. 2006. Der Ungarnaufstand 1956. Die Revolution und ihre Folgen. Munich: Bertelsmann. Lešˇcinskiene, ˙ Danute, ˙ ed. 2002. Lietuvos istorijos atlasas. Vilnius: Leidykla Briedis. Łesiów, Michał. 2000. The Polish and Ukrainian Languages: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship (pp. 396–406). In: Zvi Gitelman et al., eds. Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk. Cambridge MA: Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University (distributed by Harvard University Press). Lettrich, Jozef. 1955. History of Modern Slovakia. New York: Praeger. Leuschner, Torsten. 2004. Richard Böckh (1824–1907). Sprachenstatistik zwischen Nationalitätsprinzip und Nationalstaat (pp. 389–421). Historiographia Linguistica (Special issue: Linguistica Berolinesia). vol. 2–3. Lewaszkiewicz, Tadeusz. 1980. Panslawistyczne osobliwo´sci leksykalne S. B. Lindego i jego projekt stworzenia wspólnego je˛zyka słowianskiego. ´ Wrocław: Ossolineum. Lewaszkiewicz, Tadeusz. 1995. Łuzyczanie ˙ wobec idei wspólnego je˛zyka słowianskiego ´ (pp. 101–110). In: Tomasz Jaworski and Mieczysław Ostrowski, eds. Łuzyce ˙ w nowozytnych ˙ ´ i najnowszych dziejach Europy Srodkowej (Ser: Zielonogórskie Studia Łuzyckie, ˙ vol. 1). Zielona Góra, Poland: Verbum. Lewis, Bernard. 1963. Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire (Ser: The Centers of Civilization Series, vol. 9). Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Linde, Samuel Bogumił. 1807–1815. Słownik je˛zyka Polskiego. Warsaw: Drukarnia Xie˛zy ˙ Pijarów.

Bibliography

1023

Linde, Samuel Bogumił. 1854–1860. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (6 vols). Lemberg, Galicia, Austrain Empire: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolinskich. ´ Linek, Bernard. 1997. „Odniemczanie“ województwa s´la˛skiego w latach 1945–1950 (w s´wietle ´ ˛ski. materiałów wojewódzkich). Opole: Instytut Sla ´ ˛sku w latach 1945–1950. Opole: Linek, Bernard. 2000. Polityka antyniemiecka a Górnym Sla ´ ˛ski. Instytut Sla ´ ˛sku w latach Linek, Bernard. 2001. Próba eliminacji je˛zyka niemieckiego na Górnym Sla 1945–1950 (pp. 81–102). Przegla˛d Zachodni. vol. 1. Lins, Ulrich. 1988. Niebezpieczny je˛zyk. Warsaw: Progres. http://esperanto.pl/page.php?tid= 311179, 12 Dec 2006. List, Eveline. 1993. Das österreichische System von Sprache und Herrschaft (pp. 55–67). In: Robert Harauer, ed. Ostcharme mit Westkomfort. Beiträge zur politischen Kultur in Österreich. Vienna: Promedia. Liszka, József. 1996. Das Tauschkind-System im slowakischen Teil der Kleinen Tiefebene (pp. 58–72). Zeitschrift für Balkanologie. vol. 32. Lithuanian Bible. 2003. http://btz.lt/English/Bible, 24 Apr. Litván, György. 1999. Oszkár Jászi’s Danube Federation Theories (pp. 227–242). In: Ignác Romsics and Béla K. Király, eds. Geopolitics in the Danube Region: Hungarian Reconciliation Efforts, 1848–1998 (Ser: Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, vol. 97). Budapest: Central European University Press. Livingstone, Elizabeth A. 1977. The Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. 2000. War on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lizisowa, Maria Teresa. 2000. Je˛zyk Kodeksu Olszewskiego (1550). Z recepcji staropolskiego je˛zyka prawno-sa˛dowego w Wielkim Ksie˛stwie Litewski w szesnastym wieku. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej. Łodzinski, ´ Sławomir. 1998. Przekroczy´c własny cien. ´ Prawne, instytucjonalne oraz społeczne aspekty polityki panstwa ´ polskiego wobec mniejszo´sci w Polsce w okresie 1918–1989 (pp. 11–82). In: Bogumiła Berdychowska, ed. Mniejszo´sci narodowe w Polsce. Praktyka po 1989 roku. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe. Łodzinski, ´ Sławomir. 2005. Równo´sc´ i róznica. ˙ Mniejszo´sci narodowe w porza˛dku demokratycznym w Polsce po 1989 roku. Warsaw: Scholar. L˝ orincze, Lajos, ed. 1953. Nyelvm˝ uvelésünk f˝ obb kérdései. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. L˝ orincze, Lajos. 1959. Iskolai nyelvm˝ uvel˝ o. Budapest: Tankönyvkiado. L˝ orinczy, Éva. 1979–2002. Új magyar tájszótár (4 vols). Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Losik, Anton. 1943. Biełaruski pravapis. Minsk: Generalkommissar für Weissruthenien and Schul- und Jugendverlag / Vydaviectvo Padrauˇcnika¯ u i Literatury dla Moładzi. ´ Łossowski, Piotr. 2001. Litwa (Ser: Historie Panstw ´ Swiata w XX Wieku). Warsaw: Trio. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loza, Iurii. 1999. Ukraina. Istorychnyi atlas. 9 klas. Kyiv: Vydavnitstvo ‘Mapa’. Luˇci´c, Radovan, ed. 2002. Lexical Norm and National Language: Lexicography and language policy in South-Slavic Languages after 1989 (Ser: Die Welt der Slaven, vol. 14). Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner. Ludanyi, Andrew. 1982. The Hungarians of Transylvania (pp. 597–626). In: Béla K. Király, Peter Pastor, and Ivan Sanders, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 6: Essays on World War I: Total War and Peacemaking. A Case Study on Trianon) (Ser: Atlantic

1024 Bibliography

Studies, vol. 15; East European Monographs, vol. 105). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Ludányi, Andrew. 2003. The Fate of Hungarians in Yugoslavia: Genocide, Ethnocide or Ethnic Cleansing (pp. 575–600). In: Steven Béla Várdy and Hunt T Tooley, eds. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Boulder CO: Social Sciences Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York.) Luft, Robert. 2003. Die Grenzen des Regionalismus: Das Beispiel Mähren im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (pp. 63–87). In: Philipp. Ther, Holm Sundhaussen, and Imke Kruse, eds. Regionale Bewegnungen und Regionalismen in europäischen Zwischenräumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Ser: Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, vol. 18). Marburg: Herder-Institut. Lukacs, John. 1988. Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Łukaszenko dzieciom (p. 7). 2006. Gazeta Wyborcza. 2–3 Sep. Lukowski Jerzy and Zawadzki, Hubert. 2001. A Concise History of Poland (Ser: Cambridge Concise Histories). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynam, Edward W. 1924. The Irish Character in Print, 1571–1923. London: Oxford University Press. Łysohorsky, Óndra. 1990. Mu˚j život (pp. 6–8). Tˇešínsko. vol. 2. Lyzanec, Petro M. 1992–2003. A kárpátaljai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Machek, Václav. 1957. Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského. Prague: Nakladaˇ telství Ceskoslovenské akademie vˇed. ˇ Machek, Václav. 1968. Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského. Prague: CSAV. Mackensen, Lutz. 2005. Ursprung der Wörter. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Wiesbaden: VMA – Verlag. Ma˛czak, Antoni et al. 1996. Od plemion do Rzeczypospolitej. Naród, panstwo, ´ terytorium w dziejach Polski. Warsaw: KiW. Magaš, Branka. 2003. On Bosnianness (pp. 19–23). Nations and Nationalism. vol. 1. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1978. The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848– 1948. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1978a. Ukrainian Heritage Notes: The Language Question in Galicia. Cambridge MA: Ukrainian Studies Fund. Magocsi, Paul R. 1979. The Language Question Among the Subcarpathian Rusyns. Fairview NJ: Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1980. National Cultures and University Chairs: An Inaugural Lecture. Toronto, Ontario: Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1984. The Language Question in Nineteenth-Century Galicia (pp. 49–64). In: Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt, eds. Aspects of the Language Question (vol. 2) (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 4-b). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Magocsi Paul Robert. 1993. Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 1). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1996. A History of Ukraine. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. Magocsi, Paul Robert, ed. 1996a. A New Slavic Language Is Born: The Rusyn Literary Language of Slovakia (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 434; Classics of Carpatho-Rusyn Scholarship, vol. 8). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York).

Bibliography

1025

Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 1). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. Magocsi, Paul Robert, ed. 2004. Rusinskyi iazyk (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski and Instytut Filologii Polskiej. Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2005. History. In: Paul Robert magocsi and Ivan Pop, eds. Encyclopedia of Rusyn History and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. http://www.rusyn.org/?root=rusyns&rusyns=hist, 26 Jul. Magyar, Adorján. 1996. The Ancient Magyar Rovás. Journal of the Institute for Hungarian Studies. vol. 2. Silver Lake WI, US: Institute for Hungarian Studies (www.acronet.net/∼magyar/english/96-10/magyarad.htm). Magyar katolikus lexikon. 1993–. Budapest: Szent István Társulat. Magyar nagylexikon (19 vols). 1993–2004. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó and Magyar Nagylexikon Kiadó. Magyar statisztikai évkönyv. 1923, 1924, 1925. 1927. Budapest: Az Atheneum irodalmi és nyomadi részvénytársulat könyvnyomadája. Magyar statisztikai évkönyv. 1940. 1942. Budapest: Az Atheneum irodalmi és nyomadi részvénytársulat könyvnyomadája. Magyar statisztikai évkönyv. 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946. 1948. Budapest: Stephaneum nyomda. Magyar statisztikai évkönyv. 1993, 1994. Budapest: Központi statisztikai hivatal. Magyar statisztikai évkönyv. 2000, 2001. Budapest: Központi statisztikai hivatal. Majewicz, Alfred F. 1989. Je˛zyki s´wiata i ich klasyfikowanie. Warsaw: PWN. Major, Mark Imre. 1974. American-Hungarian Relations, 1918–1944. Astor FL: Danubian Press. Majtán, Milan, ed. 1991–2005. Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (7 vols). Bratislava: Veda. Maksimiuk, Jan. 2005. Ustava i svoja mova. Czasopis. vol. 4. http://www.slonko.com.pl/ czasopis/in.php?id=0504/2005_04_c09, 5 Jan 2007. Malá ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie (6 vols). 1984–1987. Prague: Academia. Malá encyklopédia Slovenska. 1987. Bratislava: Veda and Encyklopedický ústav Slovenskej akademi vied. Mały rocznik statystyczny. 1934. Warsaw: Główny Urza˛d Statystyczny. Mały rocznik statystyczny 1939. 1939. Warsaw: Główny Urza˛d Statystyczny. Mandelbaum, David, ed. 1963. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mandys, Pavel. 2005. Statistika knižního trhu (p. 91). Týden. vol. 18. Mannová, Elena and Holec, Roman, eds. 2000. A Concise History of Slovakia. Bratislava: Historický ústav SAV. Manowiecki, Piotr. 2006. Czechosłowacja nadal istnieje. Gazeta Wyborcza. http://serwisy. gazeta.pl/swiat/2029020,34202,3523895.html, 3 Aug. Markovi´c, Predrag. 2001. Die ‘Legitimierung’ der Königsdiktatur in Jugoslawien und die öffentliche Meinung 1929–1939 (pp. 577–632). In: Erwin Oberländer et al., eds. Autoritäre Regime in Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich: Ferdinand Schöningh. Markovich, Slobodan G. 2004. Political and Economic Heritage of Modern Serbia: Two Centuries of Convergence or Divergence Between Serbia and Western Europe? (pp. 89–124). In: Slobodan G. Markovich et al., eds. Challenges to New Democracies in the Balkans. Belgrade: Association of Fulbright Alumni of Serbia and Montenegro and Cigoja Press.

1026 Bibliography

Markowski, Andrzej, ed. 1998. Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny. Warsaw: PWN. Markowski, Andrzej and Puzynina, Jadwiga, eds. 1994. Normalizacja je˛zyka w krajach Zachodu. Warsaw: Semper. Markowski, Andrzej and Podracki, Jerzy. 1999. Problem kodyfikacji i normalizacji je˛zyka polskiego (pp. 49–62). In: Jan Mazur, ed. Polska polityka je˛zykowa na przełomie tysia˛cleci (Ser: Je˛zyk, Kultura, Społeczenstwo). ´ Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii CurieSkłodowskiej. Martel, Antoine. 1938. La langue polonaise dans les pays ruthènes, Ukraine et Russie Blanche, 1596–1667 (Ser: Travaux et mèmoires de l’Universitè de Lille. Nouvelle sèrie: Droit et lettres, vol. 20). Lille: Universitè de Lille. Martel, Philippe. 1992. Regionale Identität und nationale Kultur in Frankreich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (pp. 95–119). In: Günther Lottes, ed. Region, Nation, Eiropa. Historische Determinanten der Neugliederung eines Kontinents. (Ser: Schriftenreihe der Europa-Kolloquien im Alten Reichstag, Vol 1 and Europakolloquium im Alten Reichstag: Schriftenreihe der Europa-Kolloquien im Alten Reichstag, Vol 1). Heidelberg and Regensburg: Mittelbayer. Druck- u. Verlagsges. Martin, Bernhard. 1939. Die deutschen Mundarten. Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle & Meyer. Martin, Terry. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ser: The Wilder House Studies in Politics, History and Culture). Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Martinovi´c, Dušan J. 1994. Crna Gora u Gutenbergovoj galaksiji. Istorija crnogorskog stamparstva od kraja XV-og vijeka do 1916 g. Podgorica: Crnogorska akademija nauka i umjietnosti. Martynau, V. U., ed. 1993. Etymalahichny slounik belaruskai movy (vol. 8). Minsk: Navuka i tehnika. Marushiakova, Elena and Popov, Vesselin. 2005. The Roma – A Nation Without a State? Historical Background and Contemporary Tendencies (pp. 457–470). In: Wojciech J. Burszta, Tomasz Kamusella, and Sebastian Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms in State-Endowed and Stateless Nations (vol. 1: Europe). Poznan: ´ School of Humanities and Journalism. Marushiakova, Elena and Popov, Vesselin. 2006 [Manuscript]. Holocaust and the Gypsies: The reconstruction of the historical memory and creation of new national mythology. Marushiakova, Elena and Popov, Vesselin. 2006a. Personal E-mail Communication. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. 20 Jun. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný. 1925–1933. Prague: Ceskoslovanský Kompas. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 1). 1925. Prague: Ceskoslovanský kompas. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 2). 1926. Prague: Ceskoslovanský kompas. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 3). 1927. Prague: Ceskoslovanský kompas. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 4). 1929. Prague: Ceskoslovanský kompas. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 5). 1931. Prague: Ceskoslovanský kompas. ˇ Masaryku˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 7). 1933. Prague: Ceskoslovanský kompas. Matica slovenská. 1963. Martin: Matica slovenská. Mat’ovˇcík, Augustín et al., eds. 1999. Reprezentaˇcný biografický lexikón Slovenska. Turˇciansky Svätý Martin: Matica slovenská. Matras, Yaron. 2005. The Future of Romani: Toward a Policy of Linguistic Pluralism (pp. 31–44). Roma Rights: A Quarterly of the European Roma Rights Centre. vol. 1. Mauro, Tullio de. 1963. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. (Ser: Biblioteca di cultura moderna, vol. 585). Bari: Laterza.

Bibliography

1027

Maxwell, Alexander. 2003. ‘Literary Dialects’ in China and Slovakia: Imagining Unitary Nationality with Multiple Orthographies (pp. 129–149). International Journal of the Sociology of Language. vol. 164. Berlin and New York: Gruyter. Maxwell, Alexander. 2004. Magyarization, Language Planning, and Whorf: The Word “Uhor’’ as a Case Study in Linguistic Relativism. Multilingua. vol. 3. Maxwell, Alexander. 2005. Unintended Consequences: Language Politics and Slovak Nationalism (pp. 227–259). In: Wojciech Burszta, Tomasz Kamusella, and Sebastian Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe. Poznan: ´ Wyzsza ˙ Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i Dziennikarstwa. Maxwell, Alexander. 2006. Why the Slovak Language Has Three Dialects: A Case Study in Historical Perceptual Dialectology (pp. 385–414). Austrian History Yearbook. vol. 37, Spring, 2006. Maxwell, Alexander. 2007 [Ms]. Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czech script, and unintended nationalism. Mayenowa, Maria Renata, ed. 1966–. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego XVI wieku. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Mayenowa, Maria Renata. 1984. Aspects of the Language Question in Poland from the Middle of the Fifteenth Century to the Third Decade of the Nineteenth Century (vol. 1, pp. 337–376). In: Gerald Stone and Dean Worth, eds. The Formation of the Slavonic Literary Languages (Ser: UCLA Slavic Studies, vol. 11). Columbus OH: Slavica Publishers. Mazower, Mark. 2005. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950. New York: Knopf. McArthur, Tom, ed. 1992. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, Justin. 1997. The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923. London: Longman. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McMillin, Arnold. 1980. Belorussian (pp. 105–117). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. McMillin, Arnold. 1985. The Development of the Byelorussian Literary Lexicon in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 225–232). In: Gerald Stone and Dean Worth, eds. The Formation of the Slavonic Literary Languages (Ser: UCLA Slavic Studies, vol. 11). Columbus OH: Slavica Publishers. McMillin, Arnold B. 1977. Die Literatur der Weißrussen. A History of Byelorussian Literature: From Its Origins to the Present Day (Ser: Bausteine zur Geschichte der Literatur bei den Slawen, vol. 6). Giessen: Wilhelm Schmitz Verlag. Megiser, Hieronymus. 1744. Dictionarium quatuor linguarum: Germanicae, Latinae, Illyricae (quae Sclavonica appellatius) & Italicae, sive Heruscae. Klagenfurt: Typis Joannis Friderici Kleinmayr and Societas Jesu Colleggi. Meillet, Antoine. 1928. Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle. Paris: Payot. Melnychuk, O. S. et al., eds. 1989. Etymolohichnyi slovnyk ukrains’koi movy (vol. 3). Kyiv: Naukova dumka. Melnychuk, O. S. et al., eds. 2003. Etymolohichnyi slovnyk ukrains’koi movy (vol. 4). Kyiv: Naukova dumka.

1028 Bibliography

Menges, Karl H. 1987. Die Funktion der türkischen Sprache im Balkanraum (pp. 23–42). In: Christian Hannick, ed. Sprachen und Nationan im Balkanraum. Die historischen Bedingungen der Entstehung der heitigen Nationalsprachen. Cologne: Böhlau. Mentzel, Peter. 2000. Personal Communication. Pittsburgh PA. Mentzel, Peter. 2002. Karl Renner’s Ideas on Personal Autonomy: The Personalprinzip and the Millet System (pp. 79–91). In: Sabrina P. Ramet et al., eds. Nations and Nationalisms in East-Central Europe, 1806–1948. A Festschrift for Peter F Sugar. Bloomington IN: Slavica. Menzel, Wolfgang. 1985. Die nationale Entwicklung in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien. Von der Aufklärung bis zur Revolution 1848 (Ser: Veröffentlichunge des Sudetendeutschen Archivs in München, vol. 19). Nuremberg: Helmut Preußler Verlag. Mertelsmann, Olaf. 2006. Personal E-mail Communication. Tartu: University of Tartu. Mészáros, István. 1999. The Thousand-Year History of Schools in Hungary. Budapest: Nemzeti tankönyvkiadó. Mezihorák, František, 1994. Moravský extrémní regionalismus a pokus o Velké Slovensko (1938–1939) (Ser: Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis, Facultas Paedagogica Series Monographica, vol. 15). Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého. Miˇcátek, L’udovít Al. 1900. Differenciálny slovensko-ruský slovník s troma prílohami a Skrátˇena mluvnica slovenského jazyka s krátkym úvodom. Turˇcianský Sväty Martin: Kníhtlaˇciarskoúˇcastinárski spolok. Michna, Ewa. 1995. Łemkowie. Grupa etniczna czy naród? Cracow: Nomos. Michna, Ewa. 2004. Kwestie etniczno-narodowo´sciowe na pograniczu słowianszczyzny ´ wschodniej i zachodniej. Ruch rusinski ´ na Słowacji, Ukrainie i w Poslce (Ser: Prace Komisji Wschodnioeuropejskiej, vol. 8). Cracow: Polska Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci. Miklowicz, Anton. 2002. Kim sa˛ Pomacy? (pp. 48–56). Sprawy Polityczne. vol. 7, Sep. Mikołajczak, Aleksander Wojciech. 1998. Łacina w kulturze polskiej. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolno´sla˛skie. Mikus, Joseph A. 1973. Pride in Slovak Origin. Clevland OH: First Catholic Slovak Union. Mikuš Joseph A. and Kirschbaum, J. A. 1971. Slovakia: Historical and Cultural Background. Toronto: Slovak World Congress. Milardovi´c, And¯elko. 1998. Srednja Europa izmed¯u mita i zbilje (Ser: Europa & Mitteleuropa, vol. 3). Osjek – Zagreb – Split: Panliber. Milner-Gulland, Robin. 1997. The Russians (Ser: The Peoples of Europe). Oxford: Blackwell. Miłosz, Czesław. 1993. Historia literatury polskiej do roku 1939. Cracow: Znak. Miłosz, Czesław. 2001. Szukanie ojczyzny (Ser: Dzieła Zebrane Czesława Miłosza). Cracow: Znak. Minahan, James. 2002. Encyclopedia of Stateless Nations: Ethnic and National Groups Around the World. Westport CN: Greenwood Press. Minority Language Education in Slovakia. 2005. http://www.mercator-education.org/ infotype/webpage/view.asp?objectID=3588, 3 Sep. Miodynski, ´ Lech. 2000. Identyfikacja kulturalno-je˛zykowa Macedonczyków ´ a kod społeczny s´rodowiska wielonarodowego (pp. 195–208). In: Maria Bobrownicka, ed. Je˛zyk a tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ narodowa (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas. Miroljub, Ante Evetovic et al. 2005. The Croatian Bunjevci. http://www.hr/darko/etf/ bunjevci.html, 23 Jul. Mirga, Andrzej and Mróz, Lech. 1994. Cyganie. Odmienno´sc´ i nietolerancja. Warsaw: PWN. Mitrofanova, Anastasia V. 2004. Politizatsiia ‘pravoslavnogo mira.’ Moscow: Nauka, Diplomaticheskaia akademiiia Rossii, and Institut aktualnykh mezhdunarodnykh problem.

Bibliography

1029

Mitzka, Walther. 1962–1965. Schlesisches Wörterbuch (3 vols). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Misztal, Jan. 1990. Weryfikacja narodowo´sciowa na Ziemiach Odzyskanych. Warsaw: PWN. Mladenov, Marin Gerov et al. 1968. Bugarsko-makedonski rechnik. Skopje: Prosvetne delo and Belgrade: Nolit. Mladenovi´c, Aleksandar. 1989. Slavenosrpski jezik. Studije i clanci. Novi Sad: Knjizevna zajednica Novog Sada ‘Decje novine’. Mócsy, István. 1982. Partition of Hungary and the Origins of the Refugee Problem (pp. 491–507). In: Béla K. Király, Peter Pastor, and Ivan Sanders, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 6: Essays on World War I: Total War and Peacemaking. A Case Study on Trianon) (Ser: Atlantic Studies, vol. 15; East European Monographs, vol. 105). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Mócsy, István. 1983. War and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 12: The Effects of World War I. The Uprooted: Hungarian Refugees and their Impact on Hungary’s Domestic Politics, 1918–1921) (Ser: Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, vol. 31; East European Monographs, vol. 147). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Mojdl, Lubor. 2005. Encyklopedie písem svˇeta (vol. 1: Písma Evropy, Kavkazu a helénské oblasti). Prague: Libri. Moldovan-Romanian Dictionary by Former Communist Deputy for Sale. 2003. Moldova Azi. http://www.azi.md/news?ID=25101, 17 Aug 2004. Molnár, Miklós. 2001. A Concise History of Hungary (Ser: Cambridge Concise Histories). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monarchie. 2007. http://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monarchie, 21 Oct. Mønnesland, Svein. 1997. Lande ohne Wiederkehr. Ex-Jugoslawien: Die Wurzeln des Krieges. Klagenfurt: Wieser. Montenegrin Language. 2004. http://www.Montenegro.org/language.html, 31 Jan. Montenegrin Language. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegrin_language, 25 Apr. Morison, Stanley. 1972. Politics and Script: Aspects of Authority and Freedom in the Development of Graeco-Latin Script from the Sixth Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. (The Leyell Lectures 1957, edited and completed by Nicolas Barker). Oxford: Clarendon. Moritsch, Andreas. 1994. Nationalität und Schule. Überlegungen am Beispiel Kärtnens (pp. 249–257). In: Valeria Heuberger et al., eds. Nationen, Nationalitäten, Minderheiten. Probleme des Nationalismus in Jugoslawien, Ungarn, Rumänien, der Tschechoslowakei, Bulgarien, Polen, der Ukraine, Italien und Österreich 1945–1990 (Ser: Schrieftenreihe des Österreichischen Ost- und Südosteuropa-Instituts, vol. 22). Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik and Munich: R. Oldenboug Verlag. Moszynski, ´ Leszek. 2006. Wste˛p do filologii słowianskiej. ´ Warsaw: PWN. Motyl, Alexander J., ed. 2001. Encyclopedia of Nationalism (vol. 2: Leaders, Movements, and Concepts). San Diego CA: Academic Press. Motýl, Ivan. 2006. Slezský Babylon (pp. 36–41). Týden. vol. 22, 26 May. ´ Mróz, Lech. 1971. Cyganie (Ser: Swiatowid). Warsaw: KiW. Müller, Andreas. 2005. Berg Athos. Geschichte einer Mönchsrepublik (Ser: Wissen). Munich: C. H. Beck. Müller, Helmut M. 1996. Schlaglichter der deutschen Geschichte. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.

1030 Bibliography

Muller, Henri F. and Taylor, Pauline. 1932. A Chrestomathy of Vulgar Latin. Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas and London: D. C. Heath and Company. Münz, Teodor. 1994. Catholic Theologians and the National Questions (1939–1945) (pp. 93–104). In: Tibor Pichler and Jana Gašpariková, eds. Language, Values and the Slovak Nation (Ser: Slovak Philosophical Studies, vol. 1). Washington DC: Paideia Press and The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Musil, Jiˇrí, ed. 1995. The End of Czechoslovakia. Budapest, London, and New York: Central European University Press. Nabert, Heinrich. 1994. Die Verbreitung der Deutschen in Europa 1844–1888 (Ser: Schriftenreihe, vol. 12). Ahlhorn: Bund für deutsche Schrift und Sprache. Nadson, Aleksandr. 2006. Personal Communication. London: Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library. 16 Jan. Names of the Greeks. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_%28name%29, 24 May. Národnostní složení obyvatelstva. 2005. Prague: Czech Statistical Office. http://www.czso.cz/ csu/edicniplan.nsf/publ/4114-03, 4 Sep. National Awekening. 2006. http://www.estonica.org/eng/prindi.html?menyy_id=97& kateg=43&alam=61, 11 Apr. National Yiddish Book Center. 2007. http://yiddishbookcenter.org/+6, 26 Feb. Naumann, Friedrich. 1915. Mitteleuropa. Berlin: G. Reimer. Naumann, Friedrich. 1916. Central Europe. London: King. Naylor, Kenneth E. 1980. Serbo-Croatian (pp. 65–84). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Neˇcas, Jaroslav. 1960. Slovensko-ˇceský slovníˇcek. Prague: Kniha. Neˇcas, Jaroslav. 1964. Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdilných výrazu˚. Prague: SPN Neˇcas, Jaroslav and Kopecký, Miloslav. 1964 (2nd edn 1989). Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇceskoslovenský slovník rozdílných výrazu˚. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelstvi. Nehring, W. 1879. Über die Namen für Polen und Lechen (pp. 463–479). Archiv f ür Slavische Philologie. vol. 4. Nekvapil, Jiˇrí. 2000. Sprachmanagement und Minderheiten in der Tschechischen Republik (pp. 683–699). In: Lew N. Zybatow, ed. Sprachwandel in der Slavia. Die slavischen Sprachen an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert. Ein internationales Handbuch (Ser: Linguistik International, vol. 4, pt 2). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Nemes, Robert. 2007. Personal E-Mail Communication. Hamilton NY: Colgate University. 27 Feb. Németh, Julius. 1970. Die türkische Sprache in Ungarn im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert. Amsterdam: Verlag B. R. Grüner. Neudorfl, Marie L. 1992. Slovakia in the Czech Press at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (pp. 38–61). In: John Morison, ed. The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. Neustupný, J. V. 1989. Language Purism as a Type of Language Correction (pp. 211–224). In: Björn H. Jernudd and Michael J. Shapiro, eds. The Politics of Language Purism (Ser: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 54). Berlin and New York: Mouton. Niemiecko-polski słownik wyrazów prawniczych i administracyjnych wydany staraniem C K Towarzystwa Naukowego Krakowskiego. 1862. Cracow: Drukarnia C. K. Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. ´

Bibliography

1031

Nitsch, Kazimierz. 1911. Mowa ludu polskiego. Cracow: L. Frommer and Warsaw: E. Wende. Nitsch, Kazimierz. 1920. Granice panstwa ´ a granice je˛zyka polskiego (pp. 97–101). Je˛zyk Polski. vol. 4. Nitsch, Kazimierz. 1921. Granice panstwa ´ a granice je˛zyka polskiego (pp. 41–46). Je˛zyk Polski. vol. 5. Nitsch, Kazimierz and Kara´s, Mieczysław, eds. 1959–1970. Mały atlas gwar polskich (13 fascicles). Wrocław: Ossolineum. Nocentini, Alberto. 2002. L’Europa linguistica: Profilo storico e tipologico. Florence: Le Monnier. Nolte, Claire E. 2002. The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ˇ Novák, Karel. 1934. Slovník k ˇceským spisu˚m Husovým. Prague: Ceská akademie vˇed a umˇení. Novák, L’udovit. 1980. K najstarším dejinám slovenskáho jazyka. Bratislava: Veda vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akadámie vied. ˇ Nové vydání pravidel ˇceského pravopisu. Zpráva pro diskusi. 1956. Prague: CSAV. Nowa encyklopedia powszechna. 1995–1996. Warsaw: PWN. Nowak, Krzysztof. 1995. Ruch kozdoniowski ˙ na Šla˛sku Cieszynskim ´ (pp. 26–45). In: Maria Wanda Wanatowicz, ed. Regionalizm a separatyzm – historia i współczesno´sc´ (Ser: Prace ´ ˛skiego. Naukowe, vol. 1492). Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sla Nowy Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego. 1873 [1866]. Berlin: Trowitzsch & Sohn. Nurmi, Ismo. 1999. Slovakia: A Playground for Nationalism and National Identity (Ser: Bibliotheca Historica, vol. 42). Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura. Nyirady, Kenneth. 2006. Personal E-mail Communication. Washington DC: Library of Congress. 5 Sep. O’Boyle, L. 1970. The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe 1800–1850 (pp. 471–495). Journal of Modern History. vol. 4. Obracht-Prondzynski, ´ Cezary. 2007a. Kim sa˛ Kaszubi? Nowe tendencje w badaniach społecznych. Gdansk: ´ Instytut Kaszubski. Obracht-Prondzynski, ´ Cezary. 2007b. The Kashubs Today: Culture – Language – Identity. Gdansk: ´ Instytut Kaszubski. Ogonowski, Jerzy. 2000. Uprawnienia je˛zykowe mniejszo´sci narodowych w Rzeczypopsolitej Polskiej, 1918–1939. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe. Ogrodzinski, ´ Wincenty. 1946. Dzieje pi´smiennictwa s´la˛skiego (vol. 1). Katowice and ´ ˛ski. Wrocław: Instytut Sla Okuka, Miloš. 1983. Jezik i politika (Ser: Politiˇcka biblioteka). Sarajevo: OOUR Izdavaˇcka djelatnost. Okuka, Miloš. 1998. Eine Sprache – viele Erben. Sprachpolitik als Nationalisierungsinstrument in Ex-Jugoslawien (Ser: Österreichisch-bosnische Bezihungen, vol. 4). Klagenfurt, Vienna, Lubljana and Sarajevo: Wieser. Okuka, Miloš. 2002. Montenegrin vs. Serbian or: Is There a Separate Montenegrin Language at all? (pp. 38–48). In: Radovan Luˇci´c, ed. Lexical Norm and National Language: Lexicography and Language Policy in South-Slavic Languages After 1989 (Ser: Die Welt der Slaven, vol. 14). Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner. Okuka, Miloš and Krenn, Gerald, eds. 2002. Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens (vol. 10: Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens). Klagenfurt: Wieser. Olender, Maurice. 2002. The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites. A Match Made in Heaven. New York: Other Press.

1032 Bibliography

Om gotisk håndskrift i Norge. 2004. http://www.hist.uib.no/gotisk/gotiskinorge.htm, 18 March. Omerdi´c, Fatima. 2006–2007. Biblografija štampanih djela arapskim pismom bosanskohercegovaˇckih autora u Gazi Husrev-begovoj biblioteci (pp. 309–361). Anali Gazi Husrev-begove biblioteke. vol. 25–26. Sarajevo: Gazi Husrev-begove biblioteke. Ondrejoviˇc, Slavomír. 1999. Z výskumu jazykovej a etno-jazykovej situácie Slovákov v Rakúsku (pp. 45–59). In: Slavomír Ondrejoviˇc, ed. Slovenˇcina v kontaktoch a konfliktoch s innými jazykami (Ser: Sociolinguistica Slovaca, vol. 4). Bratislava: Veda. Ong, Walter. 1992 [1982]. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London: Routledge. Oommen, T. K. 1997. Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity: Reconciling Competing Identities. Cambridge: Polity. Oravcová, Marianna. 1994. The Ethnic and Cultural Dimension of National Emancipation: The Evocation of the Slovak Nation (pp. 9–24). In: Tibor Pichler and Jana Gašpariková, eds. Language, Values and the Slovak Nation (Ser: Slovak Philosophical Studies, vol. 1). Washington DC: Paideia Press and The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Orel, Vladimir. 1998. Albanian Etymological Dictionary. Leiden: Brill. Orło´s, Teresa Zofia. 1993. Tysia˛c lat czesko-polskich zwia˛zków je˛zykowych / Tisíc let ˇceskopolských jazykových vztahu˚. Cracow: Universitas. Orłowski, Hubert. 1998. Polnische Wirtschaft. Nowoczesny niemiecki dyskurs o Polsce. Olsztyn: Borussia. Ormis, Jan V., ed. 1973. O reˇc a národ. Slovenské národné obrany z rokov 1832–1848. Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akademié vied. Osadchenko, Ion. 1983. Literaturnye sviazi Moldavii i Rosii v XIX v. Kishinev: Literatura Artistike. Ostler, Nicholas. 2005. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. New York: HarperCollins. Ostrówka, Małgorzata. 2005. Je˛zyk polski w Wilekim Ksie˛stwie Litewskim (pp. 103–116). In: Maria Teresa Lizisowa, ed. Kultura i je˛zyki Wielkiego Ksie˛stwa litewskiego (Ser: Biblioteka Tradycji, vol. 30). Cracow: Collegium Columbinum. Ostrowski, Wiktor. 1975. About the Origin of the Name ‘White Russia’. London: W. Ostrowski. Osuský, Stephen. 1943. Beneš and Slovakia. London: Pravda. Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný. 1888–1909. Prague: J. Otto. Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 6). 1893. Prague: J. Otto. Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný (vol. 17). 1901. Prague: J. Otto. Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby (vol. 5, pt 2). 1939. Prague: Novina. Ottu˚v slovník nauˇcný nové doby (vol. 6, pt 1). 1940. Prague: Novina. Otwinowska, Barbara. 1974. Je˛zyk – naród – kultura. Antecedencje i motywy renesansowej my´sli o je˛zyku (Ser: Studia Staropolskie, vol. 44). Wrocław, Warsaw, Cracow and Gdansk: ´ Ossolineum. Ouˇredník, Patrik. 2005. Šmírbuch jazyka ˇceského. Slovník nekonvenˇcnì ˇceštiny. Prague: Paseka. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://dictionary. oed.com. Pâcli¸sanu, Zenobius. 1985. Hungary’s Struggle to Annihilate Its National Minorities: Based on Secret Hungarian Documents. Miami Beach FL: Romanian Historical Studies. Palacky, Franz (Palacký, Frantíšek). 1836. Geschichte von Böhmen (vol. 1: Die Urgeschichte und die Zeit der Herzoge in Böhmen bis zum Jahre 1197). Prague: Kronberger und Weber.

Bibliography

1033

ˇ Palacký, František. 1854. Dˇejiny národu ˇceskeho w Cechach a na Morawˇe (vol. 1, pt 2: Od roku 1125 do 1253). Prague: Knihkupectwo J. G. Kalve. Palickar, Stephen Jospeh. 1948. Slovakia: From Hungarian Despotism to Atheistic Czech Communism. Cambridge MA: The Hampshire Press. Palkowitsch, Georg. 1820–1821. Böhmisch-deutsch-lateinisches Wörterbuch mit Beyf ügung der den Slowaken und Mähren eigenen Ausdrücke und Redensarten [. . .] (2 vols). Prague: In der Fürstbischöflichen Buchdruckerey (vol. 1) and Preßburg: Gedruckt bey den Belnapschen Erben. Pallas, Peter Simon. 1786. Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa (vol. 1). St Petersburg: Typis Iohannis Caroli Schnoor. Palmowski, Jan. 2004. Building an East German Nation: The Construction of a Socialist Heimat, 1945–1961 (pp. 365–399). Central European History. vol. 3. Pałys, Piotr. 1997. Kłodzko, Racibórz i Głubczyce w stosunkach polsko-czechosłowackich w latach 1945–1947. Opole: By the Author. Panochko, Mykhailo. 1999. Slovnyk – dovidnyk sliv iz literoiu G. Lviv: Kalvariia. Panzer, Baldur. 1999. Die slavischen Sprachen in Gegenwart und Geschichte. Sprachstrukturen und Verwandschaft. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris and Vienna: Peter Lang. Pápay, József. 1929. A finnugor népek és nyelvek ismertetése. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia. Pascu, Stefan. 1982. A History of Transylvania. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Paška, Laco. 1968. Žiadosti slovenského národa, 1848–1968. Bratislava: Osvetový ústav for Matica slovenská. Patten, Alan. 2006. The Humanist Roots of Linguistic Nationalism (pp. 223–262). History of Political Thought. vol. 2, Summer. Pauliny, Eugen. 1971. Dejiny spisovnej slovenˇciny (vol. 1: Od zaˇciatkov až po L’udovíta Štúra). Bratislava: Slovenské pedagogické nakladatel’stvo. Peciar, Štefan, ed. 1953. Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu. Bratislava: Slovenská akademia vied. Peciar, Štefan. 1959–1968. Slovník slovenského jazyka (6 vols). Bratislava: Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej akadémie vied. Pedaniuk, M. et al., eds. 1965. Ukrainska knyga. Kyiv and Kharkiv: Redaktsiino-vydavnychii viddil knyzhkovoi palaty URSR. Pedersen, Vald. 1959. Dansk bogtypografi, 1845–1958. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Pelikán, Jan et al. 2004. Dˇejiny Srbska (Ser: Dˇejiny státu˚). Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Pete, I. 1988. A magyar nyelv állami változatai (Kárpátukrán változat) (pp. 779–789). In: Jen˝ o Kiss and László Sz˝ uts, eds. A magyar nyelv rétegz˝ odése. Budapest: Akademiai kiadó. ˇ Petr, Jan, ed. 1986. Casopis Ma´cicy Serbskeje. Zitschrift der Gesellschaft Ma´cica Serbska (vol. 1: Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft). Bautzen: VEB Domowina Verlag. Petro, Peter. 1995. A History of Slovak Literature. Montreal, Kingston, London and Buffalo: McGill-Queens University Press. Picchio, Riccardo. 1980. Church Slavonic (pp. 1–35). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Picchio, Riccardo. 1999. Wskazówki do studiów porównawczych nad kwestia˛ je˛zyków słowianskich ´ (pp. 89–121). In: Riccardo Picchio, ed. Studia z filologii słowianskiej ´ i polskiej (Ser: Rozprawy Wydziału Filologicznego, vol. 72). Cracow: Polska Akademia Umijeje˛tno´sci.

1034 Bibliography

Pichler, Tibor. 1994. The Idea of Slovak Language-Based Nationalism (pp. 35–46). In: Tibor Pichler and Jana Gašpariková, eds. Language, Values and the Slovak Nation (Ser: Slovak Philosophical Studies, vol. 1). Washington DC: Paideia Press and The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Pintér, Jen˝ o. 1939. Magyar nyelvvéd˝ o könyv. Budapest: Sarkany Ny. Pinto, Vivian. 1980. Bulgarian (pp. 37–52). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Pipa, Arshi. 1989. The Politics of Language in Socialist Albania. Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press). Píšová, D. 1997. Výuka cˇeštiny v rakouské monarchii od poloviny 18. do poloviny 19. stoleti (pp. 92–97). Naše ˇreˇc. vol. 80. Pisowicz, Andrzej. 2000. Ormianie polscy. Problem s´wiadomo´sci narodowej a kwestia je˛zyka (pp. 135–142). In: Maria Bobrownicka, ed. Je˛zyk a tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ narodowa (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas. Piwtorak, Hryhorij. 2006. Ukrainsko-polskie ´ relacje etniczne i je˛zykowe na przestrzeni wieków (pp. 13–18). Studia Polsko-Ukrainskie. ´ vol. 1. Plaˇcek, Vilém. 2000. Prajzáci aneb k osdu˚m Hluˇcínska, 1742–1960. Hluˇcín: Kulturné a vydˇelavci spoleˇcnost’ Hluˇcínsko i Kravˇre and Zámecké muzeum. Pleasant Fiction, A: The Human Rights Situation of Roma in Macedonia. 1998. (Ser: Country Reports Series, vol. 7). Budapest: European Roma Rights Centre. Poccetti, Paolo et al. 2005. Eine Geschichte der lateinischen Sprache. Ausformung, Sprachgebrauch, Kommunikation. Tübingen and Basel: A. Francke Verlag. Poganski, ´ Edward, ed. 1996. Nowy słownik ortograficzny PWN wraz z zasadami pisowni i interpunkcji. Warsaw: PWN. Polanski, ´ Kazimierz. 1980. Sorbian (Lusatian) (pp. 229–246). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Polenakovik, Haralampie. 1989. Niklutsite na noavata makedonska knizhevnost. Skopje: Makedonska kniga. Polish Encyclopaedia. 1922. (vol. III: Economic Life of Poland). Geneva: Atar and the Polish National Committee of America. Politikos & geofusikos khartis Elladas. 1999. Athenes: Ellinoekdotiki. Pop, Ivan. 2005. Podkarpatská Rus (Ser: Struˇcné historie státu˚). Prague: Libri. Pop, Ivan. 2005a. Laborets’. http://www.rusyn.org/?root=rusyns&rusyns=hist&article=114, 21 Aug. Pop, Ivan. 2005b. Dˇejiny Podkarpatské Rusi v datech. Prague: Libri. Pop, Ivan Ivanovich. 2001. Entsiklopedia Podkarpatskoi Pusi. Uzhgorod: Izdatelstvo V. Padiaka. Popiołek, Barbara. 2005. Je˛zyk serbski na przełomie wieków. In: Maria Da˛browskaPartyka, ed. W poszukiwaniu nowego kanonu. Reinterpretacje tradycji kulturalnej w krajach postjugosłowiansakich ´ po 1995 roku. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego. ´ Popularna encyklopedia powszechna. 1994–1998. Cracow: Fogra. Population and Housing Census, May 26, 2001: Basic data. 2005. Bratislava: Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic. http://www.statistics.sk/webdata/english/census2001/tab/int2. pdf, 4 Sep.

Bibliography

1035

Population and Housing Census of Bhutan, 2005. 2006. http://www.bhutancensus.gov.bt/ index.htm, 21 Aug. Porák, Jaroslav. 1979. Chrestomatie k vývoji ˇceského jazyka (13.-18. století). Prague: Státni pedagogické nakladatelství. Porter, Brian A. 2000. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth Century Poland. New York: Oxford University Press. Poulton, Hugh. 2003. Macedonians and Albanians as Yugoslavs (pp. 115–134). In: Dejan Djoki´c, ed. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992. Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press and London: Hurst. Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu. 1993. Prague: Academia. Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu s abecednim seznamem slov a tvaru˚. 1941. Prague: Školní nakladˇ atelství pro Cechy a Moravu. Prawidla ˇceského prawopisu, praktickými pˇrijklady wyswˇetlená, pro uˇcitele ˇceských sskol, zwlásstˇe pro kandidáty uˇradu uˇcitelského. 1846. Prague: Cjs. král. sklad normálnjch sskolnjch knih. Pražák, Albert. 1950. Dˇejiny slovenské literatury. Prague: Melantrich. Prazmowska, ˙ Anita J. 2004. Civil War in Poland, 1942–1948 (Ser: Studies in Russia and East Europe). Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Prel, Max Freiherr du. 1942. Das Generalgouvernement. Würzburg: Konrad Triltsch Verlag. Preston, Dennis R. 1993. Folk Dialectology (pp. 333–338). In: Dennis R. Preston, ed. American Dialect Research. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Gruyter. Pribilla, Marco. 2001. The Situation in Vojvodina. The Eurasian Politician. vol. 3. http://www.cc.jyu.fi/∼aphamala/pe/issue3/vajdasag.htm, 31 Jul. Price, Glanville, ed. 1998. Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Prifti, Peter R. 1978. Socialist Albania Since 1944: Domestic and Foreign Developments. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Prinz, Friedrich. 1993. Böhmen und Mähren (Ser: Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas). Berlin: Siedler. Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského. 1935–1937. Prague: Státní nakladatelství, Školní nakladatelství and SPN. ˇ Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského. 1937–1957. Prague: Statní nakladatelství and Ceská akademia vˇed a umˇení. ˇ Pˇríruˇcní slovník nauˇcný (4 vols). 1962–1967. Prague: Nakladatelství Ceskoslovenské akademie vˇed. Pritsak, Omeljan. 1984. A Historical Perspective on the Ukrainian Language Question (pp. 1–8). In: Riccardo Picchio and Harvey Goldblatt, eds. Aspects of the Language Question (vol. 2) (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 4-b). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Prochácka, Peter. 1995. The Magyar Minority in the Context of the Slovak Nationality Policy (Myth and Reality) (pp. 131–145). In: Števˇcek, Pavol. ed. Slovaks & Magyars: SlovakMagyar Relations in Central Europe. Bratislava: Správa kultúrnych zariadení MK SR pre Ministerstvo kultúry Slovenskej republiky. Prodan, D. 1971. Supplex Libellus Valachorum, Or the Political Struggle of the Romanians in Transylvania During the 18th Century (Ser: Bibliotheca Historica Romaniae, vol. 8). Bucharest: Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Protektorát. 60 let od konce války (insert). 2005. Lidové noviny. 2 Apr. Przyłubski, Feliks. 1955. Opowie´sc´ o Lindem i jego słowniku. Warsaw: WP. Publishing Market Watch (Sectoral Report 2: Book publishing). 2004. Brussels: European Commission, Enterprise Directorate-General.

1036 Bibliography

Puttkamer, Joachim von. 2004. Kein europäischer Sonderfall. Ungarns Nationalitätenproblem im 19. Jahrhundert und die jüngere Nationalismusforschung (pp. 84–98). In: Márta Fata, ed. Das Ungarnbild der deutschen Historiographie (Ser: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für donauschwäbische Geschichte und Landeskunde, vol. 13), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Pynsent, Robert B. 1994. Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality. Budapest, London and New York: Central European University Press. Pynsent, Robert B. and Kanikova, S. I., eds. 1993. The Everyman Companion to East European Literature. London: Dent. Qarai, Ali Qull. 2004. The Quran and Its Translators: A Review Article. http://www.quran. org.uk/ieb_quran_translators.htm, 12 Feb. ˇ Ráˇcek, Blažej. 1933. Ceskoslovenské dˇejiny. Prague: Ladislav Kuncíˇr. Racheva, Mariia et al., eds. 2002. Bulgarski etimologichen rechnik (vol. 6). Sofia: Akademichno izdatelstvo „Prof. Marin Drinov“. Racial Minorities in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, The. 1922. Prague: Printing Office Politika. Rapant, Daniel. 1947. Ilegálna mad’arizácia (Ser: Spisy Historického odboru Matice slovenskej, vol. 9). Turˇciansky Svätý Martin: Matica slovenská. Raport. 2005. Raport: 168 tys. Polaków zarejestrowało sie˛ do pracy w Wielkiej Brytanii. Gazeta Wyborcza. 23 Nov. http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,53621,3030210. html. Rada, Ivan et al., eds. 1995. Dˇejiny zemí Koruny ˇceské (vol. 1). Prague and Litomyšl: Paseka. R˘ adut‚ iu, Aurel and Gyémánt, Ladislau. 1975. Supplex Libelus Valachorum în variantele românes‚ti de la S‚chei (Ser: Testimonia). Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia. Rahner, Hugo. 1986. Ko´sciół i panstwo ´ we wczesnym Chrze´scijanstwie. ´ Warsaw: Pax. Rajkiewicz, Antoni. 1997. Sytuacja demograficzna (pp. 9–24). In: Antoni Rajkiewicz, ed. Społeczenstwo ´ polskie w latach 1989–1995/96. Zagadnienia polityki społecznej. Warsaw: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. ˇ ˇ Rak, Jíˇri. 1994. Bývali Cechové. Ceske historické mýty a stereotypy. Prague: Nakladatelství H&H. Rank, Josef. 1920. Allgemeines Handwörterbuch der böhmischen und deutschen Sprache. Prague, Vienna and Leipzig: A Hase. Rappaport, Emil Stanisław. 1946. Polska jako panstwo ´ jednonarodowe. My´sl Współczesna. July. Raun, Toivo U. 2001. Estonia and the Estonians (Ser: Studies of Nationalities). Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University. Raun, Toivo U. 2003. Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Estonian Nationalism Revisited (pp. 129–147). Nations and Nationalism. vol. 1. Reban, Milan J. 1981. Czechoslovakia: The New Federation (pp. 228–242). In: George Klein and Milan J. Reban, eds. The Politics of Ethnicity in Eastern Europe. New York: Columbia University Press. Redgate, A. E. 1998. The Armenians (Ser: The Peoples of Europe). Oxford UK and Malden MA: Blackwell. Reichan, Jerzy; Kara´s, Mieczysław; and Urbanczyk, ´ Stanisław, eds. (current editor: Joanna Okoniowa). 1977–. Słownik gwar polskich. Wrocław: Ossolineum (current publisher: Cracow: PAN IJP). Reinfeld, Barbara K. 1982. Karel Havlíˇcek (1821–1856): A National Leader of the Czech Renascance (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 98). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York).

Bibliography

1037

Reiter, Norbert. 1984. Gruppe, Sprache, Nation (Ser: Balkanologische Veröffentlichungen, vol. 9). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz and West Berlin: Osteuropa-Institut an der Freien universität Berlin. ˇ Rejzek, Jiˇrí. 2001. Ceský etymologický slovník. Voznice: Leda. Remnek, Miranda Beaven, ed. 1991. Books in Russia and the Soviet Union (Ser: Publishing, Bibliography, Libraries, and Archives in Russia and Eastern Europe, vol. 3). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ˇ ˇ Repa, Milan. 2001. Moravané nebo Ceši? Vývoj ˇceského národního vˇedomí na Moravˇe v 19. století. Brno: Doplnˇek. Results of the 2001 Census. 2001. Budapest: Office for Nationals and Ethnic Minorities. Révai, Miklós. 1803. Grammatica Hungarica (2 vols). Pest: M. Trattner. Révai nagy lexikona. Az ismeretek enciklopédiája (21 vols). 1911–1935. Budapest: Révai. Riabczuk, Mykoła. 2002. Od Małorosji do Ukrainy. Cracow: Universitas. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. 1959. Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Richter, Helmut. 2003. A Short History of the German Language. http://www.lrzmuenchen.de/∼hr/lang/dt-hist.htm. Richter, Michael. 1982. Die Sprachenpolitik Karls der Großen (pp. 412–437). Sprachenwissenschaft. vol. 7. Riedlmayer, Andras. 2004. Personal E-Mail Communication. Cambridge MA: Harvard University. 6 Apr. Rieger, František. 1862. Slovník nauˇcný (vol. 2). Prague: I. L. Kober. Riis, Carsten. 2002. Religion, Politics, and Historiography in Bulgaria (Ser: Eastern European Monographs, vol. 608). Boulder CO: Eastern European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Rimmele, Eva. 1996. Sprachenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich vor 1914 (Ser: Münchner Studien zur neueren und neuesten Geschichte, vol. 17). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Ripka, Ivor, ed. 1991. Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu. Bratislava: Veda. Ripka, Ivor. 1993. Some Aspects of the Relationship Between Czech and Slovak (pp. 276–285). In: Eva Eckert, ed. Varieties of Czech: Studies in Czech Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Rizner, L’udovít V. 1929–1934. Bibliografia písomníctva slovenského na spôsob slovníka od najstarších ˇcias do konca r. 1900 (6 vols). Turˇciansky Sv Martin: Matica slovenská. Robert, K. 1988. 350 aastat trükikunsti Tallinnas. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat. Rocznik statystyczny 1955. 1956. Warsaw: GUS. Rocznik statystyczny 1960. 1960. Warsaw: GUS. Rocznik statystyczny 1965. 1965. Warsaw: GUS. Rocznik statystyczny 1995. 1995. Warsaw: GUS. Rocznik statystyczny 2002 Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej/ Statistical Yerabook of the Republic of Poland 2002. 2002. Warsaw: GUS. Rodkiewicz, Witold. 1998. Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Provinces of the Empire (1863–1905). Lublin: Scientific Society of Lublin. Rogall, Joachim. 1993. Die Deutschen im Posener Land und im Mittelpolen (Ser: Studienbuchreihe der Stiftung Ostdeutscher Kulturrat, vol. 3). Munich: Langen Müller. Rogall, Joachim. 2000. Die Deutschen in Polen’ (pp. 4–9). Informationen zur politischen Bildung. vol. 2, No. 267. Rogers, Henry. 2005. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach (Ser: Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics). Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Rolková, Natália, ed. 2004. Desat’roˇcie Slovenskej republiky. Martin: Matica Slovenská.

1038 Bibliography

Romanowski, Andrzej. 2000. Dylematy je˛zykowe Białorusinów w przeszło´sci i dzi´s (pp. 123–134). In: Maria Bobrownicka, ed. Je˛zyk a tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ narodowa (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas. Romero, Elena. 1992. La creación literaria en lengua sefardí. Madrid: Mapfre. Rorty, Richard M., ed. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rospond, Stanisław. 1984. Słownik etymologiczny miast i gmin PRL. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Rotenstreich, Nathan. 1974. Volksgeist (pp. 491–496). In: Philip P. Wiener, ed. The Dictionary of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (vol. 4). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv4-66. Rothschild, Joseph. 1977. East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 9). Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press. ˇ Rous, Jan. 1979. Krása a význam ˇceské knihy. Ceský knihtisk od prvotisku˚ k secesní knize ve sbírkách Umeleckopru˚myslového muzea v Praze. Prague: Umeleckopu˚myslové muzeum ve spolupráci se Stˇredoˇceskou galerií v Praze. Roy, Olivier. 2000. The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. New York: New York University Press. Rumanová, Lidie. 2005. Chcu byˇc enem Prajz. Lidové básnˇe. Kravaˇre. Rusinow, Dennison. 1994. Minorities in Domestic Politics: Yugoslavia (pp. 71–79). In: Valeria Heuberger et al., eds. Nationen, Nationalitäten, Minderheiten. Probleme des Nationalismus in Jugoslawien, Ungarn, Rumänien, der Tschechoslowakei, Bulgarien, Polen, der Ukraine, Italien und Österreich 1945–1990 (Ser: Schrieftenreihe des Österreichischen Ost- und Südosteuropa-Instituts, vol. 22). Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik and Munich: R. Oldenboug Verlag. Rusinow, Dennison. 2003. The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia (pp. 11–26). In: Dejan Djoki´c, ed. Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992. Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press and London: Hurst. Russification of Finland. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Finland, 2 Aug. Ruthenians in Slovakia Fighting for Their Rights. 1997. http://www.lemko.org/rusyn/ctk. html, 3 Sep 2005. Ružiˇcka, Josef and Krajˇcoviˇc, Rudolf, eds. 1967. Kultúra spisovenj slovenˇciny. Bratislava: Vudavatel’stvo Slovenskej Akadámie vied. Rychlik, Jan. 1995. From Autonomy to Federation, 1938–1968 (pp. 180–200). In: Jiˇrí Musil, ed. The End of Czechoslovakia. Budapest, London, and New York: Central European University Press. ˇ a Slováci ve 20. století. Cesko-slovenské ˇ Rychlík, Jan. 1998. Ceši vztahy 1945–1992. Bratislava: Academic Electronic Press and Prague: Ústav T. G. Masaryka. Rychlík, Jan and Kouba, Miroslav. 2003. Dˇejiny Makedonie (Ser: Dˇejiny státu˚). Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Ryznar, Eliska and Croucher, Murlin. 1989. Books in Czechoslovakia: Past and Present (Ser: Publishing, Bibliography, Libraries, and Archives in Russia and Eastern Europe, vol. 2). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Rzetelska-Fleszko, Ewa. 1993. Łuzyczanie ˙ w Niemczech (pp. 135–152). Sprawy Narodowo´sciowe. vol. 2. ˇ Šafaˇrjk, Josef Pawel. 1837. Slowanské strožitnosti.Prague: Ceske museum. Sahanowicz, Hienad´z. 2002. Historia Białorusi do konca ´ XVIII wieku (Ser: Dzieje Europy ´ ´ Srodkowo-Wschodniej). Lublin: Instytut Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej.

Bibliography

1039

Sakson, Andrzej. 1990. Mazurzy – społeczno´sc´ pogranicza. Poznan: ´ Instytut Zachodni. Sándor, Anna. 2004. A Nyitra-vidéki magyar nyelvjárások atlasza. Bratislava: Kalligram. Sapir, Edward. 1963. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (edited by David Mandelbaum). Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Sarbiewski, Mathiae Casimri. 1892. Poemata omnia. Editio omnium, quae adhuc prodierant, longe plenissima. Staraviesiae (Starawie´s), Galicia: Collegium S. J. Šatava, Leoš. 1994. Národnostní menšiny v Evropˇe. Encyklopedická pˇríruˇcka. Prague: Ivo Želazný. Sautman, Barry. 2001. Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism in China (pp. 95–124). The Journal of Asian Studies. vol. 1. Sawaniewsko-Mochowa, Zofia. 2002. Ze studiów nad socjolektem drobnej szlachty kowienskiej ´ XIX wieku. Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Akademii Bydgoskiej im. Kazimierza Wilekiego. Saxonberg, Steven. 2003. The Czech Republic Before the New Millennium: Politics, Parties and Gender (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 637). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Sayer, Derek. 1996. The Language of Nationality and the Nationality of Language: Prague 1780–1920 (pp. 164–210). Past and Present. vol. 153, Nov. Sayer, Derek. 1998. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Scaglione, Aldo, ed. 1984. The Emergence of National Languages (Ser: Speculum Artium). Ravenna: Longo Editore. Schaff, Philipp. 2004. Bible Versions. http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc02/htm/iv. v.lxiv.htm, 24 Apr. Schenker, Alexander M. 1980. Polish (pp. 195–210). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Schenker, Alexander M. and Stankiewicz, Edward, eds. 1980. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Schiewe, Jürgen. 1998. Die Macht der Sprache. Eine Geschichte der Sprachkritik von der Antike bis zurg Gegenwart. Munich: C. H. Beck. Schleicher, August. 1850. Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht. Bonn: H. B. König. Schleicher, August. 1852. Les lengues de l’Europe moderne. Paris: Ladrange and Garnier. Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte. 1996. Idéologie, revolution et uniformité de la langue. Liege: Ed. Pierre Mardaga. Schlösser, Rainer. 2005. Die romanischen Sprachen (Ser: Wissen). Munich: C. H. Beck. Schneider, Reinhard. 1998. Formen und Motive mittelalterlicher Sprachenpolitik (pp. 5–24). Lectionis eriditorum extraneorum in facultate philosophica Universitatis Carolinae Pragensis factae. vol. 8. Schöpflin, George. 1987. Domestic Politics (pp. 67–106). In: Klaus-Detlev Grothusen, ed. Ungarn (Ser: Südosteuropa-Handbuch, vol. 5). Götingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Schöpflin, George and Wood, Nancy, eds. 1989. In Search of Central Europe. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Schroeder, Klaus-Henning. 1987. Marginale Romania. Die Bildung und Normierung der rumänischen Schriftsprache (pp. 195–209). In: Christian Hannick, ed. Sprachen und Nationan im Balkanraum. Die historischen Bedingungen der Entstehung der heutigen Nationalsprachen. Cologne: Böhlau.

1040 Bibliography

Schulwesen im Generalgouvernement, Die (pp. 254–255). 1941. Nation und Staat. vol. 7. Schulze, Hagen. 1998. Germany: A New History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Schwartz, Michael. 1939. Die Slowakei. Der jüngste Staat Europas. Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldman. Sedlar, Jean W. 1994. East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 3). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Seewann, Gerhard. 1995. Die Deutschen in Ungarn seit 1918 (pp. 219–231). In: Gerhard Grimm and Krista Zach, eds. Die Deutschen in Otsmittel- und Südosteuropa. Geschichte, Wirtschaft, Recht, Sprache (vol. 1) (Ser: Veröffentlichungen des Südostdeutschen Kulturwerks, B: Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten, vol. 53). Munich: Verlag Südostdeutsches Kulturwerk. Seilenthal, Tõnu. 2002. Finno-Ugristics and Pan-Finno-Ugrism (pp. 171–178). In: Gulya, János, ed. Konfrontation und Identifikation. Die finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen und Völker im europäischen Kontext (Ser: Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, vol. 59). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Selbstbestimmungsrecht. 1996. Brockhaus. Die Enzyklopädie (vol. 24, pp. 21–24). Leipzig and Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus. Šembera, Alois Vojtˇech. 1864. Základové dialektologie ˇceskoslovenské. Vienna: By the Author. Semotanová, Eva. 2003. Atlas ˇceských dˇejin (vol. 2: od r. 1618). Prague: Kartografie. Sephiha, Haïm-Vidal. 1997. Judeo-Spanish: Birth, Death and Re-birth. In: Weinstock, Nathan, ed. Yiddish and Judeo Spanish: A European Heritage (Ser: European languages, vol. 6). Dublin: European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages. Serafin, Franiszek, ed. 1996. Województwo s´la˛skie (1922–1939). Zarys monograficzny. ´ ˛skiego. Katowice: Wydawnictwo uniwersytetu Sla Seton-Watson, Robert William. 1915. The Future of Bohemia: A Lecture Delivered at King’s College, London, in Honour of the Quintcentenary of John Hus. London: Nisbet. Seton-Watson, Robert William. 1922. The Historian as a Political Force in Europe. London: School of Slavonic Studies in the University of London, King’s College. Seton-Watson, Robert William. 1934. A History of the Roumanians: From Roman Times to the Completion of Unity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seton-Watson, Robert William. 1965. A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. Hamden CT: Archon Books. Sherman, Joseph. 2006. Tongue Twister (p. 7). The Times Literary Supplement. 24 Feb. Shevchenko, Taras Hryhorovych. 1886. Kobzar. Gaidamaki. St Petersburg: Tipografia A. S. Suvorina. Shevelov, George Y. 1980. Ukrainian (pp. 143–161). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Shevelov, George Y. 1989. The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900–1941): Its state and status (Ser: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Monograph Series). Cambridge MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (distributed by Harvard University Press). Shitsgal, A. G. 1947. Graficheskaia osnova russkogo grazhdanskogo shrifta. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe nauchno-tekhnicheskoe izdatelstvo tekstilnoi, legkoi i poligraficheskoi promyshlennosti. Shitsgal, A. G. 1959. Russkii grazhdanskii shrift. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo ‘Iskusstvo.’

Bibliography

1041

Shitsgal, A. G. 1974. Russkii tipograficheskii shrift. Moscow: Izdatelstvo ‘Kniga.’ Shmeruk, Chone. 1992. Historia literatury jidysz. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Short, David. 1996. The Use and Abuse of the Language Argument in Mid-NineteenthCentury ‘Czechoslovakism’: An Appraisal of a Propaganda Milestone (pp. 40–65). In: Robert B. Pynsent, ed. The Literature of Nationalism: Essays on East European Identity. London: Macmillan in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. Shtur, Liudevit. 1867. Slavianstvo i mir budushchago. Moscow: Imperatorske obshchestvo istorii i derevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete. Siatkowska, Ewa. 1992. Rodzina je˛zyków zachodniosłowianskich. ´ Zarys historyczny. Warsaw: PWN. Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch. Deutsch-Polnisch-Russisch-Weißruthenisch-Litauisch-LettischJiddisch. 1918. Presseabteilung des Oberbefehlshabers Ost and Leipzig: Verlag Otto Spamer. Siemakowicz, Marian. 1998. Załozenia ˙ programowe głównych obozów politycznych wobec szkolnictwa dla ludno´sci białoruskiej w II Rzeczypospolitej (pp. 58–76). Białoruskie Zeszyty Historyczne. vol. 9. http://www.bialorus.pl/index.php?pokaz= zalozenia_ programowe_obozow&&Rozdzial=oswiata, 15 Nov 2006. Siemakowicz, Marian. 2001. Polityka polska wobec szkolnictwa białoruskiego w okresie odbudowy panstwowo´ ´ sci polskiej (pp. 42–51). Białoruskie Zeszyty Historyczne. vol. 15. http://www.bialorus.pl/index.php?pokaz=polityka_wobiec_szkolnictwa&&Rozdzial= oswiata, 15 Nov 2006. Silver, Brian D. 1986. The Ethnic and Language Dimensions in Russian and Soviet Censuses (pp. 70–97). In: Ralph C. Clem, ed. Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Šimek, František. 1947. Slovníˇcek staré ˇceštiny. Prague: Orbis and Matice cˇeská. Simpson, George W. 1951. The Names ‘Rus,’ ‘Russia,’ ‘Ukraine’ and Their Historical Background (Ser: Slavistica, Proceedings of the Institute of Slavistics of the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences, vol. 10). Winnipeg: Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences and Ukrainian National Association in America. Simpson, J. A. and Weiner, E. S. C., eds. 1991. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary: Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sinkó, Katalin. 1994. Árpád Versus Saint István: Competing Heroes and Competing Interests in the Figurative Representation of Hungarian History (pp. 9–26). In: Tamás Hofer, ed. Hungarians Between ‘East’ and ‘West’: Three Essays on National Myths and Symbols. Budapest: Museum of Ethnography. Šipka, Danko. 2002. Dictionary of Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian New Words. Springfield VA: Dunwoody Press. Šipka, Milan. 1999. Standardni jezik u Bosni i Hercegovini u dokumentima jeziˇcke politike. Budapest: Open Society Institute, Center for Publishing Development, Electronic Publishing. Sitarz, Magdalena Joanna. 1992. Z dziejów jidisz – jednego z je˛zyków zydowskich. ˙ Cracow: Universitas. Skilling, H. Gordon. 1992. Masaryk: Religious Heretic (pp. 62–88). In: John Morison, ed. The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan. Skobel, F. K. 1872. O skazeniu ˙ je˛zyka polskiego w dziennikach i w mowie potocznej. Osobliwie w Galicyi. Cracow: Drukarnia Akademicka.

1042 Bibliography

Skok, Petar. 1971. Etimologijski rjeˇcnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (vol. 1). Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti. Skok, Petar. 1973. Etimologijski rjeˇcnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (vol. 3). Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti. Skorupka, Stanisław; Auderska, Halina; and Łempicka, Zofia, eds. 1968. Mały słownik je˛zyka polskiego. Warsaw: PWN. Skrift, Gotisk. 2004. http://www.landesarkivetkbh.dk/genealogi/skrift/start.htm, 18 Mar. Sławski, Stanisław, ed. 1952–1982. Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (25 fascicles organized in 5 vols). Cracow: Towarzystwo Miło´sników Je˛zyka Polskiego. Słonski, ´ Stanisław. 1947. Słownik polskich błe˛dów je˛zykowych. Warsaw: Czytelnik. Slovak Collections. 2003. http://www.bl.uk/collections/easteuropean/slovak.html. Slovakia (Ser: Handbooks Prepared Under the Direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, vol. 3). 1920. London: H. M. Stationery Office. Slovenia: Amnesty International’s Briefing to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 2005. http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR680022005, 28 Nov 2006. Slovenský nauˇcný slovník. 1932. Priruˇcná encyclopedia vedomostí v troch dieloch (3 vols). Bratislava and Prague: Litevna. Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka (8 vols). 2006. Bratislava: Veda. Šmahel, František. 1969. The Idea of the “Nation’’ in Hussite Bohemia: An Analytical Study of the Ideological and Political Aspects of the National Question in Hussite Bohemia from the End of the 14th Century to the Eighties of the 15th Century (pp. 143–247 and 93–197). Historica. Nos. 16–17. ˇ Šmahel, František. 2000. Idea národa v husitských Cechach. Prague: Argo. Šmejkalová, Jiˇrina. 2000. Kniha (k teorii a praxi knižní kultury). Brno: Host. Šmihula, V. 2007. Slovník slovenského jazyka je tu! http://www.sav.sk/index.php?lang= sk&charset=&doc=services-news&news_no=1248, 15 Mar. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Graham, ed. 1990. The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union. London: Longman. Smith, Michael G. 1998. Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953 (Ser: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 80). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Smolej, Viktor. 1976. Slovaško-slovenski slovar / Slovensko-slovinský slovník. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije. Snyder, Louis L. 1984. Macro-Nationalisms: A History of the Pan-movements (Ser: Contributions in Political Science, vol. 112). Westport CT and London: Greenwood Press. Snyder, Timothy. 2003. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. New Haven NJ and London: Yale University Press. ˇ Sobota, Emil. 1929. Republika národní ˇci národnostní. Prague: CIN. Sobota, Emil. 1931. Das tschechoslovakische Nationalitätenrecht (Ser: Tschechoslovakische Quellen und Dokumente, vol. 7). Prague: Orbis. Sobota, Emil. 1946. Co to byl protektorát. Prague: Kvasniˇcka a Hampl. Šolc, Jindˇrich. 1881. Národnost’ a její výynam v životˇe veˇrejném (Ser: Politická bibliotéka ˇ ˇ Ceská, vol. 4, No. 10). Prague: Ceský klub and J. Otto. Soltész, Elizabeth. 1973. A Picture Book of Printing in Hungary 1473–1973. Budapest: Department of Typo-Graphics of the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Crafts. Šourek, Petr. 2006. Vrat’te zpátky cˇas (p. 69). Týden. vol. 20, 15 May. Sozan, Michael. 1982. Hungarian Minorities and Minority Boundary Maintenance in Burgenland (pp. 573–596). In: Béla K. Király, Peter Pastor, and Ivan Sanders, eds. War

Bibliography

1043

and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 6: Essays on World War I: Total War and Peacemaking. A Case Study on Trianon) (Ser: Atlantic Studies, vol. 15; East European Monographs, vol. 105). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Spaginska-Pruszak. ´ 1997. Sytuacja je˛zykowa w byłej Jugosławii. Gdansk: ´ Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego. ´ Spira, Thomas. 1977. German-Hungarian Relations and the Swabian Problem: From Károlyi to Gömbös 1919–1936 (Ser: Eastern European monographs, vol. 25). Boulder CO: East European Quarterly (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Spira, Thomas. 1990. The German-Hungarian-Swabian Triangle 1936–1939: The Road to Discord (Ser: East European Monographs, vol. 285). Boulder CO: East European Quarterly (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Spires, Scott. 1999. Lithuanian Linguistic Nationalism and the Cult of Antiquity (pp. 485–500). Nations and Nationalism. vol. 4. Spires, Scott. 2003. Polish Linguistic Purism in Lithuania: The Case of Aleksander Łe˛towski (pp. 601–613). The Slavonic and East European Review. vol. 4, Oct. SSSJ. 2007. http://bulbulovo.blogspot.com/2007/03/sssj-part-3.html, 14 Mar. Stachowski, Stanisław. 2003. Zabytki je˛zyka ormiansko-kipczackiego ´ jako z´ ródło do historii słownictwa polskiego i ukrainskiego ´ XVI–XVIII w. (pp. 123–129). In: Adam Fałowski and Bo´zena Zinkiewicz-Tomanek, eds. Ukraina – mie˛dzy je˛zykiem a kultura˛ (Ser: Studia Ruthenica Cracoviensia, vol. 1). Cracow: Universitas. Stadtmüller, Karol and Stadtmüller, Karol. 1913. Technisches Wörterbuch/Słownik techniczny (Deutsch-polnischer Teil./Cze˛s´c´ niemiecko-polska). Cracow. Stadtmüller, Karol and Stadtmüller, Karol. 1936. Technisches Wörterbuch/Słownik techniczny (Polnisch-deutscher Teil./Cze˛s´c´ polsko-niemiecka). Cracow. Staikos, K. Sp and Sklavenit, T. E., eds. 2000. Pentakosia chronia entypes paradoses tou Neou Hellenismou, 1499–1999. Athens: Voule ton Hellenon. Stalin, Joseph. 1973. Marxism and the National Question. In: Bruce Franklin, ed. The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings 1905–1925. London: Croom Helm. ˇ Stanˇek, Tomaš. 1991. Odsun Nˇemcu˚ z Ceskoslovenska 1945–1947. Prague: Academia and Naše Voisko. Stang, Christian Schweigaard. 1932. Die Westrussische Kanzleisprache des Grossfürstentums Litauen. Christiania: Dybwad. Stankevich, Ia. 1936. Z’mena gramatyki belaruskaga iazyka u BSRR. Wilno: By the Author. Stankevich, Ia. 1982. Belorussko-Russkii: Velikolitovsko-russkii slovar/Belaruska-rasiiski: Vialikalitouska-rasiiski slounik/Byelorussian-Russian: Greatlitvan-Russian Dictionary. New York: Lew Sapieha Greatlitvan (Byelorussian) Foundation. Stankevich, Stanislau. 1994. Rusyfikatsyia belaruskae movy u BSSR i supratsiu rusifikatsyinamu pratsesu. Minsk: Navuka i tekhnika. Stankievic, Janka. 1954. Mova rukopisu Al Kitab (Part 1: Fonetyka). New York: Francis Skoryna Kryvian (Whiteruthenian) Society of Arts and Sciences in the US. Stankiewicz, Edward. 1980. Slovenian (pp. 85–103). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Stankiewicz, Edward. 1984. Grammars and Dictionaries of the Slavic Languages from the Middle Ages up to 1850: An Annotated Bibliography. Berlin: Mouton. Stankiewicz, Edward and Worth, Dean S. 1966. A Selected Bibliography of Slavic Linguistics (vol. 1). The Hague: Mouton.

1044 Bibliography

Stankiewicz, Edward and Worth, Dean S. 1970. A Selected Bibliography of Slavic Linguistics (vol. 2). The Hague: Mouton. Staroˇceský slovník. 1968–. Prague: Academia. State of Impunity: Human rights abuse of Roma in Romania (Ser: Country Reports Series, vol. 10). 2001. Budapest: European Roma Rights Center. Stati, Vasile. 2003. Dict‚ ionar moldovenesc-românesc (Ser: Biblioteca pro Moldova). Chišin˘ au: Tipografia Central˘ a. ˇ Statistická roˇcenka Ceské a Slovenské republiky 1990. 1990. Prague: SNTL. ˇ Statistická roˇcenka Republiky Ceskoslovenské. 1937. Prague: Orbis. ˇ Statistická roˇcenka Ceské Republiky 2001. 2001. Prague: Scientia. Staunton, Mathew D. 2005. Trojan horses and Friendly Faces: Irish Gaelic typography as propaganda (pp. 86–98). Le Revue LISA/LISA e-journal. No 1. http: www.unicaen.fr/ mrsh/anglais/lisa. Stauter-Halsted, Keely. 2001. The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1918. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Stegner, Willi, ed. 2006. TaschenAtlas. Völker und Sprachen. Gotha and Stuttgart: Klett. Steier, Louis. 1920. There Is No Czech Culture in Upper Hungary. Budapest: Ph Wodianer & Sons. Stevenson, Patrick. 1997. The German Speaking World: A Practical Introduction to Sociolinguistic Issues (Ser: Routledge Language in Society). London and New York: Routledge. Stoianov, Mano. 1957. Bulgarska vuzrozhdenska knizhnina. Analitichen repertoar na bulgarskite kningi i periodichny izdaniia. Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo. Stolc, Jozef, ed. 1968–1984. Atlas slovenského jazyka (4 vols). Bratislava: Veda. Stomma, Ludwik. 2006. Polskie złudzenia narodowe. Poznan: ´ Wydawnictwo SENS. Stone, Daniel. 2001. The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 4). Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press. Stražas, A. S. 1996. Lithuania 1863–1993: Tsarist Russification and the Beginnings of the Modern Lithuanian National Movement. Lituanus. Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Science. vol. 3, Fall, http://lituanus.org/1996/96_3_03.htm, 29 Nov 2003. Struktura społeczna ludno´sci. 2005. www.gus.gov.pl, 28 May. Struve, Kai. 2001. Bauern und Nation in Ostmitteleuropa: Soziale Emanzipation und nationale Identität der galizischen Bauern im 19. Jahrhundert (pp. 347–371). In: Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Jörn Leonhard, eds. Nationalismen in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Struve, Kai. 2004. „Nationale Minderheit“ – Begriffsgeschichtliches zu Gleichheit und Differenz (pp. 233–258). In: Dan Diner, ed. Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur. Munich: K. G. Saur and Leipzig: Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur an der Universität Leipzig. Štúr, L’udovít. 1931. Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft. Bratislava: Nákladem Uˇcené spoleˇcnosti Šafaˇríkovy. Štúr, L’udovít. 1943. Náreˇcja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaˇ nje v tomto náreˇcje and Nauka reˇci slovenskej. Turˇciansky Sv Martin: Kompas. Subaˇcius, Giedrius. 1999. Ideas About Standard Lowland Lithuanian: Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language. http://tigger.uic.edu/∼ subacius/SUB_1999_Ideas_st_Lowl_Lith.PDF, 16 Mar 2007. Subaˇcius, Giedrius. 2005. Development of the Cyrillic Orthography for Lithuanian 1864–1914 (pp. 29–55). Lituanus. vol. 2. http://www.uic.edu/classes/lith/lith520/ SUB_strp/SUB_2005_Devel_of_Lith_Cyrillic_LITUANUS.pdf, 16 Mar 2007.

Bibliography

1045

Subaˇcius, Giedrius. 2007. Personal E-mail Communication. Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago. 12 Mar. Submitting New Characters or Scripts. 2005. http://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals. html, 10 Dec. Subtelny, Orest. 1994. Ukraine: A History. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press and Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Sugar, Peter F. 1958. The Influence of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (pp. 331–355). Journal of Central European Affairs. vol. 17. Sugar, Peter F. 1977. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804 (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 5). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. Sugar, Peter F. and Treadgold, Donald W., eds. 1974–. A History of East Central Europe. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press. Suhaj, Janko. 1944. Carpathian Ruthenia on the Warpath. London: The New Europe Publishing. Sukiennicki, Wiktor. 1984. East Central Europe During World War I: From Foreign Domination to National Independence (Ser: Eastern European Monographs, No. CXIX). Boulder CO: Eastern European Monographs and New York (distributed by Columbia University Press). Suleiman, Yasir. 2003. The Arabic Language and National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Suleiman, Yasir. 2004. A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sundhaußen, Holm. 1973. Der Einfluß Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Völkern der Habsburger Monarchie (Ser: Buchreihe der Südostdeutschen Historischen Kommission, vol. 27). Munich: R. Oldenburg Verlag. Surosz, Mariusz. 2004. Tragiczne losy gen. Aloisa Eliasza. Gazeta Wyborcza. 26 May. Suska, Dariusz. 2003. Bicie mojego serca (p. 15). Gazeta Wyborcza. 30 Jun. Šutaj, Štefan. 1999. Nútená výmena, resp. vysídlenie Mad’arov zo Slovenska. Plány a skutoˇcnost’ (pp. 203–216). In: Detlef Brandes, Edita Ivaniˇckova, and Jiˇrí Pešek, eds. ˇ Vynútený rozchod. Vyhnanie a vysídlenie z Ceskoslovenska 1938–1947 v porovnaní s Pol’skom, Mad’arskom a Juhosláviou. Bratislava: Veda. Sutrop, Urmas. 2000. Estonian Language. Tallinn: Estonian Institute. Sužiedelis, ˙ Saulius. 1997. Historical Dictionary of Lithuania (Ser: European Historical Dictionaries, vol. 21). Lanham MD and London: The Scarecrow Press. Synak, Bruno. 1998. Kaszubska tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ . Ciagło´sc´ i zmiana. Gdansk: ´ Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego. ´ Szamel, Dariusz. 1998. Małe społeczno´sci narodowo´sciowe (pp. 270–293). In: Bogumiła Berdychowska, ed. Mniejszo´sci narodowe w Polsce. Praktyka po 1989 roku. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe. Szarvas, Gábor and Simonyi, Zsigmond. 1890–1893. Magyar nyelv történeti szótar (3 vols). Budapest: Hornyánsky V. Szász, Zoltán. 1989. Nationale Frage und Vielvökerstaat 1867–1914 (Skizzenhafte Darstellung) (pp. 39–51). In: Tenho Takalo, ed. Finns and Hungarians Between East and West: European Nationalism and Nations in Crisis During the 19th and 20th Centuries. The Proceedings of the III Conference of Finnish-Hungarian Historians in 1988 (Ser: Studia Historica, vol. 32). Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinien Seura. Szelényi, Balázs A. 2003. Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (pp. 111–143). Austrian History Yearbook. vol. 34. Szinnyei, József. 1893–1901. Magyar tájszótár (2 vols). Budapest: Hornyánszky V.

1046 Bibliography

Szober, Stanisław. 1937. Słownik ortoepiczny. Warsaw: Arct. ´ ˛skie ABC. ´ ˛zoka. Rybnik: Wydawnictwo Sla Szołtysek, Marek. 2000. Biblia Sla Sz˝ ucs, Jen˝ o. 1981. Nation und Geschichte. Studien. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó. Szulc, Aleksander. 1999. Odmiany narodowe je˛zyka niemieckiego. Geneza – rozwój – perspektywy (Ser: Rozprawy Wydziału Filologicznego, vol. LXX). Kraków: Polska Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci. Szultka, Zygmunt. 2001. Szkic dziejów Kaszubów ze szczególnym uwzgle˛dnieniem przemian je˛zykowych (pp. 11–42). In: Edward Breza, ed. Kaszubszczyzna/Kaszëbizna (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski and Instytut Filologii Polskiej. ´ Szybieka, Zachar. 2002. Historia Białorusi, 1795–2000 (Ser: Dzieje Europy Srodkowo´ Wschodniej). Lublin: Instytut Europy Srodkowo-Wschodniej. Szyjkowski, Marian. 1948. Czeskie odrodzenie w XIX wieku (Ser: Literatura s´wiatowa w wieku XIX, vol. 16). Warsaw: Czytelnik and WP. Szymczak, Mieczysław, ed. 1979–1981. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego. Warsaw: PWN. Talvj. (Robinson, Therese Albertine Luise) 1852. Uebersichtliches handbuch einer geschichte der slavischen sprachen und literatur. Nebst einer skizze ihrer volks-poesie. Leipzig: Verlag von Carl Geibel. Tambor, Jolanta. 2006. Mowa Górno´sla˛zaków oraz ich s´wiadomo´sc´ je˛zykowa i etniczna ´ ˛skiego, vol. 2401). Katowice: Wydawnictwo (Ser: Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Sla ´ ˛skiego. Uniwersytetu Sla Táncos, Vilmos. 1988. Hungarians in Moldavia. http://www.kia.hu/konyvtar/erdely/ moldavang.htm, 27 Jul 2005. Tarajło-Lipowska. 1994. Dyglosja czeska na tle problemów narodowych (pp. 85–94). Slavica Wratislaviensia. vol. 87 (Ser: Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, vol. 1659). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. Tatarka, Dominik. 1999. Písaˇcky pre milovanú Lutéciu. Prague: Labyrint. Tazbir, Janusz. 1997. Walka na pomniki i o pomniki (pp. 3–19). Kultura i Społeczenstwo. ´ vol. 1. Tazbir, Janusz. 2001. Prace wybrane (vol. 4: Studia nad kultura˛ staropolska˛). Cracow: Universitas. Tazbir, Julia. 2000. Atlas historyczny (szkoła s´rednia), 1815–1939. Warsaw: Demart. Tessler, Vladimír and Kotyška, Vacláv, eds. 1927–1949. Technicky slovník nauˇcný. Ilustrovaná encyklopedié vˇed technickych (17 vols). Prague: Borský a Šulc. Thaden, Edward, ed. 1981. Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. The Limits of Solidarity: Roma in Poland after 1989 (Ser: Country Reports Series, vol. 11). 2002. Budapest: European Roma Rights Center. Ther, Philipp and Siljak, Ana, eds. 2001. Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Ser: Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series). Lanham, Boulder, New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Tichý, František. 1938. Vývoj souˇcasného spisovného jazyka na Podkarpatské Rusi (Ser: Knihovna Sboru pro výzkum Slovenska a Podkarpatské Rusi pˇri Slovanském ústavu v Praze, vol. 11). Prague: Sbor pro výzkum Slovenska a Podkarpatské Rusi and Orbis. Tighe, Carl. 1990. Gdansk: ´ National identity in the Polish-German Borderlands. London and Concord MA: Pluto Press. Tihany, Lesie C. 1982. The Baranya Republic and the Treaty of Trianon (pp. 297–320). In: Béla K. Király, Peter Pastor, and Ivan Sanders, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe (vol. 6: Essays on World War I: Total war and Peacemaking. A Case Study on Trianon)

Bibliography

1047

(Ser: Atlantic Studies, vol. 15; East European Monographs, vol. 105). Boulder CO: Social Science Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Time of the Skinheads: Denial and exclusion of Roma in Slovakia (Ser: Country Reports, vol. 3). 1997. Budapest: European Roma Rights Center. Timeline of Romani (Gypsy) History. 2004. http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/timeline. htm, 7 Feb. Todorova, Maria. 1992. Language in the Construction of Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Bulgarian Case. Berkeley CA: Center for German and European Studies, University of California. Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todosijevi´c, Bojan. 2002. Why Bunjevci did not Become a Nation: A Case Study (pp. 59–72). East Central Europe. vol. 1–2. Tollefson, James W. 1991. Planning Language, Planning Inequality: Language Policy in the Community. London: Longman. Toma, Peter A. and Kováˇc, Dušan. 2001. Slovakia: From Samo to Dzurinda (Ser: Studies of Nationalities). Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University. Tomanek, Przemysław. 2000. Je˛zyk ojczysty jako czynnik kształtowania sie˛ s´wiadomo´sci narodowej Ukrainców ´ (pp. 103–122). In: Maria Bobrownicka, ed. Je˛zyk a tozsamo´ ˙ sc´ narodowa (Ser: Slavica). Cracow: Universitas. Tomaszewski, Jerzy. 1985. Rzeczpospolita wielu narodów. Warsaw: Czytelnik. Tomaszewski, Jerzy. 1985a. Ojczyzna nie tylko Polaków. Mniejszo´sci narodowe w Polsce w latach 1918–1939. Warsaw: MAW. ´ Tomaszewski, Jerzy. 1997. Czechosłowacja (Ser: Historia Panstw ´ Swiata w XX Wieku). Warsaw: Trio. ´ Tomaszewski, Jerzy. 2006. Czechy i Słowacja (Ser: Historia Panstw ´ Swiata w XX Wieku). Warsaw: Trio. Tomescu, Mircea. 1968. Istoria cˇart‚ ii române¸sti de la începuturi pîna˘ la 1918. Bucharest: Editura s¸ tiint‚ fic˘a. Topolinska, ´ Zuzanna. 1980. Kashubian (pp. 183–194). In: Alexander M. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, eds. The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, vol. 1). New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies. Topolska, Maria Barbara. 2002. Społeczenstwo ´ i kultura w Wielkim Ksie˛stwie Litewskim od XV do XVIII wieku. Poznan ´ and Zielona Góra: Bogucki Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Topolska, Maria Barbara. 2003. Białoru´s bliska a nieznana – laboratorium narodu pod presja˛ geopolityki (pp. 200–208). Sprawy Narodowo´sciowe. vol. 23 (Poznan: ´ Zakład Badan ´ Narodowo´sciowych PAN). Toporišiˇc, Jože. 1993. Die slovenische Schriftsprache des 20. Jahrhunderts (pp. 137–160). Die Welt der Slaven. vol. 1. Tornow, Siegfried. 2005. Was ist Osteuropa. Handbuch zur osteuropäischen Text- und Sozialgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Nationalstaat (Ser: Slavistische Studienbücher, Neue Folge, vol. 16). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara. 2000. Contrasting Ethnic Nationalisms: Eastern Central Europe (pp. 183–220). In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, eds. Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Török, Zsuzsanna. 2003. Transylvanism: A Politics of Wise Balance? Minority Regionalism in Interwar Romania (1918–1940) (pp. 127–144). In: Philipp Ther, Holm Sundhaussen,

1048 Bibliography

and Imke Kruse, eds. Regionale Bewegnungen und Regionalismen in europäischen Zwischenräumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Ser: Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, vol. 18). Marburg: Herder-Institut. Tóth, István György. 2000. Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe. Budapest and New York: Central European University Press. Traba, Robert. 1994. Niemcy – Warmiacy – Polacy (Ser: Rozprawy i Materiały, vol. 142). Olsztyn: O´srodek Badan ´ Naukowych im. W Ke˛trzynskiego ´ and Wspólnota Kulturowa „Borussia“. Trabant, Jürgen. 2006. Europäisches Sprachdenken. Von Platon bis Wittgenstein (Ser: Beck’sche Reihe). Munich: C. H. Beck. Trampe, Ludwig. 1908. Sprachenkampf und Sprachenrecht in Preußen und seiner Ostmark. Systematische Darstellung der Entwicklung der Sprachenfrage in Preußen-Deutschland, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des preußischen Ostens, auf Grund der einschlägigen öffentlichrechtlichen Bestimmungen und parlamentarischen Verhandlungen. Leipzig: Dietrich. Translation Perspectives. 2004. http://www.wycliffe.org/features/IOW261-4.htm, 19 Mar. Trautmann, Reinhold. 1910. Die altpreussischen Sprachdenkmäler. Einleitung, Texte, Grammatik, Wörterbuch. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Trávníˇcek, Frantíšek. 1924. O ˇceském jazyce. Prague: Melantrich. Trávníˇcek, Frantíšek. 1948–1951. Mluvnice spisovné ˇceštiny. Prague: Melantrich. Treder, Jerzy. 2006. Sytuacja socjolingwistyczna kaszubszczyzny. Projekt Rastko Kaszëbë. http://www.rastko.net/rastko-ka/content/view/12, 29 Jan. Tˇreštík, Dušan. 1999. Mysliti dˇejiny. Prague and Litomšl: Paseka. Triest, Felix. 1864. Topographisches Handbuch von Schlesien. Breslau: Korn. Trotz, Michał Abraham. 1744–1772. Nowy dykcjonariusz to jest mownik polsko-francuskoniemiecki/Nouveau dictionnaire polonois, allemand et françois/Vollständiges deutsches und polnisches Wörterbuch (4 vols). Leipzig: Jean Frederic Gleditsch/Nakładem Iana Fryderyka Gledycza. Trudgill, Peter. 1995. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. London: Penguin Books. Trudgill, Peter. 2000. Greece and European Turkey: From Religious to Linguistic Identity (pp. 240–263). In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, eds. Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tryjarski, Edward. 1995. In confinibus Turcarum. Szkice turkologiczne. Warsaw: Instytut Archeologii i Etnologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Trylˇcová, Elena. 1962. Anton Bernolák (1762–1813) (Ser: Popularizácia klasického dediˇcstva). Martin: Matica slovenská. Trzcionowski, Lech et al. 2003. Atlas historyczny. Gimnazjum. Warsaw: Demart. ˇ Tvrdý, Peter. 1922. Ceskoslovenský differenciálny slovník. Trnava. Tvrdý, Peter. 1922a. Slovník inojazyˇcný. Bratislava: Comenius. Tvrdý, Peter. 1923. Chybné slová, výrazy a väzby, ktorým treba v slovenˇcine vyhýbat’: Väˇcšina ich prevzatá je z Czambelových diel, “Slov. štilistiky’’ Šenšelovej a zo “Slov. pohl’adov.’’ Trnava: Lev. Tvrdý, Peter. 1931. Slovenský frazeologický slovník. Trnava: Spolok sv. Vojtecha. ˇ Tvrdý, Peter. 1932. Ceskoslovenský differenciálny slovník. Trnava. Tvrdý, Peter. 1933. Slovenský frazeologický slovník. Prague and Prešov: Nákladom ˇ Ceskoslovenskej grafickej unie. Tvrdý, Peter. 1937. Doplnky k Slovenskému frazeologickému slovníku. Prague and Prešov: ˇ Nákladom Ceskoslovenskej grafickej unie.

Bibliography

1049

Two Years of German Oppression in Czechoslovakia. 1941. London: Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Tymoshenko, P. D., ed. 1959. Khrestomatiia materialiv z istoriï ukraïnskoï literaturnoï movy (vol. 1). Kyiv: Radianska shkola. Tymowski, Michał. 1999. Panstwa ´ Afryki przedkolonialnej (Ser: Monografie Fundacji na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej). Wrocław: Leopoldinum. Tyszka, Krzysztof. 2004. Nacjonalizm w komunizmie. Ideologia marodowa w Zwia˛zku Radzieckim i Polsce Ludowej. Warsaw: IFiS PAN. U Beˇcu objavljuje za ‘Novine srbske’ cˇlanak ‘Propast Serbije’ 1813. godine. 2004. http://www.panet.co.yu/narcis/index9.2.htm, 16 March. Új id˝ ok lexikona (24 vols). 1936–1942. Budapest: Singer & Wolfner. Új lexikon. 1936. Budapest: Dante-Pautheon Kiadás. Új magyar lexikon (6 vols). 1959–1962. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó. Ulianov, N. 2004. Genesis of Ukrainian Separatism. (Chapter: Formalny nacionalizm). http://www.lants.tellur.ru:8106/∼tchoubrikov/ulianov_pus10.htm, 26 Mar. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The. 2005. http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/index.htm. Universum. Všeobecná encyklopedie (10 vols). 1999–2001. Prague: Odeon. Uralic Languages. 2006. http://www.suri.ee/uralic.html, 10 Feb. Urbanczyk, ´ Przemysław. 2000. Władza i polityka we wczesnym s´redniowieczu (Ser: Monografie Fundacji na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, Seria Humanistyczna). Wrocław: Funna. Urbanczyk, ´ Stanisław, ed. 1953–2002. Słownik staropolski. Warsaw: PAN. Urbanczyk, ´ Stanisław, ed. 1983. Die altpolnischen Orthographien des 16. Jahrhunderts. Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau. Usien, ´ Joanna. 2001. Personal Communication. Opole. Uspenskii, Boris A. 2004. Nikolai I i polskii iazyk (Iazikovaia politika Rossiiskoi imperii v otnoshenii Tsarstva Polskogo: voprosy grafiki i orfografii) (pp. 1–38). Die Welt der Slaven. Internationale Halbjahresschrift für Slavistik. vol. 1. Ustalenie ortografii podhalanskiej ´ (pp. 31–32). 1938. Je˛zyk Polski. vol. 1. Vaitiekus, Severinas. 1995. Polacy Litwy. Vilnius: Panstwowe ´ Centrum Badan ´ Narodowo´sciowych. Vakar, Nicholas P. 1956. Belorussia: The Making of a Nation. A Case Study. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Várdy, Steven Béla. 1969. History of the Hungarian Nation (vol. 2: 1919–1968 AD). Astor Park FL: Danubian Press. Várdy, Steven Béla and Tooley, Hunt T., eds. 2003. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Boulder CO: Social Sciences Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York). Varga, János. 1993. A Hungarian Quo Vadis: Political Trends and Theories of the Early 1840s. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Varsik, Branislav. 1940. Národnostná hranica slovensko-mad’arská v ostatných dvoch storoˇciach. Bratislava: SUS. Váša, Pavel and Trávníˇcek, František. 1934–1937. Slovník jazyka ˇceského. Prague: Borový. Váša, Pavel and Travníˇcek, František. 1937. Slovník jazyka c˘ eského. Prague: F. Borový. Vasmer, Max. 1971. Etimologicheskii slovar russkogo iazyka (vol. 3). Moscow: Progress. Vážný, Václav. 1931. Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu s abecedným pravopisným slovníkom. Prague: Štátne nakladatel’stvo and Tur˘ciansky Svätý Martin: Matica slovenská.

1050 Bibliography

Velagi´c, Zoran. 1999. ‘Slavni, uljudni i krasni iliriˇcki jezik’ (pp. 161–175). In: Emil Heršak, ed. Etniˇcnost i poviest. Zagreb: Institut za migracije i narodnosti, Jesenski i Turk and Hrvatsko sociološko društvo. Velká všeobecná encyklopedie (20 vols). 2000–2006. Prague: Diderot. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. Viator, Scotus [Robert William Seton-Watson]. 1908. Racial Problems in Hungary. London: Archibald Constable & Co. Vico, Giovanni Battista. 1990. Prinzipien einer neuen Wissenschaft über die gemeinsame Natur der Völker (Ser: Philosophische Bibliothek, vol. 418). Hamburg: Meiner. Viereck, Wolfgang et al. 2002. Dtv-Atlas Englische Sprache. Munich: dtv. Views on the Serbo-Croatian Language Service at the Voice of America: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, Second Session, June 19, 1999. 1999. Washington DC: US Government Printing Office. ˘ Bucharest: Editura s¸ tiint‚ fic˘ Vîrtosu, Emil. 1968. Paleografia româno-chirilica. a. Vojvodina. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vojvodina, 22 Aug. Volgyes, Ivan. 1981. Legitimacy and Modernization. In: George Klein and Milan J. Reban, eds. The Politics of Ethnicity in Eastern Europe. New York: Columbia University Press. Volksschule (pp. 270–272). 1890. In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encyklopädie des allgemeinen Wissens (vol. 16). Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts. Všeobecná encyklopedie. 1999. Prague: Diderot. Walas, Teresa, ed. 1995. Narody i stereotypy. Cracow: Mie˛dzynarodowe Centrum Kultury. ´ Waldenberg, Marek. 1992. Kwestie narodowe w Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej. Dzieje. Idee. Warsaw: PWN. Walicki, Andrzej. 1989. The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Walicki, Andrzej. 2000. Trzy patriotyzmy (pp. 225–270). In: Andrzej Walicki, ed. Polskie zmagania z wolno´scia˛. Widziane z boku. Cracow: Universitas. Waldstein, Abraham Solomon. 1916. The Evolution of Modern Hebrew Literature, 1850–1912 (Ser: Columbia University Oriental Studies, vol. 9). New York: Columbia University Press. Walaszek, Adam, ed. 2001. Polska diaspora (Ser: Leksykon Historii i Kultury Polskiej). Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie. ´ ˛ska i Sla ´ ˛ska Wanatowicz, Maria Wanda. 1994. Historia społeczno-polityczna Górnego Sla ´ ˛skiego, vol. 497). Cieszynskiego ´ w latach 1918–1945 (Ser: Skrypty Uniwersytetu Sla ´ ˛skiego. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Sla Wandycz, Piotr S. 1974. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Ser: A History of East Central Europe, vol. 7). Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press. Wandycz, Piotr S. 1992. The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. London and New York: Routledge. Wapinski, ´ Roman. 1994. Polska i małe ojczyzny Polaków. Z dziejówq kształtowania sie˛ s´wiadomo´sci narodowej XIX I XX wieku po wybuch II wojny s´wiatowej. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Waterman, John T. 1966. A History of the German Language, With Special Reference to the Cultural and Social Forces that Shaped the Standard Literary Language. Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press.

Bibliography

1051

Weaver, Eric Beckett. 2004. Madness in the Media: Political Extremism and Beliefs in Historical Primacy as a Feature of Transition (pp. 125–141). In: Slobodan G. Markovich et al., eds. Challenges to New Democracies in the Balkans. Belgrade: Association of Fulbright Alumni of Serbia and Montenegro and Cigoja Press. Weaver, Eric Beckett. 2006. National Narcissism: The Intersection of the Nationalist Cult and Gender in Hungary. Bern: Peter Lang. Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Webster’s Their New International Dictionary and Seven Language Dictionary. 1961. Springfield MA: G & C Merriam Co. and Chicago IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Weingart, Miloš. 1923. Pˇríspˇevky k studiu slovenštiny (pp. 1–112 [699–810]). Sborník Filosofické fakulty University Komenskáho v Bratislavˇe. vol. 17. Weingart, Miloš. 1926. Jazyk ˇceskoslovenský a stˇrední škola, zvláštˇe na Slovensku. Prague: By the Author. Weingart, Miloš. 1937. Slovanské spisovné jazyky v dobˇe pˇrítomné (Ser: Dobrovského knižnice duchovˇedná, vol. 1). Prague: Melantrich. Weinreich, Max. 1945. Der YIVO un di problemen fun undzer tsayt (pp. 3–18). YIVO Bletter. vol. 1, Jan–Feb. Weisgerber, [Johann] Leo. 1948. Die Entdeckung der Muttersprache im europäischen Denken. Heliand: Verlag Lüneburg. Wexler, Paul. 1990. The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of Semitic Past (Ser: Mediterranean Language and Culture Monographs, vol. 4). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Wexler, Paul. 1993. The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkick People in Search of a Jewish Identity. Columbus OH: Slavica Publishers. Wexler, Paul N. 1974. Purism and Language: A Study in Modern Ukrainian and Belorussian Nationalism (1840–1967). Bloomington IN: Indiana University. Wicherkiewicz, Tomasz. 2003. The Making of a Language: The Case of the Idiom of Wilamowice. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Wielka encyklopedia powszechna. 1962–1970. Warsaw: PWN. Wielka encyklopedia powszechna. 2001–2005. Warsaw: PWN. Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna. 1929–1938. Cracow: Wydawnictwo Gutenberga. Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna. 1931. (vol. 13). Cracow: Wydawnictwo “Gutenberg’’. Winter, Eduard. 1956. Der böhmische Vormärz in Briefen B. Bolzanos an F. Pˇrihonský. Beiträge zur deutsch-slawischen Wechselseitigkeit (Ser: Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Slawistik, vol. 11). West Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Winter, Eduard. 1977. Die sozial- und ethnoethik Bernard Bolzanos (Ser: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Geschichte der mathematik, Naturwissenschaften und Medizin, vol. 19). Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. ´ ˛zak wydał Biblie˛. 18 Oct. Wi´sniewska, Katarzyna. 2005. Impra Jezusa – jak Sla http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:xyC0aUgSMgsJ:ziomjanek.pl/media/impra_jezusa. doc+Biblia+Slazaka&hl=en. Wolff, Philippe. 2003 [1971]. Western Languages, AD 100–1500. London: Phoenix. Wölke, Sonja. 2005. Geschichte der sorbischen Grammatikschreibung. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Budyšin/Bautzen: Ludowe nakładnistwo Domowina/Domowina-Verlag. World Factbook 2005, The. 2005. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html.

1052 Bibliography

World’s First Gypsy Bible Published. 2003. http://www.biblenetworknews.com/cgibin/pfp.cgi?bottom=self, 9 Feb. World’s Scriptures. 2006. http://www.worldscriptures.org, 4 May. Wrocławski, Krzysztof. 2002. Croatian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian National Ideas of Their Ethnogeny (pp. 242–254). In: Jolanta Sujecka, ed. The National Idea as a Research Problem. Warsaw: Slawistyczny O´srodek Wydawniczy. Wyder, Grazyna. ˙ 2003. Łuzyce ˙ w polskiej literaturze historycznej XIX wieku i okresu mie˛dzywojennego. Zielona Góra: Uniwersytet Zielonogórski. Wydra, Wiesław and Rzepka, Wojciech Ryszard. 2004. Chrestomatia staropolska. Teksty do roku 1543. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Wysocka, Dorota. 2006. Ko´sciół nizszej ˙ kategorii (pp. 15–16). Przegla˛d Prawosławny. vol. 7, Jul. Yuhasz, Michael. 1929. Wilson’s Principles in Czechoslovak Practice: The Situation of the Carpatho-Russian People Under the Czech Yoke. Homestead PA: Rusin Council of National Defense. Žáˇcek, Rudolf. 1995. Z historii regionalizmu i separatyzmu morawskiego (pp. 149–157). In: Maria Wanda Wanatowicz, ed. Regionalizm a separatyzm – historia i współczesno´sc´ (Ser: Prace Naukowe, vol. 1492). Katowice, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu ´ ˛skiego. Sla Zach, Krista. 1977. Orthodoxe Kirche und rumänisches Volksbewußtsein im 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Ser: Schriften zur Geistesgeschichte des östlichen Europa, vol. 11). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Zahradnik, Stanisław and Ryczkowski, Marek. 1992. Korzenie Zaolzia. Warsaw, Prague, and Tiniec: PAI-Press. Zapasko, Iakym and Isaievych, Iaroslav. 1981. Pamiatky knyzhkovoho mystetstva: Kataloh starodrukiv vydanykh na Ukraini (vol. 2, pt 2). Lviv: Vydavnitstvo pry Lvivskomu derzhavnomu universiteti. Zapasko, Iakym Prokhorovych and Matsiuk, O. Ia. 1983. Lvivski starodruki: Knygoznavchyi narys. Lviv: Vydavnytstvo ‘Kameniar’. Zaprudnik, Jan. 1998. Historical Dictionary of Belarus (Ser: European Historical Dictionaries, vol. 28). Lanham MD and London: The Scarecrow Press. Zaremba, Marcin. 2001. Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy w komunistycznej Polsce (Ser: W krainie PRL). Warsaw: TRIO and ISP PAN. Zavádˇení nových Pravidel c˘ eského pravopisu na školách. 1958. Prague: SPN. Zawadzki, Mariusz. 2004. Czystka je˛zykowa w szkołach Naddniestrza. Gazeta Wyborcza, http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/2029020,53600,2209531.html, 2 Aug. Zayas, Alfred M. de. 1998. Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsions of the Germans from the East. Rockport, Maine: Picton Press. ˙ ˙ Zbikowski, Andrzej. 1997. Zydzi (Ser: A to Polska wła´snie). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolno´sla˛skie. Zdanowicz, Aleksander et al. 1861. Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (2 vols). Vilna (Vilnius): Orgelbrand. Žeguc, Ivan. 1965. Die nationalpolitischen Besrebungen der Karpato-Ruthenen, 1848–1914 (Ser: Veröffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Institutes München, vol. 28). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Zeidler, Miklós. 2002. A magyar irredenta a két világháború között. Budapest: Teleki László Alapítvány. ˙ Zelazny, Walter. 1990. U z´ ródeł nowomowy (pp. 129–135). Teksty Drugie. vol. 4.

Bibliography

1053

˙ Zelazny, Walter. 2000. Francja wobec mniejszo´sci narodowych. Etniczno´sc´ , etnopolityka, etnosocjologia. Tyczyn: Wyzsza ˙ Szkoła Społeczno-Gospodarcza w Tyczynie. ˙ Zelazny, Walter. 2002. Ludwik Zamenhof – kosmopolita swojego narodu (pp. 471–482). ˙ ˙ Kwartalnik Historii Zydów [Jewish History Quarterly], vol. 4. Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historyczny. ˙ Zelazny, Walter. 2004. Personal E-mail Communication. Tyczyn: Wyzsza ˙ Szkoła Społeczno-Gospodarcza. 9 Nov. ˙ Zelazny, Walter. 2005. Je˛zyk uniwersalny w s´wiecie religii i spirytyzmu (pp. 109–122). Przegla˛d Religioznawczy. vol. 1. Warsaw: Polskie Towarzystwo Religioznawcze. Ženuch, ˇ Peter. 2002. Medzi východom a západom. Byzantsko-slovanská tradícia, kultúra a jazyk na východnom Slovensku. Bratislava: Veda. Zgółkowa, Halina, ed. 1994–2005. Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (50 vols). Poznan: ´ Kurpisz. Zielinski, ´ Andrzej. 1977. Rozwazania ˙ o narodzie i narodowo´sci w publicystyce poznanskiej ´ lat czterdziestych XIX w. (pp. 108–135). In: Janusz Go´ckowski and Andrzej Walicki, eds. Idee i koncepcje narodu w polskiej my´sli politycznej czasów porozbiorowych. Warsaw: PWN. Zieniukowa, Jadwiga. 2001. Ewolucja pogla˛dów na status kaszubszczyzny (pp. 71–80). In: Edward Breza, ed. Kaszubszczyzna/Kaszëbizna (Ser: Najnowsze Dzieje Je˛zyków Słowianskich). ´ Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski and Instytut Filologii Polskiej. Zimmermann, Volker. 1999. “Rišska župa Sudety’’ v poslednom roku vojny (pp. 43–56). In: Detlef Brandes, Edita Ivaniˇckova, and Jiˇrí Pešek, eds. Vynútený rozchod. Vyhnanie a ˇ vysídlenie z Ceskoslovenska 1938–1947 v porovnaní s Pol’skom, Mad’arskom a Juhosláviou. Bratislava: Veda. Zinkeviˇcius, Zigmas et al. 2005. Where We Come From: The Origin of the Lithuanian People. Vilnius: Science & Encyclopaedia Publishing Institute. Zinkeviˇcius, Zigmas. 1996. The History of the Lithuanian Language. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopediju˛ leidykla. Ziomek, Jerzy. 1980. Renesans (Ser: Historia Literatury Polskiej). Warsaw: PWN. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_Zizek, 4 May.

Index

In this index languages are highlighted in BOLD text. Notes are indicated by n. enclosed in parenthesis; e.g. Albanian, 240, 965(n.6). Works and publications are indicated in italics. Scripts and alphabets are mentioned throughout the text; look also in entries for individual languages. Abbas the Great, Shah (r.1587–1629), 322 Abdulazüiz, Sultan (r. 1861–1876), 249, 283 Abdülmecid, Sultan (r.1839–1861), 281 Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (The Treatise on the Origin of Language, 1772, Berlin), 44 Abizadeh, Arash, 30, 47 Abondolo, Daniel, 66, 646 Abraham ben Issac Assa, Rabbi, 318 Abramovi(t)sh, Sholem Yankev (1836–1917), 312 Abrams, Brad, 525 absolutism, 8, 398, 442, 448, 499, 503, 507, 992 academies, promoting language, 82–3, 155, 156 Academy of Rusyn Culture, 891 Act on Expatriate Slovaks (1997, Slovakia), 894 Act on Higher Education Institutions (1920, Poland), 589, 602, 604 Act on National and Ethnic Minorities (2004, Poland), 639 Act on the Language of Administration (1924, Poland), 589, 590, 591 Act on the Language of Courts (Poland), 591 Act on the Language of Schools (Poland), 591 Act on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Language (2004, Poland), 639 Act on the Polish Language (1999, Poland), 632, 633, 640, 643 Act on the State Language (1995, Slovakia), 888, 898 Adam, Eugène (1879–1947), 338 Adamczuk, Lucjan, 141, 595, 596, 619, 987, 994

Adelung, Johann Christoph, 83–4, 107, 224, 294, 378, 397, 440 Adelung’s dictionary, 84 Adler, Hans, 437 Adriatic Sea, 435, 495 Aegean Islands, 262 Aegean Macedonian, 254, 255 Aghvanian (Caucasian language), 69, 241, 323, 966(n.6) Ágis tragédiája (The Tragedy of Agis, 1772), 129 Agnew, Hugh LeCaine, 491, 493, 495, 499, 537 agrarian reform, 671 Ahrens, Eduard, 198, 199 Akademia Umie˛jetno´sci (AU) (AU, Academy of Sciences) in 1872, 392, 603 Alba Iulia (Gyulafehéhervár, Weissenburg), 123, 125, 206, 658 Albania, 241, 242, 243 Albanian, 240, 965(n.6) alphabets, use of, 54, 61, 66, 67, 69, 91, 139, 144, 153, 230, 231, 234, 243, 264, 268, 295, 323, 341, 352, 359, 362, 471, 475, 965 dialects, 242 literature, 244 standard, 246 Toskicization, 245 Albijani´c, Aleksandar, 222 Alcuin (Ealhwine, Albinus) of York, 94 Aleksandraviˇcius, Egidijus, 376, 384, 387, 388, 398, 403, 586, 980 Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), 253, 257, 259, 321, 360 Alexander I, Tsar (r.1801–1825), 375, 376, 380, 381, 384, 388, 676 Alexander II, Tsar (r.1855–1881), 115, 163, 387, 392, 394, 396 Alexander, Ronelle, 235

1054

Index

Alexis, Tsar (r.1645–1676), 159, 478 Alghieri, Dante see Dante Ališauskas, Vytautas, 98, 148, 157, 181, 182, 183, 275, 972, 973, 980 Allemanian German (Allemanisch), 27 All-Slavic Congress (1848), 47 alphabets Arabic, 39, 126, 139, 143, 157, 264, 266, 341, 358, 363 Arebica, 143 Armenian, 139, 141, 323, 325 in the Balkans, 143–4 Bohorˇ cica, 292, 293, 295 Georgian, 160, 962 Glagolitic, 68 Grazhdanka, 163 Greek, 66, 69, 87, 141, 243, 244, 269–70, 276, 341, 360–1, 418, 422 Hebrew, 78, 264, 595 Irish (Gaelic, Celtic), 92 Latin, 27, 39, 41, 48, 50, 54, 56, 61, 70, 112, 113, 119, 139, 141, 143, 153, 155, 170, 194, 196, 205, 209, 212–14, 219, 225, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233–4, 236, 243, 267, 268, 269, 270, 274, 275, 278, 286, 292, 293, 299, 314, 317, 319, 341, 342, 343, 347, 351, 352, 353, 357, 358, 359, 362, 363, 390, 391, 393, 394, 396, 398, 402, 418, 420, 423, 435, 470–1, 552, 594, 737, 745, 891, 935, 976, 977, 978 Magyar (Runic), 67, 966 military, 160 Romanian, 209 Runic, 69 Ruthenian, 162, 163 Turkic, 267–8 see also individual languages; scripts Alpine Slavs, 288 Alps, the, 886, 965(n.5) Alsace, 77, 967 Altermatt, Urs, 41, 885 Alvarez, Emmanuael, Father, 95, 371 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 53 Ambrosius, Ernst, 923 American Revolution (1776), 31, 42, 371 Ammon, Ulrich, 44 Anderson, Benedict, 25, 43, 44 Anderson, Charles Arnold, 25 Andrea, Alfred J, 576 Angevin see Anjou Anichenka, U. V, 170, 175, 384

1055

Anjou (Angevin) dynasty, 15, 121 Antall, József (1932–1939), 887 anthropology, 957 anti-communism, 936 anti-Gypsism, 329 anti-semitism, 49, 313, 329, 335, 336, 596, 664, 665, 686, 927 Central Europe, 313, 335 Hungary, 662, 664, 665, 686, 687–8 Poland, 336, 594–6, 662, 940 Romania, 927 Russian Empire, 336, 398, 927 Slovakia, 838, 855 Western Europe, 49, 71, 307, 313, 317, 335 Antohi, Sorin, 217 Antonovich, A K, 143 Anyanyelvápolók Szövetsége (Union of the Cultivators of the Mother Tongue), 704 Apponyi Law, 555 Aprilov, Vasil (1789–1847), 279 Aptroot, Marion, 316 Arabic, xx, 33, 39, 41, 48, 59, 91, 93, 113, 119, 126, 139, 142, 143. 144, 157, 220, 227, 232, 233, 239, 243, 244, 258–9, 260, 262, 264, 265–7, 271–2, 273–4, 275, 278, 287, 310–11, 314, 317, 319, 323, 328, 330, 341, 351, 354, 358, 363, 471, 475, 961(n.28), 961(n.30), 963(n.53), 969(n.27), 970, 979 Arabic (Hindu-Arabic) numerals, 266, 351, 354, 360 Aramaic, 131, 139, 142, 301, 307–11, 317, 341, 965, 969(n.29), 970, 977(n.48), 978 Arbëresh, 243 see also Albanian archdioceses, 289 archives/libraries, 8, 38 Area Studies programmes, 12 Arebica, 143 Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae (Aristarchus, or on the Contempt for the German Language, 1617, Beuthen an der Oder [Bytom Odrzanski]), ´ 45 Armenia, 141, 320–3, 324, 326, 327, 363 Armenian, 41, 67, 69, 113, 131, 139, 141, 142, 213, 240, 258, 259, 264, 271, 281, 282, 301, 307–8, 314, 317, 320–8, 331,

1056 Index

341, 358, 362, 363, 419, 706, 808, 962, 966(n.6), 970(n.29), 977(n.48), 978 Armistice Treaty (1945), 689 Armstrong, John A, 38, 978, 995 Arnautovi´c, Aleksandr, 353 Arndt, Christian Gottlieb von (1743–1829), 477, 480, 489, 531 Arndt, Ernst Moritz (1769–1860), 1, 30, 47, 400, 477, 480, 489, 531 Aromanians, 202, 205, 210, 216–17 Árpád Dynasty, 121 Arrow Cross regime, 474, 689 Árva, 578, 582–4, 732–3, 823–4 Ashkenazim/Ashkenazic Jews, 307, 309, 311, 317 Ashxarhabar (Western Armenian), 325, 326, 327 Astle, Thomas, 25 Atanasov, Petur, 355 Athens, 96, 244, 251, 253–4, 259, 262–3, 283, 287, 975(n.27) Athos, Mount, 223, 970(n.2), 975(n.27) Atlas gwar polskich (The Small Atlas of the Polish Dialects, 13 fascicles, 1959–1970, Wrocław), 626 Atlas slovenského jazyka (Atlas of the Slovak language, 1968–1984, Bratislava), 796, 881 atmoda, 194 Attica, 83, 256, 258–260 Attila, József (1905–1937), 474 AU (Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci, Academy of Sciences, Cracow), 392, 401, 415, 427–8, 429, 603, 604, 605 Augustín, Marko, 697 Aukštaitijan dialect, 182, 183, 186, 187 Aurora (periodical), 441 AU’s Komisja Je˛zykowa (Language Commission), 427, 428, 429, 604, 605 Austria-Hungary, 2, 4, 6, 9, 13–14, 19, 48ff, 49, 51, 84, 90, 137ff, 139, 142, 143, 146, 175, 211, 296, 297, 308, 313, 348–9, 368, 390–1, 399, 409ff, 411, 415, 434, 456ff, 457, 458, 459, 460, 464, 465, 471, 483, 487, 502, 507ff, 508, 510, 511, 512, 515, 516, 518, 523ff, 524, 525, 553, 557, 558, 570, 574ff, 575, 576, 582, 583, 587, 595ff, 596, 600, 609, 645ff–50, 652, 653, 655, 657, 658, 664ff, 667, 668, 676, 680, 681, 684, 711, 714, 718ff,

719–21, 725, 734, 742, 756, 765, 793, 795, 796, 804ff, 806, 809, 810, 813, 817, 821, 829ff, 830, 831, 894, 895, 903, 909, 910, 912, 913, 916, 918–23, 927, 929, 935, 963, 970, 983, 984, 993 Ausgleich (Kiegyezés, 1867, Austria-Hungary), 391, 457, 460, 466, 503, 553, 681, 716–17, 742, 798, 810, 909, 914, 919, 981(n.1) (1905, Moravia), 50, 69, 117, 163, 170, 172, 175, 177, 192, 199, 210, 212, 250, 273, 326, 337, 346, 353, 357, 385, 396, 398, 401–3, 414, 415, 427, 462, 474, 475, 502, 510, 511, 512, 518, 555, 556, 562, 566, 569, 588, 597, 680, 716, 741, 742, 750, 762, 811, 812, 827, 909, 919 Außendeutsch, 85 Austria German-Austria, 498, 513, 658, 721, 725–6, 734, 738–9, 743, 753, 823 Lower Austria, 510, 726, 830 Upper Austria, 15, 145, 984(n.4) Austria-Hungary, break up of, 411, 558, 647, 804, 921 Austrian Empire, 17–19, 47, 49, 84, 97, 108, 145, 223, 248, 294–6, 312, 345, 348, 365, 389, 390–1, 399, 441, 443, 446, 448, 452, 453, 454, 456–7, 478, 483, 487, 497–500, 504, 507, 523, 525, 538–9, 549, 551, 553, 569, 649, 668, 715, 717–18, 793, 806, 809–10, 909–10, 970,(n.30), 982(n.4) Austrian Social Democratic Party, 511, 653, 655 Austroslavism, 539, 716, 717, 718, 809 Auszra (Lithuanian periodical), 185 authoritarianism, 36, 58, 610, 664, 683, 748, 804, 852, 887, 894, 947 autochthonous communities, 889 Auty, Robert, 100, 103, 107, 136, 491, 493, 495, 507, 517, 567, 764 Avanesau, R. I, 171 Avar Khanate (Khaganate) 7th century, 14, 66–8, 218 Avar (language), 14, 66, 67, 68, 120, 120, 218, 966 Avars, 14, 63, 66–8, 87, 202, 218, 966(n. 8), 982(n. 10) Avvakum Petrov (1620–1682), 159 Azeris, 268, 327, 706

Index

Babejová, Eleonóra, 557 Badeni, Kazimierz (1846–1909), 509 Baedeker, Karl, 613, 615 Baerlein, Henry, 714 Bagin, Anton, 131, 134, 135, 136, 480, 528, 529, 535 Bahlcke, Joachim, 584, 593, 613, 619 Bajerowa, Irena, 608, 614, 619, 622, 623, 628, 629, 632 Bajt, Veronika, 298 Bajza, Josef Ignác (1755–1836), 134, 533 Bakker, Peter, 334 Bakos, Ferenc, 705, 851, 947 Bakoš, Vladimír, 851 Balaton Lake, 16, 125 Balassa, József, 127, 682 Balassi, Bálint, 127–8 Balážová, L’ubica, 900, 901, 950, 955 Balázs, Géza, 67, 124, 126, 424, 674, 705, 966 Balcová, Tána, ˇ 795, 898 Balhar, Jan, 796, 881 Balkan Wars (1912–1913), 5, 250 Balkans, the, 1, 5, 10, 13, 16, 18, 34, 37, 48, 64, 65, 71, 81, 87, 92–3, 113, 125–6, 137, 140–4, 147, 148, 150–1, 158, 202–3, 205, 211, 216, 221, 223, 236, 240–1, 245–9, 254, 256, 258–9, 262, 264–5, 277–8, 282, 286, 291, 301, 307, 317, 319, 320–2, 327–8, 332, 338, 354–5, 361–2, 363, 404, 452, 457–8, 468, 807, 820, 842, 887, 926, 966(n.6), 975(n.27), 978(n.48) Balkanization, 5 Baltic Sea, 180 Banac, Ivo, 255, 340 Banat, 16, 129, 211, 278, 285–6, 432, 436, 455, 468–9, 657–8, 673, 695, 731, 830, 856, 876, 982(n.10) Bandtkie, Jerzy Samuel, 379 Baník, Anton Augustín (1900–1978), 859, 860, 934 Bankowski, ´ Andrzej, 120, 334, 379, 392, 643, 950 Banniard, Michel, 98 Banská Bystrica (Besztercebánya, Neusohl), 483, 552, 563, 564, 772, 833, 848, 857 Baptism by the Savica Waterfall (Slovenian epic poem), 295 Barany, George, 434, 435, 439, 440, 442 Baranya, 661 Socialist Republic of, 661

1057

Bárczi, Géza (1894–1975), 625, 681, 703, 704, 933, 943 Barker, Peter, 730 Barta, Róbert, 777, 783, 872 Bartek, Heinrich (1907–1986), 845–6, 849, 859–60, 880, 934 Barth, Frederik, 38 Bartoš, František (1837–1906), 759 Barvins’kyi, Volodymyr, 391, 401 Basaj, Mieczysław, 103, 107, 491 Basanaviˇcius, Jonas (1851–1927), 185 Basil (Vasily) III, Grand Duke of Muscovy, 151 Báthory dynasty, 125 Batsányi, János (1763–1845), 439 Batthyány, Lajos (1809–1849), 454 Battle of Mohács (1526), 16, 88, 102, 125, 818 Battle of White Mountain (Bíla Hora, today part of Prague) (1620), 16, 102, 125, 133, 477, 486, 488, 819 Bauer, Otto (1881–1938), 574 Baumgarten, J, 316, 653, 993 Bavaria / Bavarians, origin of name, 27, 76, 84, 86, 102, 288, 343, 421, 659, 726, 976(n.41) Bavaria, 27, 76, 84, 86, 102, 288, 343, 421, 659, 726 Bavarian (variety of chancery German), 73, 75, 79, 80, 82, 85, 124, 288, 977 Bavarian-Austrian (Druckersprache), 79, 80 Bavarians, 288 Beauvois, Daniel, 114, 116, 164, 371, 430 Bechný, Jaroslav, 582 Bednarczuk, Leszek, 120 Belarus, 4, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 36, 42, 51, 54, 55, 79, 91, 140, 155, 157, 158, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 178, 179, 188, 191, 357, 358, 373, 411, 412, 413, 576, 577, 585, 586, 590, 600, 610, 611, 612–13, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 626, 630, 634, 846, 930, 958, 970(n.30), 971(n.7), 973, 980 independence, 51, 172, 173, 174, 411 partitioning of, 371, 374, 412 Belarusian (see White Russian, White Ruthenian) Belarusian national movement, 170, 401, 909 Belarusian-Russian creole, 174 see also Trasianka

1058 Index

Belarusians, 14, 54, 55, 119, 120, 140, 157, 158, 165, 167, 168, 172, 173, 188, 189, 191, 340, 388, 409, 413, 585, 586, 590, 591, 594, 597, 599, 600, 602, 603, 611–14, 616, 618, 619, 628, 635, 636, 637, 639, 647, 656, 678, 686, 746, 820, 893, 939, 960, 972, 973, 987 see also Gudai Belgrade, 22, 53–4, 81, 149, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 234, 239, 248, 251, 254, 280, 282, 297–8, 354, 469, 658–9, 661, 663, 666, 686, 697, 699–700, 717, 731, 926 Belgrade military convention, (1918), 658, 731 Bˇelina, Pavel, 722, 730, 734, 738, 775, 777, 790 Belzyt, Leszek, 581, 582 Bem, Józef (1794–1850), 455 Bembo, P, 45, 46 Bem-Wi´sniewska, Ewa, 109 Ben Yehuda (see Perelman, Eliezer) Benda, Kálmán, 434 Benedikz, Benedikt S, 346 Beneš, Edvard (1884–1948), 100, 557, 690, 719, 720, 735, 750, 754, 765, 771, 772, 773, 774, 775, 813, 837, 838, 857, 858, 861, 862, 872 Benešovský, M (1550–1595), 101 Benk˝ o, Loránd, 67, 124, 126, 128, 275, 440, 442, 448, 627, 646, 683, 688, 705, 945 Berˇciˇc, Branko, 344, 345, 346 Berˇci´c, Joanne, 476 Berdychowska, Bogumiła, 619, 623 Berezowski, Cezary, 384 Berlin, 2, 4, 5, 18, 20, 21, 30, 45, 47, 48, 49, 74, 84, 116, 138, 213, 249, 312, 348, 365–6, 375, 379, 383, 389, 399, 404, 408, 410–11, 426, 453, 525, 566, 569, 570, 575–6, 582, 585–6, 592, 597, 610–12, 615–17, 630, 653, 657, 660, 665, 675, 684, 690, 709, 729–30, 740–1, 753–4, 761, 765–6, 769, 837–8, 851, 854–6, 861, 893, 914, 919, 924–7, 935, 938, 946, 974(n.27), 981(n.10) Berlin, Isiah, 30 Bernolᡠctina, 135, 138, 449, 479, 512, 534, 535–7, 541–4, 546–7, 549, 550–1, 744, 763, 808, 814, 820, 842, 845, 899, 911

Bernolák, Anton (1762–1813), 134, 436, 533, 534, 911, 985 Beron, Peter, 280 Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn über die gesetzwidrigen übergriffe der Magyaren, Die (The Complaints and Accusations of the Slavs in Hungary About the Illegal Attacks of the Magyars, 1843, Leipzig), 543–5 Bessarabia, 18, 20, 21, 141, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 269, 352, 353, 609, 658, 666, 669, 694, 937, 969(n.25) see also Moldavia; Moldova Bessenyei, György (von) (1747–1811), 129, 437, 438, 440 Bethlen, István (1874–1946), 660, 663, 664 Białystok (Belastok), 586, 590, 612, 614, 628, 987 Bible language (Bibliˇ ctina), 102, 469–70, 533, 538, 843, 911 Bibles Albanian, 244, 246 Armenian, 323, 325 Belarusian, 173 Bernoláˇctina, 534 Bibliˇctina, 133, 469, 533 Bosnian, 233 Brze´sc´ Bible, 110 Bulgarian, 284 Burgenland Croatian, 237 Church Slavonic, 155 Croatian, 220, 228 Czech, 99, 100, 490, 519 Esperanto, 337 Estonian, 198, 199 Gagauz, 269 Goralian, 638 Grabar, 324 Greek, 259, 260, 261 Gutenberg’s Latin, 95, 342 Hebrew original, 308 Ivrit, 310 Karaim, 272 King James, (1611), 344 Kralice, 101, 102, 103, 536 Latgalian, 196 Latvian, 194, 195 Lithuanian, 182 Little Russian, 169–70 Livonian, 197 Lower Saxonian, 74 Luther’s, 82, 343

Index

Macedonian, 252, 253 Magyar, 122, 123 Ostróg (Ostrih), 174 Ottoman, 266 Polish, 110 Prekmurjan, 299 Romani, 333–4 Russian, 163 Ruthenian, 154, 177 Septuagint, the, 259 Serbian, 227 Serbo-Croatian, 227 Skaryna’s, 174 Slaveno-Bulgarian, 280 Slavic/Slovenian, 292, 293, 296, 298 Slovak, 135 Sorbian, Lower, 303–4 Thuringian, 79 Ukrainian, 178 of Vizsoly, 123 Vulgate, 69, 93, 122, 228, 260, 304, 310 Walachian, 206 Yiddish, 312 Bibliˇ ctina, 102, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 159, 449, 450, 469–70, 492, 533, 535, 536, 537, 538, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 551, 555, 560, 561, 638, 744, 752, 763, 808, 842, 843, 844, 845, 546, 911, 985 Biblioteka Warszawska (monthly), 427 Bibó, István, 576 Bienkowska, ´ Barbara, 110, 152, 371, 416, 608, 622 Biewer, Ludwig, 98, 201, 584 Bil’ak, Vasil, 866, 868 Bildungsbürgertum, 437, 961(n.32) bilingualism, 92, 131, 263, 306, 330, 442, 501, 505, 509, 510, 515, 667, 670, 697, 719, 734, 741, 742, 747, 756, 758, 764, 768, 769, 782, 792, 793, 794, 799, 858, 861, 867, 881, 882, 886, 897, 898, 928, 931, 941, 944, 948, 951, 954 Billig, Michael, 25, 38, 62 bi-/multi-lingualism, 10, 49 Binnendeutsch (Common Standard German), 85 Bíró, Mátyás Dévai (1500–1545), 124 Birobidzhan, Jewish Autonomous Soviet Region of, 58, 315 Black Death (1347–1354), 71, 307

1059

Black Sea, 16, 17, 66, 69, 125, 166, 256, 271, 283, 322, 323, 361, 363, 474, 475, 965(n.5), 966(n.8) Blahoslav, Jan, 101, 111, 481 Blaj (Balázsfalva, Blasendorf), 451 Blanke, Richard, 416, 579, 585 Blažek, Jan (1523–1571), 101, 481 Bloch, Howard R, 175 Bloomfield, Leonard, 25, 32, 33, 35 Bluntschli, Johann Caspar, 11, 992, 993 Bobrownicka, Maria, 47, 904 Bobula, Ida, 476 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375), 45, 95 Böckh, Richard (1824–1927), 11, 49, 399, 403 Bogdan, Henry, 696, 698 Bogomilism, 122, 241, 468 Bogomils, 219, 286, 322 Bogurodzica (Polish religious song), 109 Bohemia, 15, 19–20, 50–1, 68, 70–3, 80, 87–8, 100, 102–9, 114, 117, 122, 131, 136–7, 144, 145, 296, 302, 344, 368, 391, 408, 417–18, 421–2, 425–6, 431, 454, 457, 463, 474, 476, 478–80, 482–93, 496–517, 523–4, 528, 530, 532, 536–7, 540, 542, 554, 558, 560, 569, 596, 602, 610, 642, 654, 662, 665, 667, 674, 715–16, 719–20, 726, 730, 734, 741, 743, 751, 756, 758–9, 762, 765–6, 768, 770–1, 773, 776–7, 782, 790–1, 795, 799–800, 806–7, 809, 810, 813, 819, 832, 834, 837–8, 843, 845, 854, 880, 883, 885, 902, 910–15, 919, 925, 928, 935, 965(n.5), 976(n.41), 983(nn. 3, 6), 989(n.3) Bohemia and Moravia, Protectorate of, 15, 20, 408, 482, 610, 665, 667, 762, 765, 766, 768, 795, 838, 854, 883, 902, 925, 928, 935 Bohemian, 69, 76, 88, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103–8, 111, 120, 132, 133, 137, 138, 183, 290, 293, 304, 417, 444, 453, 469, 477, 479, 481, 482, 484, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 494, 496, 497, 498, 501, 504, 505, 507–12, 519, 523, 524, 530, 531, 532, 533, 535, 536, 537–40, 542, 544, 560, 582, 642, 716, 718, 744, 750, 776, 790, 806, 807, 833, 864, 906, 907, 910, 911, 915, 916, 968, 985, 987 see also Czech, Moravian Bohemian Museum, 492, 494

1060 Index

Bohorˇcica (script), 295 Boia, Lucia, 464 Bolshevik Revolution (1917), 31, 142, 164, 184, 350, 356, 408, 411, 558, 653, 659, 719, 735, 804, 846, 909, 919, 921 Bolzano, Bernard (1781–1848), 108, 496, 497, 498, 499, 716 Boncza-Tomaszewski, ´ Nikodem, 575 Bonn, 633–4, 939, 948 books Albanian, 224, 244 Bernolᡠctina, 541 Bibliˇ ctina, 541 Bulgarian/Slaveno-Bulgarian, 277, 280 Czech, 488, 490, 493, 514, 755, 896 Czechoslovakia, 783–4, 794 German, 74 Greek, 259 hand written (Orthodox Church), 81 Hungary, 678, 713 Latgalian, 194, 196 Latin, 40, 89 Latvian, 194 Lithuanian, 187, 188, 396 Macedonian, 248 Magyar, 128 Polish, 414, 608, 620, 640 Russia, 152 Ruthenian, 177 Samogitian, 396 scripts used, 81–2 Slovak, 533, 768, 841, 858–9, 876, 896 Slovjak, 822 Yiddish, 314 Boris I, Khan (r. 852–888), 70 Borowski, Andrzej, 126, 186, 476 Bory´s, Wiesław, 643, 955 Bosák, Ján, 780, 851, 883 Bosanˇ cica, 143, 219, 220, 232, 236, 976(n.32) Bosnia, xiv, 4, 13ff–16, 19, 20ff, 22, 23, 37, 48, 50, 53ff, 54, 58, 121, 126, 142ff, 143, 147, 148, 219ff, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 237, 240, 246, 254, 283, 286, 289, 291, 332, 358, 359, 363, 468, 469, 471, 850, 958, 975, 976, 471 Bosniaks, 233–4, 976(n.32) Bosnian, 14, 37, 50, 53ff, 54, 126, 128, 143ff, 144, 149, 217, 219, 220, 222, 226, 227, 230, 232–3, 235, 236, 240,

241, 251, 340, 341, 469, 471, 718, 961, 974, 976 Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar (Madison WI 2006), 235 Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook (Madison WI 2006), 235 Bosnians, 14, 37, 53, 128, 144, 222, 227, 340, 718, 974 Bosnian War (1992–1995), 22, 233 Botto, Július (1848–1926), Jr, 814 Bougarel, Xavier, 231, 233 bourgeoisie, 39, 339, 389, 413, 640, 812 bourgeois-national deviation, 53, 864, 873, 878, 879, 945 Boyen, Professor, 450 Bozveli, Neofit (1785–1848), 280 Bradley, John F. N, 507, 510, 513 Brandenburg, 15, 17, 21, 76, 101, 102, 302, 305–6, 482, 509 Bra¸sov (Brassó, Kronstadt), 81, 206, 440 Bratislava (Pozsony, Preßburg), 2–3, 14, 16, 81–2, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 431, 432–3, 449–50, 453, 461, 465, 482–3, 492, 514, 519, 520, 523, 529, 532, 533, 534, 535–7, 542, 544–5, 547, 549–53, 559, 562–3, 565–6, 611, 625, 645, 657, 665, 677, 702, 705, 709–10, 712, 720, 724, 731, 747, 752, 758, 763–4, 766, 768, 772, 774, 778, 780, 783, 785, 789–90, 795–7, 799, 820, 823, 829, 832–3, 836–9, 841–3, 846, 849–50, 852–7, 859–61, 865, 867, 869, 874–5, 877–83, 886, 888–90, 898–900, 903, 911, 934, 949, 951, 958(n.12), 981(n.2), 984(n.7), 985(n.13) see also Preßburg; Pozsony Bray, Reginald George Arthur de, 528 Brest Litovsk (Brze´sc´ ), 411 Breton, Roland, 82, 340, 500, 783, 974 Breza, Edward, 348 Brezhnev doctrine, 777, 865 Britannica World Language Dictionary (1945, Chicago), 316 Brno (Brünn), 80, 135, 479, 484, 492, 507, 508–9, 511, 566, 574, 653, 757, 984(n.7) Brock, Peter, 528, 535, 540, 541, 545, 547, 550, 557, 985, 986 Brockhaus, Arnold (1772–1823), 407, 408 Bronsztejn, Szyja, 619 Brown, L. Carl, 205 Brubaker, Rogers, 24, 42

Index

Brückner, Aleksander (1856–1939), 120, 428, 429, 605, 626, 763, 932, 945 Brünn programme, 574, 653 Brus jazyka ˇceského (The Whetstone of the Czech Language, 1877, Prague), 516, 759 brusiˇci, 516 Bruski, Jan Jacek, 178 Brussels, 23, 49, 631, 644, 707, 884, 949, 975(n.27) Bryce, James, 205 Brze´sc´ Bible, 110 Brzezinski, ´ Andrzej M, 148 Buc, B. S, 722, 829, 832, 967 Bucharest, 20, 65, 178, 206, 209, 210, 213–14, 216–17, 244, 255, 280, 282–3, 354, 452, 625, 657–9, 666, 671–3, 689, 693–5, 699, 706, 709, 735, 825, 830, 926, 937, 981(n.15) Buck, Carl Darling, 26, 593 Buda (Budin, Ofen), see Budapest Budapest, 3, 50, 67, 130, 146, 167, 201, 226, 227, 240, 280, 282, 339, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 466, 468, 469, 470, 471, 475, 476, 482. 484, 511, 512, 517, 520, 521, 525, 527, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 560, 563, 564, 569, 583, 610, 625, 627, 652, 653, 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 659, 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 668, 669, 671, 672, 674, 675, 681, 682, 683–9, 691–5, 698–9, 700–1, 703–12, 717–19, 721, 724–6, 731–2, 734–6, 740, 742, 745, 753, 758, 763–4, 766, 774, 799, 804, 810, 811–12, 817, 819–21, 823, 825–6, 828, 832, 838–9, 841–2, 847, 850, 853–6, 858, 861, 889, 893, 895, 912, 924–6, 928, 937, 940, 946, 951–2, 958, 986 Budmani (1835–1914), Petar, 226 Budny, Symon (1530–1593), 154 Budzhak, 16 Budzyk, Kazimierz, 118 Buffa, Ferdinand, 899 Bug (Western), 610 Bug (Southern), 165, 213 B¯ uga, Kazimieras, 189 Bukovina, 17, 20, 21, 146, 167, 175–8, 208, 211, 213, 313, 511, 601, 609, 658, 694, 735, 745, 937, 981(nn.13, 15) Bukvitsa script (Glagolitic), 69 Bulei, Ion, 453

1061

Bulgaria, 249, 281, 283, 976(n.40) Bulgarian Banat, 285, 286, 468, 469 early development, 276, 279 official language, 283 Old, 28, 34, 158, 252, 280 publications, 277, 281, 975(n.30) purifying, 282 standard, 252, 276, 280, 281, 283, 284, 286, 287, 354, 468 vernacular, 277, 280, 283 Bulgarian Church, 277, 281, 283, 284, 284 Bulgarian Empire first (681–1018), 69, 242, 246, 249, 255, 276 second (1185–1396), 158, 219, 242, 246, 276, 287 Bulgarian Exarchate, 249, 254, 258, 283 Bulgarianization, forced, 53, 285, 287 Bulgarian Literary Society, 283 Bulgarian National Library, 283 Bulgarian national movement, 282, 283, 354 Bulgarian Patriarchate, 70, 249, 276–9, 284 Bulgarians, Banat, 468, 469 Bunjevci, 239, 240, 469, 471, 662–3, 686–7, 698 Bunjevcian, 239, 240, 469 Burgenland, 19, 72, 237–8, 468, 670, 674, 726, 793, 830, 978(n.49) Burgenland Croatian, 237, 238, 468 burghers, 102, 105, 109, 110, 113, 115, 119, 123, 131, 144, 145, 146, 153, 292, 368, 380, 381, 433, 434, 437, 446, 465, 487, 488, 524, 530, 573, 649, 650, 716, 807, 808, 908, 910, 916 Burke, Peter (1729–1797), 30, 40–1, 83, 86, 98, 263, 266, 279, 968 Buzássyová, Klára, 900, 901, 950, 955 Byelorussia, 36, 52, 55, 120, 172, 173, 174, 189, 358, 818, 936, 960, 972) see also Belarusia Byelorussian, 168, 818, 846 see also Belarusian Bystron, ´ Jan Stanisław, 480 Byzantium, 68, 70–1, 87, 93–4, 96–7, 151, 218–19, 242, 246–7, 249, 255–7, 259, 263, 265, 269, 286–7, 321, 324, 964(n.3), 966(n.6), 975(n.27) see also Roman Empire, Eastern

1062 Index

´ Cakavian, 221, 222, 225, 236, 237, 291, 467, 468 see also Croatian, Kajkavian ´ Cakavian society, 237 calendar, Julian, 376, 587, 975 Calepino, Ambrogio (1440–1510), 95 Calepinus, 96 Caliphate, 41, 93, 266, 321, 342, 961(n.30) Calvet, Louis-Jean, 473 Canaanic (Jewish Slavic), 71 Canetti, Elias (1905–1994), 320 Cantemir, Dimitrie (1673–1723), 212 ˇ Capka, František, 502, 855 Caprivi, Leo von (1831–1899), 404 Caranthanii (see Carinthia) Caraus, Tamara, 215 Carinthia, 14–15, 17, 63, 67, 288–97, 299 Carmichael, Cathie, 65, 148, 231, 233 Carniola, 15, 17, 19, 21, 50, 288, 291–297 Carniolan, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296 ˇ Carnogurský, Ján, 883, 884 Carolingian Empire, 71, 74, 77, 96 see also Frankish Empire Carolingian miniscule, 68, 71, 74, 77, 92, 94, 95, 96, 342 Carpathia, 470, 687, 690, 705, 767, 774, 856, 874, 928 see also Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Transcarpathian Ruthenia Carpathians, the, 14, 63–4, 67, 202–4, 218, 271, 289, 391, 583, 673, 695, 733, 736, 825, 857, 930, 954, 974(n.25), 984(n.6) Caspian Sea, 71, 142, 271, 646, 965(n.5), 967(n.11) Castellan, Georges, 453, 456, 462, 464 Castilian, 1, 40, 96, 317–18 Cathars, 286 Catherine the Great, Tsaritsa (r.1762–1796)115, 375 Caucasus, the, 67, 91, 241, 266, 268, 271, 283, 286, 320–2, 327–8, 362, 386, 468, 935, 965(n.5), 966(nn.6, 8) Ceau¸sescu, Nicolae (1918–1989), 695 ˇ Cechien (see Czech Republic) ˇ Cechy (see Czech Republic) censuses, and language measurement, 9, 49, 239, 251, 256, 399, 501, 580, 590, 597, 599, 662, 685–6, 691, 699, 707–8, 729, 773, 781, 853, 870, 875, 931

Austria-Hungary, 2, 4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 19, 48–9, 51, 84, 90, 137, 139, 142–3, 146, 175, 211, 296–7, 308, 313, 348–9, 368, 390–1, 399, 409, 411, 415, 434, 456–9, 460, 464–5, 471, 483, 487, 507–8, 510–12, 515–16, 518, 523–5, 553, 557–8, 570, 574–6, 582–3, 587, 595, 600, 609, 645–50, 652–3, 655, 657–8, 664, 667–8, 676, 680–1, 684, 711, 714, 718–21, 725, 734, 742, 756, 765, 793, 795, 804, 806, 809–10, 813, 821, 829–31, 840, 893–5, 903, 909–10, 912–13, 916, 918–23, 927, 929, 935, 963, 970, 983–4, 993 Hungary, 652 Poland-Lithuania, 13, 16–17, 40, 70–3, 80–1, 88–90, 97, 101, 104, 110–19, 123–6, 131, 137–8, 140–2, 145, 150–2, 155–9, 162–3, 165–6, 168, 180–3, 186–8, 193–4, 196, 198, 201, 205, 219, 220, 252, 272, 277, 278, 307, 312, 323, 325, 344, 346, 351, 355, 365, 368, 370–80, 382–3, 385–6, 388, 390–1, 394, 397–400, 402–3, 410, 412–15, 418, 424, 426, 429, 434–6, 438, 443, 446, 453, 470, 473, 476–8, 482, 490, 523, 573–4, 576–80, 583, 588–9, 592, 594, 597, 599, 610, 626, 647–9, 656, 732, 744, 797, 806, 818, 823, 903, 907–9, 912, 914, 924–5, 929, 947, 958, 961, 969, 970, 973, 979, 987 Central Europe (1916, London), 12 Central Europe as a concept, 1 definitions of, 224 location of, 73, 249, 531, 985, 986 Central European studies, 4 ˇ Cernová massacre, 556–7 ˇ Ceská mluvnice (The Czech Grammar, 1951, Prague), 785 ˇ Ceské akademie cisaˇre Františka Josefa pro vˇedy, slovesnost a umˇení (Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art), 508 ˇceském jazyce, O (On the Czech Language, 1924, Prague), 517 ˇ Cesko (see Czech Republic) ˇ Cesko-nˇ emecká právnˇe-politická terminologie (Czech-German Legal and Political Terminology, 1850, Prague), 513

Index

ˇ Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (Czech-German Grammatical and Phraseological Dictionary, 1878–1893, Prague), 515, 761, 848 ˇ Ceskoslovanská Jednota (Organization of Czechoslav [Czechoslovak] Unity), 463, 512, 810, 811, 812 ˇ Ceskoslovenský differenciálny slovnik (Czech-Slovak Dictionary of Words That Are Different in Both Languages, 1922, Trnava), 847 ˇ Ceskoslovenský národ (The Czechoslovak Nation, Bratislava), 520 ˇ Cesko-slovenský slovník (The Czech Slovak Dictionary, 1979, Bratislava), 565, 780, 882, 898, 944 ˇ Ceský etymologický slovník (Czech Etymological Dictionary, 2001, Voznice), 796 ˇ Ceský jazykový atlas (Atlas of the Czech Language, 1992–2006, Prague), 796, 881 Cetinje, 80–2, 151, 971(n.3) Chaghatay, 273, 962 Chamerska, Halina, 110, 152, 371, 416, 608, 622 chancery languages, 73, 74, 75, 79, 99, 132, 292 Bohemian, 34, 69, 76, 88, 99, 100–8, 111, 120–1, 132–3, 136–8, 159, 183, 290, 293, 304, 417, 422, 444, 453, 469, 477, 479, 481–2, 484, 488–92, 494, 496–8, 501, 504–12, 519, 523–4, 530–40, 542, 544, 560, 582, 642, 716, 718, 744, 750, 773, 776, 790, 806–7, 819, 833, 864, 906–7, 910–12, 915–16, 968, 983, 985, 987 Czech, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 498, 534 Magyar, 121, 123 Polish, 109, 118 replacement of, 79 Ruthenian, 152 Charlemagne (r.768–814), 17, 75, 94, 935, 964(n.3)970 Charles I, Emperor (r.1914–1918), 652, 721 Charles IV, Emperor, 99, 481, 500, 503, 504, 653, 660 see also Charles I, King Charles I, King (r.1346–1378), 482 Charter 2007 (Rusyns), 891

1063

Charter 77 (Czechoslovakia), 866–7, 891 Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (1991, Czechoslovakia), 792, 795 Chászár, Edward, 775 Chełm (Kholm), 385, 410, 585, 970(n.30) Chernivtsi (Cern˘ au¸ti, Czernowitz), 211, 313, 601, 981(n.13), 984(n.6) Chernodrinski, Vojdan Pop Georgiev (1875–1951), 250 children exchange (grass roots multilingualism), 465 Chi¸sin˘ au (Kishinev, Kishineu), ˙ 212, 214 Chlebowczyk, Józef, 26 Chocholatý, František, 775 Chojnowski, Andrzej, 178 Chraska, Antonín (1868–1953), 296 Christianity, Latin, 88 Christianizing mission (863–867), 68, 421 Chrysoloras, Nikos, 263 Chubynskyi, Pavlo (1839–1884), 443, 444 Chudes (Estonians), 197 Church Armenian Apostolic, 322, 977 Bulgarian, 277, 281, 283, 284 Greek Catholic (Uniate), 140, 355 national Czechoslovak, 738, 750 Church Slavonic, 35, 40, 68, 70, 73, 81, 82, 87–9, 97, 101, 109, 112, 113, 114, 119, 128, 132, 140, 150–2, 154–6, 158–65, 171, 174–6, 180, 198, 204, 205–7, 218–25, 227, 228, 236, 247–9, 252, 254–6, 260, 271, 276–85, 289, 291, 294, 308, 310, 325, 341, 350, 351–7, 359–62, 371–2, 385–6, 390–1, 417, 419, 421, 435, 451, 470, 473, 477–9, 526, 529, 544, 555, 556, 583, 674, 718, 744–5, 823, 891, 961, 966(n.10), 970, 975, 980 literacy, 70, 87, 109, 127, 155, 156, 158, 205, 291, 421, 975 recensions of, 219, 222, 277, 280 see also Old Church Slavonic Chybné slová, výrazy a väzby, ktorým treba v slovenˇcine vyhýbat’ (Incorrect Words and Phrases, Which Have to Be Removed from the Slovak Language, 1922, Trnava), 848 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 959(n.16) Cienkowski, Witold, 430, 626 Ciesielski, Stanisław, 371, 416, 599

1064 Index

Cieszyn/Tˇešín (Teschen), 118, 487, 502, 577–8, 581–2, 584–5, 591, 727–30, 732–4, 741, 764, 766, 770, 773, 775, 824, 828, 836–837 Cirillo-Metodiada (Cyrilo-Methodiana, 1835, Buda), 479, 534 citizenship, 24, 25–6, 36, 42, 43, 54, 190, 254, 298, 584, 611, 612, 619, 633, 634, 688, 690, 696, 709, 717, 729, 733, 772, 774, 775, 780, 792, 829, 863, 866, 871, 872, 959, 962, 964, 990 civic states/nations, 24, 25, 26, 496, 715, 738, 740, 747, 781, 872 civil script, 160, 350, 356 Clajus, Johannes (1535–1592), 79 Clark, Charles Upson, 353 class, middle, 39, 437, 446, 448, 508, 524, 598, 614, 961 classification of languages, 984(n.2) classlessness, and languages, 954 cleavages, religion-script/social status, 139, 338, 672, 751, 791, 907, 954 Clement, St, 249 Clementis, Vlado (1902–1952), 864, 865 Cleveland Agreement (1915), 512, 513, 719, 817 Cluj (Kolozsvar, Klausenburg), 123, 125, 439, 461, 677, 682, 694–5, 758, 937 Clifford, James, 63 Cobarrubias, Juan, 26 codification, 10, 85–6, 94, 98, 101, 106–7, 133–5, 137, 138, 157, 165, 187, 207, 209, 214, 223, 225, 229, 245, 251, 252, 267, 275, 276, 283, 284, 286, 287, 296, 333, 340, 351, 372, 373, 379, 427, 439, 472, 512, 513, 516, 533, 534–8, 542, 545–6, 551, 559–64, 567, 607, 626, 642, 668, 674, 680, 744, 757, 759, 760, 764, 777, 784, 785, 801, 809, 812, 842–9, 859–61, 872, 874, 876, 877–8, 881, 890–1, 898, 899, 901, 906, 911, 918, 928, 934, 951, 954, 957(n.7), 968, 980 Albanian, 48, 54, 57, 58, 67, 81, 217, 224, 231, 234, 240, 241–8, 250, 254, 258, 259, 262, 264, 324, 334, 359, 361, 418, 697, 960–1, 966 Bohemian, Chancery, 76, 100–1, 132, 304, 484, 488, 530–2, 535, 542, 807, 906, 907, 915, 916 Bulgarian, 276, 283, 284, 286 Church Slavonic and vernaculars, 351

Classical Greek, 81, 96, 97, 228, 372, 383 Crimean Tatar, 272–275 Croatian, 225 Cyrillic, 70 Czech, 107, 513, 516, 535, 759, 760, 784 Esperanto, 340 Estonian, 199 German, 78 Goralian, 951 Grabar (Old Armenian), 141 Greek, 259 Latin, 94 Latvian, 195 Lithuanian, 189 Macedonian, 251 Magyar, 130, 286, 680 Moldavian, 214 Moravian, 801 New Czech, 106 Polish, 373, 379, 404, 427, 607, 626 Pomakian, 287 Romani, 872 Romanian, 209 Russian, 138, 350 Rusyn, 890, 891 Ruthenian, 176 Serbian, 225 Sieb’s ‘North German,’ 85 Slavic languages, 295 Slovak, 546, 560, 563, 842, 843, 845, 899 Slovenian, 291, 296 Ukrainian, 874 Walachian, 207 (West) Polesian language, 157 cohesion, 7, 25, 43 Cold War, 2, 3, 4, 12, 23, 91, 315, 339, 570, 571, 622, 703, 937 colonialism, 28, 41, 43, 59, 60, 86, 301, 733, 923, 961 Comenius (see Komenský, Jan Amos) communism, 2–4, 12, 22, 30, 42, 52, 86, 91, 150, 173, 179, 190, 201, 210, 213, 215, 286, 331–2, 339, 356, 359, 462, 469, 471, 525, 528, 571, 625–31, 637, 640, 643, 691–2, 699, 700, 704, 706, 710, 711, 763, 776–8, 780, 784, 786–7, 789, 796, 799, 805, 852, 863, 864, 869–71, 875, 883, 902, 909, 918–23, 927, 932, 935, 937–8, 941–4,

Index

946, 948–50, 952, 953, 974, 990, 992 Communist Party, Hungarian, 658 community, 38 Compendiosa Linguae Polonicae Institutio (The Brief Grammar of the Polish Language, 1690, Gdansk), ´ 109 Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, The, 309 Comrie, Bernard, 148, 164 Condillac, Étienne de (1715–1780), 105 Congress of Nationalities, 463 Congress of the Rusyn Language, Second (1999), 891, 892 Congress of Vienna (1815), 17, 18, 108, 291, 302, 365, 380, 383–4, 450, 913 Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius, 68, 87, 131, 252, 528 Constantinople, 16, 80–1, 141ff, 150, 151, 158, 164, 205, 219–20, 242, 247, 249, 254ff, 260, 266ff, 269, 277, 279ff, 281ff, 318–19, 322, 324ff, 354, 594, 964(n.3), 965, 970(n.2), 975(n.27), 977(n.47) 978 see also Istanbul Constitution, 3 May, 368, 370, 371, 380, 594 Constitution, of Independent Slovakia (1992), 528 Conversations-Lexikon (1853–1857), 407 Cook, Michael, 113, 143 Coptic, 67 Corfu, 81, 223, 244 Cornides, Daniel (1732–1787), 645 Cornucopiæ, 95 Cornwall, Mark, 757 Cossack Wars, 114 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard (1894–1972), 571 Council of Allied Ambassadors, 584 Council of Europe, 316, 332, 630, 888, 892 Counseil National des Pays Tchèques (The National Council of the Czech Lands), 557, 558, 813 Counseil national tchéco-slovaque (Czech-Slovak National Council), 813 Counter-Reformation, 89, 95, 103, 112, 114, 123, 126, 128, 133, 135, 140, 155, 156, 180, 181, 206, 220, 292, 341, 344, 431, 486, 487, 532, 578, 807, 959, 980

1065

Courland, 16, 75, 109, 113, 163, 187, 193–4, 196, 198–9, 395–6, 408, 974(n.21) Courtenay, Jan Baudouin de (1845–1929), 428, 429, 599 Courthiade, Marcel, 334, 978 Couturat, Louis (1868–1914), 337 Cox, John, 222, 437, 453 Cracow, 18, 20, 69, 72, 80–1, 109–11, 113, 117–18, 122, 124, 146, 147, 151, 180, 312, 373–7, 379–84, 389–90, 392, 397–8, 400, 405–6, 414–18, 424, 428–30, 482, 548, 588, 603–7, 611–12, 614, 623–7, 638, 640, 642–3, 651, 659, 702, 727, 758, 763, 799, 823, 907, 914, 920, 929, 935, 973(n.18), 975(n.29), 988(n.17) Cracow, Free City of, 18, 379, 384, 389, 390, 548, 907, 914, 923, 929 Crampton, R. J, 48, 70 creoles, 28 Crete, 256, 262 Crimea, 58, 65, 209, 256, 271–5, 338, 362, 387, 873, 971, 977(n.39) Crimean War (1853–1856), 209, 387 Croatia, 218, 219, 221, 443, 464 Croatia-Slavonia, 50, 129, 432, 443, 456–7, 460, 464, 467, 483, 540, 553, 569, 650, 652–4, 656, 657, 660–1, 663, 667–70, 676–7, 717, 731, 742, 926 Croatian in Catholic Latin script, 144 dialectal base of, 225, 546 manuscripts, 219 official recognition of, 106, 455, 491, 548, 892 orthography, 227, 468 Croatian national movement, 236, 237, 467 Croatian National Party, 444 Croatian-Hungarian Party, 444 Croato-Serbian, 225, 228, 230, 233, 341, 850 see also Serbo-Croatian Croato-Slavonia, 19, 50, 129, 432, 443, 456ff, 464, 483, 640, 553, 569, 650, 652ff, 662ff, 670ff, 717, 731, 742, 926 Croato-Slavonian, 225 Croats, 217, 218, 974(n.26) Croucher, Murlin, 489, 491, 493, 495, 725, 756, 768, 771, 784, 842, 861, 883 Crowe, David M, 205, 216, 334

1066 Index

Crowley, Tony, 1, 11, 62, 988 Crystal, David, 35, 958 Csáky, Moritz, 645 Csángós, 673, 674 Csere, János Apáczai (1625–1659), 128 Cs˝ ury, Bálint, 681 cultural revolution, Albanian (1966–1969), 245 Culture Centre of Latgalia, 194, 196, 200 culture, Czech/Slovak, 72, 79, 83, 85, 109, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 125, 126, 131, 136, 141, 149, 152, 162, 163, 170, 171, 175, 183, 184, 187, 196, 197, 200, 201, 207, 209, 211, 213, 214, 233, 238, 240, 242, 245, 247, 248, 266, 278, 291, 309, 310, 312, 314, 315, 316, 318, 329, 324, 326, 346, 353, 355, 359, 362, 376, 377, 382, 385, 386, 387, 389, 393, 394, 395, 397, 399, 402, 403, 410, 414, 415, 426, 431, 441, 465, 466, 469, 470, 501, 503, 506, 508, 514, 517, 520, 528, 529, 544, 549, 553, 554, 560, 561, 562, 575, 586, 599, 603, 606, 609, 615, 630, 631, 632, 643, 644, 645, 663, 670, 672, 681, 688, 695, 698, 702, 708, 711, 712, 713, 722, 723, 725, 737, 747, 748, 754, 758, 760, 770, 793, 795, 797, 798, 799, 800, 803, 805, 817, 822, 823, 825, 833, 834, 839, 858, 861, 864, 868, 876, 877, 879, 887, 891, 896, 897. 905, 915, 919, 923, 926, 928, 929, 930, 935, 941, 946, 950, 952, 954, 960, 965, 967, 971, 989 Cum Primum (On Civil Disobedience), 386 Cumania, 672 Curta, Florian, 67 Cuza, Alexandru Ioan (1820–1873), 209 Cyganski, ´ Mirosław, 306 Cyprus, 23, 57, 256, 263, 269, 361, 363, 977, 989 Cyril (Constantine) and Methodius, 68, 87, 131, 252, 480, 501, 526, 527, 528, 824, 887 Cyrillic script, 69, 119, 144, 159, 170, 173, 207, 219, 225, 228, 274, 276, 314, 350, 353, 358, 390, 529, 602 the Balkans, 1, 5, 10, 13, 16, 18, 34, 37, 48, 64, 65, 71, 81, 87, 92, 93, 113, 125, 126, 137, 140–4, 147–8, 150–1, 158, 202–3, 205, 211, 216, 223, 236, 241, 245, 246–9, 254, 256, 258, 259, 262, 264, 265, 277, 278, 282, 286, 301, 307, 317, 319, 320–2, 327–9, 332,

338, 354, 355, 361, 362–3, 404, 452, 457, 458, 468, 807, 820, 842, 887, 926, 966, 975, 978 vernaculars, use of, 6, 7, 8, 33, 35, 39, 40, 47, 81, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95, 95, 96, 97, 103, 104, 106, 114, 112, 126, 128, 129, 139, 140, 141, 146, 157, 165, 184, 191, 192, 198, 220, 222, 260, 273, 277, 323, 345, 351, 354, 419, 420, 465, 473, 478, 524, 528, 530, 532, 589, 648, 718, 968 see also individual languages Czambel, Samo (1856–1910), 520, 527, 563, 567, 757, 842, 844 Czaplinski, ´ Władysław, 379, 384, 388, 398, 406, 416, 586 Czartoryski, Adam Prince (1770–1861), 116, 376, 378 Czech, 105, 106, 107, 518 Chancery, 81, 101, 102, 106, 107, 109, 113, 123, 124, 135, 138, 477, 488, 490, 491, 505, 506 decline of, 74, 80, 98, 114, 200, 258, 263, 279, 327, 354, 602, 756 development of, 18, 25, 38, 119, 123, 127, 136, 137, 159, 175, 177–8, 184, 185, 187, 192, 196, 201, 219, 237, 248, 302, 309, 325, 353, 372, 376, 381, 392, 393, 397, 398, 420, 421, 439, 459, 460, 464, 479, 471, 487, 491, 494, 502, 510, 511, 513, 514, 527, 534, 547, 559, 560, 561, 566, 596, 604, 632, 708, 711, 713, 715, 719, 730, 734, 760, 768, 787, 791, 798, 801, 810, 814, 833, 839, 843, 845, 846, 864, 868, 873, 876, 902, 903, 908, 911, 913, 918, 919, 922, 930, 956, 970 dialects, 506, 517 dominance over Slovak, 787 education, 491 Jesuit, 103, 135, 532 lexicography, 101, 515 linguistic loans in, 259, 304, 325, 475, 515, 516, 799 literary language, 493 official language, 491, 743, 769, 777, 795, 902 orthography, 100, 136, 185, 225, 422–3, 425, 516, 760 purifying, 48, 96, 261, 282, 297, 515, 759, 881

Index

standard, 102, 107, 122, 425, 467, 494, 505, 533, 537, 541, 546, 642, 741, 744, 759, 760, 766, 807, 843, 848, 960 written, 99, 100, 103, 134, 422, 493, 506, 517, 533, 625, 642, 758, 760, 784, 758, 800, 841, 844 Czech Constitution (1992), 528, 790, 791, 792, 853, 886 Crown, Lands of, 15, 16, 73, 101–3, 106, 107, 110, 113, 117, 118, 123, 128, 132, 137, 145, 290, 391, 417, 463, 476, 477, 482–4, 487–8, 490, 496–8, 500–1, 503–4, 506–8, 512, 517, 523, 525, 530, 539, 577, 717, 721, 729, 730, 773, 791, 806–7, 885, 910, 915, 918, 927 culture, 514, 520, 554, 770, 817, 923 Germans, 831 lands, 715, 788 mass media, 867 Republic, 2, 3, 12–15, 22–3, 31, 34, 36, 54, 57, 138, 158, 214, 332, 333, 348, 462, 482, 485–6, 506, 565, 630, 642, 709, 710, 712, 713, 788, 789, 790–5, 799, 801, 870, 872, 875, 885, 886, 887–8, 892, 894, 896–8, 901–2, 919, 949–52, 958, 978 Czech Academy of Sciences and Art, 566, 760, 761, 762, 769, 785, 833 Czechization, of names, 508, 516, 554, 559, 728, 796, 826, 828, 834, 835, 841, 842, 845, 933 Czech National Council, 719, 862, 865 Czech national movement, 425, 470, 479, 498, 499, 502, 510, 511, 514, 515, 517, 547, 553, 560, 727, 807, 810, 906, 913, 960 Cžechoˇreˇcnost, seu Grammatica linguae Bohemicae (The Grammar of the Bohemian Language, 1672, Prague), 103 Czechoslovak, 51–2, 133, 135, 138, 140, 303, 340–1, 368, 417, 463, 464, 478, 481, 489, 511, 513, 514, 517, 518, 519–21, 525–7, 529, 530–1, 533, 537–40, 542, 545, 548, 554, 557, 558–62, 564, 565, 567, 582, 583, 584, 585, 596, 606, 627, 647, 657–9, 667–8, 670, 671, 674, 676, 686, 690, 697, 714–15, 717–22, 724–41, 743, 746–54, 756–7, 760,

1067

763–4, 766. 767, 768, 769, 770, 771–6, 780, 785–7, 789, 791, 794, 795–6, 803, 804, 805, 808, 809, 810–14, 816–18, 823, 825–50, 852, 854, 857–9, 861, 862, 863–7, 869–84, 889, 891, 897, 897, 902, 911, 913, 915–16, 918, 923, 928, 931, 933, 934, 935, 939, 941, 944, 945, 951, 952, 983, 984, 987, 989, 992 decline of, 74, 80, 98, 114, 200, 258, 263, 279, 327, 354, 602, 756 history of, 519–20 official language, 51, 518, 743, 746 Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 762, 780, 785, 795, 878, 882 Czecho-Slovak cooperation, 554, 812, 847 Czecho-Slovak Council, 721 Czech/Slovak, equality of, 779, 784, 797, 864, 867, 881, 897 Czechoslovak-Hungarian war (1918–1919), 734 Czecho-Slovakia, 20, 482, 512, 513, 525, 558, 559, 566, 571, 610, 657, 665, 686, 720, 721, 722, 723, 725, 750, 753, 754, 765, 767, 770, 771, 788–92, 794, 795, 801, 827, 834, 837, 854, 865, 883, 884–7, 890, 896, 898, 925, 928, 948 Czechoslovakia, 485, 486, 565, 817 3 state nations of, 714 communist, 777 Constitution (1920), 518, 564, 817, 842, 843, 848, 850 economy of, 110, 562, 655. 714, 733, 734, 758, 767, 788, 832, 843, 864, 867, 897, 928 education, 749 ethnic composition, 739, 740 federalization of, 771, 777 Five (pˇetka), the, 748 independent, 411, 513, 721, 725 industrialization, 784 inequalities, 755 interwar, 753–4, 839 minorities, national, 748, 781 name change, 725, 765 nation-state, 513, 518, 928 postwar, 773, 780–2 re-established, 775 religion, 783 territorial changes, 726–7, 730, 733–4, 738, 764–5, 766–7, 774

1068 Index

Czechoslovakism, 463, 479, 514, 518, 518, 530, 537, 538, 541, 550, 554, 556, 557, 562, 563, 566–7, 722, 730, 751–2, 757, 777, 791, 795, 810–13, 815, 820, 827, 835, 839, 844, 846, 847, 867, 876, 878, 879, 911, 913, 918, 933, 935, 941, 942–3, 945, 984, 990, 992 Czechoslovakization, 747, 748 Czechoslovak league, 720 Czechoslovak lexicological and lexicographical conference, 764 Czechoslovak movement, 464, 511, 529 Czechoslovak National Assembly, 828, 865 Czechoslovak National Committee, 771 Czechoslovak National Council, 813 Czechoslovak National Front, 858 Czechoslovak nation-state, 138, 558, 845, 933 Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, 714, 776 Czechoslovak-Polish War (1919), 824 Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement (1945), 690, 771, 772 Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement on friendship and cooperation (1943), 771 Czechoslovak-Soviet Institute, 879 Czech Socialist Republic, 485, 777, 866, 941 Czechs, Old, 507, 508, 509, 513 Czechs, Young, 508, 509, 513, 719 Czesak, Artur, 639 Czuczor, Gergely Istaván (1800–1866), 130, 442, 460–1, 515, 680–1, 703, 909, 913, 917, 932 Da˛browska, Anna, 705, 947 Dacia, 63, 64, 201–2, 207, 212, 217, 452, 958(n.10) Daco-Romanian, see Romanian Daco-Slavonic, 205 Dal, Vasilii Ivanovich (1801–1872), 162 Dalmatia, 16–17, 21, 64, 66, 69, 92–3, 121, 146–7, 218–19, 221, 222, 225, 227, 236, 238–9, 289, 291, 293, 443, 454, 457, 460, 467, 469, 488, 657, 662–3, 717, 976(n.32) Dalmatian, 202, 220–1 Dalmatin, Jurij (1547–1589), 292–3 Damborský, Ján (1880–1932), 567, 844, 848 Damm, Krystyna, 64, 65, 275, 287, 299, 334, 674, 966 Daneš, František, 780, 783, 785, 796, 801

Daniˇci´c, Djura (1825–1882), 227, 228 Danish, 40, 57, 76, 82, 183, 197, 345, 421, 898, 962, 963 Dante, Alghieri (1265–1320), 45, 94, 106, 111, 419, 648, 980(n.7) Danube, 16, 63–4, 66–7, 87, 121, 202–3, 247, 249, 432, 444, 447, 473, 474, 529, 658, 711, 965(n.5), 967(n.11), 982(n.1) Danylenko, Andrii, 157, 192 Danzig (Gdansk), ´ 19, 20, 21, 72, 75, 80, 88, 344, 366, 379, 413, 577, 578, 609, 612, 923, 925, 929, 987 Danzig, Free City of, 19ff, 366, 413, 577, 609, 923, 929 Darasz, Zdzisław, 299 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), 65 Daukantas, Simonas (1793–1864), 185 Davies, Norman, 71, 72, 376, 388, 398, 602, 603, 613–15, 619, 980 Dayton Agreement (Dayton Peace Accords, 1995), 22 Dayton Peace Accords (Dayton Agreement, 1995), 232 de Bray, Reginald George Arthur, 528 de Courtenay, Jan Baudouin (1845–1929), 428–9, 599 de Rivarol, Antoine (1753–1801), 45 de Rubertis, Giovanni (1813–1889), 238 Deák, István, 457, 461, 462, 553, 654, 656, 661, 667, 690, 693 Deák, Ladislav, 461, 553, 656, 661, 667, 690, 693, 766, 839, 989 De˛bołe˛cki, Wojciech (1585–1646), 480 Debrecen (Debreczin), 122, 128, 133, 461, 658, 677, 685, 689, 821 Dedes, George, 246, 263 Deditskii, Bogdan A, 357 Defoe, Daniel (1660–1731), 83 DeFrancis, John, 150 Dˇejiny Moravy (History of Moravia), 479 Dˇejiny národu ˇceského, 503 ˇ Dˇejiny národu ˇceského w Cechách a na Morawˇe (History of the Czech Nation, 1848–1876, Prague), 479 Dejiny Slovenska a Slovákov (History of Slovakia and the Slovaks), 132 Dˇejiny slovenské literatury (History of Slovak Literature, 1950, Prague), 520 Dejna, Karol (1911–2004), 626 Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, 337 Dell’Agata, Giuseppe, 279

Index

Dembinski, ´ Henryk (1791–1864), 455 Deme, Lászl, 703, 704 democracy, abandonment of, 925 demonstrations, anti-communist, 622 de-Polonization, 187, 395 see also Polonization Deputacja Ortograficzna (Orthography Commission), 381 Deszkiewicz, Jan Nepomucen, 367 Détruisez la Tchécoslovaquie fief du bolchevisme. Détruisez ce monstre tchéco-slovaco-germano-houngaroruthéno-polonais (Destroy Czechoslovakia, a Fief of Bolshevism: Destroy the Czecho-SlovakoGermano-Hungaro-Rutheno-Polish monster, 1936, Paris), 821 Detvan (poem), 547, 810, 811 Deutsch-böhmisches Wörterbuch, 494 Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (German Stage Pronunciation), 85 Deutsche Partei (German Party), 856 Deutscher Sprachatlas (Dialectal Atlas of the German Language), 405 di Colloredo, Ermes (1622–1692), 300 dialect continuums, 33–4, 64, 72, 304, 958(n.15)985 dialectology, German, 405, 517, 519, 956 dialects, 25, 29, 959(n.22) Chinese, 33 Dutch, 33 German, 33, 48, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83–4, 397, 405, 406, 967, 986 Latin, 93–4 Low German, 33, 80, 83–4, 967, 986 Magyar, 34, 72, 124, 128, 461, 517, 681, 705, 947 Polish, 34, 350, 394, 405, 461, 517, 606, 626, 917 Slavic, 28, 34, 35, 68, 101, 112, 113, 154, 158, 174, 187, 229, 252, 287, 288, 293, 299, 304, 481, 484, 506, 524, 567, 578, 582, 728, 875, 911, 930, 958, 984, 985 Slovak, 132, 135, 450, 512, 522, 527, 531, 540, 544–6, 744, 780, 822, 872, 899, 985 diaspora Armenian, 320, 323 Polish, 609 Roma, 327 Rusyn, 471

1069

Slovak, 860, 875, 991 dictionaries of specific languages, see separate ‘index of dictionaries’ dictionaries, compilation of, 10–11, 46 Dictionarium Latinohungaricum (The Latin-Magyar Dictionary, 1604), 122 Dic¸tionarul limbii române literare contemporane (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Romanian Language, 1955–1957, Bucharest), 625 Dictionary of Four Languages, 247, 248 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (Dictionary of the French Academy [of Sciences]), 161 Die statistische Bedeutung der Volksprache als Kennzeichen der Nationalität (The Statistical Significance of the People’s Speech as the Indicator of Their Nationality), 49 differences, linguistic, ethnic, regional, 5 Differenciálny slovensko-ruský slovník s troma prílohami a Skrátˇena mluvnica slovenského jazyka s krátkym úvodom (The Slovak-Russian Dictionary of Words That Are Different in Both Languages with Three Appendixes and a Brief Grammar of the Slovak Language, 1900, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 847 digraphs/trigraphs/multigraphs, 99 Dimitrovski, Todor, 255 Dinekov, Petr, 279 Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (A Treatise on the Universality of the French Language), 45 Dmowski, Roman (1864–1939), 31, 412, 413, 416, 576, 577, 587, 589, 617 Dnieper, 163, 165, 388, 411–13, 585, 589, 614, 980(n.8) Dniester, 18, 21, 55, 63, 208, 212–13, 977(n.40), 980(n.8) Dobrijevi´c, Irinej, 360 Dobrovský, Josef (Dobrowsky, Joseph) (1753–1829), 107, 108, 134, 224, 294, 373, 378, 437, 477, 479, 489–4, 513, 516, 519, 521, 531, 535–7, 760, 966 Dobruja, 64, 126, 211, 213, 269, 272, 275, 694, 937 Dodatky (Supplement) to Ottu˚ v slovník nauˇcný, 514, 761, 763 Dodocanese Islands, 262

1070 Index

Doležálek, Jiˇrí, 792 Donat, the, 95 Donatus’s Latin grammer, 95 Donev, Dony K, 285 Doroszewski, Witold (1899–1976), 606, 624, 625–6, 628, 640, 641, 643, 796, 943 Dorul’a, Ján, 562 Dr Esperanto, 336 see also Zamenhof, L L Dralle, Lothar, 439 Draškovi´c, Janko (1770–1856), 443 Drava, 67, 236, 297, 467 Drava Banovina, 297 Dresden, 76, 377 Drews, Robert, 263, 976 Dreyfus affair (1894), 403 Drsatova, Marta, 124 Druckersprachen (printers’ languages), 79, 80 see also printers’ languages Drucki-Podbereski, B, 173, 602 du Bellay, Joachim (1522–1560), 45 Du Cange, Charles Dufresne (1610–1688), 96 Dual Empire, 211, 460, 510, 555, 667 see also Austria-Hungary Dual Monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary (1867), 19, 569 see also Austria-Hungary Dubˇcek, Alexander (1921–1992), 777, 865, 883 Dubisz, Stanisław, 641 Duchy of Franconia, 77 Duchy of Saxony, 76 Duchy of Warsaw (1807), 17, 373, 376–7, 378, 907, 913 Duden, Konrad (1829–1911), 85 Duden Wörterbuch, 85 Dudík, Beda Franziskus (1815–1890), 479, 480 Dukanovi´c, Milo, 234 Dukhnovych, Aleksander (1803–1865), 744 Dulichenko, Aleksandr D., 134, 177, 192, 225, 240, 255, 279, 287, 299, 301, 306, 348, 357, 392, 472, 531, 535, 748, 768, 780, 801, 823, 875, 892, 985 Duma (Russian parliament), 56, 268, 274, 398 Dunham, Vera S, 725

Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, W (1807–1884), 172 Dürer, Albrecht (1471–1528), 343 ˇ Durica, Milan S, 131, 132, 842 ˇ Duroviˇ c, L’ubomír, 133, 135, 450, 531, 535, 551, 562, 567 Dutch, 27, 33, 40, 59, 60, 74–5, 78, 113, 260, 312, 329, 344, 421, 472, 520, 963, 967, 976, 988 Dúvˇerná zmluva medzi mníchom a diablom (The Secret Contract between the Monk and the Devil, 1789, Tyrnau [Trnava]), 533 Dvina, 197 DVL (Deutsche Volksliste), 611, 612, 618–19 Dvornik, Francis, 12 Dyer, Donald L, 209, 214 Dzhukeski, Alexandar, 255 Dzurinda, Mikuláš, 888, 894, 895 Ealhwine Albinus of York, 94 East Slovak (Slovjak) People’s Republic, 466, 467, 657, 820, 822, 872 Eastern front, 585, 857 Eberhard, Winfried, 12, 36–7, 52, 190, 192, 213, 215, 255, 285, 388, 613, 614, 638, 656, 661, 662, 663, 669, 672, 675, 691, 696, 725, 730, 740, 766, 775, 783, 829, 832, 869, 872 Eberhardt, Piotr, 36, 37, 52, 190, 192, 213, 215, 255, 285, 388, 613–14, 638, 656, 661–3, 669, 672, 675, 691, 696, 725, 730, 740, 766, 775, 783, 829, 832, 869, 872 Eck, John (1486–1543), 82 Eckert, Eva, 507, 759 Eco, Umberto, 473 economic development, 39, 487, 602, 723, 798, 801, 843, 949 Édes anyanyelvünk (Our Beloved Mother Tongue), 704 Edirne (Adrianopolis), 81, 330, 451 education, 8, 9, 89, 97 Bulgarian, 279, 280, 282 Czech, 492, 503, 507, 508, 755, 769 Czech-Germans, 832 Czechoslovakia, 724, 749, 782, 783 Esperanto, 337, 338 Estonia, 199–200 Gagauz, 270 Galicia, 390, 391, 401

Index

gubernias, Baltic, 396 Helleno-Bulgarian, 279 Hungary, 434, 684–5, 699, 712, 742 Ladino, 318, 319 Lithuanian schools, 188 Magyar, 447, 463, 676–7, 696, 697, 890 Poland, 387, 604, 612, 620, 635, 896 Poland-Lithuania, 370, 392, 630 Romani, 331, 333 Ruthenian, 747, 874, 875 Samogitia, 396 Serbia, 223 Slovak, 549, 554–5, 810, 836, 840 Slovenian, 295, 296 Sorbian, 305, 306 Tatar, 274 Walachia/Moldavia, 206 Edwards, John, 42, 440 Egger, Carolus, 98 Egyetemes Magyar enciklopédia (The Universal Magyar Encyclopedia, 1859–1876, Eger), 461, 712, 917 Eisler, Rudolf, 46 Ekavian, 225–6, 229–34, 239, 240, 975(n.28), 975(n.29) see also (I)jekavian, Serbo-Croatian, Serbian elastic stability, 517 Elbe, 63, 87, 290, 301–2, 977(n.42) Eliáš, Alois (1890–1942), 770 Elisa-Bursa´c, Ellen, 235 elites, 7, 9, 60, 71, 91, 96, 103, 126, 150, 166, 215, 217, 394, 400, 419, 436, 437, 440, 446, 452, 458, 465, 489, 505, 524, 543, 576, 621, 757, 804, 807, 877, 891, 938, 954 Bohemian, 906 Czech/Slovak, 525, 757, 775, 814, 841 new, 954 Ottoman, 265 Polish, elimination of, 613 Roma, 330 Roman, 92 Elle, Ludwig, 306 Enciklopedio de Esperanto, La (Encyclopedia of Esperanto, 1933–1934, Budapest), 339–40 Encyclopaedia Beliana (The Beliana Encyclopedia, 2001–, Bratislava), 712, 797, 850, 900, 950 encyclopedia, development of, 11, 90, 100, 128, 332, 334, 339, 406–8, 426, 461,

1071

462, 499, 514–15, 605, 627, 640, 641, 682, 705, 712, 758, 761, 786–7, 796, 797, 849, 850, 879, 883, 900, 917–18, 932–4, 944, 945, 950, 981, 988, 990 Catholic, 461, 641, 712, 950, 988(n.17) Catholic, Magyar, 128, 461, 705, 944, 950 Czech, 407, 514, 786, 917, 950 Czechoslovak, 627, 786, 944 Hungarian, 128 Magyar, 128, 461, 705, 917, 944 Polish, 406, 407, 426, 605, 932, 944, 950, 981 Slovak, 514, 627, 786, 849, 850, 950 encyclopedias, and politics, 406 Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline [1959]), 499 Encyklopedia Gazety Wyborczej (Encyclopedia of Gazeta Wyborcza, 2005, Warsaw), 641 Encyklopedia katolicka (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1973–, Lublin), 641, 712, 950 Encyklopedia popularna (The Popular Encyclopedia, 1982, Warsaw), 627 Encyklopedia powszechna Ultima Thule (Universal Encyclopedia Ultima Thule, 1927–1939, Warsaw), 605, 932 Encyklopédia Slovenska (Encyclopedia of Slovakia, 1977–1982, Bratislava), 883 Encyklopedya Polska (Polish Encyclopedia, 1915, Cracow), 406 Encyklopedyja Powszechna (Universal Encyclopedia, 1859–1868, Warsaw), 407, 426, 605, 917 Endlösung, 331, 770, 831, 855, 977–8(n.49) see also Holocaust, the Endzel¯ınis, J¯anis (1873–1961), 194 Eneida, 171, 175 Eneida navyvrat (Aeneid Inside Out), 171 Engels, Friedrich (1820–1859), 500 England, as first nation-state, 7, 31, 40, 75, 80, 90, 94, 98, 145, 307, 311, 342, 344, 445, 447, 805, 959(n.18), 987 English, 40, 41, 86, 91, 235, 240 Basic, 978(n.53), 979 domination of, 12, 13, 45, 83, 101, 131, 138, 151, 187, 194, 205, 223, 254, 344, 391, 394, 402, 442, 472, 483, 506, 508, 520, 593, 604, 625, 648,

1072 Index

English – continued 649, 659, 663, 701, 746, 756, 757, 767, 777, 778, 820, 826, 827, 835, 836, 863, 865, 878, 902, 941, 971 as first global language, 338, 339 in Hungary, 702 orthography, 316, 420 in Poland, 631 Enlightenment, absolutist, 434 Enlightenment, the, 574 Entente, the, 406, 652, 657, 658, 659, 660 Eðhvardðhsson, Ingi Rúnar, 345, 346 eparchies, 386 Epirus, 242, 246–7, 256–7, 319 Erasmus, Desiderius (1466–1536), 95, 122 Erkanian, V. S, 327 Ertl, Václav (1875–1929), 516, 565, 760, 844, 845, 848 Esperanto, 82, 311, 335–40, 978, 979 Esposito, John L, 269, 275 Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Understanding, 1746), 44, 105 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An, 44 Esterházy, János (1901–1957), 675, 753, 774, 855 Estland, 193, 194, 197, 199, 395, 974 Estonia, 3, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 37, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 66, 74, 88, 115, 163, 189, 190, 193, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 344, 347, 358, 362, 411, 421, 611, 614, 616, 630, 789, 923, 936, 972, 977 Estonian, 50, 54, 61, 65, 66, 76, 81, 119, 139, 146, 163, 181, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 282, 290, 344, 346–8, 358, 395, 396, 397, 411, 421, 914, 916, 935, 946, 968, 971, 972, 974, 977 Estonian national movement, 198 Estraikh, Gennady, 316, 596 ethnic boundaries, 7, 29, 37, 120, 168, 251, 331, 581, 756 ethnic cleansing, 37, 60, 108, 258, 283, 284, 327, 403, 571, 584, 606, 607, 609, 641, 644, 702, 893 Armenian, 327 Jews, 403, 617, 619 Muslims, 258, 283 ethnic groups, 14, 46, 63, 93, 216, 239, 240, 275, 295, 306, 328, 340, 453, 581,

639, 662, 663, 672, 681, 707, 805, 930, 940, 946, 956, 960, 965, 967, 976, 988 ethnic marker, language as, 10 ethnic states/nations, 24, 25, 54, 574, 575, 916, 956, 959, 962, 982 ethnic/national minorities, 26 ethnolects, 37 ethnolinguistic homogenization, 6, 9, 36, 48, 150, 283, 341, 410, 628, 644, 677, 678, 695, 699, 852, 893, 926, 931, 938, 938, 939, 941, 949, 952, 953, 979, 980 independence, 11, 54, 400, 657, 922 nationalism, 30 nation-states, 6, 962(n.46) Etwas über die Magyarizierung der Slawen in Ungarn (1821, On Magyarization of the Slavs in Hungary), 449 Etymologický slovnik jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Language, 1957, Prague), 763, 878 Etymologický slovnik jazyka ˇceského (Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, Prague), 627, 763, 785, 786, 796, 878, 881 Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, Warsaw), 643 Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Ungarischen, 705, 945 Europäische Nation, Die (The European Nation), 571 Europe, Northern, 13, 194, 342, 958 European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL), 639 European Union, 3, 13, 23, 91, 200, 253, 254, 262, 263, 269, 285, 298, 362, 571, 628, 630, 631, 644, 707, 709, 710, 713, 789, 790, 798, 799, 801, 888, 894, 895, 902, 949, 950, 964, 975 1991 enlargement, 22 2004 enlargement, 13, 23, 91, 200, 571, 902 Fábián, Pál, 704 Fac, Bolesław, 86 Facciolati, Jacopo (1682–1769), 96 Fándly, Juraj (1750–1811), 529, 533, 814 ‘fathers of nation’, 31 ‘fathers of the Italian Nation’, 95 Faulmann, Carl, 211, 246, 748, 966, 968

Index

Fellman, Jack, 308, 311 Felvidék, 646, 647, 768, 854, 856–8 Ferdinand I, Emperor (r.1835–1848), 389, 445, 484 Ferenc II Rákóczi (1676–1735), 432–433 Ferko, Jergu, 892 Ferko, Milan, 528 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), 30, 46, 62 Ficko, Josef (1772–1843), 237 Ficowski, Jerzy, 334 Filipec, Josef (1915–2001), 785, 796 Finger, Zuzana, 872 Finnish, 41, 50, 57, 65, 66, 76, 81, 82, 163, 181, 199, 201, 290, 334, 346, 421, 475, 669, 946, 968, 971, 972, 974 Finno-Ugric, 61, 65, 66, 181, 192, 193, 198, 201, 218, 290, 475, 476, 646, 681, 687, 702, 705, 946, 947, 967, 971, 972 finnugor népek és nyelvek ismertetése, A (Description of the Finno-Ugric Peoples and Languages, 1922, Budapest), 681 Fischer-Galati, Stephen, 672, 696 Fišer, Rudolf, 658, 722, 740, 759, 766, 775 Fishman, Joshua, 26, 316, 403, 431, 481 Five (pˇetka, interwar Czechoslovakia), the, 167, 341, 470, 489, 515, 530, 538, 563, 566, 567, 690, 724, 740, 743, 748, 749, 753, 754, 756, 758, 759, 762, 768, 770, 784, 785, 786, 791, 795, 799, 804, 812, 820, 828, 833, 839, 841, 857, 861, 872, 876, 878, 887, 889, 892, 898, 913, 926, 927, 933 Flajšhans, Václav (1866–1950), 520, 521, 523, 531 Flemish, 74, 77, 82, 884, 963 Florinskii, Timofiei Dmitrevich (1854–1919), 527 Fodor, István, 442, 462, 683, 705, 982 Fogarasi, János (1801–1878), 130, 442, 680, 909, 932 Fojtíková, Eva, 70, 160, 162, 171 Forcellini, Egidio (1688–1768), 96 Forgács, Tamás, 130, 439, 440, 445, 462, 464, 683, 705, 711 Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), 253 see also Macedonia Forverts (newspaper), 316 Fotinov, Konstantin (1790–1858), 280, 283

1073

fourteen points speech, 576, 922 Fox, Jonathan, 710 Fraktur script, 343 franciaországi változásokra, A (On the Changes in France, 1792), 439 Francique, 77 Francis I, Emperor, Austria (r.1792–1835), 17, 103, 383, 484 see also Francis II Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1792–1835), 17, 104 see also Francis I Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916, Emperor of Austria; r. 1867–1916, King of Hungary), 455–7, 474, 484, 508, 517, 549, 557, 566, 761, 762, 832, 982(n.2), 990 Francis Joseph Czech Academy of Sciences, Literature and Art, 508, 517, 761, 762, 832, 990 see also Czech Academy of Sciences and Art Franconia, 77 Frankish, 14, 67, 68, 71, 74, 87, 88, 94, 175, 218, 288, 301, 448, 479, 482, 646, 674, 751, 805, 977 Frankish Empire (800), 94, 67, 71, 87, 94, 218, 751, 805 see also Carolingian Empire Frankish Kingdom, 14, 68, 74, 87, 288, 301, 448, 674, 977(n.42) Franks, 14, 77, 93, 203, 258, 480, 967(n.16) Franoli´c, Branko, 68, 69, 152 Fras, Zbigniew, 384, 392, 403 Fraser, Angus, 335 Free City of Cracow see Cracow, Free City of Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) ´ see Danzig, Free City of Freiwillige Schutzstaffel, 856 French Revolution (1789), 5, 8, 24, 31, 42, 129, 223, 368, 433, 435, 439, 484, 487, 496, 805, 919, 979, 980 French, 40, 41, 42, 74, 86 ascendancy of, 90 decline of, 91 as language of science, 45 as international language, 86, 338 as sociolect of nobility in Central Europe, 597, 598 Frenzel, Konrad, 923 Friedman, Mikul (1912–2006), 30, 566

1074 Index

Friedrich Augustus, King of Saxony (r.1807–1813, as monarch of the Duchy of Warsaw), 377 Friedrich, Karen, 12, 30, 45, 46, 73, 103, 113, 184, 199, 377, 379, 406, 435, 499, 500, 507, 730, 971, 986 Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia (r.1797–1840), 379 Frisian, 75, 988 Friulian, 300, 301, 969 Frucht, Richard, 209, 222, 231, 233, 246, 255, 263, 279, 285 Frýdecký, František (1891–1943), 780, 847, 848 Gagauz, 23, 82, 264, 269, 270, 361, 362 Gagauzes, 269–70 Gagauz nationalism, 270 Gagauz Yeri, 23, 270 Gagova, Krasimira, 160, 997 Gaj, Ljudevit (1809–1872), 225, 237, 295, 443, 444, 545 Gajda, Stanisław, 384, 626, 631, 633 Gajdoš, Marián, 823, 875, 990 Galicia, 18, 19, 35, 50, 116, 137, 141–2, 145, 146, 147, 166–70, 175–9, 271, 309, 313, 323, 355, 357, 375, 383, 384, 389, 390, 392, 394, 398–403, 405, 408, 410, 411, 413–15, 417, 426, 428, 429, 444, 453, 457, 507, 510, 512, 548–9, 569, 574, 576, 577, 583, 585, 588–90, 593, 595–7, 599, 600, 602, 604, 608, 611, 613–14, 649–51, 667, 735, 745, 767, 901, 908, 912, 914, 929–30, 935, 936, 970(n.30), 971(n.5) Galician (Spain), 18, 35, 167, 176, 177, 178, 317, 318, 361, 391, 392, 400, 402, 428, 429, 463, 470, 502, 548, 581, 583, 589, 735, 736, 746–7, 757, 823, 825, 874, 912, 928, 988 Galician Jacquerie (1846), 18 Galician Poles, 391, 463, 548, 912 Galustian, Dzh O, 327 Garašanin, Ilija (1812–1874), 224, 453 Gartner, Fedir (1843–1925), 177 Gašparíková, Želmíra, 136, 565, 780, 882, 944 Gasprinskii, Ismail Bey, 273 Gaster, M, 208, 211 Gautsch, Paul (1851–1918), 509 Gawrecká, Marie, 730

Gazeta de Transilvania (Transylvanian Newspaper, 1848), 452 Gdansk ´ (Danzig), 19, 20–1, 72, 75, 80, 88, 344, 366, 379, 413, 577–8, 609, 612, 923, 925, 929, 987(n.5) see also Danzig (Gdansk) ´ Geary, Patrick J, 105 Gebauer, Jan (1838–1907), 516, 520, 527, 627, 759, 760, 844, 917, 933 Gelenius, Sigmund (1495–1554), 101 Geller, Ewa, 71, 79, 316, 320 Gellner, Ernest (1925–1995), 38, 44, 149, 575, 962 Gemeinschaft, 38, 43 Generalgouvernement, 20, 611–12, 614–15, 620, 624, 688, 767, 769, 824, 855, 902, 935 gender and national literature, 546, 731, 918, 991 genocide, 11, 323, 326, 333, 570, 870 Georgian, 41, 67, 69, 160, 213, 258, 264, 322–3, 326, 328, 358, 363, 419, 962(n.37) German, 40, 45, 56, 86 Chancery, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 99, 102, 103, 110, 136, 292, 530, 915, 927 Common, 75, 76, 79, 83, 123, 725 in Czech lands, 743 decline of, 91 dialectology, 405 dialects, 75, 85 as language of scholarly instruction/research, 161 Low, 27, 28, 33, 37, 38, 40, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 95, 128, 146, 161, 175, 181, 224, 447, 638, 701, 709, 724, 734, 805, 869, 873, 895, 965, 967, 984, 98 as official language, 767, 769 in Poland, 593 in Russia, 163 Standard, 33, 48, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 123, 313, 440, 927, 953, 968(n.20) German-Austrian National Assembly, 726 German-Austrian National Council, 721 German colonial empire, 86 German Confederation (1815), 4, 18, 108, 145, 296, 365, 389, 453, 477, 483, 497, 716, 910, 983 German Customs Union, (1834), 18, 365

Index

German Empire (1871), xx, 2, 18, 19, 48, 56, 83–4, 86, 183–4, 302–4, 308, 348, 349, 365–6, 378, 392, 399–400, 404–5, 410–11, 415, 453, 509, 569–70, 574, 579, 581–2, 600, 602, 664, 667, 669, 741, 805, 810, 893, 908–9, 914, 918–19, 921–2, 927 Germanization of of Czechs, 510 of Hungary, 459 of Slovaks, 549 German National Assembly, 453, 497, 498 Germano, A (1893–1954), 142, 330, 489, 703, 821 German-Polish Treaty, (1922), 587, 634 Germans, Carpathian, 768, 858, 823, 832, 856, 991(n.11) Germany, 967(n.13) East, Constitution, (1968), 2, 21, 22, 28, 84, 86, 303, 305, 339, 630, 728, 774, 780, 781, 938, 939 interwar, 926 post war, 19, 21, 28, 36, 37, 52, 53, 54, 963 reunification of, 23, 57, 710, 715, 716, 717, 772, 948 Geschichte der böhmischen Sprache und Literatur (History of the Bohemian Language and Literature, 1792, Prague), 489, 491 Geschichte von Böhmen (History of Bohemia, 1836–1867, Prague), 479 Gesellschaften, 43, 45 Gheg, 54, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 960(n.26), 961 Gil, Dorota, 86, 148, 225, 976 Giovine Europa (Young Europe), 31 Gitˇrenka (Morning Star), 543 Giza, Antoni, 450 Glagolitic script, 68, 69, 70, 81, 87, 421 see also individual languages Glinert, Lewis, 311, 316 globalization, 24, 43, 90, 571, 644, 711, 713, 799, 904 glossaries Istro-Romanian, 216 of Lutheran terms, 82 Polish-Latin, 110, 111, 194 Główne zasady pisowni (The Main Principles of [Polish] Orthography, January 1918, Warsaw), 429, 605, 606 Gluhak, Alemko, 220

1075

Gniezno (Gnesen), 117, 482 Goj, Ervín (see Łysohorsky, Óndra) Golden Horde, 63, 121, 271, 272 Goldstein, Ivo, 445, 456, 459, 462, 464 Golinski, ´ Cezary, 174 Gołuchowski, Agenor, Viceroy of Galicia (1812–1875), 176, 402 Gombocz, Zoltán (1877–1935), 461, 517, 681, 917, 932 Gömbös, Gyula (1886–1936), 664–5, 685 Górale (Goralians), 615, 732, 824 Goralian, 303, 612, 615, 637, 638, 824, 830, 871, 951, 991 Goralians (Górale), 614, 637, 638, 732, 733, 824, 871, 930 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 868, 884 Gorizia (Görz), 21, 288, 295, 296, 297 Górnicki, Łukasz (1527–1603), 374, 423 Górny, Grzegorz, 775 Gorove, István (1819–1881), 447 Görz, 288, 296, 299 Gothic, 65, 67, 69, 73, 81, 84, 92, 95, 107, 116, 136, 172, 183, 184, 188, 189, 194, 195, 196, 200, 296, 304, 318, 342, 343, 344, 345, 347–51, 355, 359, 360, 362, 396, 398, 419, 435, 473, 493, 494, 506, 534, 536, 538, 540, 541, 546, 548, 579, 595, 729, 741, 770, 965(n.5), 968, 973, 974 Gothic script, 69, 73, 81, 84, 92, 95, 107, 136, 172, 188, 189, 195, 304, 342, 344, 345, 347, 348–50, 355, 362, 541, 729, 741, 768, 768, 974(n.18) ban on in Germany (1941), 350, 362, 974(n.20) Czech, 107, 136, 304, 348, 493–4, 506, 541 Estonian, 200 Latvian, 194–6 Lithuanian, 182, 184, 188–9 Mazurian, 579 Moravian, 494, 506 Slovak, 135, 136, 534 Slovenian, 296 Sorbian, 304 see also individual languages Goths (also Ostrogoths, Visigoths), 65, 67, 69, 197, 202, 965(n.5), 967(n.11), 973(n.19) Grabar, 141, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327 Grabski, Władysław (1874–1938), 591 Gradisca, 21, 288, 297

1076 Index

Grafton, Amthony T, 98 Gr¯amatyka Cžeská (Czech Grammar, 1533, Námˇešt’), 100 Gramatyka powszechna wszystkim je˛zykom i własne polskiemu prawidła w sobie zamykaja˛ca, (Universal Grammar of All Languages, with the Principles of Polish Duly Presented, 1767), 109 grammars Albanian, 244 Armenian, Eastern/Western, 325, 326 Belarusian, 172, 173 Bosnian, 232 Bulgarian, 280, 285 Burgenland Croatian, 237 Carniolan, 292, 294 Church Slavonic, 155 Croatian, 225 Czech/Czechoslovak, 520, 784 Daco-Romanian or Walachian, 207 Esperanto, 339 Estonian, 198 Friulian, 300 Hungarian-Ruthenian, 745 Kajkavian, 236 Latvian-German, 194 Lithuanian, 182, 188 Little Russian, 175 Macedonian, 248 Magyar, 122, 123, 439 Moldavian, 213 Molisean Croatian, 238 Montenegrin, 234 Moravian, 801 Polish, 109, 115, 382 Romance, 957(n.3) Romani, 330, 872 Romanian, 209 Russian, 160, 161, 162, 163, 330 Ruthenian, 154, 176 Serbian, 224 Serbocroatian, 226 Slavic language in Carniola-Carinthia-Styria, 294 Sorbian, 303, 306 Turkish, 267 Grammatica Germanicae linguae (A Grammar of the German Language [. . .] Based on Luther’s Bible and His Other Writings, 1578, Leipzig), 79 Grammatica Hungarica (Grammar of Magyar, 1803, Pest), 439

Grammatica Hungarolatina (The Grammar of Magyar [Written] in Latin, 1536), 122 Grammatica linguae Slovenicae (The Grammar of the Slavic/Slovak Language, 1850), 550 Grammatica slavica (The Slavic [‘Slovak’] Grammar, 1790, Preßburg), 134, 533 Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego (The Grammar of the Polish Language, 1785), 371 Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego do uzytku ˙ szkół przeznaczona (Grammar of the Polish Language for Schools, 1823–1827), Vilnius, 382 Grammatyka je˛zyka polskiego i je˛zyka łacinskiego ´ dla szkół narodowych (The Grammar of the Polish language and the Latin Language for National Schools), 371 Granat Bibliographical Institute, 408 Granice panstwa ´ a granice je˛zyka polskiego (The Borders of the State and the Borders of the Polish Language, 1920–1921), 416 Grant, W Leonard, 32, 98, 245, 316, 330, 378, 391, 451, 463, 468, 553, 612, 674, 683, 708, 766, 774, 811, 836, 837, 856, 861, 910, 912, 930 Graus, František, 489, 502 Graz (Gradec), 125, 292, 293, 295, 583, 975(n.29) Grazhdanka script, 350–2, 353–354 Greater Moravia, xv, 14–15, 68–70, 87–8, 109, 131–2, 134, 158, 205, 218, 249, 301, 421, 448, 450, 479, 482, 501, 517, 526–9, 720, 721, 751–2, 814–16, 819, 834, 853, 859, 887, 910, 966(n.7) Great Northern War (1700–1721), 17, 958 Great Schism, (1054), 87, 204, 219, 242, 291 Great Serbian project, 224 ‘great vowel shift’, 98 Greece, independent, 257, 258, 260, 360, 361 Greek, 96 Attic, 39, 259, 261, 263 Byzantine, 33, 41, 48, 81, 96–7, 141, 155, 164, 205, 219, 241, 242, 247, 256, 259–63, 279, 308, 324, 329, 360, 419 Classical, 81, 96, 97, 228, 372, 383 as co-official language, Cyprus, 263

Index

decline of, 97 Demotic (Dhimotiki), 96, 261–3, 361 dialects, 257, 263 Katharévousa (purifying language), 48, 96, 261–3 Koine, 109, 113, 259, 263, 891 as language of Orthodox Church, 256, 351, 352 as official language, 48, 218, 255, 256, 258, 260, 276 spoken, 247, 259 standard, 261, 263, 361 Greek Civil War, 23, 55, 245, 251, 254, 255, 411, 616, 621, 781 nation-state, 247, 257, 262, 361 origins of, 38, 157, 201, 418, 473, 526 Greek Catholic Church, 140, 166, 167, 176, 179, 352, 355, 357, 383, 386, 390, 391, 435, 450, 451, 470, 471, 529, 555–6, 583, 590, 593, 602, 616, 655, 656, 668, 715, 734, 735, 737, 742, 744, 751, 776, 779, 783, 822, 834, 863, 873–5, 891, 908, 970(n.30), 990(n.3) see also Neo-Uniate Church, Uniate Church Greek Catholics, 140, 166–7, 176, 352, 355, 383, 390–1, 435, 450–1, 470–1, 529, 555–6, 583, 590, 593, 602, 655–6, 715, 734, 744, 751, 783, 822, 834, 874, 891, 908, 970(n.30) Greek Revolt (Greek War of Independence, 1821–1829), 256, 258, 279, 322 Greenberg, Robert D., 226, 228, 231, 233, 235, 719 Greenfeld, Liah, 24, 805 Gregory of Tours, 93 Gregory XVI Pope (1831–1846), 386 Greguš, Peter, 823 Gren, ˇ Štefan, 795, 898 Grenoble, Lenore A, 148, 275, 591, 972 Grétsy, László, 704 Grimes, Barbara F., 197, 201, 246, 269–70, 275, 966 Grimm, Jacob/Grimm Wilhelm (1785–1863), 84, 397, 439 Gröll, Michał (Michael) (1722–1798), 370 Gromada, Thaddeus V, 818, 829 Großdeutschland, 20 see also German Empire, Kleindeutschland

1077

große Conversations-Lexikon, Der (Great Conversation Lexicon, 1853–1857, Hildburghausen), 407 Grothusen, Klaus-Detlev, 701 gubernias Baltic, 147, 376, 395, 396, 397 Western, 382, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 390, 393, 394–6, 398, 400, 402, 413, 426, 427, 429, 585, 587, 588, 590, 597 Gudai (Gudowie), 973(n.19) see also Belarusians Guentcheva, Rossitza, 287 Guenther-Swart, Imma von, 613, 615 Guide to the Slavonic Languages (1951, London and New York), 528 Gumowski, Marian, 71 Gut, Violetta, 616 Gutenberg’s Latin Bible, 95, 342 Gutsman, Ožbalt (1727–1790), 294 Guzicki, Artur, 584 Gyáni, Gábor, 459, 656, 669, 678, 701, 708, 711, 713 Gyarmati, György, 691 Gyémánt, Ladislau, 453 Gymnasium, classicist, 97, 597 Gypsy language, see Romani Gypsy (Roma), origin of name, 203, 215, 329–32, 334–5 Habdeli´c, Juraj (1609–1678), 293 Habsburgs, 15, 16, 17, 74, 75, 89, 101, 102, 106, 114, 125, 128, 220, 221, 236, 247, 292, 343, 376, 391, 431–4, 441, 450, 453, 455, 466, 467, 482–4, 486, 487, 496, 503, 523, 525, 528, 530, 532, 649, 655, 730, 906, 910, 915, 927, 969, 981 Hácha, Emil (1872–1945), 765, 766, 768, 774, 837 Hafner, Stanislaus, 299 Hajdu, Peter, 181, 476 Halich Ruthenia, 191, 271 Halshnish, 191–2 Halych (Halicz), 971(n.5) Hamaliar, Martin (1758–1812), 535 Hamburg, 80, 302 Hamuljak, Martin (1789–1859), 541 Hancock, Ian, 205, 216, 335, 974 Hanka, Václav (1791–1861), 425, 491, 493 Hankins, James, 98

1078 Index

Hannan, Kevin, 141, 205, 299, 418, 489, 503, 730, 984 Hanseatic League, 74, 80 Haretski, M, 173 Harmonja mów (Harmony of Languages, 1895, Vilnius), 480 Harna, Josef, 658, 722, 740, 759, 766, 775 Harris, Tracy K, 320 Harrison, Henrietta, 946 Hartmann, Silvia, 343, 350 Hartmanová, Dagmar, 797 Hartweg, Frédéric, 11 Hasenmayer, Herbert, 299, 966 Hasidim, 312 Hasidism, 312–13, 315–16 Haskalah, 273, 309, 312, 319, 402, 407, 977(n.44) Hattala, Martin (1821–1903), 550, 559, 560, 561–4, 842, 843, 845, 911 Haubrichs, Wolfgang, 11 Haugen, Brit Bakker, 26, 235, 959, 963 Haugen, Einar, 26 Havel, Václav, 787–800, 867, 883–4 Havlíˇcek, Karel, 481, 497, 500, 506 Havlík, Lubomír E, 480, 486 Havránek, Bohuslav, 418, 510, 516, 517, 625, 760, 764, 785, 786, 796, 943 Havránek, Jan, 418, 510, 516, 517, 760, 764, 785, 786 Hay (Armenian self-ethnonym), 174, 321 Hayastan (see Armenia) Hayeren (see Armenian) Hazai Tudósítások (Reports from the Homeland), 440 Hebraists, 309 Hebrew, 33, 49, 58, 68, 71, 78–81, 91, 100, 116, 131, 139, 140, 142–3, 149, 152, 172, 186, 258, 259, 264, 271–2, 301, 307–11, 315–21, 331, 333, 335, 336, 339, 341, 362, 387, 402, 435, 475, 589, 595–7, 600, 601, 613, 635, 687, 739, 749, 929, 961(n.33 ), 977–8 Heck, Roman, 103, 107, 486, 491, 493, 495 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), 46, 499 Heidler, Ján, 537, 540, 545 Hej, Sloveni ešte naša slovenská reˇc žije (song) (O, Slavs [Slovaks], there still lives our Slavic [Slovak] language), 443 Helfferich, Adolph, 476 Hellenes, 256, 257 Hellenic empire, 257, 308

Hellenic kingdom, 257 Helsinki Final Act (1975), 693, 866, 867 Helyesírásí kéziszótár (The Principles of Magyar Orthography and Grammar, 1954, Budapest), 704 Helyesírásí tanácsadó szótár (The Dictionary of Advice How to Write Correctly, 1961, Budapest), 704 Henlein, Konrad (1898–1945), 675, 753, 754, 774, 836, 856 Herder, Benjamin (1818–1888), 407 Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803), 30, 44, 45, 46, 47, 105, 278, 435, 436, 495 Herkel, Ján (Joanne Pannonio Herkel) (1786–1840), 477ff, 539 Herod, Charles C, 500, 513 Herrity, Peter, 493 Herzl, Theodor (1860–1904), 402, 403 Herzogtum Franken, 77 see also Franconia Hetmanate, the, 167, 411 Hetzer, Armin, 246 Heyd, Uriel, 267 HG (Hlinková garda), 853, 855, 991(n.6) Hieronymian script, see Glagolitic script Higonnet, Patrice L.-R., 979(n.2) Hilgemann, Werner, 71 Hirner, Alexander (1911–1987), 879, 944 Hindi, 258, 328, 330, 852 Hindu-Arabic numerals see Arabic numerals Historia gentis Slavae (History of the Slavs, 1780, Fünfkirchen [Pécs]), 134, 529 Historia gentis Slavae. De regno regibusque Slavorum (History of the Slavic People: On the kingdom and kings of the Slavs), 134 Historical Atlas of Central Europe (2002, Seattle), 13 Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (1993, Seattle), 13 Historická mluvnice ˇceskoslovenská (Historical Grammar of Czechoslovak, 1935, Prague), 520 Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (The Historical Dictionary of the Slovak Language, Bratislava, 1991–), 763, 899 historiography, Slovak national, 47, 63, 66, 262, 326, 455, 495, 496, 528, 529, 556, 581, 675, 770, 813, 814, 818, 819, 937, 942, 963

Index

History of East Central Europe, A (1974–, Seattle WA), 12 History of Ukraine-Rus, 401 Hitchins, Keith, 127, 208, 990 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 20, 30, 56, 339, 570, 664, 665, 666, 689, 754, 765, 837, 851, 852, 935 Hlas (1898–1906), 463, 511, 512, 554, 811, 836 Hlasowé o potˇrebˇe jednoty spisowného jazyka ˇ pro Cechy, Morawany a Slowaky (Voices on the Need of the Unity of the Written Language for Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks, 1842, Prague), 540 Hlinka, Andrej (1864–1938), 556, 562, 720, 721, 732, 733, 750, 752, 753, 754, 758, 788, 812, 816, 823, 827, 828, 834, 836, 851, 853, 887, 913 Hluˇcínsko, the, 741 Hobsbawm, Eric John, 49, 149 Hochman, Jiˇrí, 790, 793 Hódossy, Imre, 816 Hodža, Michal Miloslav, 842 Hodža, Milan, 520, 555, 561, 750, 771, 836, 857 Hoensch, Jörg K, 667, 693, 696 Hohenzollerns, 16, 17 Hojˇc, Samuel (1806–1868), 522, 542 Holec, Roman, 456, 525 Holloway, Julia Bolton, 345 Hollý, Ján (1785–1849), 479, 480, 512, 534, 537, 546, 751, 814 Holocaust, the, 6, 36, 52, 79, 301, 307, 310, 311, 313, 315, 319, 326, 331, 333, 584, 617, 618, 688, 690, 708, 893, 936, 938, 953 see also Endlösung Holov, Hovhannes, 325 Holub, Josef, 605, 763, 785, 933, 945 Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, (1792–1835), 17 Holy Roman Empire, xv, 4, 15, 17–18, 33, 39–40, 63ff, 67, 68, 71–7, 80, 83, 87, 90, 94, 97, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 113, 121, 126, 151, 249, 256, 273, 290, 292, 294, 301, 307, 311, 343–5, 351, 365, 370, 379, 434, 437–8, 453, 478, 482–3, 488, 499, 504, 523, 648, 805ff, 815, 910, 926, 935, 961(n.32), 964(n.3), 981(n.10) Holy See (see Vatican, the) Holy Writ (see Bible)

1079

Holy, Ladislav, 725, 842 Holzer, Jerzy, 384 Homaranismo, 337 see also Esperanto, Zamnhof homogeneity, of ethnolinguistic composition, 36, 510 Honzák, F., 201, 205, 220, 242, 246, 255, 275, 299, 306, 965, 971, 974, 975, 977, 983 Horák, Gejza, 565, 595, 602, 608, 880, 984, 987 Horak, Stephan, 595, 602, 608, 880, 984, 987 Hoˇrec, Jaromír, 86, 103 Horecký, Ján, 565, 872 Horecký, Konštantín, 595, 898 Horthy, Miklós (1868–1967), 660, 663–5, 689, 758 Horvatov sloga i zjedinjenje (poem) (Croatian Concord and Unity, 1832), 443 Hösler, Joachim, 299 Hospodárske noviny (Economic News), 897 Hradeˇcný, Pavel, 263 Hrinchenko, Borys (1863–1910), 177, 178 Hroch, Miroslav, 11, 24, 106–8, 190, 575, 719, 730, 962(n.41) Hrodna (Grodna, Grodno), 19, 408, 980(n.8) Hrubý, Zikmund, 100 Hrushevsky, Michael, 167 Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo (1836–1934), 401 Hrycak, Jarosław, 164, 388, 392, 410, 416, 586, 614, 616, 619 HSL’S (Hlinkova slovenská l’udova strana) (HSL’S, Hlinka Slovak People’s Party), 750, 753, 765, 771, 772, 834, 835, 836, 837, 838, 862 Hübschman, Heinrich (1848–1908), 324 Hudson, R. A, 149 Hukovi´c, Muhamed, 143 humanist minuscule, 342, 343 Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1853), 46, 597, 962 Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 439, 441, 442, 460, 461, 681, 703, 704, 815 Commission for Language Politics, 624, 642, 703 Committee of Correct Writing, 704 Hungarian government, 130, 437, 444, 454–5, 457, 548, 549, 555, 558, 560, 665, 683, 685, 689, 745, 926

1080 Index

Hungarian National Assembly, 457 Hungarian National Museum and Library in Pest, 440 Hungarian Social Democratic Party, 655 Hungarian-Ruthenian (Ruthenian), 470, 687, 744, 745, 767, 778, 872 see also Rusyn Hungarian-Windish, 299, 467 see also Prekmurjan, Slovenian Hungary, 431–4, 646, 647, 768 Constitution, (1949), 305, 698, 707 Crown of, 125 culture in, 520, 725, 817 decline of Latin in, 444–5 economy of, 655, 693, 700, 701, 706, 713 ethnolinguistic homogeneity, 690, 691 fall of independent, 456, 903 independence of, 456, 512, 658, 659, 689, 732, 742, 768, 815, 819, 854, 903 Kingdom of, 15–17, 19, 40, 67, 72, 97, 101, 104, 121, 122–5, 127, 128, 130, 131, 137, 139, 145, 146, 147, 150, 167, 201, 204–5, 219–21, 291, 313, 323, 328, 344, 352, 358, 411, 431–4, 436, 442, 445, 450, 457, 466, 472, 482–4, 524, 528, 530–1, 533, 538–40, 542, 544, 548, 549, 551, 553, 569, 610, 645–50, 653–6, 660, 663, 667–8, 670, 676–7, 691–2, 699, 715, 721, 742, 806–7, 813–15, 820, 825, 828, 906, 915–16, 927, 981(n.1), 982(n.7) media in, 678, 701, 711 minorities, national, 683, 686, 687, 698 minority languages, 650, 669 Ottoman, 16, 88, 126, 277, 680, 915 Partition of, 915, 926 Partium, 672, 969(n.26) People’s Republic of, 466, 622, 658, 692, 731, 820, 821 political parties, 653, 655, 658, 665 post WW II, 651, 937 religion in, 466, 655 Republic of, 653, 691, 693, 706 restoration of monarchy, 660 role of Latin in, 434–5, 436 Royal Hungary, 88, 121, 124–7, 131, 146, 237, 431–2, 466–7, 523–4, 679, 915 Soviet Republic of, 558, 659 status law, (2001), 709

territorial autonomy, 654 territorial changes, 660–1, 665–6, 671, 686, 689 Transylvania, 17, 20, 124, 213, 549, 969(n.30) Upper (Slovakia), 523 World War II, 666, 689 Hunnia, 474 Hunnish, 475 Huns, 63, 202, 474, 672, 965(n.5) Hurban, Jozef Miloslav (1817–1888), 450, 545, 546–8, 553, 554, 560, 561 Hurban-Vajánský, Svetozár (1847–1916), 553–4 Hus, Jan (1370–1415), 39, 69, 99, 100, 112, 122, 124, 136, 422–4, 504, 508, 750, 834 Husák, Gustáv (1913–1991), 777, 864, 865, 866, 868, 992 Hussite Wars, 99, 100, 503 Hussitism, 39, 100, 122, 505 Hutterer, C J, 316, 662 Hýsek, Miloslav, 528 HZDS (Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko) (HZDS, Movement for Democratic Slovakia), 788, 789 Iaroslav I the Wise (r.1019–1054), 158 Idea státu rakouského (The Idea of the Austrian State, 1865, Prague), 500 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1792, Riga and Leipzig, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1800, London), 46, 47, 435 Ido (Idiomo Di Omni), 338 (I)jekavian, 225–6, 229–34, 239–40, 975(n.28), 975(n.29) see also Bosnian, Croatian, Ekavian, Serbo-Croatian Illich, Ivan, 25 illiteracy Belarusians/Ukrainians, 586 Hungary, 677, 700 Poland, 393, 602–3 Roma, 331 Slovakia, 518, 841 Subcarpathian Ruthenia, 736, 737 see also literacy Illyria (1809–1813), 17, 18, 69, 221, 222, 294, 443, 444, 654, 655 Illyrian Provinces, 290, 295

Index

Illyro-Thracian, 243 Ilustrowana encyklopedja Trzaski, Everta i Michalskiego (The Illustrated Encyclopedia of [the Publishing House] of Trzaska, Evert and Michalski, 1927–1937, Warsaw), 605, 932 Imagined Communities (1983, London), 44 Imago antiquae Hungariae (The Picture of Old Hungary, 1733, Kaschau [Košice]), 528, 819 Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism, 213, 909, 921 Imre, Samu, 67, 124, 126, 127, 128, 440, 442, 692, 693, 816 Index Bohemicorum librorum prohibitorum et corrigendorum (Index of the Prohibited Bohemian Books, 1729, Prague), 488 India, independent, 53 Indo-European languages, 46, 65, 67, 91, 186, 217, 240, 257, 259, 290, 321, 324, 328, 336, 475, 635, 946, 962(n.42), 965, 966, 967 industrial revolution (UK), 8, 65 industrialization, and literacy, 8, 18, 143, 145, 305, 487, 574, 585, 630, 756, 776, 784, 863 industrialization/urbanization (Poland), 145, 574 inequalities, Czech/Slovak, 724, 749, 833 Inoue, Koichi, 575 In Search of Central Europe (1989, Cambridge UK and Totowa NJ), 12 Institute of the Czech Language, 785 Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 190 institutione grammatical libri tres, De (The Three Books of Grammatical Principles, 1572, Lisbon), 371 intelligentsia, 39, 43, 117, 124, 168, 369, 370, 387, 397, 399, 401, 413, 415, 416, 426, 430, 448, 449, 520, 531, 574, 575, 597, 598, 599, 608, 612, 614, 621, 631, 640, 641, 642, 650, 677, 679, 700, 701, 855, 906, 908, 961 intelligibility, 32, 33, 524, 959, 963 International Congress of Statistics (1872), Sixth, 49, 399 international relations, 29, 32, 38, 591, 709, 839, 938 International Roma Union, 328, 332

1081

internationalism, (1956), 696, 699, 927, 941, 946, 991 interwar reorganization of Europe, 926 Ionchev, Vasil, 355, 360 Ioncheva, Olga, 355, 360 Ionian Islands, 262 Irish alphabet, 92 Irish national movement, 345 Iron Curtain, 12, 22, 91, 570, 629, 706 Isaev, Magomet I, 266, 956 Isaievych, Iaroslav, 357 Isakovi´c, Alija, 143 Isayev, M I, 171 Iskolai nyelvm˝ uvel (Advice on the Correct Use of [Our] Language for Schools, 1959, Budapest), 703 Islam, 39, 48, 81, 88, 93, 126, 139, 143, 204, 224, 227, 243, 246, 254, 256, 258, 264, 265, 271, 273, 275, 286, 287, 310, 321, 329, 961 Israel, 49, 59, 60, 61, 238, 309–12, 315, 319, 320, 458, 618, 695, 939, 961, 977 Issatschenko, Alexander V, 157, 160, 162, 164, 167, 374 Istanbul (Constantinople), 16, 80, 81, 141, 142, 143, 150, 151, 158, 164, 205, 219, 220, 242, 244, 247, 249, 254–60, 262, 266–7, 269, 277, 279–84, 318–19, 320, 322, 324–6, 354, 594, 964(n.3), 970(n.2), 975(n.27), 977(n.47) see also Constantinople Istoria pentru începutul românilor în Dacia (History of the Origin of the Romanians in Dacia, 1812, Buda), 452 Istoriia na bulgarskii ezik (History of the Bulgarian Language, 1919, Sofia), 527 Istria, 19, 21, 64, 202, 222, 288, 296, 297 Istro-Romanians, 202, 210, 216 István (Stephen) I, King (r. 997–1038), 121 Italian, 40, 48, 420 Italy, Kingdom of, 908 Ivan IV the Terrible (r.1533–1584), Tsar, 151 Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislau, Stanisławów, Stanyslaviv), 588 Ivic, Pavle, 354 Ivrit (Modern Hebrew), 309, 310, 336 ˙ Izmir (Smyrna), 81, 223, 280, 318, 354 Jääts, Indrek, 197, 201 Jablonskis, Jonas (1860–1930), 188 Jagiellonian dynasty, 70, 110

1082 Index

Jagodzinski, ´ Grzegorz, 299 Jahi´c, Dževad, 233 Jähnig, Bernhart, 98, 201, 584 Jakó, Zsigmond, 344 Jakowenko, Natalia, 167 Jakubovich, Emil, 681 Jakubowicz, Antoni (1789–1842), 382 Jakubowicz, Maxymilian (1785–1853), 382 Janák, Jan, 510 Jancák, Pavel, 796, 881 Janˇcoviˇc, Štefan, 562, 846 Janeˇcek, Pavel, 801 Janicki, Artur, 398 Janos, Andrew C, 122, 128, 130, 431, 439, 442, 460, 461, 475, 477, 527, 675, 680, 681, 725, 753, 855, 909, 917, 932, 992 Jánošik, Anton (1904–1971), 777, 824, 825, 860, 876–9, 943, 991 Jánošik, Juraj, 824 Janoušek, Antonín (1877–1941), 825 Janowicz, Jarosław, 628 Janowicz, Sokrat, 114 Jánský, L. M, 768, 859, 860 January Uprising (1863–1864), 18, 392, 393, 394, 396, 397, 399, 404, 426, 427 Jaroszewicz, Henryk, 231, 233, 240, 698 Järv, Harry, 345, 346 Jastrze˛bski, Włodziemierz, 613 Jászi, Oszkár, 464, 653, 654, 655, 656 Jaworski, Tomasz, 150 Jazykovedné glosy k ˇceskoslovenskej otázke (Linguistic Notes on the Czechoslovak Question, 1935, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 527 Jazykovedný sborník (Journal of Linguistics), 877 Jazykovedný ústav (Institute of Linguistics), 859, 860, 878–81, 899, 900, 934 Jazykovedný ústav L’udovíta Štúra (L’udovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics), 880 Jedisan, 16, 17 Jedliˇcka, Alois, 785 Jedlicki, Jerzy, 575 Jednota, 101, 463, 512, 557, 719, 810, 811, 812, 857 Jednota bratrská (Czech Brethren), 101 see also Unitas Fratrum Je˛drzejewicz, Wacław, 416, 588 Jehlicska, František 1879–1939, 732 Jelinek, Yeshayahu, 688

Jerczynski, ´ Dariusz, 582, 730 Jerome, Saint, 69, 93 Jerusalem of Lithuania (Vilnius), 403 Jesuit Slovak, 133, 134, 135, 532 Jeszenszky, Géza, 710 Jewish Autonomous Soviet Region of Birobidzhan, 315 Jewish German, 78, 311, 387 Jewish nationalism, 49, 79, 310, 313, 326, 333, 335, 402, 596, 597, 977 Jewish nation-state, 309, 310, 319, 336, 403, 596 Jews, the, 141, 977(n.43) Ashkenazim/Ashkenazic, 142, 307 emigration from Poland, 595 emigration, forced, 6, 11, 36, 939, 953 Hungarian, 458, 656, 685, 690 Magyarization of, 449, 458, 464, 472, 539, 543, 555, 656, 826 Russian-speaking, 310 Sephardic, 81, 142, 307, 317, 320 Slovakia, 855 Soviet, 314, 315 see also anti-Semitism, Endlösung, Holocaust Jezernik, Božidar, 49 Jezierski, Franciszek Salezy, Father (1740–1791), 116, 370 Je˛zyk Polski (periodical) (The Polish Language), 416 Jocher, Adam (1791–1860), 480 Jocher, Adam Benedykt (1791–1860), 480 Jodłowski, Stanisław, 371, 384, 424, 426, 430, 607, 625–6, 628 John Paul II, Pope (see Wojtyła, Karol) Johnson, Lonnie R, 104, 130 Johnson, Owen V, 464, 550 Johnson, William H. E., 115, 148, 162, 371, 376, 384, 388 Jóna, Eugen, 777, 861, 876, 877, 878, 879, 883, 943 Jones, William (1746–1794), 475 Još Hrvatska ni propatá (song), 443 Joseph II, Emperor (r. 1765–1790), 103, 105, 128, 375, 432, 445, 456, 484, 486, 487, 490, 529 Josephine reforms, 433, 437, 443, 445, 451, 534, 648, 715 Journal of Psychology of Nation and Linguistics (1860–1928), 46 Jovanovich, Nebojsha, 222, 240

Index

Judenstaat, Der (The Jews’ State, 1896, Vienna), 402 Juden-Teutsch (Jewish German), 78 Judeo-Slavic, 71 Judge, Anne, 371, 525 Juhász, Dezs, 705 Juhász, József, 704 Junga, V. A, 489 Jungmann, Josef (1773–1843), 107, 117, 130. 348, 460, 478, 479, 491, 492, 493, 494, 506, 513, 515, 534, 536, 537, 540, 542, 762, 763, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933, 960(n.23) jus sanguinis, 42 jus soli, 42 Juška, Jonas, 185, 973 Jussila, Osmo, 164 Jutrzenka (newspaper), 400 Kaˇcala, Ján, 757, 780, 842, 851, 861, 881, 883, 899 Ka˛cka, Bozena, ˙ 619 Kádár, János, 992(n.12) Kadare, Ismail, 245 Kadłubek, Wincenty, Bishop (1150–1223), 418 Kajkavian, 221, 223, 225, 236, 237, 291, 293, 299, 444, 467–8 ´ see also Cakavian, Croatian Kajkavian society, 237 Kálal, Karel (1860–1930), 564, 847, 848, 850 Kálal, Miroslav (1893–1962), 564–5, 567, 848, 851, 879, 934 Káldi, György (1570–1634), 123 Kalé, 329 Kalevipoeg (Estonian epic poem), 194, 199 Kaliningrad (Königsberg, Królewiec), 4, 22, 75, 81, 111, 181, 182, 187, 478, 972(n.11) Kállay, Béni (1839–1903), 226, 227, 471, 689 see also Bosnian Kállay, Miklós (1887–1967), 689 Kamenec, Ivan, 855 Kamiš, Adolf, 136, 565, 780, 786, 882, 944 Kamler, Marcin, 307 Kamusella, Tomasz, 35, 157, 493, 503, 582, 585, 634, 957, 984 Kanikova, S. I., 70, 124, 157, 170, 175, 177, 179, 182, 197, 201, 208, 222,

1083

225, 228, 242, 246, 255, 264, 279, 285, 299, 307, 316, 327, 398, 976 Kann, Robert A., 103, 104, 105, 130, 205, 222, 279, 299, 433, 493, 503, 510, 513, 540 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 45 Kapr, Albert, 343–4, 350 Kara, Gail, 217, 626 Karadži´c, Vuk (1787–1864), 223–36, 538, 545 Karaim, 264, 271, 272 Karaims, 157, 271, 272, 639 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766–1826), 161, 162, 372 Kara´s, Mieczysław (1924–1977), 626 Kardos, Gábor, 708 Karlík, Petr, 424, 517, 608, 764, 787 Karlovac (Karlstadt, Károlyváros), 64, 542 Karłowicz, Jan (1836–1903), 397, 405, 406, 428, 461, 480, 604, 796, 913, 917, 932 Karman, Danˇel (1663–1740), 133 Karmasin, Franz (1901–1970), 768, 856 Károli, Gáspár (1529–1592), 122 Károlyi, Mihály (1875–1955), 653, 657, 658, 659, 660, 731 Kárpátalja, 687, 767, 856 see also Carpathia kárpátaljai magyar nyelvjárások atlasza, A (The Atlas of the Magyar Dialects in Carpathia, 1992–2003, Budapest), 705 Karulis, Konstant¯ıns, 201 Kasa Miankowskiego (Miankowski Foundation), 397 Kashubian, 27, 28, 183, 303, 340, 341, 348, 350, 417, 580, 582, 609, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 643, 951, 986, 987, 988 Kashubian national movement, 580 Kashubs, 14, 26, 290, 348, 417, 578, 580, 581, 620, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 775, 930, 940, 986, 895 Kasper, Martin, 307 Katona, István Geleji (1589–1645), 123 Katowice (Kattowitz, Stalinogród), 621 Kaunas, Domas, 187, 188, 189, 348, 396, 412, 586, 611, 614 Kaunas (Kovno, Kowno), 187–9, 347, 396, 412, 586, 611, 614 Kavulok, Jiˇrí, 770 Kazinczy, Ferenc (1759–1831), 439, 440, 441 Khmelnytskyi (Płoskirów, Proskurov), 312 Kedourie, Elie, 24

1084 Index

KEN (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), 115, 116, 369, 370, 371, 374, 375, 376, 377, 383, 434, 440 Kenrick, Donald, 335, 619 Ker, William Paton, 421 Kerner, Robert Joseph, 676, 749 Késmárk (Kežmarok, Käsmark), 823 see also Germans, Carpathian Keyser, Jason, 311 Khazaria, 71 Kholm Eparchy of Volhynia, 385 Khrushchev, Nikita (1894–1971), 692, 864 Khudaverdian, K S, 327 Khuen-Héderváry, Károly (1849–1918), 464 Khust (Hust, Huszt), 736 Kiaupa, Zigmuntas, 182, 183, 190, 197, 398, 616, 973 Kiev Agreement, (1916), 719 Kievan Rus, 14, 15, 70, 71, 87, 88, 112, 141, 155, 157, 158, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171, 177, 218, 249, 291, 346, 527, 958(n.11), 966(n.11), 967, 971(n.6) Kinder, Hermann, 71 King, Charles, 27, 121, 205, 213–15 King, Jeremy, 11, 502, 905 Kinsky, Franz Josef (1739–1805), 106, 107, 490, 492 Kipchak Turkic, 113, 141, 142, 271, 323 Kipchaks, 271 Kirschbaum, Joseph M, 519, 803, 813, 829, 832, 836, 839, 853, 855, 858, 869, 885, 892 Kirschbaum, Stanislav J, 813, 829, 832, 836, 839, 853, 855, 858, 869, 885, 892 Kisfaludy, Károly (1788–1830), 437, 441 Kiss, Jen˝ o, 66, 424 kitabs, 157 Kizwalter, Tomasz, 384, 979 Klagenfurt (Celovec), 289, 292, 293, 296 Klagenfurt Plebiscite (1920), 289 Klaniczay, Tibor, 476 Klaus, Václav, 789, 801, 884 Kleindeutschland, 18, 392 see also German Empire, Großdeutschland, Little German nation-state Kleinrussisch (see Ukrainian) Kleinruthenisch (see Ukrainian) Kleinstaaterei, 4–5 Klemenˇciˇc, Matja, 698, 710

Klemensiewicz, Zenon, 110–11, 115, 116, 117, 118, 164, 345, 376, 379, 384, 392, 398, 406, 410, 606, 623, 624 Klimó, Arpad von, 440, 476, 946 Klimowicz, Mieczysław, 371, 374, 379 Kloch, Zbigniew, 371, 374, 426 Kloss, Heinz, 86 Knaanic, 71 Knapski, Grzegorz, 110, 378 Kneževi´c, Anthony, 459, 464 Kniezsa, István, 705, 947 Knijževni dogovor (Literary Accord, 1850), 144 Knjžka slow cžeských (The Book of the Czech Words, 1587, Prague), 101 Kobzar (The Bard, 1840, St Petersburg), 175 Kochanowski, Jan (1530–1584), 111, 423 Kochanowski, Jerzy, 459, 559 Kohn, Hans, 24, 30, 673, 956, 962(n.41) Kókay, György, 678, 683 Kolesár, Peter, 790, 899 Kollár, Ján (Kollar, Johann), 449, 477, 478, 537, 544, 718 Kollár, Karol, 437, 836, 846, 880 Kołła˛taj, Hugo (1750–1812), 369, 374 Komenského slovník nauˇcný (The Komenský [Comenius] Scientific Dictionary, 1937–1938, Prague), 761 Komenský, Jan Amos (see Comenius) Komisja Kultury Je˛zyka (Commission for Language Politics, Poland), 624 Komissarova, E. V, 348 Kompiš, Petr (1886–1945), 780, 847, 848 Koneˇcný, Jan Nepomuk (1815–1887), 519, 521 Koneˇcný, Stanislav, 519, 521, 823, 875, 990 Koneski, Blaže (1921–1993), 141, 251, 255 König, Werner, 86, 98, 970 Königlich-Böhmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences), 492 Kont, Ignace, 129 Kontler, László, 98, 124–6, 128, 222, 435, 437, 439, 459, 818, 969 Konversations-Lexikon (Conversation Lexicon, 1796–1811, Leipzig), 407 Kopczynski, ´ Onufry (1735–1817), 115, 371, 372, 373, 374, 378, 380, 381, 382, 384, 424, 428 Kopecký, Milan, 344 Kopecký, Miloslav, 565

Index

Kopeˇcný, František, 785 Kopitar, Bartholomäus (Jernej) (1780–1844), 224, 225, 294, 961, 966 Kopy´s, Tadeusz, 459, 464, 674, 969 Korais, Adamantios (1743–1833), 261 Koran, 89, 126, 157, 211, 227, 232, 233, 246, 258, 260, 261, 265, 266, 267, 284, 309, 310, 325, 340, 969(n.27), 976(n.37) Albanian translation of, 246, 258 Armenian translation of, 325 Bosnian translation of, 233 Bulgarian translation of, 252, 276, 280, 281, 283, 284 Esperanto translation of, 337, 340 Greek translation of, 256, 261 Hebrew translation of, 309 Ivrit translation of, 310 Ottoman (Old Turkish) translation of, 88, 207, 233, 250, 256, 259, 265, 266–8, 272, 277, 319, 323, 341, 354, 361, 471, 915, 961, 969 Romanian translation of, 211 Serbo-Croatian translation of, 227–8 Slavic translation of, 154, 227, 232, 254 Tatar translation of, 274 Turkish translation of, 267 Korbel, Josef, 803 Korenizatsia (nativization), 178, 213, 339, 846 Koˇrenský, Jan, 780, 795, 801, 892 Kornhauser, Julian, 222, 240 Korolevsky, Cyril, 557 Korovytsky, I, 177, 179 Kosáry, Domokos, 129, 134, 476 Ko´sciuszko, Tadeusz (1746–1817), 371 Košiˇc, Jožef (1788–1867), 299 Košice Government Programme, 772 Košice (Kaschau, Kassa), 72, 128, 466, 528, 549, 657, 666, 671, 689, 690, 723, 731, 765, 772, 783, 800, 819, 820, 821–2, 845, 857, 875, 878, 992(n.15) Kosovo (Kosova), xiv, 20, 22, 23, 37, 54, 57–8, 222, 234, 240, 243, 245, 254, 358, 359, 363, 697, 710, 960(n.26) Kosovo crisis (1999), 234 Kossuth, Lajos (1802–1894), 446, 447, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 463, 546 Kostický, Bohu, 464 Kotliarevskyi, Ivan (1769–1838), 171, 175 Kott, Štepan František (1825–1915), 515, 564, 567, 761, 763, 848, 913, 917

1085

Kotvan, Imrich (1910–1984), 535, 991 Kotyška Vacláv (1865–1945), 761 Kováˇc, Dušan, 103, 450, 456, 462, 513, 519, 549, 557, 559, 562, 719, 722, 725, 734, 753, 768, 771, 775, 777, 790, 813, 818, 829, 836, 839, 855, 858, 869, 885 Kovalovszky, Miklós, 704 Kövés, Béla, 703 Középeurópa (In-Between Europe), 12 Krajˇcoviˇc, Rudolf, 133, 521, 532, 535 Kralice Bible, 101, 102, 103, 107, 123, 133, 469, 519, 532, 533, 535, 536, 911 Kramáˇr, Karel, 719 Kramerius, Matej Václav (1759–1808), 106, 491 Krátka mluvnica slovenská (A Short Slovak Grammar, 1852, Preßburg), 551, 560, 842 Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka (The Short Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1987, Bratislava), 881, 899 Kravetskii, Aleksandr Genadevich, 360 Krejˇcí, Jaroslav, 24 Krekoviˇc, Eduard, 483, 722, 753, 768, 818, 820, 825, 836, 853, 869, 883, 892, 991 Kremianets (Kremenets, Krzemieniec), 376, 385, 979(n.6) Krenn, Gerald, 829, 986 Kreplin, Klaus-Dieter, 417 Kresy (Eastern Polish borderlands, the), 590–1 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold (1803–1882), 199 Kristoforidhi, Konstandin Nelko (1827–1895), 244 Križani´c, Juraj (1618–1683), 478 Krk (Veglia), 68, 973 Krofta, Kamil, 491, 722, 730, 734, 738, 768, 770 Król, Kazimierz, 392, 397, 970 Król, Marcin, 392 Kryms’kyi, A (1871–1941), 178 Krynski, ´ Adam Antoni, 427, 428 Kryns’kyi, Antoni (1864–1932), 397 Kryvichan, 172 Kubín, Josef Štefan (1864–1965), 565, 847–8 Kuˇcera, Karel, 786 Küchelböhmisch (‘kitchen Czech’), 103 Kulakauskas, Antanas, 376, 384, 387, 388, 398, 403, 586, 980

1086 Index

Kulísek, Vladimír, 464 Kulish, Panteleimon, 170, 177, 401 Kulishivka (Ukrainian Cyrillic), 401, 402 Kulmsee (Chełmza), ˙ 15 kulturnost, 723, 725 Kultursprachen, 85 Kun, Béla (1886–1939), 121, 659, 660, 673 Kuniš, Michael (1765–1835), 531 Kupa, 222 Kurkowska, Halina (1922–1983), 626, 640 Kuršaitis, Frydrychas (1806–1884), 184 Kusá, Dagmar, 869 Küzmiˇc, Mikloš (1737–1804), 299 Kuzmin, Michail, 148 Kvaˇcala, Ján, 719, 720 Kyiv, secondary school (academy), 15, 17, 58, 72, 114, 154, 155–6, 158, 163, 177, 178, 179, 247, 275, 314, 376, 385, 387, 401, 411, 412, 443, 471, 527, 719, 744, 872, 873, 892, 958, 972 Kyiv (Kiev, Kijów), 15, 17, 58, 72, 114, 154, 155, 156, 158, 163, 177, 178, 179, 247, 275, 314, 376, 385, 387, 411–12, 443, 471, 527, 719, 744, 872–3, 892, 958(n.11), 972(n.9) Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 156 Kyuchkov, Hristo, 334, 978 La Défense et Illustration de la langue française (The Defence and Description of the French Language, 1549), 45 Łabyncew, Jurij, 595 Lachia, 728 Lachian, 340, 341, 728, 822 L¯aˇcpl¯esis (Latvian epic poem), 194 Ladin, 300, 317 Ladino, 81, 139, 142–3, 301, 311, 317–20, 331, 335, 336, 341, 808, 978 see also Spanyol Ładogórski, Tadeusz, 379, 384, 388, 398, 416, 586 Lakatos, Judit, 701, 794, 899 Lakó, György, 705 Lakoff, Robin Tolmach, 63 l’amore della lingua (‘love of one’s language’), 45 Land Ober Ost, 168, 172, 188, 195, 313, 357, 408–10, 585, 588–9, 597, 600, 614–15, 914, 929, 935, 958(n.13) Lande, Jerzy (1886–1954), 623

Landespatriotismus, 106, 488, 490, 495, 496, 498, 501, 502, 504, 508, 510, 547, 716, 806, 814, 906 Landessprache, 390 landesüblichen Sprachen, 226, 390, 392, 596 Lands of the Czech Crown (1346), 15, 16, 73, 101–3, 106–7, 117–18, 128, 137, 145, 290, 391, 417, 463, 476, 477, 482–4, 488, 490, 496–8, 500, 501, 503–4, 506–8, 512, 517, 523, 525, 530, 539, 577, 717, 721, 729, 730, 773, 791, 806, 807, 885, 910, 915, 927 Langevelde, Ab van, 86 Language, 7, 8, 27, 28, 32, 33 civilizedness of, 372 classification of, 65, 129, 324, 488, 489, 545, 964, 984 EU official, 902 function of, 8, 44, 60, 91, 122, 137, 237, 282, 346, 351, 352, 426, 462, 531, 670, 801, 814, 882, 930 as instrument of identity, 10, 11, 46, 49, 217, 931 as instrument of ideology, 238 as instrument of politics, 34, 44, 49, 435, 648, 710, 756 isomorphism of language, nation, and state, 29, 35, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 963 origin of, 44–6, 105, 186, 269, 187, 417, 452, 473, 475, 478, 480, 519, 531, 673, 965, 971, 972, 974, 985 politicization, 6, 42, 44, 102, 123, 215, 229, 246, 345, 370, 397, 460, 465, 594, 648, 919, 932, 945, 947, 952 and religion, 10, 32, 38, 39, 48, 53, 67, 87, 88, 89, 93, 108, 113, 126, 127, 132, 139, 143–4, 153, 164, 195, 200, 205, 209, 231, 245, 246, 254, 256, 259, 263–7, 273, 277, 281, 286, 308, 311, 318, 320, 321, 324, 331, 337, 341, 356, 368, 372, 395, 428, 433, 451, 466, 472, 487, 496, 529, 579, 594, 633, 650, 655, 656, 673, 708, 712, 716, 734, 735, 744, 791, 798, 807, 822, 868, 887, 910, 926, 959, 961, 965, 980 written culture, 85 see also linguistics Language Law (1920, Czechoslovakia), 196, 197, 442, 518, 738, 743, 747, 828

Index

language of Babel, 5, 43, 472 language/nation, similarities, 23–9 language riots, Prague, 756 Lanstyák, István, 711 Lanti, Eugène, 338 Lastauskas, V, 602 Lastouski, Vacla˘ u, 173 Lateran Council, fourth (1215), 78 Latgalian (High Latvian), 194, 195, 196, 200 Latin, 86, 87, 91, 93, 98 alphabet/script, 27, 39, 41, 48, 50, 55–6, 61, 70, 93, 95, 112, 113, 119, 139, 141, 143, 153, 155, 160, 170, 176, 189, 194, 196, 205, 209, 212, 213, 214, 219, 225, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 243, 244, 267–70, 274–5, 278, 286, 292, 293, 299, 314, 317, 319, 341–3, 346, 351–3, 355–9, 362–3, 390–1, 393, 394, 396, 398, 402, 418–19, 420, 423, 435, 470, 471, 552, 594, 603, 718, 737, 745, 891, 935, 976, 977–8 Carolingian, 68, 71, 74, 77, 92, 94–6, 342 decline of, 74, 80, 98, 114, 200, 258, 263, 279, 327, 354, 602, 756 as ‘devil instrument’, 278 humanist project of renewing, 95 as language of education, 89, 115, 280, 401, 414, 446, 593, 746, 833 Medieval, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 343, 959, 967 as official language, 255 and religion, 89, 97 as sociolect, 111, 119, 369, 370, 597–8, 701 standard/vulgar, 35, 40, 92, 93, 94, 203, 419 use in Hungary, 434–5, 436 Latinitas Foundation, 98 Latinization, 41, 56, 266, 268, 272, 314, 326, 330, 358, 594, 961(n.36), 962, 974, 979 Latium, 91, 198 Latoszek, Marek, 581 Latvia, 193, 197–8, 411 Latvian, 50, 52, 61, 81, 119, 139, 146, 163, 172, 180, 184, 186–92, 193, 194, 195–200, 282, 313, 325, 334, 344, 346–7, 358, 395, 396, 402, 409, 410, 477, 914, 916, 935, 968, 972, 974

1087

Latvian Language Law (1999), 196 Latvian national movement, 194, 198 Laut, Jens Peter, 267, 476 law, uniformity of, 25 Lazarus, Moritz (1824–1903), 46, 336 Le Page, Robert Brock, 25 League of Nations, 31, 173, 338, 577, 592, 594, 603, 670, 753, 922–3, 925, 930, 931, 959 minorities treaties system, 670, 986 Lehrgebäude der böhmischen Sprache (Learning System of the Bohemian Language, Prague), 491 Lehr-Spławinski, ´ Tadeusz (1891–1965), 255, 299, 573, 606, 932, 933 Leisering, Walter, 98 Lekhitic (Polish), 416, 417 Lekhito-Polish, 417 Lemberg, Hans, 155, 375, 383, 389, 392, 440, 444, 486, 615, 792, 981 Lemkian, 628, 890 see also Rusyn Lemkos (Galician Rusyns), 14, 584, 615, 618, 635–9, 662, 686, 732, 890–1, 930, 939 Lemtsiugova, V P, 173 Lemtsiuhov, V P, 171 Lencek, Rado, 299 Lendle, O C, 421 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924), 30, 569, 659, 851, 920–1, 936, 961(n. 36) Leopold II (r. 1790–1792), Emperor, 105, 433, 451, 484, 491 Łesiów, Michał, 157 Leszczynski, ´ Rafał, 306 Lettrich, Jozef, 525, 549, 557, 559, 722, 829, 842, 853, 858 Lëtzebuergesch (see Luxemburgish) Leuschner, Torsten, 1, 11, 46, 49 Levoˇca (Leutschau, Lewocza, L˝ ocse), 522, 537, 543, 868, 919 Lewaszkiewicz, Tadeusz, 384, 480 Lewis, Bernard, 263, 269, 970 lex Grabski, 591 lexicography, 101, 326, 407, 461, 515, 763, 846, 899 Lexicon Latino-Polonicum (The Latin-Polish Dictionary, 1564, Königsberg [Kaliningrad]), 110, 478 Lexicon recentis Latinitatis (Dictionary of Recent Latin, 1992–1997, Vatican), 98

1088 Index

Lexicon symphonum (The Symphonia of Words, 1537 and 1544, Basle), 101 Linde, Samuel Bogumił (1771–1847), 116–17, 185, 294, 375, 377–9, 381, 438, 460, 477, 478, 604, 796, 960(n.23), 980 Linek, Bernard, 573, 593, 617, 626 lingua adamica, 46 lingua latina, 94 lingua romana, 94 linguarum in genere, tum Polonicae seorsim praestantia et utilitate oratio, De (On Language in General, Including the Defence of the Polish Language and a Speech on Its Usefulness, 1589, Gdansk), ´ 111 linguas francas, 7, 965 linguistics, 33, 34, 35, 46, 83, 149, 175, 224, 405, 439, 476, 532, 546, 563, 624, 643, 760, 762, 763, 764, 778, 785, 796, 845, 849, 859, 860–1, 877, 878–81, 899, 900, 932, 934, 955, 968 development, early, 6–9, 63–4 engineering, 210 homogenization, German, 48, 341, 410, 893, 979 marxist, 778, 785, 878–80 and nations/nation-states, 51–6 see also Language lingwe uniwersala (see Esperanto) Linhart, Anton Tomaž (1756–1795), 294, 295 Lins, Ulrich, 340, 393 List, Eveline, 86 Liszka, József, 465, 904 literacy, 38 Albanian, 244 Armenian, 323, 326 Cyrillic-based, 87, 471 Czech, 723 Greek, 66, 141 Hebrew, 307 Hungary, 699 mass, 8, 25, 38, 39, 43, 147 Muscovy, 160 Polish, 621 Prussia, 388 rates, 145–8 Roma, 331 Russian, 164, 980(n.12) Ruthenian, 154 Slavophone, 532

Slovenia, 296 Sorbian, 303 Soviet Union, 942 see also illiteracy Literary Agreement, Vienna, (1850), 225, 229, 230, 460, 850 literature Czech, 493, 514 Ladino, 318, 319, 320 Latin, 92 Magyar, 437, 438 Polish, 415 Romani, 330 Slovak, 512, 520, 530, 533, 546, 731, 841, 985(n.13) Slovjak, 821 Sorbian, 304, 305 Ukrainian, 174, 175 Yiddish, 312 Lithuania, 70 declaration of independence, 54, 58, 298, 721, 725, 738, 743, 817 Grand Duchy of, relgious/language changes, 15, 16, 17, 70, 71, 72, 88, 89, 101, 110, 111, 112, 118, 126, 137, 151, 152, 153, 154–9, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 171, 172, 175, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 271, 272, 307, 313, 368, 373, 374, 382, 384, 385, 388, 395, 403, 408, 410, 439, 465, 473, 482, 598, 647, 744, 907, 929, 971, 972, 973 origins of name, 181–2 Lithuanian, 180, 183, 185, 186, 395 dialects/vernaculars, 191, 973(n.17) as official language, 188 reintroduction, Latin script, 179, 210, 402, 409 standard, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190 as state language, Soviet republics, 49, 51, 174, 179, 190, 390, 399, 404, 411, 456, 460, 542, 578, 589, 591, 596, 622, 638, 670, 710, 747, 757, 794, 803, 838, 886, 888, 897, 898, 940 see also Samogitian Lithuanianization, of the Vilnius area, 189 Lithuanians, pagan, 15 ‘Little German nation-state’, 18, 365 see also Kleindeutschland Little Russia, 166

Index

Little Russian (see Ukrainian) Litván, György, 656 Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, 50, 411 Livingstone, Elizabeth A, 242 Livonia, 16, 65, 74, 113, 115, 163, 181, 187, 193–4, 196–9, 271, 344, 395, 974(n.21) Livonian, 16, 65, 181, 187, 193, 197, 198, 271 Livonian Order, State of the, 16, 187, 193, 197, 271 Lizisowa, Maria Teresa, 157, 997 Ljubljana (Laibach), 291, 292–3, 294, 295–298 Locke, John (1632–1704), 44, 46 Łodzinski, ´ Sławomir, 636, 639, 895 Löhner, Ludwig von (1812–1852), 498, 500, 509, 513 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 154, 161, 162, 163, 224, 280, 325 London, 12, 44, 46, 47, 80, 162, 252, 260, 283, 332, 337, 403, 406, 435, 487, 610, 623, 721, 754, 771, 813, 838, 857, 921, 978(n.53) Loos, Josef (1839–1878), 563, 846 Łopacinski, ´ Hieronim (1860–1906), 405 Loránd, Benk, 627, 705, 945 L˝ orincze, Lajos (1915–1993), 703 L˝ orinczy, Éva, 705, 947 Lorraine, 77, 78 Ło´s, Jan, 405, 606 Losik, Anton, 173, 616 Louis (Lajos) I, King (r. 1342–1382), 102, 121, 337, 431, 817 Low German, 27, 28, 33, 74, 75, 77, 80, 83, 84, 85, 477, 967, 986 Lowenthal, David, 645 Lower Saxonian, 73–4, 75–6, 79–80, 85 Loza, Iurii, 403 Lublin, 16, 146, 278, 379, 408–10, 576, 588, 590, 594, 604, 616, 617, 621, 628, 641, 689, 712 Luˇci´c, Radovan, 144 Ludanyi, Andrew, 672, 696, 710 Luft, Robert, 495, 722 Lukacs, John, 464 Lukashenka, Aleksandr, 174 Łukowski, Jerzy, 411 Lusatia, 14, 15, 27, 102, 113, 218, 290, 301–3, 305, 306, 417, 478, 482, 729, 730, 773, 806

1089

Lower Lusatia, 302–3, 482 Upper Lusatia, 302, 303, 482 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 39, 79, 88, 343 Lutheran faith, 194 Luther’s German, 82, 182, 292, 304, 312, 333 Lutsk (Łuck, Luzk), 309 Luxembourg, 5, 12, 56, 59, 76–7, 85, 124, 644, 926, 961, 967 Luxemburg, House of, 15, 30, 77, 503 Luxemburgish (see Lëtzebuergesch) Lviv (Lemberg, Lvov, Lwów), 72, 81, 119, 154, 155, 177, 178, 369, 373, 375, 383, 389, 392, 401, 403, 411, 414, 429, 440, 444, 486, 502, 588, 590, 601, 604, 607, 613, 615, 617, 621, 625, 677, 758, 792, 970(n.5), 971(n.9) Lyer, Stanislav, 785, 879, 945 Lynam, Edward W, 345 Łysohorsky, Óndra (Goj, Erwín), 728, 730 see also Lachia, Lachian Lyzanec, Petro M, 705, 947 McArthur, Tom, 86, 979 McCarthy, Justin, 255, 264, 270, 275, 285, 327 Macedonia, 246–7, 250, 251, 253, 254, 976(n.34) see also Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) Macedonian, 248, 249, 250, 253, 975(n.30) Macedonian cultural society, 250 Macedonian national movement, 246, 250, 254 Macedonian, Old, 28, 252, 287 Machek, Václav, 627, 763, 786, 878, 881, 945 Ma´cica Serbska, 304 McLuhan, Marshall, 25 McMillin, Arnold B, 157, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 398 Ma˛czak, Antoni, 388, 416, 587 Ma˛czynski, ´ Jan (1520–1584), 110, 478 Mad’arsko, 484, 524, 562, 566, 646, 846 see also Hungary Mad’arsko-ˇcesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇcesko-mad’arský technícký slovník (Magyar-Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech-Magyar Technical Dictionary, 1964, Bratislava), 566, 898 Magaš, Branka, 233

1090 Index

Magdeburg, 74, 75, 80, 84 Magocsi, Paul Robert, 13 Magyar culture, 441, 465 discrimination against, 887 identity card, 709, 894, 895, 989 minorities, 610, 670, 671, 675, 677, 679, 681, 683, 693, 694, 698, 701, 704, 706, 709–11, 715, 725, 774, 852, 889, 894, 895, 923, 926, 931, 940, 949, 951 nation, 130, 368, 440, 446, 447–8, 452, 454, 457–9, 461, 462, 466, 500, 539, 540, 543, 649, 650, 679, 680, 686, 706, 806, 809, 887, 906–11, 926, 947, 952, 981 nation-state, 457, 910 origin of name, 646 see also Magyars Magyar, 65, 121, 211, 473, 915–16 alphabet, 67 Chancery, 121, 123, 124 decline of, 669–70 EU official language, 902 in Hungary, 442, 460, 909, 961(n.34) languages influencing, 128 lexicography, 461 literacy, 127 as official language, 445, 461, 649, 651, 767, 901 origins of, 38, 124, 157, 201. 224, 228, 418, 437, 473, 475–6, 526, 641, 642, 805 orthography, 122, 123, 124, 207, 239, 299, 423, 442, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 530, 532, 545, 703, 821, 985 purifying, 48, 96, 261, 282, 297, 515, 759, 881 rise of, 130 as sociolect, 111, 119, 369, 370, 597, 598, 701 standard, 122, 128, 441, 442, 677, 679, 680, 681, 701, 703, 704 vernaculars, 126, 139, 465, 532 as written language, 139, 293, 438, 474, 947 Magyar Autonomous Region (in Romania), 694, 891, 937 Magyar encyclopaedia (Hungarian Encyclopedia, 1653, Utrecht), 128

Magyar értelmez˝ o kéziszótár (The Short Explanatory Dictionary of Magyar, 1972, Budapest), 704 Magyar etymológiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1914–, Budapest), 461, 517, 527, 681, 764, 917, 932 Magyar Grammatikátska (The Small Grammar of Magyar, 1645, Karlsburg [Alba Iulia]), 123, 124 Magyar helyesírás és szóragasztás f˝ obb szabályai (The Significant Rules of Magyar Orthography and Declension, 1832), 442 Magyar helyesírás szabályai, A (The Principles of Magyar Orthography and Grammar, 1954, Budapest), 703, 704 Magyar Hírmandó (newspaper) (Hungarian Courier, 1780–1788), 129, 439 Magyar identity card, 709, 710, 894, 895, 989 Magyar Katolikus Lexikon (The Magyar Catholic Lexicon, 1993–, Budapest), 712, 950 Magyar Királyság (Kingdom of Hungary), 648 Magyar language movement, 440 Magyar Múzeum (The Magyar Museum), 439, 950 Magyar Nagylexikon (The Great Magyar Lexicon, 1993–2004, Budapest), 712, 950 Magyar nyelv értelmez˝ o szótára, A (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1959–1962, Budapest), 625, 703, 711 Magyar nyelv rendszere, A (The System of the Magyar Language, 1844), 442 Magyar nyelv szótára, A (The Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1862–1874, Pest), 130, 460, 461, 680, 681, 682, 704, 909, 913, 917, 932 Magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára (The Historical-Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1967–1976, Budapest), 627, 705 Magyar nyelvhelyesség (How to Write and Speak Correctly in Magyar, 1957, Budapest), 703 Magyar Nyelvi Bizottság (Commission for the Magyar Language, Hungary), 460

Index

Magyar Nyelv˝ or (periodical) (The Guardian of the Magyar Language), 460, 680, 703 Magyar nyelvtörténeti szótár (The Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language), 460, 627, 680 Magyar nyelvújítás szótára, A (Dictionary of the Magyar Language Reform, 1902–1908, Budapest), 462, 764, 917 Magyar nyelvvéd˝ o könyv (Purification Book of the Magyar Language, 1938–1939, Budapest), 681 Magyar szófejt˝ o szótár (Magyar Etymological Dictionary, Budapest), 130, 460, 680, 704 magyar szókészlet finnugor elemei, A (The Finno-Ugric Elements in the Magyar Lexical Stock, 1967–1978, Budapest), 705 Magyar tájszótár (Dictionary of the Magyar Dialects, Budapest, 1893–1901), 461, 517, 705, 947 Magyarization, 50, 146, 228, 236, 186, 447–9, 452–3, 458, 459, 462–72, 474, 480, 527, 529, 531, 539–40, 543–4, 547, 549, 553–6, 559–61, 652, 654, 656, 663, 668, 684, 685, 687, 699, 708, 723, 734, 742, 745, 810, 811, 812, 826, 829, 830, 839, 840, 842, 844, 856, 893, 909, 911, 946, 986 of Hungary’s Slavs, 536, 542, 543, 544 opposition to, 228, 447, 452, 458, 466, 553, 840 Slovak, 527, 529, 531, 539, 543, 544, 547, 549, 554, 555, 556, 560, 561 success of, 458–9 Magyarország, 484, 486, 645, 647, 648, 651, 652, 660, 661, 669, 676, 677, 678, 679, 684, 688, 689, 694, 989 see also Hungary Magyarosan (periodical) (In Proper Magyar [literally, In a Magyar Way], 1932–1943), 681, 682 Magyars, 3, 14, 15, 63, 67, 68, 87, 120, 121, 127, 128, 142, 146, 167, 202, 203, 207, 210, 211, 217, 218, 329, 349, 391, 441, 444–8, 450, 451, 453–5, 457–9, 462, 465, 466, 473–6, 479, 484, 496, 499, 500, 503, 507, 513, 515, 521, 523–6, 529, 540, 542, 544, 548, 549, 550, 552, 559, 569, 631, 645, 646, 649, 650, 652–3, 655, 656, 659, 661, 662,

1091

665, 666, 668, 669, 670–80, 682–3, 685–8, 690–9, 701, 706–11, 714–15, 717, 719, 721, 733, 736, 739–40, 749, 750, 753–6, 765, 775, 780,–3, 790, 793, 797, 798, 809, 810, 812, 813, 814–20, 822–3, 829–31, 833, 836, 838, 839, 841, 852, 854–6, 862–3, 868–71, 873, 877, 885, 887, 889, 890, 891, 892, 893–4, 903, 906–7, 912, 916, 917, 918, 923, 924, 937,. 939, 940, 945–7, 952, 965, 967, 970, 974, 983, 989, 990 national poet of, 454, 465, 918, 973 persecution of, 71, 133, 142, 283, 307, 331, 415, 512, 586, 603, 610, 692, 693, 696, 697, 770, 863, 864, 866, 871 see also Magyar Magyarság (Magyardom), 438 Mährens allgemeine Geschichte (General History of Moravia, 1860–1888, Brünn [Brno]), 479 Maior, Petru (1761–1821), 452 Majewicz, Alfred F, 27, 65, 269, 309, 966 Major, Mark Imre, 656, 661 Majtán, Milan, 899, 948 Maksimiuk, Jan, 192 Mala ˇceskoslovenská encyklopedie (The Small Czechoslovak Encyclopedia, 1984–1987, Prague), 627, 786 Malá encyklopédia Slovenska (The Little Encyclopedia of Slovakia, 1887, Bratislava), 883 Małopolska, 109, 117–18, 131, 477, 579, 651–2 Maltese, 59, 963(n.53) Mały słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Small Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1968, Warsaw, 625 Malý staroˇceský slovník (The Little Old Czech Dictionary, 1979, Prague), 786 Mandelbaum, David, 905 Mandys, Pavel, 794, 899 Mannová, Elena, 456, 525 Manouche (‘human being,’ ‘man’), 329 see also Roma Manowiecki, Piotr, 795 Maramure¸s (Máramaros), 211, 470 Maria Theresa (Habsburg, r. 1740–1780), 103–4, 106, 128, 375, 383, 434, 470, 484, 487, 490, 730 Marína (poem), 547 Markowski, Andrzej, 41, 48, 641, 642, 643

1092 Index

Martel, Antoine, 119, 157, 979 Martin (Sankt Martin, Turócszentmárton, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 877, 886–7 Martin Declaration, (1918), 803, 817, 827, 828, 835 Martin, Bernhard, 406 Martin, Terry, 41, 52, 214, 266, 269, 316, 335, 359, 575 Martinovi´c, Dušan J., 129, 130, 152, 354, 433, 435, 440, 551 Martinovics conspiracy, (1794–1795), 129, 130, 433, 435 Martinovics, Ignatius, Father (1755–1795), 129, 130, 433, 435, 440, 551 martinský úzus (Martin usage), 562, 843, 844, 845, 848, 850 Martynau, V U, 120 Marushiakova, Elena, 335, 974, 978 Marx, Karl (1818–1883), 30, 500, 992(n.2) marxist linguistic conferences, 778 Marxism and the National Question, 575, 659, 920 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue (1850–1837), 493, 505, 511, 512, 514, 521, 554, 557, 558, 562, 719, 721, 722, 730, 735–6, 747, 748, 750, 751, 753, 757, 758, 771, 773, 810, 812–13, 817, 823, 827, 828, 833, 834, 836, 837, 842, 844, 851, 918, 984, 990 Masarykuv ˚ slovník nauˇcný (Masaryk Scientific Dictionary: A people’s encyclopedia of general information, 1925–1933, Prague), 514, 761 Mashkit font (Hebrew script), 311 Ma´sica Serbska (Sorbian Cultural Organization), 304 see also Sorbian Massoch, S., 450 Mat’ovˇcík, Augustín, 775 Matica crnogorska (Montenegrin Cultural Society), 234 see also Montenegrin Matica slovenská (Slovak Cultural Organization), 462, 547, 552, 553–4, 557, 560, 562, 565, 566, 778, 810, 822, 833, 835, 842–6, 849, 859, 860, 865, 877, 878, 879, 887, 933, 986, (n.14), 991 see also Slovak Matice cˇeska (Czech Cultural Organization), 444, 492 see also Czech

Matice moravská (Moravian Cultural Organization), 501, 502 see also Czech, Moravian Matice opavská (Opava Cultural Organization), 502 see also Czech, Slunzakian Matice osvˇety lidové pro Tˇešínsko (Educational Organization for Tˇešín/Teschen Silesia), 502 see also Czech, Slunzakian Matoš, Antun Gustav (1873–1914), 237 Matras, Yaron, 335 ˇ Trenˇciansky a jeho vláda na Matúš Cák ˇ Trenˇciansky Slovensku (Matúš Cák and His Rule in Slovakia, 1938, Prague), 815 Mauro, Tullio de, 5 Maximos of Gallipoli, 260 Maxwell, Alexander, 233, 464, 476, 522, 535, 537, 541, 545, 547, 550–1, 557, 562, 567, 956(n.1) Mayenowa, Maria Renata (1910–1988), 384, 627, 947 Mazovia, 15, 17, 118, 477, 578–9 Mazower, Mark, 255, 263, 320 Mazuria, 183, 350, 578, 579, 582, 584, 617, 618, 619 Mazurian, 183, 348, 350, 578, 579, 582, 609 Mazurs, 14, 348, 578–81, 618ff, 775, 930, 940 Mažvydas, Martynas (1510–1563), 181 Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–1872), 30, 31 MDP (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja) (MDP, Hungarian Workers’ Party), 691, 692 Meˇciar, Vladimir, 709, 788, 883, 884, 949 media, mass, 6, 9, 13, 301, 310, 331, 622, 631, 698, 701, 759, 779, 794, 799, 800, 801, 876, 882, 883, 898, 941, 953 Mediterranean Sea, 92 Megleno-Romanians, 202, 210, 216 Meillet, Antoine, 493 Meissen (Upper Saxonian), 76, 79, 82, 123 Mekhitarist congregation, 324 Melich, János, 461, 517, 527, 681, 917, 932 Melnychuk, O S, 120, 646 Memelland, 188, 189 Memorandum of the Slovak Nation, 551, 912 Menges, Karl H, 275

Index

Mensk/Minsk (Minsk), ´ 19, 42, 55, 58, 72, 165, 173, 314, 373, 403, 411, 412, 415, 577, 971(n.7) Mentzel, Peter, 143, 513 Menze, Ernest A, 437, 994 Menzel, Wolfgang, 499 Mertelsmann, Olaf, 190, 201, 972 Mészáros, István, 688 methode dejepisu Slovenska, O (article) (On the Methodology of Slovak Historiography, 1881), 814 Meyer, Joseph (1796–1856), 407 Mezihorák, František, 766, 855 Miˇcátek, L’udovít Al, 847–8 Michaláˇc, Jozef, 882 Michna, Ewa, 584 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855), 172, 186, 191, 382, 441, 465, 473, 597, 644, 918, 973 middle class, 39, 437, 446, 448, 508, 524, 598, 614, 961 Middle East, the, 10, 93, 244, 307, 341, 363, 475 Middle German literary language, see Upper Saxonian (Meissen) migration, mass, Germans from Poland, 271, 311, 585, 967 Miklowicz, Anton, 287 Mikołajczak, Aleksander Wojciech, 98, 114, 371, 598 Mikusinska, ´ Aldona, 64–5, 275, 287, 299, 334, 674 – Milardovi´c, Andelko, 13 Millennium of the Magyar conquest of Hungary, 458 Milner-Gulland, Robin, 167 Miloradi´c, Mate Merši (1850–1928), 237 Miloševi´c, Slobodan, 697, 710 Miłosz, Czesław, 598, 623 Milosz, Oscar, 598 Minahan, James, 24 minorities acts on, 987(n.14) national, 5, 26, 36, 52, 305, 412, 447, 455, 456, 458–9, 570–1, 573, 58, 599, 608, 628, 633, 634, 635–9, 654, 662, 683–4, 686, 687, 738, 747, 781, 789, 798, 838, 925, 939, 940, 949, 951, 987 treaties, 52, 587, 670, 792, 986(n.3) Miodek, Jan, 632 Miodynski, ´ Lech, 255

1093

Mirga, Andrzej, 335 Misztal, Jan, 619 Mitrofanova, Anastasia V, 360 Mitteleuropa, 2, 12, 920, 921, 958(n.8) Mitteleuropa (1915, Berlin) Mitzka, Walther, 406 Mladenovi´c, Aleksandar, 222 Mluvnica jazyka slovenského (A Grammar of the Slovak Language, 1864–1865, Budapest), 560 Mluvnice ˇceská pro školy stˇrední a ústavy uˇcitelské (The Czech Grammar for Schools and Teachers’Colleges, 1890, Prague), 516, 759–60, 844 mobility, social/spatial, 7, 36, 38, 43, 128, 210, 254, 305, 707, 808, 893 Mócsy, István, 661, 667, 734 modernity, 43, 139, 141, 308, 317, 329, 349, 361, 439, 440, 447, 667, 725, 805, 916 modernization, 39, 40, 41, 43, 104, 105, 108, 113, 129, 144, 160, 162, 213, 266, 274, 309, 313, 314, 346, 370, 387, 390, 438, 439, 440, 532, 574, 695, 700, 893, 908, 914, 980 Mohyla, Petro, Archimandrite (Petru Movil˘ a, Piotr Mohyła, 1596–1647), 156 Mojdl, Lubor, 67, 70, 98, 242, 246, 327, 356, 966, 967 Moldova, 4, 13, 18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 36, 54, 55, 212, 213–15, 264, 269, 270, 352, 353, 358, 362, 669, 969 see also Bessarabia; Moldavia Moldavia, 203, 204, 205, 969(n.25) see also Bessarabia; Moldova; Romania Moldovan, 23, 27, 33, 51, 55, 141, 201, 208, 211, 212, 213–14, 215, 230, 269–70, 288, 352, 353, 358, 362, 669, 976 see also Moldavian Moldavian, 51, 212, 213, 214, 270, 325, 346, 352, 353, 358, 658, 963 see also Moldovan Moldavian to Moldovan, 214 Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), 212 Molisean Slavic, 237, 238 Molnár, Albert Szenci (1574–1634), 121, 122, 127, 128, 433, 453, 456, 459, 462, 465, 476, 549, 656, 661, 662, 667, 688, 690, 693, 701

1094 Index

Molnár, Miklós, 121, 433, 453, 456, 459, 462, 465, 476, 549, 656, 661–2, 667, 668, 693, 701 Monarchia jöv˝ oje és a Dunai Egyesült Államok, A (The Future of the Monarchy and the United States of Danubia, 1918, Budapest), 654 Mongol campaigns in Central Europe (1236–1242), 15 Mønnesland, Svein, 677, 691, 698 monolingualism, of state administration, 41, 60, 131, 310, 438, 686, 768, 851, 856, 858, 888 Montenegrin, 14, 37, 53, 54, 58, 82, 144, 217, 222, 224, 227, 229, 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 251, 265, 340, 353, 467, 657, 974, 976 Montenegrin Language, The, 54, 144, 234, 235 Montenegro, xiv, 4, 13, 18, 20ff, 37, 48, 50, 53ff, 58, 144, 151, 209, 220, 222, 224, 225–7, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233–5, 243, 245–6, 278, 283, 332, 353–4, 358, 359, 363, 657, 718, 850, 958(n.15), 971(n.3) see also Serbia-Montenegro Morava, 218, 485, 501 Moravia, 15, 19–20, 50–1, 64, 68–70, 80, 87, 100–8, 114, 117, 131–7, 144–5, 158, 205, 218, 249, 296, 301, 368, 391, 401, 408, 418, 421–2, 448, 450, 455, 457, 463, 478–9, 482–94, 497–517, 526–30, 536–7, 540, 544–5, 554, 557, 558, 560, 569, 596, 602, 610, 642, 657, 662, 665, 667, 674, 715–16, 719, 720, 726, 728–30, 734, 739, 741, 743, 751–3, 756, 758–9, 762, 765–6, 768, 770–1, 773, 776–8, 782, 788, 790–1, 795, 799–800, 806–11, 814–16, 819, 834, 837–8, 843, 853–4, 859, 869, 883, 885, 887, 902, 910, 912–13, 915, 925, 928, 935, 954, 966(n.7), 983(nn.3, 6) Moravian, 489 Moravians, 105, 293, 401, 443, 476, 478, 481, 485, 489, 496, 497, 501, 506, 526, 533, 540, 543, 716, 727, 729, 750, 751, 790, 791, 792, 800, 801, 814, 816, 830, 834, 853, 887, 889, 892, 895, 906 see also Morawecs Moravská národní strana (Moravian National Party), 788

Morawecs, 14, 348, 727, 729, 739, 741, 748, 824, 990(n.5) see also Moravians More, Thomas (1478–1538), 95 Morison, Stanley, 343–4 Moritsch, Andreas, 671 Moscow, 20–2, 27, 81–2, 89, 151, 154, 159, 160–2, 164–5, 172–3, 177, 178, 185, 189, 193, 212–14, 247, 251, 266, 268, 270, 273, 275, 279, 305, 315, 325, 331, 334, 336, 350, 354, 356, 372, 377, 381, 387, 408, 412, 415, 478, 550, 570, 586, 591, 594, 603, 610, 611, 613, 614, 616–17, 619, 630, 633, 666, 687, 689–95, 699–701, 706–7, 728, 771–5, 777–9, 787, 857–8, 861, 866, 873, 877, 930, 935–9, 953, 956(n.3), 972(n.12), 977(n.46), 991(nn.12, 13) Moscow University, 161 Moszynski, ´ Leszek, 86, 100, 157, 255, 279 Motýl, Ivan, 801, 976, 977 Mountain Wreath, The (Montenegrin/Serbian epic poem), 224, 234 Mróz, Lech, 335, 424 MSzMP (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt) (Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party), 692 Mukachevo (Mukaˇcevo, Munkács, Munkatsch), 656, 736 Mulih, Juraj (1694–1754), 237 Muller, Henri F, 152 Müller, Stanisław (1786–1847), 382 multilingualism, Hungary, 50, 465, 903 multilingualism/multiethnicity, 6, 893 Munich, 84, 610, 665, 754, 764, 771–2, 837, 872, 883, 925 Munich Agreement (1938), 610, 665, 754, 764, 771, 772, 837, 872, 925 Muntenia (see Walachia) Münz, Teodor, 853 Murádin, László, 705, 947 Muscovian, 89, 152, 159–60, 164, 172, 177, 478 see also Russian Muscovy, 17, 82, 113–15, 140, 147, 151–2, 154–6, 158–60, 163–6, 168, 193, 219, 220, 252, 276, 278, 328, 342, 350–1, 478, 970(n.2), 973(n.19), 987(n.9) Mušicki, Lukijan (1777–1837), 223 Musil, Jiˇrí, 756, 777, 784, 790, 869, 896

Index

Muzeálna slovenská spoleˇcnost’ (Slovak Museum Association), 554 MZO (Ministerstwo Ziem Odzyskanych) (Ministry of the Recovered Territories, Poland), 620 Nabert, Heinrich, 86, 502 Nadson, Aleksandr, 141 Nagodba (Croatia, 1868), 457, 460, 464, 553, 652, 667, 670, 717, 742 Nagy, Gábor Tolcsavi, 424 Nagy, Imre (1896–1958), 692, 693, 988(n.3) Nagy, Pál Beregszászy (1750–1828), 475 Nakhichevan, 322, 363 Napoleonic Wars (1805–1807), 17, 45, 47, 365, 377, 379, 381, 383, 384, 433, 434, 439, 448 Náreˇcja slovenskuo alebo potreba písaˇ nje v tomto náreˇcje (The Slovak Dialect and the Need to Write in This Dialect, 1846, Preßburg [Bratislava]), 450, 545 Národní listy (National Newspaper), 507 národní obrození, 495 národních pisních a povˇestech plemen slovanských, O (On National Songs and Stories of the Slavic Tribes, 1852, Prague), 550 Národnie noviny (newspaper), 552, 553, 562 Národnie Zpiewanky ˇcili písnˇe svˇetské (National [Folk], or Secular Songs, 1834–1835, Buda), 538 Narutowicz, Gabriel (1865–1922), 587 Narys istorii ukrainskoi movy (Outline of the Ukrainian Language, 1927, Kiev [Kyiv]), 527, 987 Naša zastava (Our Opinion, 1907–1918, Eperjes [Prešov]), 821 Naše ˇreˇc, 516, 517, 567, 757, 760, 761, 971 Naše úˇrední ˇceština (periodical) (Our Office Czech, 1921–1933), 761 Nasha niva (periodical) (Our Land), 170, 174 nation definition of, 32, 116, 370–1, 462, 540, 541, 805, 839, 889 linguistic definition of, 805 spirit of, 46 National and Ethnic Minority Rights Act (1993, Hungary), 708 nation of God’s warriors, 504

1095

nation/language, similarities, 23–4, 27, 28, 47, 478, 540, 565, 723, 738, 811 National Casino, 441 national character/consciousness, 46, 571, 748, 895 National Council of the Czech Lands, 512–13, 557, 813 National Council, Hungary (1918), 653, 657 National House of Prosvita, 747 national language, non-speakers of, 52 national rehabilitation, 618, 775 national verification, 618, 775 National Yiddish Book Center, 316 nationalism, 24, 31, 42, 44, 908, 962 (n.41) Armenian, 321, 326 Belarusian, 357, 403, 616 Bulgarian, 249, 278–80, 282, 324 and communism, 920 Croatian, 444, 467, 663 Czech, 492, 496, 498, 500, 501, 807 ethnolinguistically-defined, 909 French, 42, 959 German, 18, 47, 48, 49, 56, 83, 84, 108, 345, 390, 403, 405, 453, 499, 501, 529, 906, 961 Hungarian civic, 466 Jewish, 49, 79, 310, 313, 326, 333, 335, 402, 596–7, 977 and language, 515, 931 Lithuanian, 183, 185, 186, 401, 818 Magyar, 125, 130, 225, 441, 446, 447, 452, 454, 458, 463, 472, 475, 524, 553, 649, 652, 668, 680, 685, 716, 806, 905, 906, 909, 911, 981 Polish, 377, 392, 403, 415–16, 502, 574, 581, 589, 594, 599, 604, 633, 649, 651, 830, 924 Roma, 332 Romanian, 48, 139, 207, 208, 452, 539, 556 Russian, 356, 909, 937, 980 Serbian, 227, 697, 717 Slovak, 131, 349, 449, 450, 466, 470, 479, 480, 485, 519, 522, 524, 526, 529, 539, 541, 546, 547, 548, 550, 552, 556, 562, 733, 800, 805–8, 809–12, 814, 818, 820, 821, 822, 842, 862, 887, 888, 910, 911, 913, 984, 986, 992

1096 Index

nationalism – continued Slovenian, 296, 467 as statehood legitimization, 24, 31, 42, 105, 390, 399, 529, 569, 571, 572, 575, 651, 699, 922 Turkish, 265, 267 Ukrainian, 177, 400–1, 890 White Ruthenian (Belarusian), 410 Nationality Law (Hungary, 1868), 460, 461, 463, 555, 654, 668, 684, 742, 747 nationality, ethnically construed, 42 Nationallexicon (‘National Dictionary,’ Prague, 1788), 106 nation-building, 10, 117, 341, 447, 448, 466, 472, 648, 662, 711, 805, 920, 923, 939, 961 Nations and Nationalism (1983, Cambridge), 44 nations, ethnic stateless, 962(n.41) nation-states civic/ethnic, 26, 42, 54, 574, 575, 916 England, as first, 805, 959(n.18) ethnolinguistic, 6, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 238, 330, 332, 362, 465, 569, 570, 598, 806, 919, 921, 926, 941, 948, 964, 993 globalization, 24, 43, 904 new, 2, 18, 19, 36, 52, 58, 411, 571, 575, 576, 582, 587, 761, 886, 893, 923 NATO, 3, 22, 23, 240, 253, 630, 709, 713, 789, 888, 894, 902, 949, 950 Nauka reˇci slovenskej (Learning to Read and Write the Slovak Language, 1846, Preßburg [Bratislava]), 450, 545 Naukove tovarystvo imeny Shevchenka (Shevchenko Society of Sciences), 401, 613 Naumann, Friedrich (1860–1919), 12 návrhu na nové Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu, O (On the Project of the New Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, 1952, Martin), 757, 835, 859, 878, 899 Naylor, Kenneth E., 222, 225, 226, 228, 231 Nazor, Vladimir (1876–1949), 237 Neˇcas, Jaroslav (1913–1988), 565, 780 Nedilia (weekly) (Sunday), 745 Nehring, W, 418 Nekvapil, Jiˇrí, 792, 793 Neman (Niemen), 165, 185 Nˇemcova, Božena (1820–1862), 918

Nˇemecko-ˇceský slovník vˇedeckého názvosloví pro gymnasia a reálné školy/Deutschböhmisches Wörterbuch der wissenschaftlichen Terminologie für Gymnasien und Realschulen (The German-Czech Dictionary of Scientific Terminology for Secondary Schools, 1853, Prague), 494, 513–14 Nemes, Robert, 476 német, 126, 448, 967 Németh, Julius, 126 nemzeti államok kialakulása és a nemzetiségi kérdés, A (The Evolution of Nation-States and the Nationality Question, 1912, Budapest), 654 Nemzeti Sport (periodical) (National Sport), 682 Nemzetiség (periodical) (Nationality), 447 neo-absolutism, 456, 549, 551 Neo-Latin, 95–6 neologists, Magyar, 130, 440, 441, 442, 680 Neo-Uniate Church, 140, 173, 602 see also Greek Catholic Church, Uniate Church Neo-Uniate liturgy, 140 Nép és Nyelv (periodical) (People and Language, 1941–1943), 682 Népünk és Nyelvünk (periodical) (Our People and Our Language, 1930–1939), 682 Neruda, Jan (1834–1891), 918 Neudorfl, Marie L, 562 Neue und Kurze Beschreibung des Koenigreiches Ungarn (The New and Brief Description of the Kingdom of Hungary, 1664, Nuremberg), 544 Neustupný, J V, 103, 764 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1884–1928, Oxford), 84 New Julfa, 322 New York, 42, 314–16, 320, 566, 868 newspapers Arebica, 143, 232 Belarusian, 174 Bibliˇctina, 449, 535, 560 Bulgarian, 354 Burgenland Croatian, 237 Cracow, 400 Czech, 106, 489, 491, 507, 897 German-Russian, 409 Ladino, 318

Index

Lithuanian, 188 Magyar, 129, 439, 440, 446 Moldavian, 212 Old Slovak, 541 Polish, 641 Russian, 160 Ruthenia, Subcarpathian, 745 Ruthenian (Rusyn), 391 Serbian, 223 Slaveno-Ruthenian, 390 Slovak, 134, 449, 450, 546, 552, 835 Slovenian, 294 Slovjak, 821 Sorbian, Upper, 304 Walachian (Romanian), 452 White Ruthenian (Belarusian), 395 Yiddish, 312, 316 Nicholas I, Tsar (r.1825–1855), 384, 385, 388 Nicholas II, Tsar (r.1894–1917), 398, 409 Nicholas V, Pope (1447–1455), 343 Niedersächsisch, 74 Nied´zwiedzki, Władysław, 397 Niemiecko-polski słownik wyrazów prawniczych i administracyjnych (German-Polish Dictionary of Legal and Administrative Vocabulary, 1862), 405 Niezałatwiona Kwestia, Kwestya, Kwestyja, Kwestja ortograficzna (The Unresolved Orthographic Question, 1890, Warsaw), 428 Nikˇcevi´c, Vojislav, 234 Nikon, Patriarch, 159 Nitra (periodical), 131, 450, 546, 560, 567, 705, 751, 752, 834, 844, 845, 887 Nitra (Neutra, Nyitra), 131, 450, 546, 560, 567, 705, 751–2, 834, 844, 845, 887 Nitra Principality, 751, 752 Nitsch, Kazimierz (1874–1858), 406, 416, 517, 606, 607, 609, 620, 626 Njegoš, Petar II Petrovi´c (r. 1830–1851), 224, 227, 234, 235 Nolte, Claire E, 507 Nomenclator (‘Dictionary,’ Prague, 1746–1768), 101, 106 Nomenclator quadrilinguis (The Four-Language [Czech-Latin-Greek-German] Dictionary, 1598, Prague), 101 Non-Aligned Movement, 328

1097

normative isomorphism, language/nation/state, 29, 35, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60–1, 963 North German Confederation (1867), 365 Northern Europe, 13, 194, 342, 958 Northern German Confederation (1867), 18 Nouveau dictionnaire françois, allemand et polonois/ Nowy dykcjonariusz to jest mownik polsko-francuskoniemiecki/Vollständiges deutsches und polnisches Wörterbuch (The New Dictionary, consisting of the French-German-Polish part, the Polish-French-German part, and the German-Polish part, 1744–1772, Leipzig), 378 Novák, Karel, 764 Novák, L’udovit, 527, 528, 859 Nové vydání pravidel ˇceského pravopisu. Zpráva pro diskusi (The New Edition of the Rules of Czech Orthography: An outline for discussion, 1956, Prague), 760 November Uprising (1830–1831), 381, 384, 386, 388, 389, 394, 395, 399 Novgorod, 158, 159, 971(n.4) Noví mad’arsko-slovenskí a slovensko-mad’arskí slovˇ ník (New Magyar-Slovak and Slovak-Magyar Dictionary, 1848, Szarvas), 122, 128, 461, 562, 704, 745, 846 Novi Sad (Neusatz, Ujvidék), 20, 226, 229–31, 444, 470, 538, 657, 982(n.10) Novi Sad Agreement (1954), 230, 231 Nowa encyklopedia powszechna (1995–1996), 640, 641, 650 Nowak, Krzysztof, 503, 607 Nowy elementarz polski (The New Polish Primer, 1803, Breslau [Wrocław]), 379 Nowy słownik ortograficzny PWN wraz z zasadami pisowni i interpunkcji (The PWN’s New Orthographic Dictionary with the Principles of Spelling, Writing and Punctuation, 1996, Warsaw), 642 numerus clausus (anti-Semitism), 594–5, 662, 664, 677, 685 numerus nullus (anti-Semitism), 595 Nuremberg club (see Volapük, Esperanto) Nurmi, Ismo, 525

1098 Index

Nyelvm˝ uvelésünk f˝ obb kérdései (The Most Significant Questions of Our Language Politics, 1953, Budapest), 703 Nyelvm˝ uvel˝ o kézikönyv (The Handbook of Language Cultivation, 1980–1985, Budapest), 704 Nyitra-vidéki magyar nyelvjárások atlasza, A (The Atlas of the Magyar Dialect in the Nitra Region, 2004, Bratislava), 705 pisowni polskiej, O (On Polish Spelling, 1882, Warsaw), 427 O’Boyle, L, 575 obecná cˇeština, 506–7, 642, 758–9, 800–1, 845 see also Czech, spisovná cˇeština obecná sleštino-moravština, 801 Obradovi´c, Dositej (1739–1811), 223, 436 Oder (Odra), 28, 45, 83, 85, 87, 289, 301, 302, 405, 617, 633, 773, 936, 938 Oder-Neisse line, 28, 85, 405, 617, 633, 773, 936, 938 Odesa (Odessa), 282, 388, 415 ODS (Obˇcanská demokratická strana) (Civic Democratic Party), 789 Ogonowski, Jerzy, 379, 392, 398, 403, 406, 411, 586, 588, 589, 591, 593, 595–7, 829, 832, 987, 990 Ogrodzinski, ´ Wincenty, 379 Ojczyzna-polszczyzna (TV program) (Fatherland—the Polish Language), 633 Okuka, Miloš, 28, 144, 226, 228, 233, 235, 683, 829, 899, 986 Old Albanian script, 243 Old Believers, 159, 637, 987 Old Bulgarian, 28, 34, 68, 158, 204, 252, 280 Old Church Slavonic, 28, 34–5, 39, 41, 68, 82, 99, 108, 112, 127, 131, 132, 140, 143, 204, 218, 252, 276, 287, 291, 294, 526, 961(n.29), 966(n.10) as Old Slovenian, 35, 291, 294 recensions of, 82, 140, 204, 219, 248 Old Czech, see Bible language (Bibliˇctina) Old Czechs, 507, 508, 509, 513 Old Slavic, 68, 128, 132, 218, 473, 859 ‘Old Slovak’, 35, 102, 131, 294, 469, 512, 526, 527, 528, 541, 547, 550–1, 560, 752, 846 see also Bible language (Bibliˇctina)

Olga of Greece, Queen (1851–1926), 261 Olomouc (Olmütz), 490, 492, 507, 741, 783 Oltenia (see Walachia) Ó-magyar olvasókönyv (Old Magyar Reader, 1929, Budapest), 681 Ondrejoviˇc, Slavomír, 832, 876 one state/one nation, 9 Ong, Walter, 149 Oommen, T. K, 26 Opitz, Martin (1597–1639), 45, 82 Opole (Oppeln), 118, 577, 581, 619, 630, 634, 636 Optát, Beneš, 100 oratore, De (About Oratory, 55 BCE), 959(n.16) Orava/Orawa (Árva, Arwa), 578, 582–4, 609–11, 732–3, 774, 823–4, 828, 830, 837, 854, 871 Oravcová, Marianna, 535 Order of the Hospitallers of St Mary of the Teutons, 15 Orel, Vladimir, 242 origine successoribusque Slavorum, De (On the Origin of the Present-Day Slavdom, 1525, Venice), 478 Orgelbrand, Maurycy (1826–1904), 426 Orgelbrand, Samuel (1810–1868), 407 Orło´s, Teresa Zofia, 110, 116, 424, 426, 481, 495 Orłowski, Hubert, 581 Ormis, Ján V, 450, 531, 540, 545, 991 Országh, László, 625, 703, 704, 943 Országh-Hviezdoslav, Pavol, 558 Orthodox Church, 70, 73, 81, 87, 113, 153, 155, 156, 159, 162, 163, 164, 170, 179, 184, 204, 212, 219, 220, 223, 225, 227, 228, 249, 252, 256, 259, 260, 261, 263, 277, 281, 282, 310, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 356, 359, 361, 385, 389, 394, 556, 585, 586, 593, 594, 603, 610, 612, 616, 668, 669, 737, 742, 863, 909, 937, 975, 977, 980, 987 acceptance of printing, 155 discrimination against, 159, 585, 594 orthographia bohemica, De (On the Czech Orthography, 1406), 100, 422 Orthographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi polonicum idoma quam utilissimus (Orthography, or on the

Index

Manner of Correct Writing and Reading, with the Most Useful Polish Expressions, 1513), 423 Orthographia Vngarica (Magyar Orthography, 1538 and 1549, Cracow), 124 orthography, 428, 606 orthologists, Magyar, 130, 440, 441, 442, 680 Orzechowski, Marian, 103, 107, 486, 491, 493, 495 Osadchenko, Ion, 353 Ossolineum, 383, 384, 389, 392, 440, 625 Ossolinski, ´ Józef Maksymilian (1748–1826), 378, 383, 440, 625, 960(n.23) Ostler, Nicholas, 41, 961, 962, 964 Ostrava (Ostrau), 582, 584, 610, 779, 801, 868, 925 Ostrówka, Małgorzata, 71, 120, 181 Ostrowski, Mieczysław, 150, 167 Ostrowski, Wiktor, 167 Osuský, Štefan (Stephen) (1889–1973), 519, 813 Other(s) Central Europe as, 4, 5 Roma as, 330 Slovaks as the, 724 Othodox Christianity, 28, 48, 64, 69, 88, 101, 112, 127, 139, 142, 151, 153, 159, 164, 169, 199, 200, 204, 216, 220, 223, 224, 243, 251, 256, 310, 324, 346, 359, 360, 388, 394, 396, 417, 418, 431, 595, 655, 663, 737, 783, 804, 822, 970, 980, 990 Ottoman (Old Turkish, Osmanlıca), 88, 136, 259, 265, 273, 961(n.30) Ottoman Empire, 5, 9, 16, 18, 41, 48, 51, 81, 96, 121, 124–5, 128, 147, 158, 166, 202, 205, 208–9, 220, 226, 241, 243, 247, 249, 254, 256, 258–60, 262, 264–6, 272, 277, 279, 281ff, 307, 317–19, 322–5, 329, 353–4, 359–61, 431ff, 450ff, 463, 467–8, 523, 532, 717, 830, 876, 915, 922, 946, 960(n.28), 961(n.30), 968(n.23), 969(n.25), 972(n.2), 972(n.3), 977(n.47), 982(n.10) Ottuv ˚ slovnik nauˇcný (Otto Scientific Dictionary, 1888–1908, Prague), 407–8, 514, 682, 761, 797

1099

Otwinowska, Barbara, 480 Ouˇredník, Patrik, 800, 801 Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1800, London), 46, 435 Overfield, James H, 576 Oxford English Dictionary (1884–1928, Oxford), 84, 264, 644, 786, 932 Pâcli¸sanu, Zenobius, 669, 685 Pact of Eternal Friendship, 666 Pais, Dezs˝ o, 681 Paisii (1722–1773), 278, 279 Palacký, František (see Palacky, Franz), 31, 437, 453, 479–81, 489, 491, 493–4, 497–500, 503–7, 512, 514, 537, 539, 547–8, 717–18, 751, 809, 918, 983(n.2) Palacky, Franz (see Palacký, František) Palickar, Stephen Joseph, 525 Palkoviˇc, Juraj (Protestant pastor) (1769–1850), 519, 534, 535–40, 542–4, 552, 911, 985(n.7) Palkoviˇc, Juraj (Catholic priest) (1763–1865), 534, 985(n.7) Pallas nagy lexikona, A (Pallas Great Lexicon, 1893–1904, Budapest), 461, 462, 917 Pallas, Peter Simon, 46, 133, 461, 462, 917 Pallis, Alexander (1741–1811), 261 Palmowski, Jan, 939 ‘pan,’ etymology of, 120 PAN (Polska Akademia Nauk), 622, 624 Pan Tadeusz (Polish epic poem), 172, 441 Pan-European movement, 571 Panochko, Mykhailo, 179 Pan-Serbian identity, 224 Pan-Slavic, 278, 489, 537, 540, 542, 550, 946, 949 Pan-Slav Congress (see Slav Congress) Pan-Slavism, 167, 222, 225, 288, 381, 453, 460, 464, 476, 477, 478, 495, 512, 537, 539, 541, 543, 544, 717, 718, 719, 722, 745, 799, 847, 878, 945 Pan-Turanianism, 476, 946, 947 Pannonia, 14, 63–4, 66–7, 474, 965, 966 Panzer, Baldur, 100, 112 Papánek, Juraj (1738–1802), 134, 436, 450, 479, 529, 814, 985 Pápay, József, 681 Papusza (Wajs, Bronisława, Poet), 334 Paris, 27, 45, 59, 77, 80, 82–3, 96, 110, 235, 261, 266, 305, 316, 319, 325, 338–40, 376–7, 403, 453, 461, 487,

1100 Index

512, 557, 584, 610, 623, 631, 658, 689, 694, 696, 719, 721, 730–2, 736, 754, 771, 813, 816, 821, 828, 888, 893, 921–2, 979(nn.1, 7), 981(n.14) Paris Peace Conference (1919), 27, 305, 658, 922 Paris Peace Conference (1947), 696 Páriz, Ferenc Pápai (1649–1716), 122 Pascu, Stefan, 669 Paška, Laco, 344, 349, 549 Pasolini, Piere Paolo (1922–1975), 300 Pastrnek, František (1853–1940), 519, 520, 762 Patoˇcka, Jan (1907–1977), 867 patriarchal characteristics of Central Europe, 901, 918 patriarchates, 975(n.27), 978(n.47) patriotism of the nobility, 488 patriotism, 43, 106, 108, 452, 465, 466, 488, 492, 496, 716, 806, 906 Patten, Alan, 8, 959 PAU (Polska Akademia Umieje˛tno´sci, Polish Academy of Sciences), 603–4, 605, 606, 621, 624, 640 Paul I, Tsar (r.1796–1801), 375 Paulician, 286, 303, 468, 469 see also Bulgarian Paulicianism, 241 Paulicians, 241, 286, 322, 468, 966 Pauliny, Eugen, 528, 547, 879, 880 Paulíny-Tóth, Viliam, 553, 554 Pavlo, Buzuk, 443, 527 Pázmány, Péter (1570–1637), 123, 128 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 74 peasants Magyarophone, 454, 650 Polish, 389, 400 revolt, Walachian, 203, 451 Slavophone, 202, 254, 286, 449, 807 ˙ Pe´c (Ipek), 256 Pechány, Adolf, 564, 846, 847, 848 Peciar, Štefan, 135, 535, 625, 778, 878, 879, 880, 881, 882, 883, 899, 900, 913, 943 Pécs (Fünfkirchen), 134, 443, 529, 661, 664, 677, 703 Pedaniuk, M, 356, 358 Pedersen, Vald, 346 Pelikán, Jan, 220, 222, 225, 228 Peltzl, Franz Martin, 491 Pennsylvania Dutch, 78

Pentateuch, the, 79, 271, 310, 312, 318, 335 Perelman, Eliezer (see Ben Yehuda) perestroika, 942 Persia, 27, 141, 258, 321–2, 325, 328, 475 Persian (Farsi), 27, 59, 126, 141, 143, 233, 239, 258–9, 265–6, 267, 273–4, 320, 322, 325, 328, 341, 418, 475, 961(n.30), 961(n.35), 962(n.45), 963, 965(n.5), 977, 982(n.10) Pésci, Tamás, 122 Pesikan, Mitar, 354 Pest, see Budapest Peštbudínske vedomosti (newspaper), 552 Pesti Hirlap (newspaper), 446 Pete, I, 711 Peter the Great, Tsar (r.1682–1725), 151, 161, 160, 164, 165, 193, 350, 351, 356, 360, 745 Pet˝ ofi, Sándor (1823–1849), 454, 465, 815, 918 Petr, Jan, 348, 394, 417, 780, 847 Petrarca, Francesco (1304–1374), 45, 95 Petrarch, 95 Petrine reforms, 160 Petro, Peter, 156, 437, 450, 480, 529, 535, 537, 540, 545, 550, 547, 550, 557, 559, 562, 705, 947 Petrov, Avvakum (1620–1682), 159 Phanariot administration, 205, 206, 207, 247, 256, 258, 277 Phillip II, Macedonia (382–336 BCE), 253 philologists, Polish, 7, 65, 68, 133, 221, 252, 415, 416, 429, 516, 609, 620, 632, 757, 942 Philotheus of Pskov, 151 Piast dynasty, 15, 118 Píˇc, Josef Ladislav (1847–1911), 814 Picchio, Riccardo, 68, 157, 980 Pichler, Tibor, 549 Piłsudski, Bronisław (1866–1916), 412, 574, 576, 577, 587, 588, 591, 593, 647, 656, 660, 748, 758, 851 Piłsudski, Józef (1867–1935), 412, 574, 576, 577, 587, 588, 591, 593, 647, 656, 660, 748, 758, 851 Pintér, Jen˝ o (1881–1940), 681 Pinto, Vivian, 279, 285 Pipa, Arshi, 242, 246 Pisárˇciková, Mária, 881, 899 Píšová, D, 104 Pisowicz, Andrzej, 141, 275, 327

Index

Pisownia polska w ostatnich wydaniach (Polish Spelling in the latest Editions [of PAU’s Polish Orthography], 1933, Warsaw), 606 Pisownia polska. Przepisy–słowniczek (Polish Orthography: The principles and the dictionary, Cracow), 606, 607, 624, 625, 627–8, 642 Pittsburgh Agreement (1918), 513, 558, 721, 765, 817, 827, 828, 883 Piwtorak, Hryhorij, 398 Pjsnˇe swˇetské lidu slawenského w Uhrách (songs) (The Secular Songs of the Slavic [Slovak] People of Hungary, 1823–1827, Pest), 538, 544 Plaˇcek, Vilém, 730, 775 Plain Language Society, 309 Platt, 77, 80, 967 Plebiscite, Upper Silesia (1921), 289, 584, 585, 587, 609, 617, 661, 726, 727, 733, 735, 753, 989 plebiscites, East/West Prussia (1920), 584, 726, 733, 824 Pletneva, Aleksandra Andreevna, 360 Plody zboru uˇcencu˚ ˇreˇci ˇceskolovenske prešporského (The Literary Fruit by the Students of the Czechoslovak Language at the Prešpurk [Preßburg] Secondary School, 1836, Preßburg [Bratislava]), 542 Poccetti, Paolo, 98 Podgorica (Titograd), 54, 233, 234 Podkarpatskoe Obshchestvo Nauk (Subcarpathian Scientific Society), 857 Podolia, 15–17, 312 Podracki, Jerzy, 643 Polabian, 302 Poland Congress Kingdom of, 18, 19, 169, 380, 384, 386, 393, 408, 414, 435, 907, 914, 924, 929, 936, 970 Constitutions (1921 and 1997), 230, 257, 306, 451, 588, 633, 638, 684, 828, 952 corridor, 577, 584, 873 culture, 415, 622 economy of, 895 education, 896 ethnic nation, 24, 26, 54, 169, 389, 400, 414, 454, 484, 491, 491, 540, 574, 575, 609, 916, 982

1101

Germanization of, 184, 228, 305, 350, 375, 404, 425, 459, 510, 549, 554, 559, 612, 619, 620, 623, 810, 839, 893, 907, 945 industrial output, 215, 387, 591, 664, 770 intelligentsia, 39, 43, 117, 124, 168, 369, 370, 387, 397, 399, 401, 413, 415, 416, 426, 430, 448, 449, 520, 531, 574, 575, 597, 598, 599, 608, 612, 614, 621, 631, 640, 641, 642, 650, 677, 679, 700, 701, 855, 906, 908, 961 interwar, 120, 357, 413, 414, 416, 586, 587, 588, 589, 591, 592–9, 605–7, 609, 613, 616–17, 626, 650, 678, 687, 688, 727, 797, 927, 928, 929, 987 Jews in, 595–6, 929 Kingdom of, 15–19, 50, 69, 72, 73, 102, 110–12, 117–18, 137, 146, 153, 156, 165, 168, 169, 175, 180, 185, 186, 187, 368, 373, 373, 374, 380, 381, 382, 384, 387, 393, 408, 409, 429, 435, 439, 455, 473, 576, 604, 647, 744, 907, 914, 924, 929, 936, 970, 971 languages used, 582 Legion, 405, 412 minorities in, 636, 638, 924, 940 nation, 908 national movement, 398, 581 nation-state, 408–16, 412, 413, 576, 603, 929 organizations, patriotic, 3, 31, 32, 177, 214, 234, 300, 319, 328, 329, 330, 382, 404, 410, 512, 554, 555, 558, 561, 588, 595, 596, 607, 629, 633, 634, 663, 721, 735, 772, 868, 873, 875, 876, 889, 892, 894, 930, 959, 976, 981 peasantry, 38, 78, 106, 114, 119, 126, 139, 145, 153, 194, 370, 384, 389, 392, 393, 400, 434, 435, 454, 490, 505, 524, 573, 649, 671, 807, 808, 906, 920, 954, 972, 983 People’s Republic of, 466, 622, 658, 692, 731, 820, 821 Poland B, 590 Prussians, 15, 28, 83, 578, 579, 580, 729, 820, 972, 990 religion in, 593–4

1102 Index

Poland – continued Russian Revolution, 250, 408, 409, 555, 962 Soviet control, 148, 172, 611, 616, 689, 772, 773, 936, 941 standard of living, 508, 511, 630, 693, 776, 832, 863, 873, 876 territorial changes, 406, 577–8, 617, 936 Unitary Kingdom of, 368 see also Vistula Land Poland/Grand Duchy of Lithuania, union of (1385), 15–17, 70, 71, 72, 88, 89, 101, 110–12, 118, 126, 137, 151, 152–9, 162, 163–4, 168, 171, 172, 175, 180–3, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 271, 272, 307, 313, 368, 373, 374, 382, 384, 385, 388, 395, 403, 408, 410, 439, 465, 473, 482, 598, 647, 744, 907, 929, 971, 972, 973 Poland-Lithuania Austrian (Habsburg) zone of partition, 375, 577 Commonwealth of, 16, 17, 23, 73, 110, 113, 115, 116, 119, 137, 142, 180, 368, 370, 395, 439, 647, 648, 907, 979 education, 90, 163, 376, 377, 379, 382, 384, 591 end of, 116, 372 French as sociolect, 369, 370, 597 German in, 375, 378, 388, 391–2 Latin, decline of, 114, 369 mass migration of Germans, 585 Partitions of (1772, 1793, 1795), 193, 371, 373, 375, 588 Polish, decline of, 386, 387 political class, 907 Prussian zone of partition, 428, 604 publishing in, 369 religion in, 368 Russian zone of partition, 913 Russification, 385 territiorial shape, 576 uprising, 1794, 371 Polanian state, 15, 88 Polanski, ´ Kazimierz, 307 Polenakovik, Haralampie, 355, 362 Polesia (Polissia), 191, 590, 591, 601 Polesian, 157, 191–2 Polish/Lekhitic, 416–18 Polish Anglicization of, 632–3, 643

Chancery, 109, 111, 118, 157, 915 continuous use of, 651, 907, 914 creating national homogeneity, 117 Czech influence in, 110 decline of, 114, 602, 767 development of, 108–9, 119, 393 dialects/vernacular, 34, 111, 118, 119, 152, 350, 382, 405, 406, 417, 461, 517, 606, 626, 917 in Galicia, 50, 405, 596, 914 in Lithuania, 137, 163, 377, 574, 924 and nationalism, 16, 185, 368, 390, 415, 604, 608, 647, 761, 805 as official language, 26, 40, 42, 50, 70, 73, 79, 90, 111–12, 113, 114–16, 137, 138–9, 152, 154, 156, 162–3, 172, 180, 184, 188, 189, 193, 195, 196, 277, 314, 347, 367, 368, 369, 374, 382, 386–7, 392, 396, 398, 403, 404, 408, 409, 416, 417, 426–8, 433, 442–3, 448, 461, 476–7, 644, 929 as official language, sole, 40, 73, 90, 111, 112, 115–16, 135, 137–9, 180, 184, 188, 195, 404, 409, 502, 543, 548, 579, 589, 592, 622, 667, 741, 886, 902, 907, 914–16, 928, 929, 935, 948 orthography, 111, 181, 185, 346, 381, 402, 423, 424–6, 427, 428–9, 502, 605–7, 625, 628 purifying, 282, 372, 429, 515, 881 rise of, 40, 79, 99, 108, 111, 112, 113–14, 120, 124, 128, 139, 142, 155, 178, 181–2, 185, 193, 194, 210, 303–4, 313, 347, 368, 390, 397, 403, 408, 411, 425–6, 434, 478, 502, 582, 598, 604, 637, 693, 909, 912 as ‘Sarmatian language,’ 114 as spirit of nation, 372, 574 standard, 34, 118, 191, 373, 380–1, 392, 404–5, 579, 598, 608, 621, 625–6, 631, 638, 641, 642, 643, 733, 960(n.23), 980(n.6), 981(n.16) standardization, of language, 27, 117, 123, 136, 186, 191, 195, 210, 282, 294, 314, 378, 380–1, 391–2, 425–7, 438, 440, 461, 638, 648, 908, 931, 954, 981(n.16) use in Russia, 163 vocabulary, 374, 378, 392, 627, 786 written, 109, 112, 156, 371 Polish-Czechoslovak War (1919), 584

Index

Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921), 412, 577 political/social organization, pre-modern, 31 politicization, 6, 42, 44, 102, 123, 215, 229, 246, 345, 370, 397, 465, 594, 648, 919, 932, 945, 947, 952 politics of language, 6, 7–11, 102, 756, 803, 956(n.3) politics/language, historical perspective, 37–41, 773 Polnische Grammatik fuer Deutsche (The Polish Grammar for Germans, 1808, Breslau), 379 Polnische Wirtschaft, 580 Polnoi frantsuzskoi i rossiikoi leksikon (Complete Lexicon of French and Russian, 1786, St Petersburg), 161 Polonia, 117–18, 608, 609 Polonicae Grammatices Institutio (The Foundations of Polish Grammar, 1568, Cracow), 109 Polonization, 116 in 1920s; 1930s, 609 of Belarusians, 140, 157, 586, 594, 603, 619, 628, 637, 678, 972(n.8) of education, 183–4, 395, 591–2, 594, 599–601, 603, 608, 623, 628, 678, 871, 930 of Jews and Germans, 413 of Lithuanians, 182, 184, 185, 193, 347, 591, 637, 930 of Szlonzoks, 592, 603, 619–20, 775 of Ukrainians, 157, 177, 314, 394, 413, 591, 594, 601, 603, 619–20, 628, 637, 678, 871, 930, 972(n.8) see also de-Polonization Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe (PWN) (Polish Scientific Publishing House), 640 Polsko-rossiiskii slovar/Słownik polsko-rossyyski (Polish-Russian Dictionary, 1828–1830, Wilno [Vilnius]), 382 Polytechnic of Lwów, 392 Pomakian, 286, 287, 303, 361 Pomerania, 17, 21, 72, 118, 290, 375, 417, 584, 588, 590, 592, 595, 611–12, 987(n.5) Pop, Ivan, 98, 220, 557, 657, 667, 671, 676, 688, 690, 698, 725, 738, 748, 753, 766, 768, 771, 775, 825, 829, 858, 875, 892, 986(n.14), 992(n.13) Popadi´c, Miloslav, 143

1103

Pope John Paul II (see Wojtyła, Karol) Popiołek, Barbara, 149 Popov, Vesselin, 335 Popularna encyklopedia powszechna (The Popular Universal Encyclopedia, 1994–1998, Cracow), 640–1, 950 population exchange, 11, 36, 48, 52, 60, 361, 611, 614, 618, 775, 863, 893, 939, 959(n.17), 989(n.1) Poradnik Je˛zykowy (periodical) (Language Advisor, Warsaw), 624 Porajmos, 617, 978(n.50) see also Samudardipen Porák, Jaroslav, 100, 421, 424 Porter, Brian A, 403 Portuguese, 32, 35, 40, 41, 64, 96, 112, 318, 329, 361 Posen, Grand Duchy of, 18, 380, 382–3 see also Wielkopolska Posen, Province of, 19, 348, 400, 403–4, 408, 413, 415, 428, 577, 936 see also Wielkopolska postwar order, 684, 716, 722, 735, 925 Potocki, Stanisław Kostka (1755–1821), 372 Potsdam, 306, 617–18, 938 Potsdam Conference (1945), 617, 618 Poulton, Hugh, 255 power, 7–9, 11, 15, 18, 27, 33, 39, 42, 59, 112–13, 118, 121, 137–8, 140, 145, 162, 259, 263, 264, 269, 282, 342, 373, 393, 399, 409, 411, 452, 457, 472, 477, 482–3, 544, 587–8, 592, 599, 621, 622, 653, 658, 660, 664, 679, 689, 692, 697, 702, 703, 709, 720, 750, 753–4, 758, 760, 768, 773, 776–7, 788-9, 815, 821, 825, 834, 836, 839, 862, 866–7, 873, 877, 884, 888, 894, 901, 909–10, 919, 931, 938, 958(n.16), 959(n.16), 961(n.31), 964(n.3), 965(n.5), 970(n.2), 971(n.3), 991(n.9), 992(nn.12, 2), 993(n.3) Poznan ´ (Posen), 18, 19, 347, 375, 380, 382, 389, 400, 403–4, 408, 413–15, 428–9, 482, 577, 611, 936 Pozsony children exchange, 465 see also Preßburg; Bratislava Prace Filologiczne (periodical) (Philological Review, Warsaw), 428 Prach, Ivan (1750–1818), 538 Pragocentrismus, 505, 777

1104 Index

Prague, 3, 16, 47, 69, 72, 73, 79–82, 99–107, 111, 117, 122, 133, 135, 154, 178, 185, 282, 304–5, 408, 443–4, 453, 463, 470, 477–8, 479, 482–5, 488–94, 497–8, 500, 504–17, 519–21, 536, 538, 540, 542, 548, 550, 554, 557–8, 560–1, 565, 567, 582, 606, 610, 625, 627, 642, 657, 674, 683, 697–702, 712, 715, 718–21, 724, 726–34, 736–8, 741, 743, 746–54, 756–65, 769, 771–81, 783–8, 790, 793, 795–800, 808–12, 814–18, 821, 823–4, 826–37, 839, 841-5, 847–9, 861–2, 864–72, 874, 877–85, 891–2, 895, 913, 915, 924, 926, 928, 931, 936, 941–5, 951, 958(n. 12) Prague Agreements (1946), 862 Prague dialect, 506 Prague Linguistic Circle (Pražský linguistický kroužek), 516–17 Prague Spring, 565, 697, 698, 701, 702, 776, 777–8, 783, 786, 788, 865–6, 880, 941–2, 943–5 Prague Technical University, 508 Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (The Practical Dictionary of Contemporary Polish, Poznan, ´ 1994–2005, Poznan), ´ 643 Pravidla ˇceského pravopisu (The Principles of Czech Orthography and Correct Writing, Prague), 760, 771, 785, 796 Pravidla hledící k ˇceskému pravopisu a tvarosloví (The Rules of Czech Orthography and Morphology, 1902, Prague), 516, 760 Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (The Principles of Slovak Orthography and Correct Writing, Prague and Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 757, 835, 845, 859, 879, 880, 899 Pražák, Albert (1880–1956), 520, 521 Predislovie o polze knig tserkovnykh iazyke (On the Use of Church Books in the Russian Language, 1755, St Petersburg), 161 Preis, Petr Ivanovich (1810–1846), 417 Prekmurjan, 293, 299–300, 467 Prekmurje, 289–90, 292–3, 295, 297, 299, 467, 697 Prel, Max Freiherr du, 613, 615 Prešeren, France (1800–1849), 295 Preßburg, 16, 82, 125, 129, 131, 133–4, 431–3, 449–50, 453, 461, 482, 492,

519, 522–3, 529, 533, 535–7, 542, 544–5, 547, 549, 550–2, 559, 562, 645, 842, 846, 903, 911, 958(n.112), 982(n.2), 985(n.13) see also Bratislava; Pozsony Prešov (Epejres, Preschau), 556, 567, 731, 736–7, 740, 746, 778, 820, 822, 825–6, 849, 874–5, 891, 954, 985(n.10), 992(n.13) prewar frontier, 2 Pribina, 751–2 Pribojevi´c, Vinko, 478 Price, Glanville, 41, 48, 65, 86, 98, 103, 152, 157, 160, 162, 177, 181, 183, 186, 190, 197, 201, 205, 208, 211, 215, 217, 220, 222, 226, 228, 231, 246, 255, 264, 266, 275, 285, 287, 299, 301, 307, 309, 311, 316, 320, 327, 335, 340, 531, 535, 581, 974(n.22), 978(n.52) Prifti, Peter R, 242 primordialism, 27 printers’ languages, 79 see also Druckersprachen printing, 39, 41, 69, 80, 81, 136, 342 Belarusian, 171 Catholic/Protestant, 81 Church Slavonic, 151 Czech, 100, 107 Hungarian, 122 Macedonia, 247 Magyar language, 122 Poland-Lithuania, 183, 369 Polish, 393 Russia, 152 Serbia, 223 Slovenian, 293 spread of, 79, 80, 81 Walachian, 206 Prinz, Friedrich, 730, 740 Pripet Marshes, 168 Priruˇcka k dejinám spisovnej slovenˇciny (The Handbook of Written Slovak, 1999, Bratislava), 532 Pˇriruˇcní slovník ˇcesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský (The Reference Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary, 1919, Prague), 847 Pˇriruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1935–1957, Prague), 515, 762, 763, 784, 785

Index

P´riruˇcní slovník nauˇcný (The Reference Scientific Dictionary, 1962–1967, Prague), 786 Príruˇcný encyklopedický slovník (The Reference Encyclopedical Dictionary, Martin), 879 Priština (Prishtinë), 245 Prítomnosˇt a obrazy zo života tatranského (Contemporary Pictures from Life under the Tatra Mountains, 1844, Preßburg [Bratislava]), 547 Pritsak, Omeljan, 175 Prochácka, Peter, 697 Prodan, D, 453 Prohászka, Ottokár (1858–1927), 664 Projekt ortografii polskiej w podre˛cznikach szkolnych (A Proposal of Polish Orthography to be Employed in School Textbooks, 1891, Cracow), 428 Prose della volgar lingua (Vernacular Prose, 1525, Venice), 45 Protestant Bible Society, 162 Prúdy (periodical) (Currents, 1909–1914, Budapest), 554 Prussia, 17, 84, 580 Ducal, 111, 113, 115, 578, 580 East, 17, 18, 21–2, 72, 85, 180, 183–5, 187, 347–8, 375, 398, 401, 577–9, 584, 617, 925, 936 Royal, 73, 81, 113, 115, 579, 580, 592, 908, 987(n.5) West, 17–19, 344, 413, 577, 580, 584, 987(n.5) Prut, 18, 208, 969(n.25) Pruthenian (Old Prussian), 180–1, 344 Przemy´sl (Peremyshl), 383, 652 Przyborowski, Józef, 397 Przyłubski, Feliks, 379, 384 PSL (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe) (Polish People’s [Peasant] Party), 399, 400 psychology of nation, 46 publications/publishing, 402 Armenian, 324 Ashxarhabar, 326 Biblictina, 536 Czech, 490, 491, 514 Esperanto, 337 Estonian, 198 Hebrew, 309 Hungary, 700–1 Ladino, 319 Latgalian, 196

1105

Magyar, 438, 439, 441, 679 Polish, 414, 415, 620, 629 Romani, 330, 333 Serbian, 452 Slovakia, 783 Slovjak, 821 Sorbian, 304 Walachian, 452 Yiddish, 312, 314 Pulevski, G’or’gija (1820/1828–1895), 248 Pumpurs, Andrejs (1841–1902), 194 Pushkin, Alexander (1799–1837), 162, 372 Puszta (Hungarian Plain), 128 Puttkamer, Joachim von, 459 Puxon, Grattan, 335, 619 Puzynina, Jadwiga, 41, 48 PWN (Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe) (Polish Scientific Publishing House), 640 Pynsent, Robert B., 70, 124, 157, 170, 175, 177, 179, 182, 197, 201, 208, 222, 225, 228, 242, 246, 255, 264, 279, 285, 299, 307, 316, 327, 398, 437, 976(n.29) Qarai, Ali Qull, 228, 233, 246, 264, 269, 285, 311, 327, 340, 976(n.37) Quo Vadis, 415 Ráˇcek, Blažej, 502, 510 Racheva, Mariia, 167 Rada, Ivan, 98, 103, 111 R˘ adulescu, Ion Heliade (1802–1872), 209 Rahner, Hugo, 264 Rainis, J¯anis (1865–1929), 194 Rajkiewicz, Antoni, 636 Rak, Jíˇri, 505 Rákóczi, Ferenc II (1676–1735), 432 Rank, Josef, 348, 489 Rapant, Daniel, 450 Rappaport, Emil Stanisław, 573 Raun, Toivo U, 148, 194, 201 Reban, Milan J, 783 Rechnik na svaremenen balgarski ezik (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Bulgarian Language, 1955–1959, Sofia), 625 records, written, 8, 330 Red Army, 411, 412, 616, 772, 774 Hungarian, 411, 589, 659, 689, 690, 774, 825 Redgate, A E, 327 Reform Movement, Second, 655

1106 Index

Reformation, the, 6, 8, 39, 69, 88, 111–12, 127, 139–40, 180–1, 184, 192, 206, 220, 220, 236, 260, 277, 292, 303, 341, 343, 344, 421, 431, 467, 504, 532, 578, 579, 959(n.16), 980(n.7) refugees, 584–5, 608 Czech, 767 German, 468, 585, 687, 774, 777, 781 Magyar, 681, 690, 691, 695, 733 Polish, 666, 687, 734, 748, 774 Tˇešín (Cieszyn, Teschen) Silesia, 610 regime change, destruction of records, 8 regional groups, empowerment of, 8 Reichan, Jerzy, 626 Reichskommissariat Kaukasus, 935 Reichskommissariat Moskau, 935 Reichskommissariat Ostland, 21, 602, 614–15, 935 Reichskommissariat Ukraine, 21, 614–15, 935 Reichsrat (Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary), 456–7, 463, 508–9, 557 Reichsrat (German Empire), 349 Reinfeld, Barbara K, 500 Rej, Mikołaj (1505–1569), 110 Rejzek, Jiˇrí, 120, 335, 796, 969(n.24), 984(n.6) religion Czech/Czechoslovakia, 2, 12, 14–15, 34, 61, 81, 87, 118, 138, 167, 242, 282, 332, 391, 470, 483, 486–7, 498, 524, 532, 581, 582, 600, 610, 657, 686, 671, 695, 705, 710, 727, 729, 740, 743, 746, 765–6, 772, 778–9, 783, 791, 794, 798, 814, 818, 821, 824, 826, 840–2, 858, 864, 871, 873–4, 903, 912, 914, 925, 928, 937, 940 Hungary, 2, 12–15, 81, 87, 138, 167, 250, 291–2, 308, 332, 352, 391, 415, 450, 470–1, 524, 532, 549, 582, 600, 610, 655, 657, 671, 695, 705, 710, 714, 743, 765–6, 778, 794, 814, 818, 821, 826, 840, 842, 858, 871, 891, 903, 912, 921, 925, 928, 937, 940 and language, 4, 14, 34, 39, 61, 86, 93, 102, 118, 138, 152, 156, 187–8, 189, 232, 250, 270, 282, 301, 308, 314, 335, 341, 346, 354, 362, 415, 426, 470–1, 549, 580, 582, 590, 600, 636, 671, 686, 710, 743, 746, 779, 818,

821, 840–1, 858, 871, 873, 903, 914, 928, 940 in Poland, 113, 126, 153, 311, 593–4, 602, 633, 727, 746, 748, 791, 824, 940 political significance of, 10, 39 Ruthenian, 126–7, 277, 656, 734, 873 and scripts, 87, 342–4, 347–8 Slovak, 195, 531, 571, 656, 868 Walachia/Moldavia, 48, 88, 113, 127, 139, 204, 208, 209, 277, 451, 673 religion-script divide, 144 Remnek, Miranda Beaven, 152, 416 Renaissance, the, 94, 473 Renan, Ernest (1823–1892), 46 René mlád’enca príhodi, a skúsenost’i (René or Adventures and Experiences of a Young Man, 1783–1785, Preßburg [Bratislava]), 134, 533, 853 Renner, Karl (1870–1950), 575, 993 ˇ Repa, Milan, 502 Resian, 300 Resians, 300 Révai Nagy Lexikona. Az ismeretek enciklopédiája (Révai Great Lexicon: A universal encyclopedia, 1911–1935, Budapest), 682, 705 Révai, Miklós (1750–1807), 439 Rhodope, the, 64, 468 Riabczuk, Mykoła, 632 Ribay, Jur (1745–1812), 535 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, (1939), 611, 973(n.18) Richter, Helmut, 86 Richter, Michael, 98 Rieger, František (1818–1903), 487, 493, 497, 507, 508, 514, 515 Riga, 46, 186, 190, 195, 197–8, 412–13, 435, 495, 577, 589, 973(n.18) Riggs, Elias (1810–1910), 280, 283 Riis, Carsten, 246, 264, 285 Rijeka (Fiume), 16, 457, 652, 660 Rilski, Neofit (1793–1881), 280 Ripka, Ivor, 851, 869, 883, 899, 900 Rivarol, Antoine, see de Rivarol, Antoine Rizner, L’udovít V (1929–1934), 34 Roads of the Roma: A PEN anthology of Gypsy writers, the (1998, Hatfield), 334 Robert, K, 347 Rodkiewicz, Witold, 115, 164, 167, 170, 185, 190, 972(n.8) Rogall, Joachim, 384, 416, 619, 630

Index

Rogers, Henry, 61, 98, 327, 421 Rohn, Jan Karel, 106 Rolková, Natália, 875, 892, 895, 896, 899 Roma International Union, 978(n.51) Roma national movement, 332–3, 872, 978(n.51) Roma, 892, 895, 904 in Czechoslovakia, 781, 870, 889 in Hungary, 14, 203, 328, 332, 699, 707–8, 792, 872, 889 national village soviet/collective farms, 330 origins of, 328 population, 215–16, 331–2, 892 Samudardipen (Roma Holocaust) slavery, 263, 32–9, 831, 495, 831, 974(n.23) Roman Empire, 4, 14–15, 17–18, 33, 39, 40, 63, 64–5, 66–8, 71–7, 80, 83, 87–90, 92–4, 96–7, 99, 101, 103–4, 106, 108–9, 113, 121, 123, 126, 142, 151, 186, 203, 242, 246–7, 249, 255–6, 259, 263, 273, 290, 292, 294, 301, 307, 311, 321, 343–5, 351, 365, 370, 379, 419, 434, 437–8, 453, 473–4, 478, 482–3, 488, 499, 504, 523, 648, 805–7, 815, 910, 926, 935, 961(n.32), 964(n.3), 965(n.5), 981(n.10) Roman Empire, Eastern, 66, 93–4, 96, 141, 246–7, 249, 321, 419, 964(n.3) see also Byzantium Roman Empire, Western, 93–4, 259, 263, 419 Romance, 35, 64–5, 96–7, 152, 159–60, 182, 201–2, 205, 210, 214–15, 217, 300, 317, 352, 361, 419–21, 473, 957(n.3), 969(n.22), 974(n.22) Rhaeto-Romance subgroup, 300 romancium circa latinum, 94 Romani, 203, 327–35, 635, 699, 793, 871–2, 904, 952, 978(n.48), 978(n.51) Romania, 3–4, 18, 21, 48, 52, 55, 57, 72, 140–1, 148, 203, 208, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 270, 286, 311, 313, 323, 333, 363, 459, 571, 625, 654, 661, 664, 666, 670, 671, 673, 676–7, 679, 686, 691, 693, 694, 695–6, 699, 705, 709–10, 735, 737, 793, 819, 893–4, 924, 926, 927, 937, 942, 969(n.25) Romania (daily, Bucharest), 452, 964(n.3) Romanian Academy of Sciences, 210, 211 Romanian communist party, 695

1107

Romanian national movement, 4, 210, 447, 472, 555 Romanian, 50, 64–5, 176, 201, 209, 210, 211–12, 214–17, 269, 328, 353, 361, 463, 503, 554, 670, 686, 697, 876, 940, 963(n.49) see also Walachian Romanowski, Andrzej, 170–1, 173, 174 Romans, 95, 182, 186, 201, 202, 203, 205, 208, 216–17, 256, 257, 277, 290, 319, 372, 418, 473, 964(n.3), 965(n.5) Romansch, 40, 961(n.28) Rome, 7, 15, 48, 68, 69, 80, 82, 87, 91–3, 95, 98, 109, 151, 165, 203, 207, 210, 216, 219, 242, 254, 257, 261, 265, 277, 321, 324, 342–4, 352, 415, 419, 528, 610, 754, 837, 861, 964–5(n.3), 974(n.24) Romero, Elena, 320 Romlex (online Romani dictionary, 2005, Graz), 334 Rosa, Václav Jan (1625–1675), 103 Rosiiskaia grammatika (Russian Grammar, 1755, St Petersburg), 161 Rospond, Stanisław, 418 rossiiskii, 162, 164–5, 167, 382 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 46 Rothschild, Joseph, 52, 603, 661, 662, 667, 672, 676, 677, 678, 683, 685, 688, 690, 725, 738, 740, 749, 753, 754, 756, 766, 832, 836, 842 Rous, Jan, 344, 348, 517 Roy, Olivier, 24, 27, 269, 275 Royal Society of Prussia, 260 Rozprawy i wnioski o ortografii polskiej (Theses and Conclusions on Polish Orthography, 1830, Warsaw), 381 Rubinyi, Mózes (1881–1965), 680 Rudolf II, Emperor (r.1576–1612), 482 Rukovät’ spisovnej reˇci slovenskej (The Guide to the Written Slovak Language, 1902, Turócszentmárton), 563, 567, 843, 847, 848 Rukovˇet’ správné ˇceštiny (The Handbook of Correct Czech, 1891, Telˇc/Teltsch), 759 Rum empire, 256 Rumelia (see Bulgaria) Rumelia, Eastern, 283 Runes, 67, 69, 143, 419–20, 473, 475, 965–6(n.5), 967(n.11) Rusinow, Dennison, 226, 698

1108 Index

ruskaia dusha (Russian soul or spirit), 46 Ruskaia Pravda (Rus Law Code), 158 ruski, 70, 152, 162, 164, 165–7, 169, 171, 177, 351, 383, 394, 409, 744 Russia, 4, 7, 9, 12–13, 17–21, 23, 50, 55, 97, 115, 117, 137, 145, 165–6, 171, 175, 177–8, 181, 183–5, 187, 196, 205, 208–9, 223, 250, 252, 257, 264, 273–4, 280, 282, 313, 325, 327, 330, 333, 347, 353–4, 358, 360, 365, 370, 376, 381, 382, 384, 385, 388, 390, 394, 396, 399, 402, 404, 409, 412, 414, 453, 470, 512, 557, 575, 577, 583, 589, 593, 596, 617, 630, 680, 719, 720, 732, 771, 735, 760, 772, 799, 822, 828, 888, 907, 914, 919–21, 924, 958(n.8), 971(n.6), 981(n.12) Russian Academy of Sciences, 40, 89, 161, 385, 971(n.5), 979(n.5) Russian Empire, 2, 9, 17–20, 40–1, 49, 51, 72–3, 89, 113, 138, 140, 142, 147, 162–6, 168, 170, 175–6, 183, 188, 193, 211–12, 273–4, 308–9, 313, 323, 326, 345–7, 350–2, 355–7, 376, 380, 382, 385–8, 393–4, 397–8, 407–9, 414–15, 427, 453, 477, 490, 497, 499, 569–70, 575–6, 583, 595, 597, 602, 669, 745, 804, 893, 907, 909, 918–19, 921, 936, 946, 970(n.30), 980(n.9), 981(n.12) see also Muscovy Russian Federation, 56, 58, 66, 197, 201, 269, 274 Russian Revolution (1905), 250, 409, 555 Russian, 41, 55, 86, 91, 158, 164 3 styles of, 161, 163, 223, 224, 280, 325 dialects/vernacular, 159, 160, 161, 168, 169, 171 Great Russian, 162, 166, 168–9, 175, 211, 213–14, 303, 314, 357, 394–5, 398, 669, 846, 961(n.36) influence of French, 453, 161 in international communication, 701 in Israel, 310 as official language, 162 Old, 171 replacement of Finnish/Swedish, 163 rise of, 138, 303, 656 simplifying reform, 164 Russification, 36, 54, 398 Belarus, 55, 173, 174, 360, 615 Estonia, 199 gubernias, Baltic, 395–6, 397

Lithuanian/Samogitian, 184, 398 Poland-Lithuania, 385 of Soviet Jewry, 314–15 Ukraine, 36, 55, 66, 120, 173, 591, 603, 613, 615, 778, 873–4, 935 Russkaia grammatika (Russian Grammar, 1831, St Petersburg), 162 russkii, 162, 164–5, 166, 167 Russkoe pravopisane (Russian Grammar, 1885, St Petersburg), 163 rustica romana lingua (‘rural Roman language’), 94 Rusyn national movement, 355, 583, 890 Rusyn (see Ruthenian) Rusyns, 14, 131–2, 146, 218, 355, 391, 471, 583–4, 732, 804, 822, 889–92, 923, 930 Ruthenia, 656, 735, 749, 872 Subcarpathian, 20–1, 167, 177–8, 355, 470, 484, 558, 583, 610, 657, 665, 670–1, 674, 677, 686, 690, 696, 715, 723–4, 732, 734, 736, 737, 739–41, 743–9, 753–8, 765–7, 770–4, 778, 817, 818–19, 821, 826–8, 832, 836–8, 841, 885, 856, 858, 872–4, 923, 925–6, 928, 930, 936, 939, 990(n.3), 992(n.13) Transcarpathian, 470, 772, 775, 993(n.13) see also Carpathia ‘Ruthenian Munich’ (1945), 772, 872 Ruthenian National Councils, 734, 736 Ruthenian national movement, 470, 687, 744, 804, 873–4, 890, 986(n.14) Ruthenian, 40, 70, 81, 89, 101, 111–20, 125, 127, 129, 142, 152–66, 174–5, 181, 188, 191, 198, 204, 222, 271, 276–7, 340–1, 351, 390, 470, 590, 743, 907, 960(n.28), 971(n.10), 973(n.19), 979(n.3) Chancery, 152 Church Slavonic as, 176 decline/rise of, 156, 767 literacy, 154, 155–6, 157, 158–9, 177, 351, 470 phonetic orthography, 391 in Poland, 597 as the Russian language, 162 vernacular, 176, 744–7, 767, 829, 872, 874 Ruthenian (Rusyn), 470, 484, 503, 512–13, 545, 549–52, 558, 583, 610,

Index

670, 674, 687, 697, 743–7, 778, 795, 832, 872–6, 928, 963(n.49), 982(n.10), 985(n.14) Ruthenian (Ukrainian), 40, 50, 166ff, 176–7, 210, 248, 355, 357, 373, 375, 377, 380, 383, 390–4, 401–2, 409, 414, 417–18, 440, 444, 463, 497, 583, 588–91, 597, 601–3, 743, 929–30, 980(n.11), 981(n.13) Ružiˇcka, Jozef (1916–1989), 521, 881, 899–900, 1037 Rybinski, ´ Jan (1560–1621), 111 Rychlik, Jan, 771, 777, 790, 869 Ryczkowski, Marek, 730, 775 Rykaczewski, Erazm (1803–1873), 426, 427 Ryznar, Eliska, 489, 491, 493, 495, 725, 756, 768, 771, 784, 842, 861, 883 Rzepka, Wojciech Ryszard, 111 Rzetelska-Fleszko, Ewa, 27 Šafárik, Pavol Jozef (Šafaˇrik, Pavel Jozef and Šafaˇrjk, Pawel Josef), 417, 438, 449, 479, 489, 513, 532, 537–44, 546, 550, 561, 718, 808–9, 812–13, 819, 835, 878, 985(n.8), 990(n.4) Sahanowicz, Hienad, 157, 167 St Stephen, King (r. 997–1038), see Vajk, King (r. 997–1038) Sajnovics, János (1733–1785), 475 Sakcinski, Ivan Kukuljevi´c (1816–1889), 444 Sakson, Andrzej, 348, 579 salami economy (Hungary), 693, 700 Salva, Karel, 564, 847–8 Samenhof, Eliezer (1859–1917), 309, 336 see also Zamenhof, Ludwik Samo (ruler), 14, 479 Samo’s state (623–658), 14, 527 Samogitia (see Lithuania) Samogitian, 181–4, 186–8, 190, 194–6, 200, 212, 395–6, 398, 402, 588, 972(n.13), 973(n.14, 15, 17) see also Lithuanian Samogitian-Lithuanian, 183–4 Samoyedic languages, 65 Samudardipen (Roma Holocaust), 617, 978(n.50) see also Porajmos Sandecki-Malecki, Jan (1490–1567), 110, 423 Sanders, Barry, 25 Sándor, Anna, 705, 947

1109

St Petersburg, 19, 49–50, 89, 115, 141, 160–2, 165–71, 177–8, 183, 185, 187, 199, 208–12, 273, 278, 282–3, 304, 322, 325, 330, 337, 345–7, 353, 370, 372, 380–2, 389–90, 393–9, 403–4, 407–10, 415, 429, 451, 569, 575, 588, 595, 602, 669, 909, 919, 925, 969(n.30), 971(n.8), 979(n.5), 985(n.9), 986(n.2) Sanskrit, 61, 186, 258, 473, 475, 962(n.42), 978(n.51) Sapir, Edward, 63, 905, 962(n.43) Sarajevo (Bosna Saray), 232, 232–3 Sarajlija, Sima Milutinovi´c (1791–1847), 224 Sarbiewski (Sarbievus) Maciej Kazimierz (1595–1640), 95, 987(n.10) sariskij (Sáros) jazik, 821, 985(n.10) see also Slovjak Sasinek, František Viktor (1830–1914), 814 Šatava, Leoš, 619, 697, 699, 708, 783, 792, 793, 832, 872, 875–6, 883 Sautman, Barry, 27 Sava, 16, 218, 220–3, 236, 255, 467, 982(n.10) Saxons, 72, 76, 93, 121, 127, 207, 450–2, 455, 658, 672–3, 687, 856, 967(n.15), 990(n.1) Saxony, 83, 977(n.42) Kingdom of, 139, 232, 358, 377, 529 Lower, 76 Prussian, 18, 83, 377 Sayer, Derek, 491, 493, 495, 510, 513, 757 Sborní k Maticy slovenskej (The Journal of the Matica slovenská), 860 Scaglione, Aldo, 41 Schaff, Philipp, 222, 228 Schenker, Alexander M, 28, 48, 111, 115, 961(n.29) Schiewe, Jürgen, 40, 86, 442 schism (1667, Old Believers, Muscovy), 159 Schism, Great (1054), 87, 204, 219, 242, 291 Schleicher, August, 417, 489 Schlesisches Wörterbuch (Dictionary of the Silesian Dialect, 1962–1965, Berlin), 406 Schlösser, Rainer, 35, 41, 45, 99, 143, 211, 320, 957(n.2), 961(n.28) Schneider, Reinhard, 99 Schöpflin, George, 12, 693

1110 Index

Schroeder, Klaus-Henning, 208, 211 Schulze, Hagen, 456 Schwabacher script, 342 Schwartz, Michael, 566, 722 Schwyzertüütsch, 76, 78 see also Swiss German Scotus Viator, 437, 450, 459, 462, 464, 550, 557 see also Seton-Watson, Robert William scripts, 139, 358–61 Antiqua, 95, 342, 770 Armenian, 323–4, 362 banning of, Russian, 220 Bosnian, 220 Carolingian miniscule, 68, 92, 95, 342 in Church Slavonic, 81, 151, 160, 164, 205, 219–20, 254, 353–4, 356–7, 359–60, 529 civil, 160, 350, 356 Cyrillic, 144, 225, 247, 314, 353, 359, 529, 602 Devanagari, 328, 978(n.51) German national, 349 Glagolitic, 69, 87 Gothic, 69, 73, 84, 92, 95, 107, 136, 172, 188–9, 195, 304, 342, 344–5, 347–50, 355, 362, 541, 729, 741, 968(n.18), 974(n.20) Grazhdanka, 350, 351, 353, 354 Greek, 39, 69, 91, 141, 160, 205, 244, 247, 254, 259, 287, 341, 360, 363, 965(n.5) humanist miniscule, 343 Irish (Gaelic), 92, 345 Latin, 91–2, 244, 419 political significance of, Schwabacher, 342, 358 Sogdian (Runic), 264, 965(n.5) Sorbian, 304, 306 see also individual languages Scythian, 475 Scythians, 475 SdP (Sudetendeutsche Partei), 836 Sedlar, Jean W, 63–4, 67–70, 148 Seewann, Gerhard, 685 Seilenthal, Tõnu, 201 Sejm of interwar Poland, 592, 987(n.11) of postcommunist Poland, 632, 636 of Silesian Voivodeship, the, 592, 602 self-determination, national, 32, 51, 411, 416, 459, 558–9, 569, 653, 721–2, 725,

753, 816, 826, 921–5, 961(n.36), 992–3(n.2) Šembera, Alois Vojtˇech (1807–1882), 517, 519 Semitic languages, 67, 307 Semotanová, Eva, 730, 734, 738, 749, 753, 756, 771, 775, 777, 784, 790, 792, 829, 836, 839 Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT, World Non-National Association), 338 Sephardim, 307, 318–19, 336 Sephiha, Haïm-Vidal, 320 Septuagint, the (Greek translation of the Old Testament), 259 Serafin, Franiszek, 585, 593, 598, 602, 610, 730 Serbia, 217, 218, 222, 982(n.4) Serbian uprising, first (1807–1813), 223 Serbian uprising, second, (1815), 223 see also Kosovo, Yugoslavia Serbia-Montenegro, 37, 54, 144, 235, 254 see also Montenegro, Serbia Serbian, 20, 22, 34–5, 37, 50, 54, 58, 70, 82, 129, 141, 143–4, 147, 149, 176, 204, 176, 204, 217–19, 220, 222–3, 224, 225–6, 227–31, 232–6, 238–41, 243, 245, 247–8, 250–1, 253, 254, 256, 276, 278–9, 297, 302–3, 306, 340, 351, 353–4, 358–9, 361, 390, 436, 444, 452–3, 456–7, 460, 463, 465, 468–9, 471, 477, 480, 492, 502–3, 512, 538–9, 543, 545, 551, 554, 657–8, 663, 676–7, 697, 706, 710, 717–18, 745, 812, 850, 851, 876, 953, 961(n.26), 963(n.49), 975(nn.27, 29), 976(nnn.30, 31, 32), 982(n.10) Serbo-Croatian, 28, 37, 50, 53–4, 144, 217, 225, 226, 227–9, 230, 231–3, 235, 236, 238–40, 244, 248, 251–3, 281, 291, 295, 297–8, 303, 329, 340–1, 351, 359, 436, 460, 469, 471, 527, 667, 670, 676, 686–7, 697, 718, 738, 742, 850–1, 876, 940, 977(n.43), 982(n.6) Serbo-Croato-Bulgarian, 281 Serbocroatoslovenian, 51–3, 228–9, 232, 297, 303, 340, 676, 738, 850 Serbske narodne novine (periodical) (Serbian National News), 452 serfdom, 39, 119, 145, 209, 328, 371, 389–90, 434, 451, 454, 474, 487, 548,

Index

573, 587, 650, 672, 807, 808, 938(n.13) Croatian, 454, 807, 983(n.13) Czech Crown, Lands of, 487, 807 Hungarian, 434, 454, 474, 487, 548, 587, 650, 672, 807–8 Poland/ Poland-Lithuania, 119, 145, 368, 371, 389, 390, 434, 573, 587 Seto (Setu), 200–1 see also Võro Setus, 200 Seton-Watson, Robert William (1879–1951), 11, 208–9, 445, 456, 491, 500, 510, 557, 559, 813 see also Scotus Viator Seven Weeks’ War (1866), 18, 365, 453 Seym of Congress Poland, 384, 386 of Poland-Lithuania, 111, 115, 368, 384, 386 Sforim, Mendele Mocher (1836–1917), 312 Shapkarev, Kuzman (1834–1909), 248 Shche ne vmerla Ukraina (song), 443 Sherman, Joseph, 79 Shevchenko, Taras (1814–1861), 31, 175, 175, 358, 401, 613 Shevelov, George Y, 167, 170, 177–9 Shitsgal, A G, 351 Shkumbin, 242 Shmeruk, Chone, 86 Short, David, 507, 541, 547, 557, 562 Siarczynski, ´ Franciszek, Father (1758–1829), 384 Siatkowska, Ewa, 100, 103, 110, 111, 134, 255, 371, 374, 424, 481, 521 Sibiu (Hermannstadt, Nagyszeben), 72, 81, 204, 206, 694 Siebs, Theodor (1862–1941), 85 Siemakowicz, Marian, 591, 602 Sienkiewicz, Henryk (1846–1916), 415 Sikorski, Saturnin (1862–1922), 407 Silesia, 15, 72, 85, 106, 340, 348, 413, 485, 487, 493, 494, 497–8, 502–3, 506, 507, 517, 530, 581, 582, 584, 585, 587, 592, 609–10, 633, 642, 665, 719, 720, 726, 728–30, 732–4, 739, 741, 747, 758, 766, 773, 775–6, 778, 781, 788, 790, 800, 824, 687, 871, 912, 915, 925, 985(n.9) Czech, 20, 484–6, 506, 642, 665, 674, 728, 730, 734, 739, 754, 758–9,

1111

765–6, 780–2, 791, 800, 821, 867, 869, 871, 913, 954 Lower, 72, 350, 413, 581, 730, 773 Silesian Voivodeship, 587, 591–3, 596, 598, 602–3, 610, 854 Upper, 17, 19, 340, 413, 494, 573, 577, 578, 581–2, 584–5, 587, 591–3, 595, 598, 610–12, 618, 633–4, 636, 717, 727–30, 733, 747, 756, 772–3, 775, 806, 922, 925, 930, 940, 954, 989(n.1), 990(n.5) Silesian, 82, 303, 340–1, 406, 417, 478, 481, 485, 488–9, 490, 496–7, 502–3, 532, 540, 560, 578, 581, 584, 587, 591–3, 596, 598, 602–3, 610, 633, 636–9, 717, 727–8, 733, 739, 758, 790–2, 800–1, 806, 822, 836, 854, 873, 892, 895, 906, 930, 931, 940, 951, 987(n.12), 989(n.1), 990(nn.5, 2) see also Slunzakian, Szlonzokian Silesian Uprisings (revolts), 581 Silesian Voivodeship, 587, 591, 592–3, 596, 598, 602–3, 610, 854 Silesians, 478, 481, 489, 496–7, 502, 578, 581, 636–9, 717, 727–8, 790–2, 800–1, 873, 892, 895, 906, 930 see also Slunzaks, Szlonzoks Siljak, Ana, 36, 72 Silva quadrilinguis (The Forest of Four Languages, 1598, Prague), 101 Silver, Brian D, 168 Šimek, František, 786 Simonyi, Zsigmond (1853–1919), 461, 517, 627, 680, 917, 947 Simpson, George W, 167 Simpson, J A, 99, 167, 275, 309, 316, 335, 962(n.42), 965(n.3), 967(n.13), 968(n.16), 976(n.33), 977(n.43), 983(n.10) Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991), 316, 320 Sinkó, Katalin, 476 Sinti, 306, 329 see also Roma Šipka, Danko, 235 Šipka, Milan, 228, 231, 233, 360 Sirigos, Meletios (1590–1664), 260 Sirvydas, Konstantinas (1578–1631), 182 Sitarz, Magdalena Joanna, 79 Sixtus V, Pope (1585–1590), 343 Skaryna, Frantsysk (1486–1551), 154

1112 Index

Skënderbeu, Gjergj Kastrioti (Skanderberg, ˙ Iskender Bey) (1405–1468), 243 Skilling, H Gordon, 836 Sklavenit, T E, 361 Sklenár, Juraj (1745–1790), 450, 479, 529, 815 Skobel, F K, 406 Skok, Petar, 217, 220, 222, 242 Skopje (Üsküb), 28, 245, 250–3, 255, 287, 331, 333 Skorupka, Stanisław (1906–1988), 625, 640 Škultéry, Jozef, 553, 562, 757, 815, 816, 843–4, 849, 859–60 SL’S (Slovenská l’udova strana) (SL’S, Slovak Peasant Party), 556, 750, 827, Sládkoviˇc, Andrej (1820–1872), 547 Slav Congress (see Pan-Slav Congress) Slav, The (epic poem, 1839, Buda), 479–80, 535 Slaveikov, P R (1827–1895), 283 Slaveno-Bulgarian, 279–80, 351, 354 Slaveno-Russian, 280, 351 Slaveno-Ruthenian, 176, 390–2, 744–5 Slaveno-Serbian, 176, 222–5, 227, 279, 351, 353, 390, 745 slavery, Roma, 263, 328, 329, 831, 495, 831, 974(n.23) Slavic, 158 literacy, 291 Pannonian, 120, 534 vernacular, 87, 131, 133, 135, 152–4, 221, 227, 232, 233, 247, 247, 248, 250, 278, 291, 292, 436, 470, 526, 535, 806–7 West/East, 153, 169, 478, 527, 563, 643, written in Cyrillic, 27, 70, 140–1, 152–3, 233, 247, 285, 744 see also Slavonic Slavic-Bulgarian History (1762), 278 Slavonia, 19, 50, 121, 129, 221–3, 237, 239, 289, 293, 432, 435, 443, 454, 456, 457, 460, 464, 467, 483, 488, 540, 549, 553, 569, 650, 652–4, 656–7, 660–3, 667–70, 676–7, 697, 710, 717, 731, 742, 830, 876, 926 see also Croatia-Slavonia Slavonian, 221, 225, 436, 460, 662 Slavonic, 28, 33–5, 39–41, 43, 48, 50, 68–70, 73, 81–2, 87–9, 97, 99, 101, 108–9, 112–14, 119, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 143, 150–6, 158–65, 171, 174–6, 180, 198, 204–7, 212, 218–25, 227–8,

236, 247–9, 252, 254–6, 260, 271, 276–80, 282–5, 287, 289, 291, 294, 308, 310, 325, 341, 350–7, 359–62, 371–2, 385–6, 390–1, 417, 419, 421, 435, 451, 470, 473, 477, 478–9, 506, 526, 528–9, 544, 555–6, 583, 674, 705, 718, 744–5, 823, 891, 961(n.29), 966(n.10), 970(n.28), 975(nn.27, 28), 980(n.5) Sláwy dcera (epic poem) (The Daughter of Slava, 1824, Ofen [Pest]), 537 Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft, Das (Slavdom and the World of the Future, 1851), 550 Sławski, Franciszek (1916–2001), 626 Słonski, ´ Stanisław (1879–1959), 623 Slováci. Vývin ich národného povedomia (The Slovaks: Development of their national consciousness, 1906–1910, Turócszentmárton [Martin]), 814 Slovácko, 766, 791, 853–4, 984(n.4), 991(n.7) Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts, 566, 859, 860, 877, 878, 934 Slovak Academy of Sciences, 565, 566, 778, 780, 795, 797, 833, 859, 860, 877, 878, 879, 880, 882–3, 898, 901, 934 Slovak National Council, 548, 557, 721, 771, 772, 788, 813, 827, 857, 861 Slovak national gathering, 548 Slovak national movement, 132, 135, 349, 449, 527, 542–3, 547–8, 549, 552–7, 559–61, 810–11, 815, 840, 848, 910, 911–12, 960(n.23) Slovak National Party, 552–3, 555–8, 562, 720, 750, 827 see also SNS (Slovenská národná strana) Slovak national project, 814, 858 Slovak Peasant Party, see SL’S (Slovenská l’udova strana) Slovjak People’s Republic, 466, 731, 820–1 Slovak Republic, 528, 657, 803, 838, 886, 888 Slovak Socialist Republic, 485, 777, 866, 941 Slovak workers’ movement, 555 Slovák, origin of the ethnonym, 132, 750, 835, 886 Slovak, 132, 541, 543, 546, 916, 984(n.3) decline/rise of, 561, 767, 779, 842 development of, 913 dialects/vernacular, 133, 544–5, 956(n.1)

Index

Eastern (Slovjak), 822 as language of liturgy, 843 New, 547, 551, 561 as official language, 565, 566, 768, 838, 858, 902 Old, 541 purifying, 757, 859 as separate language, 527 standard, 131, 512, 527, 551, 731, 985(n.11) Western/Central, 531–2 Slovaken. Eine Ethnographische Skizze, Die (The Slovaks: An ethnographic outline, 1875, Prague), 814 Slovak-Hungarian Treaty on Friendship and Cooperation (1995), 888 Slovakia, 523, 525, 551–2 autonomy, lack of, 749 clerical-fascist regime, 877 communism, fall of, 869 Constitution (1939), 838, 852 Constitution (1992), 853, 886 culture, 547, 549, 552, 833, 839, 876 Czech administration in, 840–1 economy of, 789, 820, 832–3 federalization of, 565 independence, 765, 851, 885, 984(n.1) independent (1939–1945), 135, 519, 565, 789, 837 industrialization of, 776 marginalization of, 866 minorities, national, 830–1, 856, 871, 888 National Uprising (1944), 772, 857, 861, 864 nation-state, 525, 768 New, 886 population composition, 740, 855, 869, 875, 889 Republic (1939–1945), 528 territorial changes, 819–20, 837–8, 854 Slovakization, 133, 559, 690, 696, 775, 781–2, 863, 869, 871, 875, Slovaks, as victims, 820 Slovar Akademii Rossiiskoi (Dictionary of the Russian Academy [of Sciences], 1789–1794, St Petersburg), 161 Slovar rossiisko-polskii, sochinennyi po slovariam Akademii Rossiiskoi/Słownik rossyysko-polski ułozony ˙ podług słowników Akademii rossyyskiej

1113

(Russian-Polish Dictionary, Compiled in Accordance with the Russian Academy’s Dictionaries [of Russian], 1825–1828, Warsaw), 382 Slovar sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Russian Language, 1950–1965, Moscow), 164 Slovenia, 3–4, 13, 17, 20, 22–3, 37, 53, 54, 57, 61, 63, 158, 221, 229, 246, 288, 290, 291, 293, 295, 297, 298–300, 358–9, 362, 457, 464, 630, 652, 661, 668, 710, 718, 799, 885–6, 894, 964 (n.57) Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 297 Slovenian national movement, 295, 299 Slovenian, 13, 34–5, 37, 50–1, 53, 61, 81, 228–9, 231, 248, 285, 288–300, 303–4, 340, 344, 345, 463, 467, 468, 477, 491, 498, 526, 657, 676, 697, 886, 898, 961(n.29), 964(n.57), 975(n.29) Slovenish (Slavic) script (Glagolitic), 69 Slovenská mluvnica pre stredné školy a uˇcitelské ústavy (The Slovak Grammar for Secondary Schools and Teachers’ Colleges, Nitra), 567, 844 Slovenská mluvnica so zváštnym zretel’om na prvavopis (The Slovak Grammar with a Special Attention Paid to the Rules of Correct Writing, 1919, Nitra), 844 Slovenská omladina (Slovak Youth Association, established in 1870), 553 Slovenská réˇc a jej miesto v rodine slovanských jazykov (The Slovak Language and Its Place in the Family of the Slavic Languages, 1906, Turócszentmárton [Martin]), 527 Slovenská reˇc (periodical) (The Slovak Language), 567, 757, 845, 849, 860, 876, 880, 933 Slovenské pohl’ady (periodical) (Slovak Views), 553, 562, 814 Slovenské uˇcené tovarišstvo (Slovak Scientific Society), 533, 535 Slovenskje národˇ nje novini (newspaper), 450, 546 Slovenskje pohlad’i na vedi, umenia a literatúru (Slovak Views on Science, Arts, and Literature, 1846–1848, 1851–1852), 547, 553

1114 Index

Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovnik rozdilných výrazov (Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak dictionary of words that are different in both languages, Prague), 780, 883 Slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský slovník rozdielnych výrazov (Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary of the Words That Are Different in Both Languages, 1997, Žilina), 898 Slovensko-ˇceský slovník (Slovak-Czech Dictionary, Prague), 780, 882 Slovenský frazeologický slovník (The Slovak Phraseological Dictionary, 1931, Trnava), 567, 849 Slovenský jazyk, 860 Slovenský nauˇcný slovník (The Slovak Scientific Dictionary: A short universal encyclopedia in three volumes, 1932, Bratislava and Prague), 514, 849 Slovenský pravopis (The Principles of Slovak Orthography, 1890, Budapest), 563, 842 Slovensky prestolny prosbopis (Slovak Regional Written Request), 449 Slovenský slovnik z literatúry aj náreˇci (The Slovak Dictionary With Words Taken From Literary Works and Dialects, 1924, Banská Bystrica), 564, 848, 850 Slovincian, 28, 986(n.2) Slovjak (East Slovak), 466–7, 657, 820, 822 see also sariskij (Sáros) jazik Slovjak national movement, 466, 821–2 Slovjak v Amerike (newspaper) (Slovjak in America), 821 Slovjak (East Slovak) People’s Republic, 466, 657, 731, 820, 821–2 Slovjaks, 11, 132, 466, 657, 731, 821–3, 840, 854, 875, 990(n.2) Slovníˇcek staré ˇceštiny (The Little Dictionary of Old Czech, 1947, Prague), 786 Slovník inojazyˇcný (The Dictionary of Foreign Words, 1922, Bratislava, and second edition, 1932, Žilina), 849 Slovník k ˇceským spisum ˚ Husovým (The Dictionary of Hus’s Czech-Language Writings, 1934, Prague), 764 Slovník nauˇcný (Scientific Dictionary [Encyclopedia], 1860–1874, Prague), 514

Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1959–1968, Bratislava), 135, 534, 625, 778, 879, 880 Slovník slovenskej, mad’arskej a nemeckej reˇci (The [Trilingual] Dictionary of the Slovak, Magyar and German Languages), 563, 846 Slovník slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský (The Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary, 1896, Rózsahegy [Ružomberok]), 564, 847 Slovnik slovenskoˇceský (The Slovak-Czech Dictionary [of Words That Are Different in Both Languages], 1920, Prague), 565, 847 Slovník slovenský a mad’arský dl’a Josefa Loosa (The Dictionary of the Slovak and Magyar Languages Compiled in Accordance with the Principles of Jozef Loos’s Dictionary, 1906, Budapest), 564, 846 Slovník slovenských náreˇcí (The Dictionary of the Slovak Dialects, 1994–2005, Bratislava), 899 Slovník spisovné ˇceštiny pro školu a veˇrjnost (The Dictionary of Written Czech for Schools and the General User, 1978, Prague), 785, 796 Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (The Dictionary of the Written Czech Language, 1957–1971, Prague), 625, 785, 796 Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského (The Dictionary of the Written Slovak Language, 1946–1949, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 777, 877, 878 Slovník staroˇceský (The Old Czech Dictionary, 1903–1913, Prague), 627 Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Slovak Language, 2006–, Bratislava), 797, 900, 901 Slowakei. Der jüngste Staat Europas, Die (Slovakia: The Youngest State of Europe, 1939, Leipzig), 566 Slowanské starožitnosti (Slavic Antiquities, 1837, Prgaue), 479, 540 Slowanský národopis (Slavic Ethnography, 1842, Prague), 540 ˇ Slowár Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoˇ Nemecko-Uherskí seu Lexicon Slavicum

Index

Bohemico-Latino-Germanico-Ungaricum (The Slovak Dictionary: Czech-Latin-German-Magyar, 1825–1827, Buda), 134, 534 Slowesnost (Word-Formation, 1820, Prague), 493 Słownik dokładny je˛zyka polskiego i niemieckiego / Vollständiges polnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch (The Exact Dictionary of the Polish and German Dictionaries, 1806, Breslau [Wrocław]), 379 Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1927, Cracow), 605, 763, 932, 945 Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1952-1982, Cracow), 626–7, 763, 945 Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2005, Cracow), 643 Słownik gwar polskich (Dictionary of the Polish Dialects, 1900–1911, Cracow), 405, 606, 626 Slowník jazyka ˇceského (Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1937, Prague), 515 Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego podług Lindego i innych nowszych z´ ródel (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, Compiled in Accordance with Linde’s [Dictionary] and Other Newer Lexicographic Works, 1866, Berlin), 426 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego XVI wieku (The Dictionary of the 16th-Century Polish Language, 1966–, Wrocław), 627 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language), 116, 378, 397, 415, 424, 426, 427, 534, 604, 606, 625, 626, 628, 640, 643, 932 Słownik ortoepiczny (The Dictionary of Correct Writing, 1937, Warsaw), 623, 682 Słownik polskich błe˛dów je˛zykowych (The Dictionary of Polish Linguistic Errors, 1947, Warsaw), 623 Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (The Dictionary of Correct Polish, 1973, Warsaw), 625–6, 641

1115

Slownik slowenskej, mad’arskej a nemeckej reˇci (The [Trilingual] Dictionary of the Slovak, Magyar and German Languages), 563, 846 Słownik staropolski (The Old Polish Dictionary, 1953–2002, Warsaw), 517, 627, 763, 947 Słownik wilenski ´ (Słownik je˛zyka polskiego) (The [Vilnius] Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1861, Vilna [Vilnius]), 426 Słownik wymowy polskiej (The Dictionary of Polish Pronunciation, 1977, Warsaw), 626 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (by Linde) (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1807–1814, Warsaw), 116 Słownika je˛zyka polskiego (by Karłowicz) (Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1900–1927, Warsaw), 116, 378, 397 Słownika je˛zyka polskiego (by Szymczak) (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1978–1981, Warsaw), 626, 908, 911, 917 Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), 107, 117, 493, 534, 536, 762, 763, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933 Slunzakian, 581, 582, 612, 727, 791, 821, 951 see also Silesian, Szlonzokian Slunzakian national movement, 581, 582, 821 Slunzaks, 14, 502, 581, 612, 717, 722, 727–9, 732–3, 739, 774, 791–2, 821, 824, 895, 930 Šmahel, František, 480, 489, 502 Smal’-Stots’kyi, Stepan (1859–1938), 177 Šmejkalová, Jiˇrina, 883 Šmihula, V, 904 Šmírbuch jazyka ˇceského. Slovník nekonvenˇcni ˇceštiny (The Trash-Book of the Czech Language: A dictionary of unconventional Czech, 1988, 1992, 2005, Prague), 800 Smith, Graham, 173, 275, 316, 327 Smith, Michael G, 167, 269, 340, 851, 963(n.47) Smolej, Viktor, 886 Smotrytskyi, Meletii (1578–1633), 154

1116 Index

SN-D (Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne) (National-Democratic Party), 399, 400, 412 Snˇem (Diet), Bohemian/Moravian, 102 ´ Sniadecki, Jan (1756–1830), 373 SNJ (Organization of Slovak National Unity), 857 see also Slovak National Council SNR (Slovak National Council), 857–8, 861, 862, 864–6, 877, 888 SNRvL (Slovenská národná rada v Londýne) (Slovak National Council in London), 857, 861 SNRvZ (Slovenská národná rada v zahraníˇcí) (Slovak National Council Abroad), 861 SNS (Slovenská národná strana) (Slovak National Party), 552, 555–7, 562, 720, 721, 750, 827–8, 836, 843 Snyder, Louis L, 476 Snyder, Timothy, 71, 112, 157, 168–9, 175, 181, 185, 186, 190, 376, 384, 388, 398, 403, 465, 476, 614 Sobota, Emil, 519, 730, 748, 766, 770 social cohesion, and language, 7 social determinism, 922 social engineering, 150, 331, 893, 938, 939, 953 social sciences, 44, 210, 298, 764, 897, 922, 942, 957(n.4) Societas Excolendae Linguae Slavicae (Society for the Teaching of the Slavic/Slovak Language), 533 Societas Slavica (Slavic Society), 535, 543 Societas Slavobohemica (Slavobohemian Society), 535 Society of Jesus, 89, 103–4, 115, 134, 532 Sociolect (French, Latin), of Polish-Lithuanian nobility, 111, 119, 369–70, 597–8, 701 sociolinguistics, 35, 44 Sofia, 28, 229, 250, 251–4, 277, 278, 283, 284–5, 286, 287–8, 527, 625 Sogdian, 264, 965(n.5) Šokci, 239, 240, 469, 662–3, 686–8 Sokol (falcon) gymnastics association, 507 Šolc, Jindˇrich, 491, 493, 500 Solidarity, 509, 628–9, 636 Sollen wir Magyaren werden (Should We Become Magyars?, 1833, Karlstadt [Karlovac]), 542

Soltész, Elizabeth, 131, 136, 344 Sopron (Ödenburg), 299, 431, 661 Sorbian, 27, 81, 150, 183, 290, 301–6, 334, 344, 348, 404, 417, 477, 489, 540, 567, 643, 729, 730, 977(n.42) Sorbian National Committee, 305 Sorbian national movement, 302, 305, 729–30 Sorbs of Lusatia, 218, 290, 301 sovereignty, 20, 24, 39, 205, 578, 592, 757, 761, 788, 789, 949 Sovetsk (Tilsit), 188 Soviet Union, 2, 4–5, 19–22, 24, 27, 36–7, 41, 51–2, 54, 85–6, 91, 120, 148, 164, 170–3, 175, 177–8, 189–90, 195, 200, 213–14, 251, 255, 268, 270, 272, 274–5, 310–11, 314–15, 326, 330–1, 339–40, 352, 356, 358–9, 362–3, 405, 413, 458, 525, 569, 570–1, 575, 586, 591, 603, 609, 610–15, 617–20, 626, 630, 631, 641, 666–7, 679, 687, 688, 689, 690–1, 694, 696, 699, 702, 707–8, 722, 728, 753, 765, 766, 771, 772–5, 778, 783, 799, 804–5, 839, 864, 686, 873, 884, 909, 920, 922, 925–7, 936–8, 939–42, 948, 953, 956(n.3), 962(n.42), 963(n.46), 971(n.7), 972(n.12), 984(n.1), 989(nn.2, 3), 991(n.9) see also Moscow, Russian Empire, St Petersburg Soviet-Czechoslovak cooperation (1943), 857 Sovietization, 12, 36, 586, 693 Sozan, Michael, 671, 674 Soziolinguistik. Ein Handbuch zur Sprach-und Kommunikationswissenschaft Soziolinguistik / Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society (1987–1988, Berlin), 44 Spanish, 1, 28, 31–2, 35, 40, 41–2, 59, 74, 76, 82, 90, 95–6, 103, 113, 143, 182, 261, 316–20, 329, 334, 338, 361, 419, 420, 472, 631, 644, 852, 903, 957(n.3), 978(nn.48, 52) Spanyol, 142, 317 see also Ladino Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677), 318 Spira, Thomas, 453, 685 Spires, Scott, 186, 430 Spiš/Spisz (Szepes, Zips), 530, 556, 578, 582, 584, 587, 609, 610, 611, 732,

Index

733, 774, 822, 823, 824, 828, 830, 837, 854, 871 Spisovná ˇceština a jazyková kultura (Written Czech and Language Culture, 1932, Prague), 517 spisovná c ˇeština, 506–7, 516–17, 533, 642, 758–60, 763–4, 784–5, 796, 800–1, 845, see also Czech, obecná c ˇeština Spolek milovníkov reˇci a literatúry slovenskej (Society of Lovers of the Slovak Language and Literature), 541 Spravochnii entsiklopedicheskii slovar (Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1847-1855, St Petersburg), 407, 408 Sremski Karlovci (Karlóca, Karlofça, Karlowitz), 125, 204, 223 Šrobár, Vavro (1867–1950), 730–1 SSNJ (Strana slovenskej národnej jednoty) (SSNJ, Party of Slovak National Unity), 837–8, 852 Staatsprache (state language), 390, 596 Stachowski, Stanisław, 275, 327 Stadtmüller, Karol (father), 405, 607 Stadtmüller, Karol (son), 405, 607 Stalin, Joseph (1879–1953), 22, 570, 575, 659, 687, 920, 936 standardization, of language, 10, 27, 38, 74, 83, 85, 92, 94, 107, 117, 123, 136, 161, 186, 191, 195, 210, 286, 282, 294, 300, 306, 314–15, 325, 332–3, 378, 380–1, 391–2, 425–7, 438, 440, 461, 505–6, 564, 638, 648, 760, 846, 860, 861, 891, 908, 931, 954, 957(n.7) Czech, 102, 107, 117, 122, 425, 467, 494, 505, 506, 533, 537, 541, 546, 642, 741, 744, 759–60, 790, 807, 843 French, 42, 210, 979(n.1) German, 33, 48, 75–8, 80, 83, 84–5, 123, 294, 440, 927, 953, 986(n.20) Latin, 27, 35, 83, 92–3, 94, 96 Lithuanian, 182, 184, 185–90, 973(n.17) Magyar, 122, 128, 130, 440–2, 461, 648, 677, 679, 680–1, 701, 703–4 Polish, 34, 116, 118, 191, 373, 380, 381, 392, 404–5, 426–7, 579, 598, 608, 621, 625–6, 631, 638, 641–3, 733, 908, 960(n.23), 980(n.6), 981 Resian, 300 Romanian, 203, 210, 211 Russian, 152, 161, 162, 163, 351, 386, 390, 418, 744 Serbo-Croatian, 228

1117

Slovak, 34, 131, 134, 135, 136, 138, 348, 466, 467, 469, 470, 512, 521, 522, 528, 531, 546–7, 551–2, 564, 567, 731, 763, 811, 814, 822, 842, 844, 846, 860, 861, 880, 882, 889, 933, 934, 985(nn.8, 11) Tatar, 56, 58, 267, 268, 272, 274, 275 Turkish, 56, 238, 266, 267, 268, 270, 273, 287, 476, 969(n.23) Yiddish, 314, 315, 316, 410, 601, 613 Stanˇek, Toma, 775 Stang, Christian Schweigaard, 120, 157 Stanisław August Poniatowski, King (r.1764–1795), 115, 368, 369 Stanislav, Ján (1904–1977), 877 Stankevich, Ia, 169, 173 Stankevich, Stanisla˘ u, 169, 173 Stankievic, Janka, 142, 173 Stankiewicz, Edward, 28, 35, 71, 100, 110, 111, 133, 135, 162, 164, 299, 307, 371, 379, 384, 417, 481, 567 Stanowisko mowy Słowaków (On the Position of the Slovak Language, 1937, Warsaw), 528 Staroˇceský slovník (The Old Czech Dictionary, 1968-, Prague), 517, 786, 947 Starý národ – mladý štát (old nation – young state, 1994, Bratislava), 528 state the modern, 39 rise of the, 6, 7, 24, 33, 39, 53, 71, 114, 138, 144, 175, 222, 235, 243, 286, 303, 408, 451, 503, 560, 598, 650, 711, 840, 975(n.27) statehood legitimization, 24, 31, 42, 105, 390, 399, 529, 569, 571–2, 575, 615, 699, 922 statehood, national, 9, 217, 254, 478, 609, 683, 753, 761, 791, 807, 809–10, 834, 862, 866, 890 Stati, Vasile, 214, 976(n.30) Statorius Petrus, 109 Stauter-Halsted, Keely, 403 Štefánik, Milan Rastislav (1880–1919), 512, 557, 719-20, 813, 817–19 Stegner, Willi, 235, 242, 976(n.36) Steier, Louis, 521 Steinthal, Heyman (1823–1899), 46 Ste˛pka, Stanisław, 619 stereotypes, of Central Europe, 505,

1118 Index

Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, 316 Stevenson, Patrick, 86 Stieber, Zdzisław, 527–8 Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (folk songs) (The Voices of Peoples Expressed in Their Songs, 1778–1779, Leipzig), 538 Stodvadsat’ pät’ rokov zo slovenského života (One Hundred and Twenty-Five Years from the Life of the Slovak Nation, 1918, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 816 Stoianov, Mano, 355 Stojenski, ´ Piotr, 109 Štokavian, 50, 221–2, 224–6, 229–31, 234, 236–9, 240, 291, 443, 444, 467, 469, 475(n.29) ´ see also Cakavian, Kajkavian, Serbo-Croatian Stolc, Jozef, 796, 881 Stomma, Ludwik, 372, 384, 981(n.16) Stone, Daniel, 19, 66, 92, 125, 186, 253, 934 Straná narodná (National Party), 507, 508 Stražas, A S, 183, 185 Struˇcná mluvnice ˇcesko-slovenská (A Short Czech-Slovak Grammar, 1919, Prague), 565, 844 Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského (The Short Etymological Dictionary of the Czechoslovak Language, 1933, Prague), 605, 763, 785, 933, 945 Struve, Kai, 167, 588 Štúr, L’udovít (1815–1856), 449–50, 512, 522, 543–8, 550, 552, 556, 559–61, 562–4, 646, 718, 720, 744, 809, 812, 815, 824, 843, 845, 859, 880–1, 899, 900, 911, 918, 934, 960(n.23), 985(nnn.11, 12, 13), Štúrovˇ ciná, 546–7, 549, 550, 551, 911 Styria, 15, 288ff, 290, 292ff, 294–7, 467, 726 Subaˇcius, Giedrius, 185, 186, 190, 192, 972(n.13) Subotica (Maria-Theresiopel, Szabadka), 239, 240, 469, 663 Subtelny, Orest, 168, 172, 175 Subcarpathian Ruthenia (see Carpathia, Transcarpathian Ruthenia) Sudeten Mountains, 218

Sudetenland, 20, 51, 85, 486, 610, 667, 675, 726, 729, 753–4, 764, 766–7, 774, 837, 923, 925, 927 suffrage, 9, 43, 400, 511, 554, 555, 653, 655, 660, 750, 812, 918, 962(n.40) Czech lands, 511, 554, 655, 750 Hungary, 9, 511, 554, 555, 653, 655, 660, 812, 918 male, 400, 653, 660, 750, 918 Slovak, 511, 554, 555, 750, 812, 918 Sugar, Peter F (1920–2000), 12, 143, 255, 264, 279, 320, 327, 434, 958(n. 9), 970(n.2), 983(n.10) Suhaj, Janko, 829 Sukiennicki, Wiktor, 168, 958(nn.9, 13) Šumavský, Josef Franta (1796–1857), 494 Šumec, Andrej, 780, 882, 944, Sumerian, 67, 217, 476, 947, 974(n.26) Sun Theory of the Turkish language, 238, 267, 476 Surosz, Mariusz, 771 Surzhyk, 179, 192 see also Ukrainian, Trasianka Šutaj, Štefan, 691, 775, 869 Sutrop, Urmas, 201 Sužiedelis, ˙ Saulius, 586 Swabians, 72, 452, 673, 856 Swatopluk (epic poem) (1835, Tyrnau [Trnava]), 425, 479–80, 535, 853, 991(n.6) Sweden, 16–17, 23, 57, 67, 74, 81, 88, 114, 193, 198, 333, 345–6, 971(n.6) Swedish, 40–1, 50, 57, 82, 115, 163, 193–4, 200–01, 272, 316, 334, 345–6, 377, 421, 472, 669, 963(n.50), 967(n.11), 971(n.6), 974(n.21) Swiss German, 75–6, 78, 83, 85, 303 see also Schwyzertüütsch Switzerland, 5, 12, 40, 44, 56–7, 59, 76–7, 79, 80, 83–5, 108, 300, 311, 344, 403, 587, 679, 726, 926, 958(n.15), 961(n.28), 962(n.40), 967(n.16) Sylvester, János, 122 Symeon I (r. 893–927), 249 Synak, Bruno, 27, 581 syntactical language, 7 Syriac, 67, 258, 264, 308, 323, 419 Syrmia, 19, 122, 982–3(n.10) Szálasi, Ferenc (1897–1946), 665 Szamel, Dariusz, 275 Szamosközi, István (1565–1612), 67, 143

Index

Szarvas, Gábor (1832–1895), 461, 517, 562, 627, 680, 846, 917, 947 Szász, Zoltán, 447, 455, 459, 815 Szczawinska, Łarisa, 595 Szczecin (Stettin), 375, 621 Széchenyi, Ferenc (1754–1820), 440 Széchenyi, István (1791–1860), 437, 441 Szeged (Szegedin), 286, 456, 562, 658, 660, 677, 682, 687 Székesféhervár (Stuhlweißenburg), 121, 482, 664 Szeklers, 67, 121, 127, 450–1, 672–3, 687, 966(n.5), 990(n.1) Szelényi, Balázs A, 434, 439 Széll, Kálmán (1843–1915), 462 Szepes, 556, 578, 582, 584, 587, 732, 733, 823–4 Szily, Kálmán (1838–1924), 462 Szinnyei, József (1857–1943), 461, 517, 917 Szlonzokian, 582, 592–3, 598, 609, 822, 892, 951, 987(n.12) see also Silesian, Slunzakian Szlonzokian national movement, 581, 582 Szlonzokians, 582, 592–3, 598, 609, 822, 892, 951, 987(n.12) Szlonzoks, 14, 581–2, 582, 585, 592–3, 603, 612, 618, 619, 620, 636, 717, 722, 727, 729, 732, 733, 775, 791, 854, 873, 892, 895, 930, 940, 990(nn.5, 2) Szober, Stanisław (1879–1938), 623, 682 Szołtysek, Marek, 638 Szombathely (Steinmanger), 299 Szózat a Magyar és szláv nemzetiség ügyében (An Appeal in the Cause of the Magyar and Slav Nationalities, 1843, Klausenburg [Cluj]), 447 Szulc, Aleksander, 27, 86 Szultka, Zygmunt, 581 Szybieka, Zachar, 172, 388, 398, 403, 411, 416, 586, 602, 613, 614, 616, 619 Szyjkowski, Marian, 493 Szylarski, Walenty (1730–1770), 109 Szymborska, Wiesława, 955 Szymczak, Mieczysław (1927–1985), 626, 640, 641 Taczanowski, Wacław, 405 Tallinn (Reval, Revel), 190, 198, 199, 973(n.18) Tambor, Jolanta, 582

1119

Táncos, Vilmos, 674 Tarnów, 389 Tartu (Dorpat), 193, 198, 199, 200, 376, 387, 395 Taszycki, Witold (1898–1979), 624 Tatras, the, 529, 537, 545–7, 553, 724, 823–4, 830, 837, 886, 991(n.6) Tatar, 56, 58, 66, 264, 267–8, 271–5, 323, 362, 476 Crimean, 272 Tatarka, Dominik (1913–1989), 867, 897, 904 Tatars, 63, 113, 119, 142, 157, 271–2, 275, 639, 529, 537, 545–7, 553, 724, 823–4, 830, 837, 886, 990(n.6) Crimean, 272, 5 Kazan (Volga), 273–5 Tatarstan, 55–6, 268, 274–5, 362 Tatranskâ múza s lýrou slowanskou (poems) (The Muse of the Tatras with a Slavic Lyre, Leutschau [Levoˇca], 1814), 537 Tatrín (association), 450, 547, 552, 982(n.9) Tatry a more (poems) (The Tatras and the Sea, 1879), 553 Taube, Friedrich Wilhelm von (1728–1778), 435 Taylor, Pauline, 152 Tazbir, Janusz, 113–17, 367, 371–2, 619 Tazbir, Julia, 591 Technicky slovník nauˇcný (Scientific Dictionary of Technology: Illustrated encyclopedia of technical sciences, 1927–1949, Prague), 514, 761, 933 Technisches Wörterbuch/Słownik techiczny (German-Polish Technical Dictionary, 1913, Cracow), 405, 607 Teleki, Pál (1879–1941), 666 Ternopil (Tarnopol, Ternopol), 588, 590 territorial changes, 2, 585, 806, 924 to 18th century, 15–17, 41, 90, 106, 413, 433, 509, 806 19th century, 17–18, 19, 90, 167, 197, 279, 313, 413, 580, 609, 654, 686, 815, 819, 821, 823, 921, 924, 966(n.7) 20th century, 2, 6, 9, 19–22, 39, 41, 156, 167, 197, 413, 554, 599, 609, 688, 821, 919 21st century, 22–3, 949 European Union, 13, 23, 298, 949 post 1945, 2, 12, 21, 677, 937

1120 Index

territorial changes – continued World War II, 2, 21, 90, 167, 584, 683, 688, 728, 935, 9376 territorial division, models of, 30 Teutonic law self-governments, 72 Teutonic Order of Prussia, 193, 578 Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum, oder Teutscher Sprachsatz, Der (The Genealogical Tree of the German Language, or the German Vocabulary, 1691, Nuremberg), 83 Teutschen Vaterland, Des (poem) (The German’s Fatherland), 400 Teyssler, Vladimír (1891–1958), 514, 761 Tézy o slovenˇcine (Theses on the Slovak Language, 1966, Brartislava), 881, 899–900 Thaden, Edward, 398 Thám, Karel Ignác (1763–1816), 106 Ther, Philipp, 36, 72 Theresian and Josephine reforms, 437, 715 Thesaurus ˇceského jazyka (Thesaurus of the Czech Language, Prague, initiated in 1905), 762 Thesaurus polono-latino-graecus (Polish-Latin-Greek dictionary, 1621–1632, Cracow), 110, 378 Thessaloníki (Salonika, Thessalonicae), 28, 35, 81, 154, 158, 246, 247, 249, 254, 318, 319, 354 Third Reich, 20, 36, 56, 173, 210, 284, 297, 304–5, 339, 350, 570, 611, 614, 617, 666–7, 727, 730, 753, 762, 764–5, 767, 769, 770, 831, 839, 856, 861, 870, 893, 925, 927–8, 933–7, 939, 974(n.20), 978(n.49) see also Berlin, Germany Thirty Years’ War, 69, 88, 292, 302 Thrace, 20, 126, 284 Tichý, František, 357, 748 Tighe, Carl, 585 Tihany, Lesie C, 661 Timio¸sara (Temeschwar-Josephstadt, Temesvár), 694, 695, 982(n.10) Timon, Samuel (1675–1736), 528, 819 Tîrgu-Mure¸s (Marosvásárhely, Neumarkt), 440, 694–5 Tiso, Josef (1887–1947), 665, 765, 774, 837, 851–2, 857–8, 861–2, 877 Tisza, Kálmán (1830–1902), 458, 464 Tisza (Theiss), 441, 458, 462, 464, 474, 553, 560, 659, 982(n.10)

Tito, Josip Broz, 331, 691, 975(n.29) TNW (Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie) (Scientific Society of Warsaw), 398, 606 Todorova, Maria, 13, 141, 279, 285, 287 Todosijevi´c, Bojan, 240, 663 Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Explanatory Dictionary of the Contemporary Great Russian Language, 1863–1866, Moscow), 162, 394 Tollefson, James W, 26 Tolstoy, Leo (1828–1910), 336, 337 Toma, Peter A, 450, 456, 462, 513, 519, 549, 557, 559, 562 Tomanek, Przemysław, 170, 175, 179 Tomašik, Samo (1813–1887), 443 Tomaszewski, Jerzy, 416, 486, 575, 587, 588, 591, 595, 599, 602, 693, 725, 730, 734, 749, 753, 754, 766, 775, 777, 790, 839, 987(nn.8, 9) Tomescu, Mircea, 353 Tooley, Hunt T, 72 Topolinska, ´ Zuzanna, 581 Topolska, Maria Barbara, 71, 113, 152, 157, 182, 183, 197, 388 Toporišiˇc, Jože, 299 Tornow, Siegfried, 86, 124, 126, 162, 225–6, 228, 240, 275, 301, 320, 439, 440, 472, 480, 493, 507, 510, 969(n.26) Törnquist-Plewa, Barbara, 103, 111, 133 Török, Zsuzsanna, 672 Tosk, 54, 217, 241–6, 258, 960–61(n.26) Tót (Magyar pejorative for ‘Slovak,’ ‘Slav’), 447–8, 563, 686–7 Tóth, István György, 127, 148 Totius Latinitatis Lexicon (The Entire Lexicon of Latin, 1771, Padua), 96 Tov, Baal Shem, 312 TPN (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) (Society of Friends of Sciences), 377, 380–1, 384, 386, 389, 392, 398, 429, 980(n.6) Traba, Robert, 580 Trabant, Jürgen, 30, 45, 47, 440, 957(n.1), 959(n.16), 964(n.42) Trampe, Ludwig, 1, 11, 49 translation industry, 95 Transcarpathian Ruthenia (see Carpathia, Subcarpathian Ruthenia)

Index

Transnistria, 21, 23, 55, 141, 213–15, 270, 353, 358 see also Moldova Transylvania, 15–17, 20, 63, 66–7, 76, 88–9, 121–5, 127–9, 202–13, 217, 276, 280, 325, 328–9, 352, 431–3, 433, 435, 437, 439, 441, 447–8, 450–2, 454–7, 463, 466, 472, 483, 523, 528, 549, 654, 658–9, 661, 666, 668, 671–3, 680, 687–8, 691, 693–5, 715, 731, 742, 825, 833, 907, 915, 937, 942, 969, 969(n.26), 970(n.30), 974(nn.23, 25), 990(n.1) Transylvanian Association for the Cultivation of the Magyar Idiom, 440 Transylvanian School, 207, 451–2 Trasianka, 174, 179, 192 see also Belarusian, Surzhyk Trautmann, Reinhold, 181, 344 Travníˇcek, František, 515–18, 520, 760, 762, 764, 784–5, 879, 933 Treadgold, Donald W, 12, 958(n.9) Treaty of Adrianopole (1829), 451 of Berlin (1878), 249, 975(n.27) on Brest Litovsk (1918), 411 of Good Neighbourliness and Cooperation, 634 of Lausanne (1923), 48, 262, 975(n.27) of Protection (1939), 838 of Riga (1921), 412, 413, 577, 589 of Saint-Germain (1919), 657, 660, 670, 726, 736–8, 741, 743, 765, 816, 820, 826–7, 828 of San Stefano, 249 of Trianon (1920), 660, 665, 670, 684, 732, 737, 820, 826, of Versailles (1919), 188, 413, 577, 660, 664, 726, 728, 936, 946, 989(n.1) of Westphalia (1648), 39, 90, 472 Treder, Jerzy, 638 Trenchin, Matthaeus a (1260–1321), 815 Tˇreštík, Dušan, 482, 483, 753 Triest, Felix, 288, 295, 324, 489 Trieste (Triest, Trst), 21, 288, 324 Tripartite Pact, 666 Tripartitum, 125–6 Trnava (Tyrnau, Nagyszombat), 432, 434, 479, 528, 533, 567, 847, 848, 849, 859, 887, 991(n.5) Trotz, Michał Abraham (1703–1769), 378 Trudgill, Peter, 149, 264

1121

Trylˇcová, Elena, 535 Trylogia (The Trilogy, 1884–1888, Warsaw), 415 Trzcionowski, Lech, 418 Tschechei, 485–6 see also Czech Republic Tsiapinskii, Vasil (1540–1603), 154 Tsonov, Beno (1863–1926), 527 Tuka, Vojtech (1880–1946), 750, 751, 774, 835, 845, 861, 862 Turˇciansky Svätý Martin (Martin, Sankt Martin, Turócszentmárton), 462, 483, 513, 527, 545, 554, 561, 566, 657, 720–1, 757–8, 777–8, 700, 816, 820, 833, 835, 843, 845, 847, 859, 877, 992(n.15) Turˇciansky Svätý Martin (see Turócszentmárton) Turk, origins of name, 250, 264 Turkey, Republic of, 21, 23, 31, 41, 48, 52, 56, 57, 148, 238, 254, 256, 262, 265–70, 284–5, 287, 319, 321, 324, 330, 358, 361, 363, 476, 470, 689, 975(n.27), 978(n.48) Turkic, 23, 34, 56, 63, 66–7, 69, 71, 87, 113, 120–1, 126, 130, 141–2, 204, 218, 247, 256, 259–75, 282, 285, 287, 317, 321, 323, 325, 341, 362, 474–6, 646, 672–3, 808, 946, 962(n.45), 963(n.50), 965(n.5), 966(nn.6, 8), 967(n.11), 969(n.24), 977(nn.39, 40) Turkish Grand National Assembly (1922), 266 Turkish Language Society, 267, 268, 270 Turkish nation-state, 51, 267, 977(n.38) Turkish, 41, 48, 51, 56–7, 82, 88, 114, 122, 126, 137, 141, 207, 209, 220, 233, 238, 250, 254–6, 258, 259, 261–70, 273, 275–7, 284–5, 287, 319–20, 323, 328–30, 341–2, 354, 360–3, 410, 465, 471, 475–6, 415, 961(nn.28, 30), 963(n.45), 969(n.23), 977(n.38) Tatar, 268 see also Sun Theory of the Turkish language Turkish/Russia, relationship, 268 Turócszentmárton (see Turˇciansky Svätý Martin) Tuvalu, 28, 32, 60 Tuvaluan, 28, 60 Tvrdý, Peter, 567, 847, 848, 849, 851,

1122 Index

Twelve points (Hungarian War of Independence, 1848–1849), 454 Tymoshenko, P D, 171 Tymowski, Michał, 8 Tyrol, 18, 19, 57, 726 Tyrs, Miroslav (1832–1884), 507 Tyszka, Krzysztof, 619 Über die Wechselseitigkeit zwischen den verschiedenen Stämmen und Mundarten der slawischen Nation (On the Reciprocity Between the Tribes and Vernaculars of the Slavic Nation, 1837, Pest), 477, 539, 718 Ueber den Ursprung und die verschiedenartige Verwandtschaft der europäischen Sprachen (On the Emergence and Variegated Interrelatedness of the European languages, 1818, Frankfurt am Main), 477 Ueberlieferungen zur Geschichte unserer Zeit (journal), 539 Uhersko/Uhorsko, 484, 646, 647, 984(n4) Uhry, 646, 984(n.4) Új id˝ ok lexikona (The Lexicon of New Times, 1936–1942, Budapest), 682, 932 Új lexikon (The New Lexicon, Budapest), 682, 932 Új magyar lexikon (The New Magyar Lexicon, 1936, Budapest), 705 Új magyar tájszótár (The New Dictionary of the Magyar Dialects, 1979–2002, Budapest), 705, 947 Ujlaki, Bálint, 122 Ukraine Carpathian, 470, 665, 686–7, 766–7, 928 Dnieper, 388, 411–13, 585, 589 independent, 177–8, 400, 412, 558, 656, 659, 735, 804, 891 national republic, Western, 411, 981(n.15) partitioning of, 412 Soviet, 21, 36, 51, 53, 55, 177–9, 212–13, 314, 412, 577, 586, 590, 603, 609, 610, 613, 616, 618, 625, 687, 747, 754, 767, 772, 778, 846, 858, 872, 930, 936, 938, 992(n.13) Ukrainian / Russian creole, 179 see also Trasianka Ukrainian National Council, 778, 874, 992(n.13)

Ukrainian National Council of the Prešov Ruthenia, 874 Ukrainian national movement, 168, 175, 401, 590, 767, 873 Ukrainian Republic, People’s National, 411 Ukrainian states, 971(n.9) Ukrainian (see Little Russian, Ruthenian) as official language, 179, 687, 872 restrictions on, 78, 170, 187, 556 Ukrainians, 14, 36, 54-5, 119–20, 114, 158, 167–8, 175, 177, 178–9, 212, 215, 340, 355, 388, 401, 409, 412, 471, 497, 583, 585–6, 589–91, 593–4, 597, 599–600, 603, 611–12, 614–16, 618–19, 628, 635–7, 639, 647, 656, 678, 686, 697, 698, 739, 743, 746, 767, 778, 781–4, 820, 871, 873–5, 890, 892–3, 939, 960(n.25), 972(n.8), 985(n.12), 987(n.6), 992(n.14) Ulfilas (Wulfila), 965(n.5) Ulianov, N, 358 uncial Latin cursive, 92 unemployment, Slovakia, 634, 726, 749, 789, 792, 896, Uniate Church, 89, 119, 127, 140, 153, 204, 208, 355, 385, 395, 602, 970(n.30) see also Greek Catholic Church, Neo-Uniate Church Uniates, 127, 139, 140, 146, 156, 208, 371, 373, 388, 390, 403, 410, 435, 450–1, 470, 594, 744, 783, 973(n.19) Union of Brze´sc´ (1596) (Brest in Belarusian), 155 Union of Estonian Writers, 199 Union of Germans from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia for the Preservation of their Nationality, 498 Union of Lublin (1569), 16 Unitas Fratrum (Czech Brethren), 101 see also Jednota bratrská United Nations Organization, 31 United States, postwar role, 925 Universal Esperanto-Asocio, 337 universities Albanian (Gheg), 241–3, 245 Bulgarian, 283 Cluj, 694 Cracow, 374, 375, 377, 379, 381, 383–4, 390, 392, 397, 405, 614 Czech, 554, 560, 741, 769, 809, 810, 843, 984, 757, 769, 783, 984(n.7)

Index

Dorpat, 198–9, 387, 395 Gagauz, 270 German-medium, 198, 211 Halle, 83, 161 Kaunas, 188 Kolozsvár, 682, 694 Komenský (Slovak), 520, 562, 566, 843, 859–60, 878 Lublin, Catholic, 604, 621, 641 Lwów, 369, 392, 401, 601, 613, 621 Marburg, 161 Moscow, 161 Pest, 439, 449, 459, 551 Polish, The Free, 384, 604, 613–14, 621 Poznan, ´ 604 Prague Technical, 508 Prague, 105, 491, 504 Prešov, 891 Romanian-language, 35, 65, 209, 247, 937 St Vladimir, 385 Serbian, 223 Simferopol, 275 Slovak, 724, 747, 752, 833, 859, 860, 878 Slovenian, 297 Torun, ´ 377, 621, 677 Vilnius, 375, 376, 381–2, 385, 387, 613 Warsaw, 188, 336, 381, 386, 387, 408, 429, 433, 604–6, 640 Wilno, 369, 373, 604, 607, 677 Wrocław, 621 Universum. Všeobecná encyklopedie (Universum: The Universal Encyclopedia, 2000, Prague), 712, 796, 797, 950 Uniwersalny Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Universal Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2003, Warsaw), 641 Unua Libro (La lingvo internacia, 1887, Warsaw), 336–37 Úplný némeckoˇceský slovník (Complete German-Bohemian Dictionary, 1843–1847, Prague), 494 Upper Hungary (see Slovakia) Upper Saxonian (Meissen), 76, 79, 83–4 uprising, January (1863–1864), 18, 392, 393, 394, 396 uprising, November (1830–1831), 384, 386, 388, uprising, Polish (1846), 389 uprising, Slovak National (1944), 772, 857, 861, 864, 991(n.11)

1123

uprisings (revolts), Silesian (1919, 1920, 1921), 581 Úprk, Joža, 853 Urbanczyk, ´ Przemysław, 8, 63, 67, 220, 299 Urbanczyk, ´ Stanisław, 112, 627, 947 urbanization, Hungary, 574, 595, 700, 756, 784 Usien, ´ Joanna, 113, 143 Uspenskii, Boris A, 398 Ústav pre zahraniˇcných Slovákov (Institute for the Study of the Slovak Diaspora), 860 Ústav pro jazyk cˇeský (Institute for the Czech Language), 762 Uvarov, Sergei Semionovich (1786–1855), 385, 393 Uzhhorod (Ungvár, Ungwar, Uzhgorod, Uz’horod), 127, 391, 432, 657, 698, 736, 873, 891, 986(n.14) Vaitiekus, Severinas, 636 Vajk, King (r. 997–1038), see St Stephen, King (r. 997–1038), 68, 474 Vakar, Nicholas P, 167–8, 170, 173, 358, 398, 403, 602, 603, 614, 616 Valla, Lorenzo (1407–1457), 343 Valuev, Petr, Count (1814–1890), 394 Vamvas, Neofitos (1770–1855), 261 Vandals, language of the, 301, 303 Várdy, Steven Béla, 72, 678, 691, 696–7, 698, 701 Varga, János, 442, 445, 447, 464 Varpas (periodical) (The Bell, 1889–1906, Ragnit [Neman]), 185 Varsik, Branislav, 768, 855 Váša, Pavel (1874–1954), 515, 762, 764, 784, 879, 933 Vasmer, Max, 167, 971(n.6) Vatican, the, 6, 57, 97–8, 140, 598, 623, 750, 855, 891, 975(n.27) Vatican Council, Second (1962–1965), xvii, 6, 97, 140, 598 Vavryk, M, 177, 179 Vážný, Václav (1892–1966), 757, 835, 845, 849, 859, 878, 880, 881, 933, 934 Vedomosti (newspaper), 160, 514, 552, 849, 934 Velagi´c, Zoran, 222 Veleslavína, Danˇel Adam z (1546–1599), 101, 107, 110 Velímský, Vitˇezslav, 24

1124 Index

Velká všeobecná encyklopedie (The Great Universal Encyclopedia, 2000–, Prague), 797, 950 velvet divorce (Czechoslovakia), 895, 897 Venice, 16–17, 45, 80–2, 151, 216, 219–22, 242–3, 247, 260, 288, 290, 301, 324–6, 353, 478, 968(n.18), 971(n.3) Verdery, Katherine, 208 Verfassungspatriotismus, 939 Vergina Sun, 253 vernacular languages, 6, 89, 96, 152, 420–01, 980(n.7) vernacular-turned-written language, defence of, 45 Vichian, 191–2 Vico, Giovanni Battista (1668–1744), 30, 46, 62 Vienna, 2, 16–19, 50, 72, 75, 76, 79–80, 82, 100, 101, 103–6, 108, 116, 122–3, 125–30, 137–8, 144, 151, 166, 176–7, 204–05, 207–08, 211, 222–7, 237, 269, 278, 282–3, 291, 294–5, 297, 302, 313, 324, 326, 353, 355, 365, 375–6, 378, 380, 383–4, 389, 391, 400, 402, 404, 408, 410, 411, 431–8, 441, 443–4, 449, 450, 452–7, 460, 463, 468, 483–4, 487–8, 498–500, 505, 507, 509–13, 517, 519, 525, 538–9, 541, 548–50, 552–3, 557, 559, 561, 569, 575–6, 581–3, 588, 597, 653–4, 657, 659–60, 665–7, 670, 684, 715, 717–19, 721, 725–6, 730, 754, 760, 761, 770, 793, 804, 807, 809–12, 820, 837, 844, 850, 856, 906–7, 909, 912–14, 919–20, 929, 960(n.24), 970(n.30), 975(n.29), 981(n. 10), 982(n.10), 983(nn.10, 13) Vienna Arbitration, Second, 666, 754 Viereck, Wolfgang, 86 Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno), 19–21, 81, 154–6, 169, 172–3, 180, 182, 185, 188–91, 198, 272, 309, 314, 369, 373, 375–6, 381–2, 385, 387, 396, 397, 400, 403, 410–12, 414, 426–7, 429, 480, 570, 577, 586, 590, 600, 610–11, 613, 616–17, 621, 626, 677, 744, 930, 973(n.18), 980(nn.6, 8), 987(n.9) Violence, religious-cum-national, 53, 398, 509, 584, 660, 726, 733 Vîrtosu, Emil, 353 Visegrád, 121, 482 Vistula, 18, 50, 147, 183, 375, 393, 396–400, 402–03, 407, 408, 413–15,

427–8, 577, 581, 590, 599, 605, 611, 614, 669, 914–15, 981(n.12) Vistula Land, 18, 50, 147, 393, 396–400, 402–03, 408, 413–15, 427–8, 577, 581, 599, 605, 611, 669, 914–15, 981(n.12) see also Poland, (Congress) Kingdom of Vitsebsk/Vitebsk (Witebsk), 72, 158, 194, 196, 403 Vlachs, 64, 202 Vlasc a šerco (poems) (Land and Heart, 1909, Kassa [Košice]), 821 vlastenectví, 106, 496 Vltava (Moldau), 436, 495 Vlˇcek, Jaroslav (1860–1930), 815–16 Vojvodina, 19–20, 37, 53, 58, 66, 122, 222–3, 226, 239–40, 286, 452, 455–7, 469–71, 539, 545, 657–9, 661–3, 666–7, 676, 686, 691, 697, 706–7, 710, 717, 742, 830, 863, 875–6, 890, 902, 940, 953, 963(n.49), 976(n.31), 982(n.10), 983(n.10), 989(n.4) Volapük, 337, 978(n.52) Volga, 45, 63, 65–6, 106, 271, 274–5, 386, 966(n.5), 977(n.40) Volgyes, Ivan, 699 Volhynia, 15–17, 19, 165, 168, 376, 385, 408, 586, 590, 594, 597, 601, 603, 616, 618, 775, 939, 971(n.5), 980(n.6), 987(n.8) Völker, 46, 495, 499, 500, 538, 920, 957(n.4), 982(n.3), 984(n.5) Völkerabfälle (ruins of peoples), 499, 500 Völkerpsychologie (‘psychology of nation’), 46, 49 Volksgeist (spirit, genius, soul, or character of the nation, people, or ethnic group), 46, 851 Volksgemeinschaft (nation in its ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state), 851, 856, 927, 935, Voloshyn, Avhustyn (Vološin, Augustin) (1874–1945), 745, 774 von Arndt, Christian Gottlieb (1743–1829), 477 von Bessenyei, György (1747–1811), 437 von Caprivi, Leo (1831–1899), 404 von Humboldt, Wilhelm (1767–1853), 46, 597 von Löhner, Ludwig (1812–1852), 498 von Taube, Friedrich Wilhelm (1728–1778), 435 Vongrej, Pavol, 349, 547

Index

Voralberg, 726 Võro, 200–01 see also Seto Võro-Seto, 200–1 Vörösmarty, Michael, 437, 441–2, 454 Vostokov, Aleksandr Khristoforovich (1781–1864), 162 vowels, long, 100, 122, 199, 422, 424–5 vowels, nasal, 112, 423 Vrchovský, Alexander Boleslav (1812–1865), 815 vulgari eloquentia, De (On the Eloquence of Vernacular, 1303–1305, first published in 1529), 45, 106, 111, 420, 980(n.7) Vulgate, the (Latin Bible), 69, 93–4, 100, 123, 154, 228, 260–1, 304, 310, 537 Wajs, Bronisława (Papusza) (1910–1987), 334 Walachia, 16, 48, 63, 81, 88–9, 97, 113, 120–1, 127–8, 137, 139–41, 147, 151, 156, 202–12, 216, 224, 247, 256, 258, 260, 276–7, 282, 319, 328, 329, 352–3, 361, 431, 435–7, 444, 446, 447, 451–2, 454, 463, 471, 542, 551, 649, 663, 672–3, 686–7, 715, 744, 831, 915, 974(n.23, 25), 984(n.6), 990(n.1) see also Romania Walachian, 81, 88–9, 97, 121, 127–8, 139–41, 202–08, 210–12, 216, 224, 258, 276, 277, 282, 352–3, 431, 435–7, 444, 446–7, 451–2, 454, 471, 542, 551, 649, 663, 672–3, 686–7, 687, 715, 744, 974(n.25), 984(n.6), 990(n.1) see also Romanian Walachians, 121, 127, 140, 202–8, 212, 431, 435, 437, 444, 446–7, 451–2, 454, 471, 542, 672, 715, 744, 990(n.1) Walas, Teresa, 609 Walaszek, Adam, 609 Waldenberg, Marek, 398, 493, 510 Waldstein, Abraham Solomon, 311 Walicki, Andrzej, 371 Walka o ortografie˛ (article) (The Struggle Over Orthography, 1935–1936, Cracow), 606 Wanatowicz, Maria Wanda, 613 Wandycz, Piotr S, 376, 379, 384, 392, 398, 958(n.9) Wapinski, ´ Roman, 384, 388, 403

1125

War of Greek Independence (1821–1827), 205 War of Independence (Hungary, 1848–1849), 90, 445, 455, 649, 798, 839, 907, 983(n.10) war of lords, 384 war reparations, Germany, 923 Warmia (Ermland), 579–80, 584, 617, 925 Warmiaks (Ermlanders), 578–9, 580–81 wars Balkan (1912–1913), 5, 250, 284 Bosnia (1992–1995), 22, 231–2, 233, 286, 471, 710 Cossack, 114 Crimean (1853–1856), 209, 387 Czechoslovak-Hungarian (1918–1919), 731, 714, 775, 804, 825, 828 Czechoslovak-Polish (1919), 771, 787, 824 see also Polish-Czechoslovak War Great Northern (1700–1721), 17, 958 (n.8) Greek Civil (1946–1949), 251, 781 Greek Independence (1821–1827), 205 Hussite, 99, 100, 295, 503–4 of Independence (Hungary, 1848–1849), 90, 445, 455–6, 649, 716, 798, 739, 907, 916, 983 (n.10) ‘of lords’, 384 Napoleonic, 17, 45, 47, 90, 108, 222, 294, 365, 377, 379, 381, 383–4, 433–4, 439, 448, 487, 529, 908 Polish-Czechoslovak (1919), 582, 584, 987 (n.8) see also Czechoslovak Polish War Polish-Soviet (1919–1921), 168, 412, 577, 589, 608, 618, 625 Russo-Japanese (1904–1905), 398 Seven Weeks’ (1866), 18, 365, 453 Thirty Years’ (1618–1648), 69, 88, 292, 302 World War I, 1, 6, 9, 19, 43, 51, 139, 147, 168, 177, 182, 211, 227–8, 239, 244, 266, 299, 313, 319, 337–8, 347, 349, 358, 361, 365, 401, 405–8, 443, 456, 459, 465, 468, 476, 485, 500, 512, 516–17, 523, 530, 551, 562–3, 581, 587, 613–15, 630, 645-6, 652, 684, 727, 766, 780, 813, 825, 893, 903, 914, 916–18, 920, 923, 935, 936 World War II, see World War II

1126 Index

Warsaw, 3, 17–18, 20, 22, 27, 81–2, 115, 116–18, 167, 173, 177, 188, 255, 300, 305, 309, 313–14, 332, 336–7, 339–40, 370–82, 384, 386–7, 389, 392–3, 397–8, 405, 407–9, 411–16, 424, 427–30, 433, 435, 443, 482, 517, 576–8, 582–5, 587–95, 598–9, 601–7, 609–10, 612, 615, 619–27, 630, 633–4, 636, 636–8, 640–3, 662, 665, 682, 692, 695, 702, 706–7, 712, 721, 726–7, 729, 731–3, 747, 754, 758, 763, 765, 775, 777, 799, 823–5, 828, 830, 837, 871, 892, 895, 907, 913, 924–5, 930–1, 935, 937, 940–1, 948, 958(n.12), 973(n.18), 987(n.8), 988(n.18), 991(n.6) Warsaw Pact (see Warsaw Treaty Organization), 630, 692, 695, 777, 799, 937, 947 Warsaw Treaty Organization (see Warsaw Pact), 22 Warsaw, Duchy of, 3, 17–18, 20, 22, 27, 81–2, 115, 116–18, 167, 173, 177, 188, 255, 300, 305, 309, 313–14, 332, 336–7, 339–40, 370–82, 384, 386–7, 389, 392–3, 397–8, 405, 407–9, 411–16, 424, 427–30, 433, 435, 443, 482, 517, 576–8, 582–5, 587–95, 598–9, 601–7, 609–10, 612, 615, 619–27, 630, 633–4, 636, 636–8, 640–3, 662, 665, 682, 692, 695, 702, 706–7, 712, 721, 726–7, 729, 731–3, 747, 754, 758, 763, 765, 775, 777, 799, 823–5, 828, 830, 837, 871, 892, 895, 907, 913, 924–5, 930–1, 935, 937, 940–1, 948, 958(n.12), 973(n.18), 987(n.8), 988(n.18), 991(n.6) Warschauer Bibliothek (periodical) (Warsaw’s Library, 1753–1795), 370 Warta, 611 Wartheland, 611–12 see also Wielkopolska Was ist das deutsche Vaterland? (poem) (What is the German Fatherland?, 1812), 47 Washington, 459, 721, 771, 857, 921, 978(n.53) Waterman, John T, 103 Weaver, Eric Beckett, 217, 240, 476, 645, 674 Weber, Eugen, 5, 24, 979(n.1) Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 316

Weiner, E S C, 99, 275, 309, 316, 335, 962(n.42), 965(n.3), 967(nn.13, 14), 968(n.16), 976(n.33), 977(n.43), 983(n.10) Weingart, Miloš (1880–1939), 517, 520, 521, 537, 540, 545, 559, 567, 760, 764 Weinreich, Max, 1 Weißruthenisch (White Ruthenian), 166, 172, 409, see also Belarusian Welsch, 203, 289 Welsh, 40, 82, 203, 289, 988(n.15) Wenden, 289, 290 Wendisch, 290, 302, 477 Weneds, 290 Wesselényi, Miklós (1796–1850), 447 Westmitteleuropa/Ostmitteleuropa, 12 Wexler, Paul, 71, 142, 170, 311 White Russia (Belarus), 166, 351, 357, 971(n.7), 973(n.19) White Russian (Belarusian), 50–1, 157, 168–71, 211–12, 357, 395–6, 398, 401–2, 409, 411, 414, 585, 588–9, 602, 669, 746, 971(n.7) White Ruthenian (Belarusian), 50, 165, 172, 188, 357–8, 358, 382, 394–5, 409–11, 585, 588–9, 914, 930, 930–1, 935 Wielka encyklopedia powszechna (The Great Universal Encyclopedia, 1962–1970, Warsaw), 627–8, 640–1, 712, 944, 950 Wielka encyklopedyja powszechna ilustrowana (Great Universal Encyclopedia with Illustrations), 407, 605, 917 Wielka ilustrowana encyklopedja powszechna (The Great Illustrated Universal Encyclopedia, 1929–1938, Cracow), 605, 609, 640, 932 Wielkopolska, 117–18, 375, 377, 380, 400, 403–4, 413, 417, 477, 576–7, 579, 584, 592, 595, 599, 607, 611–12, 907 uprising (1918–1919), 576–7 Wikipedia, 174, 190, 235–6, 334, 340, 641, 712, 900, 972(n.13), 978(n.51), 979(n.53), 990(n.4) Bosnian, 235–6 Croatian, 235–6 Czech, 990(n.4) Esperanto, 340 Montenegrin, 236 Magyar, 712

Index

Polish, 641 Romani, 334, 978(n.51) Serbian, 235–6 Simple English, 978(n.53) Slovak, 900 Wilamowicean, 988(n.17) Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), 51, 366, 411, 559, 569, 576, 577, 652, 674, 679, 717, 722, 731, 735, 921–2 Wilsonovo Mesto (Bratislava), 559 Wincenty Kadłubek, Bishop (1150–1223), 418 Winden (Windisch), 289 Windisch, 288–90, 292, 294, 302, 477 Winds, 289, 299, 467 Winter, Eduard, 233, 499, 666, 972(n.12) Wi´sniewska, Katarzyna, 109, 638 Wojtyła, Karol (Pope John Paul II) (1920–2005), 623 Wolff, Christian (1679–1754), 161 Wolff, Philippe, 99, 161, 421 Wölke, Sonja, 307 women, equality of, 8–9, 129, 145, 147–8, 312, 353, 370, 507, 621, 755, 870, 901, 918–19, 954–5, 962(n.40) Wood, Nancy, 12 workers movement, 338, 555, 920 World Congress of Esperanto (1905), 337 World Congress of Rusyns (1991), 890 World Congress of Rusyns, Fifth (1999), 892 World Council of Churches, 332 World Gypsy Congress, 332 World Roma Congress, Fourth (1990), 332, 334 World War I, 1, 6, 9, 19, 43, 51, 139, 147, 168, 177, 182, 211, 227–8, 239, 244, 266, 299, 313, 319, 337–8, 347, 349, 358, 361, 365, 401, 405–8, 443, 456, 459, 465, 468, 476, 485, 500, 512, 516–17, 523, 530, 551, 562–3, 581, 587, 613–15, 630, 645-6, 652, 684, 727, 766, 780, 813, 825, 893, 903, 914, 916–18, 920, 923, 935, 936 World War II, 2, 5, 12, 21, 25, 28, 52–3, 56, 60, 79, 86, 90–1, 97, 117, 119, 145, 148, 167, 173, 178, 213, 229, 251, 269, 272, 284, 297, 299, 300–2, 305, 311, 315, 327, 331, 332, 339–40, 345, 347, 356–8, 362, 405, 466, 474, 485, 489, 495, 516, 520–1, 525, 565–6, 570–1,

1127

584, 586, 590, 605–6, 608–10, 617, 620, 623, 627–8, 632, 634, 640–1, 644, 651, 666, 673, 678, 683, 688, 691, 697, 727–8, 754, 758, 760, 762, 766, 770, 783, 786, 795, 798, 824, 830–1, 839, 858, 869, 872, 876–7, 890, 893, 902–3, 913, 925, 932, 934–5, 937, 942, 952 Czech descent into, 764 Slovakia, 2, 12, 332, 466, 489, 520–1, 525, 565–6, 570–1, 584, 610, 666, 697, 754, 758, 766, 770, 783, 795, 798, 824, 830–1, 839, 858, 869, 872, 876, 877, 890, 893, 902–3, 913, 925, 934–5, 937, 952 World Zionist Congress, 403 Worth, Dean S, 4, 18, 23, 35, 138, 307, 356–8, 417, 508, 946 Woyna (Wojna), Jan Karol (1605–1693), 109 writing systems, 26, 33, 39, 56, 61, 367, 419, 422, 979(n.3) writing, 4, 7, 8–9, 25–6, 33–4, 38, 41, 43, 45, 50, 56, 58, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 76, 85, 91, 95–6, 99, 107, 131, 135, 114–15, 119, 137, 140–1, 144, 148–50, 153–4, 157, 159, 160, 173, 179, 180, 187, 191, 194, 196, 199, 200, 206, 209, 212–14, 215, 218, 221–2, 224, 227, 232–3, 239, 248, 253, 258, 266, 268–9, 270, 272, 274, 277–9, 282, 285, 292, 301, 304, 312, 318–19, 324, 326, 328–30, 342, 350, 352–4, 356–8, 361–2, 367, 381, 387, 393, 396, 398, 402, 409, 418–19, 421–3, 425, 427, 435, 471, 473, 475, 494, 506, 529, 532, 537–8, 544–5, 561, 583, 590, 592, 594–5, 602, 614, 623, 642, 644–5, 688, 704, 722, 728, 757, 759, 800, 804, 835, 844–5, 859, 878, 899, 956(n.3), 957(n.7), 965(n.5), 970(n.1), 972(n.12), 978(n.51), 979(n.4) Wrocław (Breslau), 80, 118, 581, 621, 624–7, 632–3, 677, 729, 799, 974(n.26) Wujek, Jakub (1541–1597), 110, 123 Wyder, Grazyna, ˙ 27, 307 Wydra, Wiesław, 111 Wysocka, Dorota, 586, 595 Yazygia, 672 Yeltsin, Boris, 884 Ye¸silköy (San Stefano), 249

1128 Index

Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO), 314 Yiddish, 41, 49–51, 58, 77–9, 81, 116, 119, 131, 139, 142, 169, 172, 188, 211, 213, 301, 309–17, 319–20, 326, 331, 335–6, 341, 358, 380, 383, 387, 397, 402, 409–10, 493, 513, 573, 588–9, 595–7, 600–1, 613, 620, 649, 662, 668–7, 708, 716, 739, 756, 807, 831, 914, 925, 929 Young Czechs, 508, 509, 513, 719 Young Turk Revolution, 250 Yugoslavia, 2, 4, 5, 13, 20–2, 37, 50–4, 57, 90, 143–4, 225, 228–33, 235, 237–9, 245–6, 251–2, 254–5, 284–6, 297–8, 331–2, 334, 340–1, 355, 358–9, 362, 444, 468–71, 571, 658, 663, 666, 676, 679, 686, 690–1, 694, 697, 699, 700, 710, 722, 781, 819, 822, 830, 850–1, 863, 875–6, 884, 890, 902, 923–4, 926, 937–8, 940–1 Break-up, 22, 24, 135, 144, 150, 213, 285 Yugoslavian, 227, 229, 281, 297, 460 see also Serbocroatoslovenian Yuhasz, Michael, 829 Zaborowski, Stanisław, 423 Žáˇcek, Rudolf, 489, 502 Zach, Krista, 205, 208 Zagreb (Agram, Zágráb), 16, 17, 28, 72, 90, 220, 223, 226–8, 232, 237–9, 297, 299, 436, 443–4, 448, 454, 464, 467, 469, 531, 657, 663, 975(n.29) zagrozeniach ˙ i bogactwie polszczyzny, O (On What Endangers Polish, and the Language’s Riches, 1996, Wroclaw), 633 Zahradnik, Stanisław, 730, 775 Zaja˛czek, Józef, General (1752–1826), 380 Zakład, the, 383, 625 see also Ossolineum Základové dialektologie ˇceskoslovenské (The Basis of Czechoslovak Dialectology, Vienna and Olmütz [Olomouc] 1864), 517 Zalán futása (Magyar epic poem) (The Flight of Zalán, 1825, Pest), 441 Zamenhof, Ludwik (Samenhof, Eliezer) (1859–1917), 311, 336–8

Zapasko, Iakym, 357 Zápolyas, 431, 432 Zaprudnik, Jan, 403 Zaremba, Marcin, 619 Zawadzki, Hubert, 215, 411, 573 Zawadzki, Mariusz, 215, 411, 573 Zayas, Alfred M de, 619 ˙ Zbikowski, Andrzej, 392, 596, 619 Zdaniewicz, Witold, 141, 595–6, 619 Zdanowicz, Aleksander, 430 Zdenˇek, David V., 103, 104, 105, 130, 205, 222, 279, 299, 493, 503, 510, 513 Zeidler, Miklós, 685 Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Psychology of Nation and Linguistics, 1860–1928), 46, 49 ˙ Zelazny, Walter, 86, 140 Ženuch, ˇ Peter, 823 Zgółkowa, Halina, 643, 901, 950, 955 Zhelikhivskyi, I (1844–1885), 176 Zhytomyr (Schitomir, Zhitomir, ˙ Zytomierz), 72, 313 Zielinski, ´ Andrzej, 392 Zieniukowa, Jadwiga, 636 Žigo, Pavol, 532, 535 Zimmermann, Volker, 768 Zinkeviˇcius, Zigmas, 181, 182, 186, 190 Ziomek, Jerzy, 111 Zionism, 49, 79, 309, 310, 313, 335, 336, 402–3, 596–7, 749, 927 Žižek, Slavoj, 298, 299 Žjadost’i Slowenskjeho Národu (The Demands of the Slovak Nation), 548 žmoniu˛ kalba (‘language of the people’), 188 Zog I, King (r.1928–1939), 244 Zohar, the, 308 Zora (periodical), 449 Zpod jarma (poems) (From Under the Yoke, Prague, 1884), 553 Zsatkovich, Gregory, 735–7, 772 Zubatý, Josef (1855–1931), 516 Zupanˇciˇc, Jernej, 698, 710 Zwischengruppe (group between [Germandom and Polishdom]), 611, 612

Index of Dictionaries

Albanian, 240–6 etymology, 240–1 first monolingual dictionary (1954), 245 first dictionary (1635) – ‘Epirean’ (epiroticum), 243 first printed book, a missal (1555), 81, 243 grammar of Albanian in Greek (1882), 244 -Greek dictionary (1904), 244 Greek-based alphabet, 67 as official language of Kosovo, 57–8 official principles of grammar and orthography (1956 and 1967), 245 script – Bakshimi (Unity), 244 -speaking polities, 58, 240 translation of Koran (1992), 246 Albanian-Greek dictionary (1904), 244 Armenian, 320–7 Ashxarhabar-Grabar dictionary, (1869, Venice), 326 authoritative dictionary (1944–1945), 326 ethnonym, 320 etymology, 321 first periodical (1794), 324 first printed book (1512), 324 Greek-based alphabet, 67 St Mesrob Mashtots, 323 script, 141 translation of Koran, 325 translations of New Testament, 325 vernacular tradition of writing (beginning in 17th century), 325 Aromanian dictionary of (1963), 216 language – Vlah or Vlach, 216 script, 216–17 Ashxarhabar-Grabar dictionary, (1869, Venice), 326 Ausführliches und vollständiges deutsch-böhmisches synonymisch-phrasologisches

Wörterbuch (The Explanatory Full German-Czech Dictionary, 1821, Prague), 107 Belarusian, 167–74, 411 Belarusian-Polish dictionary (1929, Wilno [Vilnius]), 173 first authoritative multi-volume dictionary (1977–1984), 173 ‘Old Belarusian’ (starobelaruski), 171 pocket Yiddish-Belarusian dictionary (1932), 314 scripts, 157, 171 state language of Soviet Republic of Byelorussia, 174 texts in 18th and 19th centuries, 169 Belarusian-Muscovian (see Russian), 172 dictionary (1919, Wilno [Vilnius]), 172 Belarusian-Muscovian dictionary (1919, Wilno [Vilnius]), 172 Belarusian-Polish dictionary (1929), 173 Belarusian-Polish dictionary (1929, Wilno [Vilnius]), 173 Bernoláˇctina (see Slovak), 135, 744 Bernolák’s dictionary of, 536 19th-century codification of Slovak language, 512 Bibliˇctina Böhmisch-deutsch-lateinisches Wörterbuch (Bohemian/CzechGerman-Latin Dictionary, 1820–1821, Prague and Preßburg [Bratislava]), 536, 911 Bohemian/Czech-German-Latin Bibliˇctina Böhmisch-deutsch-lateinisches Wörterbuch (Bohemian/CzechGerman-Latin Dictionary, 1820–1821, Prague and Preßburg [Bratislava]), 536, 911 dictionary (1791), 494 dictionary (1820–1821), 536 first monolingual dictionary of, Knjžka slow cžeských (The Book of Czech Words, 1587, Prague), 101 1129

1130 Index of Dictionaries

Böhmisch-deutsch-lateinisches Wörterbuch mit Beyfügung der den Slowaken und Mähren eigenen Ausdrücke und Redensarten (two-volume dictionary of Bibliˇctina, 1820–1821, Prague and Preßburg [Bratislava]), 536, 911 Bosnian (see Serbo-Croatian), 233, 235 dictionary of characteristic vocabulary (1992), 233 language, 232 script, 220 Britannica World Language Dictionary (1954, Chicago), 316 Bulgarian, 276–88 authoritative dictionary (1977–), 284 beginning of, 279 etymology, 287 dictionary (1896, Szeged), 286 first periodical, Liuboslovie (‘Love of Words,’ 1842–1846), 280 first printed book (1566), 968(n.19) first printed books in Grazhdanka (1840), 354 first publications in New, 281 five-volume dictionary (1895–1904), 284 -Macedonian dictionary (1968), 252, 976(n.30) standardized (19th century), 27 three written standards of, 286 translation of Koran (1930), 284 Bulgarian dictionary (1896, Szeged), 286 Burgenland Croatian-Croatian-German dictionary (1991), 238 ˇ Cesko-n . ˇemecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (Czech-German Grammatical and Phraseological Dictionary, 1878–1893, Prague), 515, 564, 567, 761, 763, 848, 913, 917 ˇ Cesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský slovník (Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary, 2004, Bratislava), 780, 795, 847, 850, 898 ˇ Ceský etymologický slovník (Czech Etymological Dictionary, 2001, Voznice), 796 Church Slavonic-Greek-Latin dictionary (1704, Moscow), 154

Church Slavonic-Ruthenian dictionaries (1596, Wilno [Vilnius] and 1627, Kijów [Kyiv]), 154 Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, The (1959), 309–10 Cornucopiæ (monolingual dictionary of Latin, 1502, Reggio), 95 Croatian authoritative dictionary of (1880–1975, Zagreb), 226, 227 dictionaries, 16th-century tradition of compiling, 222 encyclopedia, Hrvatska enciklopedija/Encyclopaedia Croatica (1941–1945, Zagreb), 90 first authoritative grammar (1899, Agram [Zagreb]), 226 first printed book (1483, in Glagolitic), 236 first printed dictionary (1595), 236 Latin alphabet for writing, 50 oldest surviving manuscripts, 219 script, 237 two-volume dictionary (1901), 227 Croatian Kajkavian, dictionary, first volume (Zagreb, 1984), 237 Czech ˇ Ceský etymologický slovník (Czech Etymological Dictionary, 2001, Voznice), 796 Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1952, Prague), 785 Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1968, Prague), 881, 945 Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Languages, 1957, Prague), 627, 763, 786, 878, 945 first authoritative dictionary of Czech language, Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), 107, 117, 348, 493, 534, 536, 762–3, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933 first grammar, Gr¯amatyka Cžeská (Czech Grammar, 1533, Námešt’), 100 first monolingual dictionary of Bohemian, Knjžka slow cžeských

Index of Dictionaries

(The Book of Czech Words, 1587, Prague), 101 first printed dictionary (1511), 100 Grammaticae Bohemicae (Czech Grammar, Prague, 1603), 100 Knjžka slow cžeských (The Book of the Czech Words, 1587, Prague), 101 -language encyclopedia Slovník nauˇcný (1859–1874, Prague), 461 lexicography Lexicon symphonum (The Symphonia of Words, 1537 and 1544, Basle), 101 Malý staroˇceský slovník (The Small Dictionary of Old Czech, 1979, Prague), 786 Národní encyklopedie ˇceská (The National Czech Encyclopedia), 407 Nomenclator quadrilinguis (The Four-Language [Czech-Latin-Greek-German] Dictionary, 1598, Prague), 101 Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1935–1957, Prague), 515, 605–6, 762–3, 771, 784–5, 796, 879, 913, 933, 943 publication of full Czech translation of Bible (1579–1594, Kralice), 101 Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (The Dictionary of the Written Czech Language, 1957–1971, Prague), 625, 785, 796, 943 Slovník staroˇceský (The Dictionary of Old Czech, 1903–1916, Prague), 517, 627, 763, 786, 917, 933, 947 Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), 107, 117, 348, 493, 534, 536, 762–3, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933 Staroˇceský slovník (The Dictionary of Old Czech, 1968–, Prague), 517, 786 Czech–German dictionary of the Czech language (1835–1839, Prague, printed in Antiqua), 348 Czech-German authoritative five-volume dictionary of (1835–1839, Prague), 107, 117, 348, 493, 534, 536, 762–3, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933 ˇ Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický

1131

(Czech-German Grammatical and Phraseological Dictionary, 1878–1893, Prague), 515, 564, 567, 761, 763, 848, 913, 917 multi-volume authoritative phraseological dictionary, ˇ Cesko-nˇ emecký slovník zvláste grammaticko-fraseologický (1878–1893, Prague), 515, 564, 567, 761, 763, 848, 913, 917 Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), 107, 117, 493, 534, 536, 762–3, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933 Czech-German-Latin dictionary (1791), 494 Czech-Latin-German Nomenclator (Dictionary, 1746–1768, Prague), 106 Czech-Slovak authoritative dictionary (2005), 795 ˇ Cesko-slovenský a slovensko-ˇceský slovník (Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary, 2004, Bratislava), 780, 795, 847, 850, 898 dictionary (Slovník slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský, 1896, Rózsahegy [Ružomberok]), 564 grammar (Struˇcná mluvnice ˇcesko-slovenská, 1919, Prague), 565 Czechoslovak (see Czech, Slovak) Historická mluvnice ˇceskoslovenská (Historical Grammar of Czechoslovak, Prague, 1935), 520 short etymological dictionary, Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského (1933, Prague), 763 Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského (The Short Etymological Dictionary of the Czechoslovak Language, 1933, Prague), 605–6, 785, 945 Deutschböhmisches Wörterbuch (The German-Bohemian Dictionary, 1802 and 1821, Prague), 494 Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary, 1854–1960, Lepizig), 397 Dictionarium Latinohungaricum (The Latin-Magyar Dictionary, 1604, Nuremberg), 122

1132 Index of Dictionaries

Dic¸tionarul limbii române literare contemporane (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Romanian Language, 1955–1957, Bucharest), 625 dictionary of Ottoman, 1874, 265 Dictionniare de l’Académie française (The Dictionary of the French Academy, 1694, Paris), 83 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (The Dictionary of the French Academy, 4th ed., 1762, Paris), 161 Dictionnaire français-latin (The French-Latin Dictionary, 1541, Paris), 110 English-Slovak (1905), 566 Esperanto, 335–40 encyclopedia of (La Enciklopedio de Esperanto, 1933–1934, Budapest), 339 first book, 336 Universala Vortaro (The Universal Dictionary [of Esperanto], 1891, Warsaw), 337 Estonian, 192–201 etymology, 197 first monolingual authoritative dictionary of (1925–1937), 200 grammar, multi-volume descriptive (1875), 199 Estonian-German dictionary (1663–1749), 198 dictionary (1869), 199 Etymological Dictionary, 2001, 275, 299, 308, 320, 967–8(n.13, 15, 16), 974(n.24), 976(n.976), 977(n.40) Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1952, Prague), 785 Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1968, Prague), 881, 945 Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Languages, 1957, Prague), 627, 763, 786, 878, 945 Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of Polish Language, 1927, Cracow), 605, 643, 763, 932, 945

Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of Polish Language, 1952–1982, Cracow), 626–7, 945 Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of Polish Language, 2000, Warsaw), 643, 950 French Dictionniare de l’Académie française (The Dictionary of the French Academy, 1694, Paris), 83 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (The Dictionary of the French Academy, 4th ed., 1762, Paris), 161 Dictionnaire français-latin (The FrenchLatin Dictionary, 1541, Paris), 110 first printed book (1476), 82 Polnoi frantsuzskoi i rossiiskoi leksikon (The Complete Lexicon of French and Russian, 1786, St Petersburg), 161 Friulian dictionary (1871), 300 ethnonym, 300 first grammar (1846), 300 Gagauz-Moldavian (see Moldovan) dictionary (1973, Moscow), 270 Gagauz-Moldavian dictionary (1973, Moscow), 273 Gagauz-Turkish, 270 Gagauz-Turkish dictionary (1991, Ankara), 270 German, 73–86 Deutsches Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary, 1854–1960, Lepizig), 397 first newspaper (1764), 129 first normative dictionary (1691,Nuremberg), 83 Nomenclator quadrilinguis (The Four-Language [Czech-Latin-Greek-German] Dictionary, 1598, Prague), 101 pronunciation norm, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache (German Stage Pronunciation, 1898, Berlin), 85 Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum, oder Teutscher Sprachsatz, Der (The Genealogical Tree of the German Language, or the German Vocabulary, 1691, Nuremberg), 83

Index of Dictionaries

Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuchs der Hochdeutschen Mundart (An Attempt at the Full Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of the High German Dialect, 1774–1786, Leipzig), 83–4, 378, 397 German-Czech dictionary (1788), 494 German-Bohemian (see Czech) Deutschböhmisches Wörterbuch (German-Czech Dictionary, 1802 and 1821, Prague), 494 Úplný n ˇ emeckoˇceský slovník (Complete German-Bohemian Dictionary, 1843–1847, Prague), 494 German-Burgenland Croatian-Croatian dictionary (1982), 238 German-Croatian dictionary (1901), 227 German-Czech Ausführliches und vollständiges deutsch-böhmisches synonymisch-phrasologisches Wörterbuch (The Explanatory Full German-Czech Dictionary, 1821, Prague), 107 comprehensive two-volume German-Czech dictionary (Deutschböhmisches Wörterbuch, 1802 and 1821, Prague), 107 Nationallexicon (‘National Dictionary,’ 1788, Prague and Vienna), 106 Nˇemecko-ˇceský slovník vˇedeckého názvosloví progymnasia a reálné školy (German-Czech Dictionary of Scientific Terminology for Secondary Schools, 1853, Prague), 494, 513–14 German-Czech dictionary (Ausführliches und vollständiges deutsch-böhmisches synonymisch-phrasologisches Wörterbuch, 1792, Prague), 107 German-Czech Nationallexicon (‘National Dictionary,’ 1788, Prague and Vienna), 106 German-Lithuanian bilingual dictionaries (1870–1874 and 1883), 184 German-Lower Sorbian dictionary (1953), 306 German-Polish dictionary of legal and administrative vocabulary, Niemiecko-polski słownik

1133

wyrazów prawniczych i administracyjnych (1862, Cracow), 405 Niemiecko-polski słownik wyrazów prawniczych i administracyjnych (The German-Polish Dictionary of Legal and Administrative Vocabulary, 1862, Cracow), 405 Słownik dokładny je˛zyka polskiego i niemieckiego / Vollständiges polnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch (The Exact Dictionary of the Polish and German Languages, 1806, Breslau [Wrocław]), 379 technical dictionary (Technisches Wörterbuch / Słownik techniczny, 1913), 405, 607 German-Slovak two-volume dictionary (1922–1923, Bratislava), 566 German-Upper Sorbian two-volume dictionary (1989–1991), 306 German-Upper Sorbian dictionary (1989–1991), 306 German-Windish dictionary (1789), 293 German-Windish (see Slovenian) dictionary (1789), 293 Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis (authoritative monolingual dictionary of Medieval and Neo-Latin, 1678, Paris), 96 Grabar-Ashxarhabar (see Armenian) dictionary (1843), 326 Grabar-Ashxarhabar dictionary, (1843, Venice), 326 Grabar (see Armenian) Bible (1666, Amsterdam), 324 two extensive dictionaries (1836–1837, Vienna and 1844–1846, Constantinople), 326 Greek, Demotic first novel (1888), 261 Gypsy-Russian dictionary, 1931, 331 Gypsy (see Romani)-Russian dictionary (1938), 331 Hebrew (including Ivrit, or New Hebrew), 307–11 Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, The (1959), 309–10 first novel (1853), 309

1134 Index of Dictionaries

Hebrew – continued first weekly (1856), 309 New Testament (1599), 308 Old Testament (1488), 308 translation of Koran (1857, Leipzig), 309 Helyesírásí tanácsadó szótár (The Dictionary of Advice How to Write Correctly, 1961, Budapest), 704 Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (The Historical Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1991–, Bratislava), 763, 899, 948 Ilustrovaná encyklopedié vˇed technickych (Illustrated Scientific Dictionary of Technology, 1927–1949, Pargue), 514–15 Italian-Latin-Illyrian (see Croatian) dictionaries (1728, Venice and 1805, Ragusa), 222 Judeo- (see Ladino, Spanyol)-SpanishFrench dictionary (1977, Madrid), 320 Judeo- (see Ladino, Spanyol)-SpanishTurkish dictionary (1997, Istanbul), 320 Jewish Spanish (see Ladino, Spanyol)-French dictionary, (1853, Jerusalem), 319 extensive dictionary (1898, Jerusalem), 319 Knjžka slow cžeských (The Book of the Czech Words, 1587, Prague), 101 Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka (The Short Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1987, Bratislava), 881, 899 Ladino-Spanish-French dictionary (1977, Madrid), 320 Latin-German-Italian-Slavic (Slovenian) (1592, Graz), 292 Latin-Grabar (see Armenian) dictionary (1695, Rome), 324 Latin-Grabar dictionary (1695, Rome), 324 Latin-Italian-German-Dalmatian (see Croatian)-Hungarian (see Magyar) dictionary (1595, Venice), 220

Latin-Magyar, 442 Dictionarium Latinohungaricum (The Latin-Magyar Dictionary, 1604, Nuremberg), 122 first extensive dictionaries (1590, Debrecen and 1604, Nuremberg), 122 Latin-Polish dictionary (Lexicon Latinopolonicum, 1564, Königsberg [Kaliningrad]), 111, 478 Latvian, 192–201 -German dictionary (1638), 194, 195 first grammar (1644), 194 first printed book (1525), 194 Latvian-German dictionary (1638), 194, 195 four-volume dictionary (1923–1932), 195 Latvian-German dictionary (1923–1932), 194, 195 Lexicon Latinopolonicum (The Latin-Polish Dictionary, 1564, Königsberg [Kaliningrad] in Ducal Prussia), 111, 478 Lexikon Tetraglosson (dictionary of four languages, Greek, Albanian, Valachian [Aromanian], and Slavic – 1794, Moschopolis [Voskopojë]), 248 Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa (The Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of the World, 1786–1789, St Petersburg), 46 Lithuanian, 180–92 etymology, 181–2 first authoritative dictionary (1941–2002), 189 first full-fledged dictionary (1631), 182 Lithuanian-Polish-Russian dictionary (1897–1922), 185 Lithuanian-Samogitian (see Lithuanian), 184 Little Russian (see Ukrainian) first novel (1857), 170 Lower Sorbian-German extensive dictionary (1999), 306 dictionary (1911–1928, St Petersburg and Prague), 304 Macedonian, 246–55 grammar (1865), 248 standardized in mid-20th century, 27

Index of Dictionaries

three-volume dictionary with explanations in Serbo-Croatian (1961–1966), 252 translation of Bible (1967), 252 Magyar, 130, 460, 461, 705, 917, 932, 943, 945, 947 Dictionary of Correct Writing in Magyar (Magyar helyesírásí kéziszótár, 1999, Budapest), 704 Dictionary of the Magyar Language (magyar nyelv szótára, A, 1862–1874, Budapest), 130, 460, 515, 680, 681, 682, 704 Dictionary of the Magyar Language Reform (Magyar nyelvújítás szótára, A, 1902–1908, Budapest), 462, 764 Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language (Magyar etymológiai szótár, 1914–1944, Budapest), 461, 517, 527, 681 Explanatory Dictionary of the Magyar Language (Magyar nyelv értelmez˝ o szótára, A, 1959–1962, Budapest), 625, 703 Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language (Magyar nyelv történeti szótar, 1890–1893, Budapest), 461, 517, 627, 763, 947 Historical-Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language (Magyar nyelv történeti-etimologiai szótára, A, 1967–1976, Budapest), 627, 705 Short Explanatory Dictionary of Magyar (Magyar értelmez˝ o kéziszótár, 1972, Budapest), 704 Magyar értelmez˝ o kéziszótár (The Short Explanatory Dictionary of Magyar, 1972, Budapest), 704 Magyar etymológiai szótár (Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1914–1944, Budapest), 461, 517, 527, 681 Magyar helyesírásí kéziszótár (The Dictionary of Correct Writing in Magyar, 1999, Budapest), 704 Magyar nyelv értelmez˝ o szótára, A (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1959–1962, Budapest), 625, 703 magyar nyelv szótára, A (The Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1862–1874,

1135

Budapest), 130, 460, 515, 680, 681, 682, 704 Magyar nyelv történeti-etimologiai szótára, A (The Historical-Etymological Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1967–1976, Budapest), 627, 705 Magyar nyelvújítás szótára, A (Dictionary of the Magyar Language Reform, 1902–1908, Budapest), 462, 764 Magyar nyelv történeti szótar (Historical Dictionary of the Magyar Language, 1890–1893, Budapest), 461, 517, 627, 763, 947 Magyar-Romani two bilingual dictionaries, 952 Magyar tájszótár (The Dictionary of the Magyar Dialects, 1893–1901, Budapest), 461 Mały słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Small Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1968, Warsaw), 625, 640 Malý staroˇceský slovník (The Small Dictionary of Old Czech, 1979, Prague), 786 Megleno-Romanian three-volume dictionary (1935), 216 Moldavian (see Moldovan), 214 Moldovan-Romanian first ever dictionary (2003), 214, 976(n.30) Muscovian (see Russian)-Ukrainian bilingual dictionary (Slovnyk moskovsko-ukrains’kyi, 1918, Kyiv), 177 Slovnyk moskovsko-ukrains’kyi (The Muscovian-Ukrainian dictionary, 1918, Kyiv), 177 Nˇemecko-ˇceský slovník vˇedeckého názvosloví pro gymnasia a reálné školy (German-Czech Dictionary of Scientific Terminology for Secondary Schools, 1853, Prague), 494, 513–14 New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, The (1884–1928, Oxford), 84 Niemiecko-polski słownik wyrazów prawniczych i administracyjnych (The German-Polish Dictionary of Legal and Administrative Vocabulary, 1862, Cracow), 405

1136 Index of Dictionaries

Nomenclator quadrilinguis (The Four-Language [Czech-LatinGreek-German] Dictionary, 1598, Prague), 101 Ottoman (see Old Turkish)-Turkish (1952), 267 dictionary of Ottoman, 1874, 265 Ottoman-Turkish dictionary, 1952, 267 Oxford English Dictionary Online 2004, 264 Polish, 108–20, 368–406 Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of Polish Language, 1927, Cracow), 605, 643, 763, 932, 945 Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of Polish Language, 1952–1982, Cracow), 626–7, 945 Etymologiczny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of Polish Language, 2000, Warsaw), 643, 950 first authoritative dictionary (1807–1814, Warsaw), 116–17, 378, 397, 424, 426, 534, 604, 625, 908, 911, 913, 917 first etymological dictionary published (1927, Cracow), 932 first extensive dictionary, two-volume Lexicon Latinopolonicum (The Latin-Polish Dictionary, 1564, Königsberg [Kaliningrad]), 111 first grammar (1568, Cracow), 109 first printed book (1513), 110 Mały słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Small Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1968, Warsaw), 625, 640 Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (The Practical Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1994–2005, Poznan), ´ 643, 711, 901, 950, 955 purely monolingual dictionary (1900–1927, Warsaw), 397, 515 Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2005, Cracow), 605, 626–7, 643, 763, 918 Słownik gwar polskich (The Dictionary of the Polish Dialects, 1900–1911,

Cracow), 405, 461, 505, 517, 561, 606, 626, 650, 670, 917, 961 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1807–1814, Warsaw), 116, 378, 397, 424, 426, 534, 604, 625, 908, 911, 913, 917 Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1861, Vilna [Vilnius] 1861), 426–7, 626 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1900–1927, Warsaw), 397, 415, 427–8, 461, 604–6, 913, 932 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1938–1939, Warsaw), 604–5, 932–3 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1958–1969, Warsaw), 625, 628, 640, 643, 943 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1978–1981, Warsaw), 626, 640 Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego podług Lindego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, Compiled in Accordance with Linde’s [Dictionary], 1866, Berlin), 426 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego XVI wieku (The Dictionary of the 16th-Century Polish Language, 1966–, Wrocław), 627 Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (The Dictionary of Correct Polish, 1973, Warsaw), 625–6, 640, 641 Słownik staropolski (The Dictionary of Old Polish, 1953–2002, Warsaw), 517, 627, 763, 947 Słownik wilenski ´ (The Vilnius Dictionary [actually titled Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego, The Dictionary of the Polish Language], 1861, Vilna [Vilnius]), 116, 378, 397, 426–7, 534, 604, 605, 606, 625, 626 standard reference dictionary, Słownika je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of Polish Language, 1978–1981, Warsaw), 626 Thesaurus Polonolatinograecus (Polish-Latin-Greek Dictionary, 1621–1632, Cracow), 110

Index of Dictionaries

Uniwersalny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Universal Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2003, Warsaw), 641 Polish-Church Slavonic dictionary (1722), 156 Polish-French-German dictionary (1744–1782, Leipzig), 378 Polish-Latin-Latvian dictionary (1673), 194 Polsko-rossiiskii slovar / Słownik polsko-rossyyski (The Polish-Russian Dictionary, 1828–1830, Vilna [Vilnius]), 382 Praktyczny słownik współczesnej polszczyzny (The Practical Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1994–2005, Poznan), ´ 643, 711, 901, 950, 955 Prekmurjan (see Slovenian) first-ever dictionary (1922), 299 first periodical (20th century), 299 first printed book, catechism (1715, Halle), 299 Pˇríruˇcní slovník jazyka ˇceského (The Reference Dictionary of the Czech Language, 1935–1957, Prague), 515, 605–6, 762–3, 771, 784–5, 796, 879, 913, 933, 943 Romani, 327–35 -Czech dictionary (1991, Prague), 872 etymology, 216 first dictionary and grammar (1844–1845, Halle), 330 first periodical published in (1920s, Edirne), 330 first published text written in Romani (1755), 330 -Punjabi-English dictionary (1981, Patiala, Punjab), 328 Romani-German-English (1994, Wiesbaden), 334 Romani-Punjabi-English dictionary (1981, Patiala, Punjab), 328 Romanian, 201–17 authoritative dictionary (1955–1957, Bucharest), 625 Dic¸tionarul limbii române literare contemporane (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Romanian Language, 1955–1957, Bucharest), 625 etymology, 201

1137

first authoritative, two-volume dictionary (1871–1876), 211 first printed book (1544), 97 standardization of, 210 Russian, 158–64 authoritative Polsko-rossiiskii slovar / Słownik polsko-rossyyski (The Polish-Russian Dictionary, 1828–1830, Vilna [Vilnius]), 382 first book, 82 first translation of the Bible (1856), 163 Russkaia grammatika (Russian Grammar, 1831, St Petersburg), 160, 162 Russkoe pravopisane (Russian Grammar, 1885, St Petersburg), 163 Slovar Akademii Rossiiskoi (The Dictionary of the Russian Academy, 1789–1794, St Petersburg), 161 Slovar rossiisko-polskii, sochinennyi po slovariam Akademii Rossiiskoi / Słownik rossyysko -polski ułozony ˙ podług słowników Akademii rossyyskiej (The Russian-Polish Dictionary, Compiled in Accordance with the Russian Academy’s Dictionaries [of Russian], 1825–1828, Warsaw), 382 Slovar sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Literary Russian Language, 1950–1965, Moscow), 164 Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (The Explanatory Dictionary of the Contemporary Great Russian Language, 1863–1866, Moscow), 162 Russian-Jewish (see Yiddish) dictionary (1984), 315 Russian-Jewish (Yiddish) dictionary, 315 Russian-Magyar dictionary (1881), 745 Russian-‘New Jewish’ (see Yiddish) dictionary in 1909, 313 Russian-Polish, 382, 385 Russian-Ukrainian dictionary (1924–1933, Kyiv), 178 Ruthenian (official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) Church Slavonic-Ruthenian dictionary (1596, Wilno [Vilnius]), 154 Church Slavonic-Ruthenian dictionary (1627, Kijów [Kyiv]), 154

1138 Index of Dictionaries

Ruthenian (Rusyn)-German dictionary (1886), 176 Šariš (see Slovak, Eastern)-Slovak dictionary, compiled (2000–2006, Prešov), 822 Serbian, 224, 227, 235 first authoritative grammar (1899), 226 first printed book (1761), 82 first printshop (1831), 223 first newspaper (1834), 223 first primer (Montenegro, 1836), 353 Serbo-Croatian, 217–40 Sieben-Sprachen-Wörterbuch (Dictionary of Seven Languages [German-Polish-Russian-White Ruthenian-Lithuanian-LatvianYiddish], 1918, Leipzig), 313 Silesian dialect (of German) dictionary of (Schlesisches Wörterbuch, 1962–1965), 406 Silva quadrilinguis (The Forest of Four Languages, 1598, Prague), 101 Slavic (see Croatian), 222 etymology, 197 Grammatica slavica (The Slavic Grammar, 1790), 134, 533 Vergleichende slavische Grammatik (Comparative Slavic Grammar, 1924), 520 Slovak Etymologický slovník jazyka ˇceského a slovenského (The Etymological Dictionary of the Czech and Slovak Languages, 1957, Prague), 627, 763, 786, 878, 945 first-ever authoritative dictionary of Slovak (Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského, The Dictionary of the Written Slovak Language, 1946–1949, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 625, 763–64, 777 Historický slovník slovenského jazyka (The Historical Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1991–, Bratislava), 763, 899, 948 Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka (The Short Dictionary of the Slovak Language, 1987, Bratislava), 881, 899 Slovenský nauˇcný slovník. Priruˇcná encyklopedia vedomostí v troch dieloch

(The Slovak Scientific Dictionary, 1932, Bratislava and Prague), 514, 849 Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci (The Slovak Dictionary With Words Taken From Literary Works and Dialects, 1924, Banská Bystrica), 564 Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of Slovak Language, 1959–1968, Bratislava), 138, 534, 625, 778, 879–81, 899–900, 913, 943 Slovník slovenský a mad’arský dl’a Josefa Loosa (The Dictionary of the Slovak and Magyar Languages Compiled in Accordance with the Principles of Jozef Loos’s Dictionary, 1906, Budapest), 564, 846–7 ˇ Slowá´r Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoˇ NemeckoUherskí seu Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-LatinoGermanico-Ungaricum (The Slovak Dictionary: Czech-Latin-German-Magyar, 1825–1827, Buda), 134, 534, 911 Slovník slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský (The Slovak-Czech and Czech-Slovak Dictionary, 1896, Rózsahegy [Ružomberok]), 564 Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského (The Dictionary of the Written Slovak Language, 1946–1949, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 777, 877–9, 878, 879, 943 Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Slovak Language, 2006–, Bratislava), 643, 797, 900, 901, 943, 950, 955 Slovak-Czech, 861–83 dictionaries, 564, 565, 780, 795, 847, 850, 882, 898, 944 extensive one-volume Slovak-Czech dictionary (Slovensko-ˇceský slovník, 1967, Prague), 780, 944 monolingual dictionaries published in interwar Czechoslovakia, 563 Reference Czech-Slovak and Slovak-Czech Dictionary (1919, Prague), 847 Slovník slovensko-ˇceský a ˇcesko-slovenský (The Slovak-Czech and

Index of Dictionaries

Czech-Slovak Dictionary, 1896, Rózsahegy [Ružomberok]), 564, 565, 780, 847, 882, 898, 944 Slovak-Magyar Lekársky slovník (Medical Dictionary, 1920, Brno), 566 Slovak/Slavic Dictionary: Czech/Bohemian-Latin-GermanHungarian (1825–1827, Buda), 534 Slovar Akademii Rossiiskoi (Dictionary of the Russian Academy [of Sciences], 1789–1794, St Petersburg), 161 Slovenian-German dictionary (1894–1895), 296 Slovenian (Slavic), 293, 298 dictionary, based on Kajkavian Croatian (1670, Graz), 293 Slovenský nauˇcný slovník. Priruˇcná encyklopedia vedomostí v troch dieloch (The Slovak Scientific Dictionary, 1932, Bratislava and Prague), 514, 849 Slovenský slovník z literatúry aj náreˇci (The Slovak Dictionary With Words Taken From Literary Works and Dialects, 1924, Banská Bystrica), 564 Slovník slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of Slovak Language, 1959–1968, Bratislava), 138, 534, 625, 778, 879–81, 899–900, 913, 943 Slovník slovenský a mad’arský dl’a Josefa Loosa (The Dictionary of the Slovak and Magyar Languages Compiled in Accordance with the Principles of Jozef Loos’s Dictionary, 1906, Budapest), 564, 846–7 Slovník spisovného jazyka ˇceského (The Dictionary of the Written Czech Language, 1957–1971, Prague), 625, 785, 796, 943 Slovník spisovného jazyka slovenského (The Dictionary of the Written Slovak Language, 1946–1949, Turˇciansky Svätý Martin), 777, 877–9, 878, 879, 943 Slovník staroˇceský (The Dictionary of Old Czech, 1903–1916, Prague), 517, 627, 763, 786, 917, 933, 947 Slovník súˇcasného slovenského jazyka (The Dictionary of the Contemporary Slovak Language, 2006–, Bratislava), 643, 797, 900–1, 943, 950, 955

1139

Slovnyk moskovsko-ukrains’kyi (The Muscovian-Ukrainian dictionary, 1918, Kyiv), 177 ˇ Slowá´r Slowenski Cesko-Lat’inskoˇ Nemecko-Uherskí, seu Lexicon Slavicum Bohemico-Latino-Germanico-Ungaricum (The Slovak/Slavic Dictionary: Czech/Bohemian-LatinGerman-Hungarian, 1825–1827, Buda), 134, 534, 911 Słownik dokładny je˛zyka polskiego i niemieckiego / Vollständiges polnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch (The Exact Dictionary of the Polish and German Languages, 1806, Breslau [Wrocław]), 379 Słownik etymologiczny je˛zyka polskiego (The Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2005, Cracow), 605, 626–7, 643, 763, 918 Słownik gwar polskich (The Dictionary of the Polish Dialects, 1900–1911, Cracow), 405, 461, 505, 517, 561, 606, 626, 650, 670, 917, 961 Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1861, Vilna [Vilnius] 1861), 426–7, 626 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1900–1927, Warsaw), 397, 415, 427–8, 461, 604–6, 913, 932 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1938–1939, Warsaw), 604–5, 932–3 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1958–1969, Warsaw), 625, 628, 640, 643, 943 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, 1978–1981, Warsaw), 626, 640 Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego podług Lindego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language, Compiled in Accordance with Linde’s [Dictionary], 1866, Berlin), 426 Słownik je˛zyka polskiego XVI wieku (The Dictionary of the 16th-Century Polish Language, 1966–, Wrocław), 627 Słownik ortoepiczny (The Dictionary of Correct Writing, 1937, Warsaw), 623, 682

1140 Index of Dictionaries

Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (The Dictionary of Correct Polish, 1973, Warsaw), 625–6, 640, 641 Słownik staropolski (The Dictionary of Old Polish, 1953–2002, Warsaw), 517, 627, 763, 947 Słownik wilenski ´ (The Vilnius Dictionary [actually titled Słownik Je˛zyka Polskiego, The Dictionary of the Polish Language], 1861, Vilna [Vilnius]), 116, 378, 397, 426–7, 534, 604, 605, 606, 625, 626 Slownjk ˇcesko-nˇemecký (The Czech-German Dictionary, 1835–1839, Prague), 107, 117, 348, 493, 534, 536, 762–3, 796, 906, 911, 913, 917, 933 Sorbian-German dictionary (1911–1928, St Petersburg and Prague), 304, 306 Staroˇceský slovník (The Dictionary of Old Czech, 1968–, Prague), 517, 786 Struˇcný slovník etymologický jazyka ˇceskoslovenského (The Short Etymological Dictionary of the Czechoslovak Language, 1933, Prague), 605–6, 785, 945 Technisches Wörterbuch/Słownik techniczny (The German-Polish Technical Dictionary, 1913), 405, 607 Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum, Oder Teutscher Sprachsatz, Der (The Genealogical Tree of the German Language, or the German Vocabulary, 1691, Nuremberg), 83 Thesaurus Polonolatinograecus (Polish-Latin-Greek Dictionary, 1621–1632, Cracow), 110 Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Explanatory Dictionary of the Contemporary Great Russian Language, 1863–1866, Moscow), 162

Ukrainian, 166, 178 Universala Vortaro (Universal Dictionary [of Esperanto], 1891, Warsaw), 337 Uniwersalny słownik je˛zyka polskiego (The Universal Dictionary of the Polish Language, 2003, Warsaw), 641 Úplný n ˇ emeckoˇceský slovník (Complete German-Bohemian Dictionary, 1843–1847, Prague), 494 Upper Sorbian-German dictionaries, 304–6 Upper Sorbian-Russian dictionary (1954–1974), 306 Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuchs der Hochdeutschen Mundart (An Attempt at the Full Grammatical-Critical Dictionary of the High German Dialect, 1774–1786, Leipzig), 83–4, 378, 397 Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (The Dictionary of Accademia della Crusca, 1612, Venice), 82 Walachian (see Romanian)-Latin-MagyarGerman first authoritative (1825, Buda), 207 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1966, Chicago), 316 White Russian (see Belarusian), 409 significant dictionaries of dialect (nareche) (1845 and 1870), 171 Yiddish, 311–16 etymology, 311 first printed book (1534, Cracow), 312 first newspaper, 312 Yiddish-Belarusian dictionary (1932), 314 Yiddish-English dictionary (1968), 315 Yiddish-Russian dictionaries (1876 and 1940), 313, 314