The Kingdom of Hungary instituted the civil registry of births, marriages, and deaths in 1894. While the new institution was both eulogized and criticized as a major step in the separation of church and state and toward the creation of a modern, secular Hungary, it also opened up a new path for nation building. In this exceedingly multilingual and multinational country, churches often acted as proxies of cultural and political institutions for the national minorities. In the present article, I examine the specifically nation-building aspects embodied in the new regulation for the official use of first names that accompanied Act XXXIII of 1894 on the civil registry, and focus particularly on Romanian first names. Due to their considerable mismatch with Hungarian first names, Romanian names posed a special challenge to policy makers, and for this reason they demonstrate some less obvious dimensions of the changes instituted in 1894. The geographic parameters of this investigation have been imposed by the spatial framework of a wider research project on the interconnections among language, nationalism, and social change in the eastern part of Dualist Hungary, a territory encompassing Transylvania, the easternmost counties of contemporary Hungary proper (according to the administrative division created in 1876), and the eastern two-thirds of the Banat.Footnote ¹ This framework enables me to make comparisons with other ethnolinguistic groups, notably Transylvanian Saxons and the Catholic Germans of the Banat.

During the second half of its existence, Dualist Hungary engaged in various policies meant to assert Magyar cultural dominance by adjusting dissonant names in its territory and among its citizens to its linguistic self-image. Among these measures, an 1898 law on locality names, along with the government's endorsement of a movement to Magyarize family names, sparked especially bitter conflicts between the Magyar and minority political and social elites. The 1898 law, which prompted Transylvanian Saxon MPs to leave the governing party in protest, became the central topic of a monograph in Hungarian—one that, however, treated place-name changes from a purely formal, descriptive viewpoint.Footnote ² Family-name Magyarizations have in the past decades grown into an established field of research in Hungary, with research agendas grounded in sociocultural history, although little is known, for example, about the ways that Hungarian family names were enforced on civil servants in the Dualist Period.Footnote ³

The codification of a Hungarian first-name regime, in contrast, has hardly received any serious attention in the historical literature, something that has been by and large true for the codification of first-name regimes in general. To be sure, the subject became truly relevant only with the emergence of the nation-state, whereas earlier interventions in parents' choices about naming their babies were rare and often followed a different logic. Until the modern era, name giving fell under the authority of the church, through the institution of baptism. However, the slow replacement of Germanic with Christian names in Western Europe during the high and late medieval period did not result from a consistent church policy, and only after the Council of Trent did the Catholic Church restrict the pool of baptismal names to the names of canonized saints.Footnote ⁴ By that time, Calvin and his fellow pastors in reformed Geneva had forbidden and even tried to uproot names that they associated with the papal faith, either because they were unbiblical (Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar) or else because they were linked to popular local saints (Claude, Martin).Footnote ⁵

Absolutist rulers sometimes curtailed the right of specific groups to name their babies. Joseph II of Austria, for example, planned to introduce a ban on specifically Jewish names to promote the enforced integration of Jews, whereas the Prussian king Frederick William III tried to achieve the exact opposite, perpetuating Jews' social exclusion by limiting their choice to specifically Jewish names.Footnote ⁶ Finally, the first modern baby-naming trend of secular, although still nonnationalist inspiration, the French revolutionary taste for ancient Roman and Greek names, found a formal recognition in Napoléon's law dated 11 Germinal year XI (1 April 1803), which opened up the list of eligible names to names of ancient historical figures.Footnote ⁷

Once the state took over population registers from the churches, a move that in most Roman Catholic areas also inaugurated the usage of the national standard language instead of Latin, the state apparatus started to make implicit or explicit decisions about the official usage of specific name forms.Footnote ⁸ This was a novelty compared to the examples cited in the preceding paragraphs, where the selection took place between different names and not among variants of the same names. Wherever the state-nation project was not contested by successful rival nationalisms, the general trend reduced variety and favored standard, accepted forms of first names at the expense of sundry regional and local variants, which, at least among the peasantry, remained very much alive during the nineteenth century. The work of registrars was abetted here by the universalization of literacy and the growing number of required personal documents. The ideal was a national inventory of names with few alternative forms and a size that could be memorized, something that was given a physical manifestation in the ubiquitous calendars and in baby-naming books, a genre that became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹ Such first-name inventories reinforced the symbolic boundaries of the nation, the community of those who wear one of “our” names.Footnote ¹⁰ Interchangeability disappeared between cognate names in the same system, and in the last resort, the possibility of conversion between equivalents across languages was also greatly diminished.

Wherever the borders of states and nations did not overlap, that added a further dimension to this state of affairs, one of willful discrimination against the forms used by linguistic minorities. The repressive Polenpolitik in the Prussian provinces of Posen and West Prussia, often quoted approvingly by hawkish Magyar commentators on contemporary Hungary's “nationalities question,” established provisions similar to those the Hungarian government would impose. A Prussian ministerial decree connected to the 1875 imperial law on the civil registry ordered that children of Polish-speaking parents must be registered with German equivalents of their first names.Footnote ¹¹ In contrast to the Hungarian regulation, however, the Prussian practice made a sharp distinction between people born before and after the introduction of the civil registry in 1875. For the older generations, forms found in the parish registers were treated as official, which lead to the mildly anachronistic effect that many Polish-speaking Catholics officially bore Latin first names.Footnote ¹²

In the German-speaking parts of Alsace-Lorraine/Elsaß-Lothringen, a regional policy specifically targeted the “nationally alienated” and especially urban population of the new German province, who were oriented toward French cultural models and developed a fashion for French name variants. Imperial German officials thus enforced an informal ban on these variants in the civil registry. French names were not considered a threat elsewhere in Germany, where children could be freely registered with names like Louis and Marie, but only Ludwig and Maria were thought admissible in Alsace-Lorraine. The pioneering sociolinguist Paul Lévy was himself entered into the registry as Paulus, from the registrar's fear that a higher authority might find Paul too French.Footnote ¹³

The cause of names lent itself to political use in turn-of-the-century Ireland after Irish nationalists enthusiastically embraced Gaelic and where British officials had, among other things, consistently replaced the popular Irish versions of Christian names with their English versions in the civil registry.Footnote ¹⁴ The Gaelic League's call to use Irish name forms triggered a sharp response from the British authorities, peaking in the cause célèbre of the nationalist activist Pádraic Mac Piarais / Patrick Pearse, who lost a case before the appellate court after being fined for painting his Irish name on his cart.Footnote ¹⁵

Out of fifteen million Hungarian citizens in 1890, roughly half, seven and a half million, were native speakers of languages other than Hungarian, making the country unique in this respect among European states pursuing nation-building policies. Moreover, discrete linguistic differences separated Hungarian from its minority languages, which therefore under no condition could be claimed to constitute its dialects. In the eastern counties of the kingdom that are the object of my research, around 53 percent of the population were native speakers of Romanian, 30 percent of Hungarian, and 10 percent of German, and the vast majority were peasants. Since differences in language use tended to converge with confessional belonging and often also with historic status distinctions, pronounced ethnic boundaries predated the rise of nationalisms in the area. They were reinforced by the prevailing monolingualism of the people, in spite of the large contact zones among the various mother-tongue groups. Ethnic Romanians' reported knowledge of Hungarian was particularly low (only seven percent of native Romanians in the Kingdom of Hungary claimed knowledge of Hungarian in the 1890 census),Footnote ¹⁶ a phenomenon the government's repeated measures imposing the teaching of the Hungarian language on minority primary schools could barely change.

Ethnic churches acted as the major carriers and promoters of nationalist ideas for the Romanian, Magyar, and Transylvanian Saxon peasantry. Among the main forces encouraging the nationalization of the masses were the attraction held by the newly formed kin states (Romania and Serbia); the memories of the civil war of 1848–49, which had pitted peasants against each other along ethnic lines; and the daily conflicts with the ethnically Magyar state officials and landowners. Moreover, the overall low level of social mobility and the limited possibility of political participation reinforced the forces of conservation. A narrow franchise combined with systematic electoral malpractice and Transylvanian Romanian politicians' electoral boycott to secure most constituencies for the ruling Hungarian Liberal Party, to entrench the Magyar gentry and its allies in the leadership of counties, and to limit Romanian nationalists' range of actions in the Hungarian political sphere to public declarations of protest. With the exception of the Catholic People's Party, which grew out of the debates over the laws on civil marriage and registry, major Magyar parties were in the 1890s aligned in their support behind the state's symbolic Magyarizing policies. Indeed the Kossuthites (Independentists) and the “national” oppositions usually struck a more radical tone, demanded a tougher line and accused the Liberal government of indecision and give-and-take.

A firm tradition among the social and cultural elites of Dualist Hungary treated non-Hungarian first names with known Hungarian cognates, that is, names pointing back to the same biblical or early Christian figures, as translatable.Footnote ¹⁷ This translatability ultimately sprang from earlier diglossia in Latin and corresponded to similar norms in the rest of Europe. Translation could take four directions in the public sphere. The Romanian press in Hungary usually referred to notable Magyars by Romanian or Romanianized first names.Footnote ¹⁸ In the same way, the Hungarian press regularly Magyarized the first names of prominent ethnic Romanians and, maybe a touch less consistently, those of the lower classes.Footnote ¹⁹ By default, educated Romanians and Saxons readily used the Hungarian counterparts of their first names in Hungarian speech or writing.Footnote ²⁰ On turn-of-the-century photographs, shop signs are sometimes seen displaying the shopkeepers' names in multiple versions. There is also some evidence that Magyar politicians, public intellectuals, or entrepreneurs, on the rare occasions when they signed or put their names in a Romanian text, were not above referring to themselves by Romanian first names.Footnote ²¹ They also proceeded similarly when writing in German. Indeed, until surprisingly late, translating first names was standard fare in major Western languages, and a historical monograph in English published as late as 1984 by a prestigious academic press rendered the names of its figures in forms such as “Alexander Cuza” and “Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatiev.”Footnote ²²

Beyond their easygoing attitude toward the translation of first names in the private sphere and in civil society, members of the minority nationalist intelligentsias seldom challenged the official practice of using the Hungarian forms of first names before this practice became compulsorily enforced on the entire population, thus systematically affecting the peasants whom they regarded as their ethnic constituents in their national communities. Even after the Hungarian state politicized the question of first names, that did not immediately transform the personal habits of the ethnic middle classes. In the case of Romanian nationalists, this practice contrasted dramatically with their increasingly frequent complaints over the common Hungarian spelling of Romanian family names in official documents.

The nonelite, in contrast, did not usually regard first names as translatable. It is not that peasants crossing ethnic borders necessarily used different strategies of self-presentation from the elite, but a Magyar peasant called Jancsi likely remained Jancsi (Ioanci) rather than becoming Iuon in his contact with Romanian speakers or after settling in a Romanian-speaking environment, and vice versa for a Romanian peasant. Moreover, the bulk of average Romanians, living in largely Romanian monolingual areas, not only spoke neither Hungarian nor German and had relatively little general experience in crossing languages, but they also had at best a patchy knowledge of the Hungarian or German first-name corpus. Symptomatically, the only set of written records that I have come across from the period where given names could have been translated but were consistently written out in their original forms emanated not from critical social-democratic or radical circles but from the traditional artisanate, and it probably transmitted a plebeian sense of limited translatability. The two parallel, German and Hungarian versions of the records of the Brassó/Brașov/Kronstadt bootmakers' guild, conducted between 1871 and 1884, referred to master bootmakers from the other linguistic group under their native names, preserving not only the mother-tongue forms but the name order as well; thus, “Friedrich Reich” was the regular form for German bootmakers in the Hungarian version and “Konya Balázs” for Magyars in the German one.Footnote ²³

It is important to point out here that the interchangeability between what today's observer would see as different variants of the same name was also often limited in the world of the village. Ilona and Elena could be the names of two sisters, just as well as Maria and Mari ș ca.Footnote ²⁴ Ionu ț, Ionel, Ioni ț ă, Nu ț, Onișcă and Iană ș, all hypocoristics of Ioan/Iuon/Ion, could behave as functionally different names, individuating their bearers within a given community.Footnote ²⁵ It also attests to this trend that after the establishment of the civil registry, parents often tried to give hypocoristic forms to their children in front of the registrars. Romanian (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) priests, who had kept the registers until 1894, had the necessary expertise to introduce a more normative form in such cases. Since they had not recorded births and marriages with any consistency before the end of the eighteenth century, Romanian priests' onomastic control was neither very old, nor could it become too coordinated. There is no evidence that their flock resented it, not only because it was not coercive, but also because Romanian peasants felt their ethnic churches incomparably closer to themselves culturally than the state.

Before 1894, non-Magyar citizens' names appeared in a variety of ways in documents produced by the state and county authorities, the local governments, and the judiciary. As most personal documents were not based on birth certificates, it could happen that the same person bearing a first name with several corresponding Hungarian variants had it recorded differently in his trade license, tax booklet, passport, and on the electoral rolls. There was no uniformity or consistency either between the practice of various authorities or within the same authority longitudinally, sometimes not even in the same document. An order by a district judge in Ilia/Marosillye, dated 5 July 1906, refers to the same person first as Mártin and then as Márton. Footnote ²⁶

In Hungarian official usage, first names were either left in their native forms (nearly always if no obvious equivalent was available in Hungarian) or translated, but the name order regularly followed the Hungarian custom: family name first, given name second. A rough estimation about how widespread these alternative methods were can be made based on the registry books of the Ministry of the Interior. The hundreds of Romanian names contained in these registry books for each year are written in diverse forms, which likely reflects the diversity of the authorities that forwarded the files to the ministry. At least in the years preceding the regulation, it was clearly the “family name + native given name” pattern that appeared most often, with both elements transcribed according to Hungarian spelling.

Although non-Magyar town or county officials were more likely to write native forms, zealous champions of Magyarization might try to stamp them out from bureaucratic practice in their particular sphere of influence. In 1882, as the prefect (főispán) of Szolnok-Doboka County, the later prime minister Dezső Bánffy ordered non-Hungarian first names to be translated in all official documents.Footnote ²⁷ Some district administrators (főszolgabíró) put pressure on local governments to use the Hungarian variants in their records, claiming that they “would not understand them” otherwise.Footnote ²⁸ As early as 1894, the Lugoj/Lugosch/Lugos-based lawyer Nicolae Proșteanu protested against those authorities that had Magyarized first names in cadastral map transcripts, and had done so in such an arbitrary fashion that the Romanian Achim had been replaced by the unrelated Hungarian name Ákos.Footnote ²⁹

With Act XXXIII of 1894, however, the state took over from the churches the keeping of registers of births, marriages, and deaths. This measure was hotly debated in the Hungarian press and was widely interpreted as challenging the secular power of churches.Footnote ³⁰ The law also included measures that served as nationalist sugar coating for an anticlerical pill. The governing Liberal Party tried to deploy the full Magyarizing potential inherent in the new institution of a state civil registry. Although the law enacting the new system did not explicitly prescribe how the first names of newborn children, newlywed couples, and of the dead should be introduced in the registers, section 20 declared Hungarian to be the language of registers, and from this passage in the law, decrees by the minister of the interior presumed an obligation to display all names in their “Hungarian-sounding” (magyaros) forms. “Foreign” (i.e., native) names could appear only upon request and in parentheses.Footnote ³¹ Registrars were also called upon to make sure that the names parents reported for their babies were the same they were given in church baptisms.Footnote ³²

Preparations for the law started as early as the late 1880s. In order to establish the proper Hungarian equivalents for non-Hungarian names, the Ministry of the Interior asked prefects to draw up lists of all first names current in their counties. Prefects would in turn forward this request to village or circle secretaries (községi jegyzők and közjegyzők), the only professional bureaucrats in rural local governments. Nominated by the county administration and elected for life, those serving in these posts were increasingly Magyars, even in non-Magyar villages, and often acted as local representatives of Hungarian state nationalism. In most places after 1894, they would also be invested with the new duties of registrar.

Only seven prefects returned lists of names, collected by village secretaries subordinated to them, during 1889 and 1890. Significantly, three of these came from counties with Romanian majorities, another three from counties with substantial Romanian minority populations, and only one from Slovak-speaking parts of Upper Hungary.Footnote ³³ The ministry then entrusted the Hungarian Academy with compiling an equivalence list for the names thus collected. The resulting printed brochure, the work of a team of four, listed the first names in use among the minorities alongside their Hungarian counterparts, sometimes more than one. German first names were rendered in their German spellings, whereas Romanian first names were reported in an (attempted) phonetic Hungarian transcription. To help state registrars who were often at a loss in linking diminutive forms to their roots, the brochure contained a variety of hypocoristics. Still, the catalog of Romanian first names was less than exhaustive. It was sent out to all registrars and to other official organs, first in 1893 and later in two amended and extended versions.Footnote ³⁴

As was usual with measures that reduced the scope for minority languages, the Hungarian government also offered an alternative interpretation of its intent from that of Magyarization, adducing practical grounds for the introduction of an official first-name regime. As was also usual, government officials appealed to the alleged demands of a modern, efficient bureaucracy. They argued that it added an excessive burden on officials, unfamiliar with the language and names of the people they administered, to find their ways through a thicket of strange diminutives in order to establish the identity of a person. In some cases, even a person's gender was hard to ascertain!

In a “decision of theoretical importance” from 1905, the minister of the interior also put forward the slightly spurious reasoning that the usage of Hungarian first names in Hungarian documents was just a routine part of translation, and that it ensued from the status of Hungarian as the official state language:

In fact, the part of the regulation that affected non-Magyar first names takes on its full significance when it is seen in the fin-de-siècle climate of nationalist frenzy that pervaded the Magyar urban middle classes, who demanded ever harsher measures toward the national minorities. Thus it fit in among a series of new policies enacted in the years leading up to and following the millennium of 1896: the regulation of confessional-school teachers' salaries, construction of Hungarian state schools in massively minority-majority areas, forcible Magyarization of lower-rank public employees' family names, and a systematic renaming of localities.Footnote ³⁶ These measures supplemented a more protracted, powerful self-Magyarizing social movement among middle-class groups of German, Jewish, and Slavic extraction, and were meant to “repaint the surface,” that is, to represent the (partly existing, partly wished-for) Magyar cultural hegemony in the eyes of citizens and noncitizens alike, by cramming visible and legitimate spaces with linguistic signs anchored in Hungarian. Moreover, according to the optimistic vision of the Magyarizing discourse of the era, Hungarian first names would help Hungarian culture to assert itself by developing an affectionate bond to the state language among the names' reluctant bearers, thus making them better disposed toward learning Hungarian. Or, short of that, their new names would at least make them bow to Magyar cultural sovereignty. In the words of the Independentist daily Egyetértés: “Finally, Wallachian litigants will learn the way they are called in Hungarian from the writs, summonses, and sentences.”Footnote ³⁷

Soon after the new state registrars stepped into office, they started to besiege the ministry with complaints about the many names that parents were choosing for their children that were not listed in the official publication. Acting upon a circular from the Ministry of the Interior in 1896, registrars working in minority areas sent up new lists of names to the academy. The academician authors, however, refused to consider these new names in earnest, pointing out that they were either hypocoristic forms or untranslatable to Hungarian. The language they used to dismiss these new lists is worth quoting, as it relates to expectations that were apparently widespread among public servants: ”[some registrars] misinterpret the goal of the list, presuming that the government or the academy, or both, want to extirpate … the names … that the minorities have freely used so far and want to replace them with Hungarian-sounding names yet to be created.”Footnote ³⁸ On the basis of this expert opinion, the minister now made an exception for first names without ascertainable Hungarian equivalents, which could thereafter stand in their native forms in the registers. However, state registrars should not let themselves fooled by parents and accept as a name what was really just a hypocoristic variant, and it fell upon them to determine whether the requested forms belonged to a name with an established Hungarian equivalent.Footnote ³⁹

The law included the following ominous, equivocal passage (section 44): “No one can bear a family or first name different from the ones entered in his birth certificate.” This clause was neither meant nor interpreted as a general ban on the non-Hungarian forms of first names, but referred to cases where people assumed a false identity or would inadvertently mislead the authorities by taking on an altogether different name. The regulations left untouched the private sphere, not to mention the written practice of the non-Hungarian press and of non-Magyar institutions (with the exception of schools, as we shall immediately see).

One truly paradoxical aspect of the law was that it regulated only the official first names of those born or married after it came into effect, but contained no provision regarding the rest of the population. Though the regulation was ambiguous, it clearly emerges from the sources that the Budapest government in fact aimed at replacing native names in the short run, across the age pyramid and in the entire official realm. Indicative in this regard is the letter that the Ministry of the Interior sent out to state organs in preparation of the law: it has come to the minister's attention, the letter reads, that in certain regions, documents issued by the administration contain “foreign-sounding” first names or names that “correspond to the local idiom,” instead of to the appropriate Hungarian forms. One version of the letter explicitly mentioned that too many Romanian names turned up in official texts.Footnote ⁴⁰ The minister stressed that “this widespread improper practice has no justification whatsoever.”Footnote ⁴¹ His judgment fits oddly with the ministry's similarly incongruous handling of non-Hungarian first names in its registry books, to which I referred above. Beyond such indirect commands, the circulation of the brochure to all state and county offices was itself meant to drive it home to civil servants that the government wished to expand the usage of Hungarian names to the entire citizenry. Later on, several decrees were issued that circumscribed the sphere in which non-Hungarian name forms could officially appear, irrespective of whether their bearers were born after or before 1894. Hungarian first names became officially binding in lists of conscripts for the Honvéd Army after 1896 and in the land registers after 1910, whose keeping also pertained to the duties of village secretaries.Footnote ⁴² In 1902, the chair of the Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg high court of appeal ordered all subordinate courts to use the Hungarian versions of first names in all their registers and when addressing the parties, witnesses, and forensic experts in the courtroom.Footnote ⁴³

Measures were also taken to inculcate the official, Hungarian names in the minds of new generations. The 1908 curriculum for non-Hungarian primary schools (the majority of Romanian and Transylvanian Saxon pupils attended mother-tongue schools) instructed teachers to acquaint children of six to seven years of age with their Hungarian names in and outside of Hungarian classes, and starting with the 1908–9 school year, pupils' names had to be put in the class registers using the Hungarian equivalents and the family name plus given name order.Footnote ⁴⁴ A manual of methodology advised non-Magyar trainee teachers to start familiarizing children with their Hungarian names already on the day of enrollment, when they came to school with their mother or father:

Later, children were to be made to practice their names for a few half-hours during Hungarian classes, and teachers were encouraged to call them by their Hungarian names well into the first year, whenever they addressed them.Footnote ⁴⁶ In practice, however, all this was likely no more than the desires of Magyar educationalists. Non-Magyar teachers might have agreed that it was useful for children to know their official first names, but it is rather unlikely that many of them would have followed their textbook instructions so excessively. At the same time, the usage of Hungarian names went without saying in schools with a Hungarian medium of instruction. As a consequence, awareness of them was probably higher among new generations of Banat Swabians,Footnote ⁴⁷ whose primary schools had been largely Magyarized by the turn of the century, although a local historian of Werschetz/Vršac/Versec remarked the following about Swabian children's last day in Hungarian school: “From this day forward, the students' names were no longer ‘János,’ but rather, ‘Hans,’ not ‘Károly,’ but rather, ‘Karl.’”Footnote ⁴⁸

How deeply did the principle of translating first names in fact permeate the official sphere before the outbreak of the Great War, when the first generation entered into the civil registry at birth had not yet turned twenty? The registry books of the Ministry of the Interior are no longer accessible for the respective period to gauge the extent of change in the practice of the executive branch.Footnote ⁴⁹ The weekly county bulletins, a new type of publication that in most counties had not existed before the turn of the century, systematically translated citizens' first names. These bulletins, however, at best reflected the practice of county administrative departments and not necessarily even that, since the chief clerks were Magyars in all counties by 1914, and they were more likely to guard over the enforcement of the spirit of regulations, at least in the public eye. Moreover, announcements issued by lower-level officials also disrupt the uniform picture presented by county bulletins. Many district administrators, police chiefs, and village secretaries, Magyars and non-Magyars alike, did not go the extra mile to look up the Hungarian equivalents, but rather followed the old custom and wrote Danilla, Átyim, Radu, Viorika, Tógyer, Costi, Filip, Barbu, Avram, and Toma instead of the Dániel, Joákim, Rudolf, Viola, Tódor, Szilárd, Fülöp, Bárb, Ábrahám, and Tamás expected from them.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, why would have they done otherwise? The new first-name regime might have simplified state administration, but it unnecessarily encumbered the work of local governments, where officials often themselves knew all residents by name. Even though the binomial mother-tongue names were seldom used in everyday village settings, they nevertheless could be relied upon with a fair degree of certainty to identify their bearers for covillagers, whereas one could not expect the local public to decode Hungarian given names. Thus if a village secretary put a bounty on a stray horse, it saved complications if he indicated the owner as Sztán Bukur rather than Sztán Vidor, even if the person in case was normally referred to in a vernacular form as, say, Bucur al lui Ionică al lui Moise Ș chiopu. Footnote ⁵¹ The surviving files of local and county archives provide ample evidence for the continuing official use of vernacular first names.

People who lived in localities with Romanian or German as an official language would indeed usually encounter their names in mother-tongue spelling (Bucur Stan or Stan Bucur) in documents issued by the local authorities. Although the percentage of such local governments had fallen since the first decades of the Dualist era, 20 percent of village secretaries in the eastern counties still declared Romanian nationality in 1910, and Transylvanian Saxon villages were typically administered by Saxon village secretaries.Footnote ⁵² There were also Magyars in these jobs who wrote documents related to strictly municipal tasks, as well as letters to the public, in Romanian or German. Ironically, it was probably in the corps of village secretaries, who usually also acted as state registrars, that most officials continued to write first names in their vernacular forms and mother-tongue spellings, even though they would grudgingly enter the Hungarian names in the registers.

Nonetheless, average villagers more often received notices from the state authorities than from the village secretary, who would rather send for them or go to their homes and talk to them in person. State agencies and courts sent out papers only in Hungarian, and they were also more likely to use the Hungarian equivalents of first names. And yet, the old ways were slow to die out even in this sphere, judging by no less prominent a document than a supreme court sentence from 1904 in a famous case of gendarmes shooting more than thirty Socialist demonstrators to death, which contained an untidy mixture of Romanian first names sometimes translated into Hungarian and sometimes left in their vernacular forms.Footnote ⁵³

In any case, documents carrying citizens' names multiplied rapidly as the administration expanded in leaps and bounds. For this reason, non-Magyar subjects of the Hungarian state had abundant opportunities to become confronted, time and again, with the labels by which the state deigned to recognize them and that they felt alien to themselves. Indeed, many Romanian peasants could hardly get their tongues around what had become their official first names. The assertion of state dominance was unmitigated here by shared nationalism, which in other parts of Europe bound subjects of diverse linguistic backgrounds to the state. Widespread illiteracy could perhaps, however, soften the intensity of such encounters. With wide differences regionally, between 15 and 50 percent of Romanians were reported as literate in 1910, whereas virtually all adult Transylvanian Saxons and the large majority of Catholic Germans knew how to read. As Hungarian nationalism left them indifferent at best, it is hard to imagine how Romanian peasants could have experienced the Hungarian names foisted on them as anything other than exotic, no matter how perfectly these matched their “real” names. They reacted with aversion to the very institution of a civil registry, as evidenced by their calling the state registrar “the Jewish pope, since he can marry unlawfully.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The term “Jewish pope” here also alluded to the increasing share of Jews among village secretaries-cum-registrars in Romanian-inhabited regions in the early twentieth century.

This is not, however, the whole story. Through the massive Magyarization of the German-speaking Christian and Jewish urban bourgeoisie, the rules of conversion between German and Hungarian forms of Christian names had gradually solidified. Indeed, the most popular names of pre-Christian German origin had also taken root in Hungarian.Footnote ⁵⁵ But no such linguistic assimilation involving Romanian speakers took place on a comparable scale, and a large group of Romanian first names remained untranslatable to Hungarian even in an elite context. To the group of untranslatable Romanian names belonged those saints of the Eastern-rite calendar who were either not venerated in the Western Church or had not become popular patron saints among Magyars. Many of these names were typically borne by monks as monastic names, but some of them enjoyed currency in the populace at large.

More critically, a new set of Latinate first names, which were par excellence carriers of nationalist imaginaries, had come into fashion in the 1840s with the original function of emphasizing the mythical Roman origins of Romanians. This trend had close parallels in the slightly earlier surge of pagan and historical names among Magyars and especially among Lutheran Germans, but it seems that the diffusion of similar “national” names was a staple ingredient of the nationalization process in the eastern half of the continent.Footnote ⁵⁶ Romanian Latinate first names referred back to Roman gentes, prænomina, common cognomina, Roman emperors, historical figures, mythical heroes, and Latin authors. Most of these first names, and the male ones especially, did not occur among Magyars. Their share steadily grew in upper-class families, and by the second half of the 1890s it stood around 50 percent among newborn sons of Hungary's Romanian elite.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the same time, the peasantry remained for a long time reluctant toward using them, and not simply on account of their novelty. Most peasant parents saw them as heathen and therefore improper for Christian children. After their rising popularity in the “trousered class,” they were also shunned as “lordish.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, lacking a patron saint and a feast day in the calendar, their majority were not anchored anywhere in the year, whereas peasants traditionally chose names on the basis of the child's day of birth.

It was this latter group of Latinate first names that would rankle Magyar village secretaries-cum-registrars the most. While Neolog Jews, Dualist Hungary's exemplary assimilationist ethnic group, consciously adjusted their first names to the latest trends among middle-class non-Jewish Magyars, Romanians continuously drifted away from any future shared corpus of names.Footnote ⁵⁹ Worse than this and flying in the face of culturally homogenizing policies and designs, Latinate names were also the symbols of a separate national identity. This connotation was not lost on Magyar political writers, who typically exaggerated the prevalence of Latinate names if they wished to strike a pessimistic tone about the prospects of large-scale voluntary assimilation. Independentist politician Miklós Bartha's assessment of their political significance gives voice to a common sentiment: “These Coriolans, Gracchuses, Traians, Suetoniuses, and Brutuses would be much more honest and reliable people if they were still called Dumitru, Găvrilă, Niculae, and Gligor.”Footnote ⁶⁰

For all the distaste and scorn they provoked from Magyar nationalist ultras, the Hungarian state could not place a ban on Latinate names, if for no other reason that it would have meant an unlawful and undue breach of church autonomy. But the many Hungarian place-names coined after 1898, especially for Upper Hungary and the Banat, demonstrate that fabricating new Hungarian equivalents for Romanian first names that had none would have also been a viable option. For instance, they could have matched Romanian Traian with Tarján, the name of a pagan Magyar tribe preserved in Hungarian place-names, or Tiberiu with Tibor, one of the archaizing first names coined in the romantic period, in the same way as learned tradition had already matched Hungarian Jenő with Eugenius and Gyula with Iulius. Eventually it was not the prestige of Latin in itself but the views of the academicians involved in the process that prevented this scenario, as testified by the correspondence between the academy and the Ministry of the Interior.

The Romanian component of the official list of equivalents was largely the work of György/Gheorghe Joannovics, Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy and chair of its Linguistics Committee.Footnote ⁶¹ He was entrusted by the institution with heading the original team of authors, and he took on himself the task of establishing Hungarian equivalents for Romanian names. In the second, 1909 edition of the list, he was replaced in this role by Szilárd Sulica/Constantin Sulică. This new edition, however, brought few changes to Romanian names, the most important addition being two new Hungarian equivalents, László and Vászoly, for the widespread Romanian first name Vasile.

Born to a landowning Orthodox merchant family in the Banat, of Aromanian descent, German culture, and Hungarian political sympathies, György Joannovics spent four years in prison for his activity during the 1848–49 revolution on the side of the revolutionary Hungarian government and served as secretary of state under Minister of Education József Eötvös after 1867.Footnote ⁶² No doubt could be cast upon his Hungarian nationalist credentials, but being representative of an older, more tolerant generation, he was not as averse to non-Magyar cultural life in Hungary as were many of his younger colleagues. However, his linguistic interests were confined to Hungarian (his main field of research was Hungarian word order), and he never dealt with Romanian-related topics in a scholarly manner.

More important, he set forth his views on Hungarian language planning in two lectures presented at the academy. In their organicist understanding of linguistic development, which ruled out deliberate intervention from above, these lectures bore resemblance to the radical vernacularist ideology of the Magyar Nyelvőr, an influential periodical to which he frequently contributed.Footnote ⁶³ In particular, he found the Hungarian language reform of the first half of the century guilty of confusing the logic of Hungarian, and he marked out corrupt linguistic coinages for purging. The yardsticks he used were alleged “laws” of word formation, which he boldly extracted from earlier layers of the Hungarian vocabulary. This work of cleansing he certainly considered to be a necessary evil, since he was no friend to linguistic engineering and would have preferred to leave it to the spirit of language, working unadulterated in the simple folk, spontaneously to bring about linguistic change.Footnote ⁶⁴

One cannot help but see a connection between Joannovics's theoretically grounded resistance to neologisms and his prudence in establishing Hungarian equivalents for minority first names. His purism of the organicist type kept him from satisfying some of the tacit expectations of Hungarian nationalists. In their letter written to the Ministry of the Interior during the first round of the process, he and his colleague, the Slavicist Oszkár Asbóth, made it clear that they had not undertaken to create new Hungarian forms, even though the method of “translating” classical names had been in vogue in Hungarian throughout the nineteenth century and had given birth to names like Angyalka from Angelica, Aranka from Aurelia, Hajnalka from Aurora, Bódog from Felix, Győző from Victor, Szilárd from Constantinus, and Vidor from Hilarius. They did not even consider the matching of Latinate Romanian or pre-Christian German first names with similar-sounding pagan Hungarian ones, to be recovered from historical sources or place-names. They pointed out that whenever they had not found a proper Hungarian equivalent, they had left the minority first name unchanged.Footnote ⁶⁵ Joannovics could only repeat this principle when the ministry approached him once again in 1896.

Certainly, the bulk of the most common Romanian first names had long-established Hungarian equivalents and did not need further codification: Catarina ~ Katalin; Elena ~ Ilona; Ioan ~ János; Petru ~ Péter, etc. Apart from such names, however, Joannovics included few new Romanian–Hungarian pairs of cognates.Footnote ⁶⁶ His new pairs were always motivated by an etymological relationship, even if a less obvious one for the nonphilologist: Sava (formerly transcribed into Hungarian as Száva) ~ Sebők, Sânziana ~ Johanna, Vlad ~ László. For a few names without modern Hungarian equivalents, Joannovics restored related forms attested in medieval Hungarian, like Beszárion, Cirjék, Karácson, Pentele, and Prokóp. Through this strategy, often employed in the Magyarization of locality names, the Romanian name bearers were symbolically grafted onto one thousand years of Hungarian cultural and language history, in accordance with the ideology of a triumphant Hungarian state nationalism, rather than allowing their “alien-sounding” first names to enter the authorized inventory. Joannovics implemented this particular method rather sparingly, however.

A series of rare, mainly monastic names were given truncated Hungarian forms, by removing their distinctly non-Hungarian endings. It is unclear whether Joannovics actually coined any of these or if they were already in use in Hungarian Greek Catholic publications, or in reference to Romanian or Serb monks. One Latinate name, Tiberiu, also received an apocopic Hungarian equivalent, Tibér, which hints at the possibility of a similar treatment in the case of most Latinate names. Although forms like Horác, Homér, and Ovid still sounded natural in Hungarian at the time, Joannovics did not make further use of this strategy.

Instead, he more often pursued the opposite method and added the Latin (-i)us ending to names that did not have it in Romanian (Longin > Longinus; Teren ț ie > Terentius). He probably aimed at achieving more prestigious and more universal versions, or he might have had Western monastic names in mind, but maybe he just wanted to live up to his task and alter some more Romanian forms. His procedure is all the stranger as such Latinizing of names only emphasized the Latin character of their Romanian bearers, something the regime likely wished to avoid. Moreover, most names affected were not of Latin origin (Artemie, Crăciun, Gherasim, Macavei, Sofronie) or did not count as Latinate names among Romanians (Anghel, Maxim, Ș erban). Indeed, at least two of them (Artemie and Carp) had patron saints only in the Eastern Church.Footnote ⁶⁷

Joannovics usually left out those names from the list for which he did not find a Hungarian equivalent. He included a few Romanian names, with just two examples (Sabin and Traian) traditional ones, on which he performed purely orthographic Magyarization. He may not have even intended this orthographic Magyarization, since he also transcribed the original Romanian names. According to the ministerial decision, names not included in the brochure could keep their original forms in the civil registry.

Thus, although a majority of newborn ethnic Romanians and the great majority of ethnic Germans would be introduced into the civil register with name forms generally accepted as Hungarian, even if not particularly widespread among ethnic Magyars, a significant minority of Romanian names were either declared untranslatable, subjected to a merely cosmetic Magyarization, or outright re-Latinized. Paradoxically, most Latinate names, which the Romanian intelligentsia had thrown into circulation to become the bearers of a nationalist vision, were assigned into this group of “untranslatable” names. In that way, this special treatment may have even boosted the acceptance of Latinate names among Romanian peasants, which had been rather low until the turn of the century. Romanian intellectuals referred to their official untranslatability as an argument for Latinate names when making propaganda for them, and various sources can attest that Romanian priests circulated lists of “untranslatable” first names among themselves and promoted them to their faithful.Footnote ⁶⁸ It certainly added to the appeal of these “pagan” names that they spared Romanian children from the burden of a separate Hungarian name, a reason that could lead otherwise reluctant parents to give them for their children. A similar hypothesis, which connects the rise in popularity of first names of Slavic origin to homogenizing civil registry policies in the Province of Posen/Poznań under German rule, has been formulated by Justyna Walkowiak.Footnote ⁶⁹

An interesting confusion arose around the name Florea. On the basis of its etymology, the first edition matched it with Virág, a Hungarian female name revived in the nineteenth century from medieval sources to replace Flóra. This solution caused quite an uproar among Floreas in Hungary, whose majority knew Virág only as a popular name for buffalo cows, as the editorialist of the Romanian weekly Libertatea flippantly pointed out in 1905.Footnote ⁷⁰ The prefect of Arad County besought the academy to reconsider its choice. Joannovics retracted and pleaded a misprint in the brochure, where Flóra and not Virág should have figured.Footnote ⁷¹ Subsequently, Flóra was established as the Hungarian equivalent for the Romanian Florea in a ministerial order from 1899.Footnote ⁷² This correction did little to solve the problem, however, since both Virág and Flóra are female names, whereas Florea is male. It was the second edition that ultimately disentangled the difference between two Romanian names: Florica or Floara on the one hand, female names corresponding to Flóra, and the male name Florea on the other, which the publication now identified with the Hungarian Flórián. Incidentally, the equivalence of Florea and Flórián had been known earlier at least to Florea Bozgan, a Romanian Kossuthite lawyer from Caransebeș/Karansebesch/Karánsebes, who habitually styled himself Bozgán Flóris in Hungarian, Flóris being a variant of the name Flórián.

Was there a genuine belief in the Magyar political elite that modernization of the administrative machinery demanded a homogeneous inventory of first names? What makes it difficult to give a straight answer to this problem is that the dominant public discourse in Dualist Hungary projected modernization and Magyarization as two closely intertwined goals, and social, not to mention official, multilingualism as an obstacle to progress. Without claiming that the modernizing ethos, often stressed in senior officials' public utterances, was somehow less genuine, the argument that the generalization of Hungarian first names would make the work of (Magyar) civil servants smoother seems related in this logic to the broader bid for unconditional cultural dominance. In hindsight, even if some sort of regulation was necessary, the troubles at which government circles hinted certainly did not warrant the demotion of minority first names to an inferior status, as is borne out by the states that today maintain larger and more complex bureaucratic apparatuses than Dualist Hungary and yet also implement more inclusive name policies (contemporary Hungary and Romania among them).Footnote ⁷³ By the same token, since the Hungarian state ordered a survey of minority first names, it could just as well have declared the non-Magyar names on the list, which all registrars received anyway, to be official. Instead, they exploited the ambiguous perception of translating first names, which they could still claim to be “natural,” though they could hardly conceal the political intent behind it.

In the end, what did it entail officially to “rename” half of Hungary's citizens from the viewpoint of the state nationalist agenda? How could it satisfy assimilationist expectations if peasants who usually did not know much Hungarian became increasingly aware that the authorities did not record them under their “real” names? Such renaming could instantly create a semblance of assimilation in the eyes and the imagination of Magyar society, with the proviso that this result was far from obvious in a context where even the first names of famous foreigners, like writers and scientists, were also routinely translated into Hungarian. Clearly a Hungarian first name did not necessarily signify cultural Magyarness. Nevertheless, this kind of make-believe assimilation of the surface was intended and welcome. It symbolically displaced non-Magyar citizens to the realm of the state language, which signified the beginning of their merging into a shared national community.

In the short run, no equivalence table could bridge the incongruity between the Hungarian and Romanian corpora of first names. Most of the new Hungarian equivalents remained markedly non-Magyar, sometimes because they were new creations in Hungarian and more often because they were virtually nonexistent among ethnic Magyars. Somebody officially called Athanáz or Vazul would be rightly identified as a Romanian, a Ruthene, or a Serb, and a Dömötör or Illés as more likely a Romanian than a Magyar. These first names, however “Hungarian,” carried an undertone of foreignness for most Magyars, much like any Romanian form. The majority of Hungarian nationalists perhaps wished to see Magyar cultural patterns generalized and would expect that the offspring of ethnic Romanians bear the same names as theirs. Others would gladly incorporate nonnational or domesticated elements of “minority cultures” into a future Hungarian culture. The regulation, at any case, left intact the specifically Romanian trends of name giving.

As far as the desired internalization of Hungarian first names was concerned, some rural Banat Swabians might use them under certain settings, but Romanian peasants, apparently the main targets of the regulation, could perceive them only as just another kind of vexation. Hungarian nationalists could perhaps invest their hopes in future generations of peasants who, by learning Hungarian and growing up to be more functionally literate, might take a liking to them. While traditional Romanian names presented little threat for assimilationist designs in this respect, Latinate names were a delicate matter, especially since their popularity was on a steady upswing. Joannovics's list offered no strategy that promised to neutralize their nationalist content, although Hungarian orthography might go some way to taming it. On the contrary, the regulation only underscored their national character by declaring them untranslatable. Short of anything better, Hungarian nationalists could only hope that the connotation invested in these names would slowly wear out.

Finally, rather than just linking them to straightforward and level-headed assimilatory expectations, we can also regard this series of measures as a form of symbolic violence, the affirmation of an asymmetrical relationship through which the state could impose upon its subjects a legitimate view about who they were. The maintenance of subordination, realized in acts of naming, mattered more for state nationalism and especially for its local representatives than the actual content of this view, which was often mediated through partly autonomous knowledge regimes, as is shown through Joannovics's example. The vision that the Magyar/Hungarian political elite offered through such symbolic legislation gained its strength from the message it carried about the nation's power. In the eastern peripheries of Hungary, however, this power was hard and coercive rather than soft and hegemonic, particularly so in rural contexts. On the outside, Magyar politicians and political commentators talked much about the culturally integrative function of their onomastic Gleichschaltung policies, appealing to the inherent truth of their vision and the inexorable logic of modern state sovereignty; but the effect of such policies was bound to be the opposite, at least on Romanians and Transylvanian Saxons. These populations had direct access to strong minority nationalist ideologies endowed with their own institutionalized linguistic authorities, which thus enjoyed a structural advantage over any state-sponsored vision. Hungarian names, when applied to the intimate sphere, necessarily emphasized the cultural distance separating the self and its immediate face-to-face group from the state. Influential rival nationalisms validated this perception and called the attention of their claimed constituencies to the aggression that the Hungarian state perpetrated by imposing bits of an alien culture on them.

Would the enforcers of the law have resented such a framing of what they were doing? Certainly, they would have vehemently rejected the labeling of the officially promoted state culture as alien to inhabitants of Hungary—not on empirical grounds, but by apodictically justifying their claim with the political subject's obligation of loyalty to his or her sovereign state. Given the Hungarian establishment's ingrained obsession with the lurking threat of irredentist designs (pan-Slavic, “Daco-Romanian,” or pan-German), failure to surrender designated parts of one's cultural identity in the public sphere was treated as a breach of civic loyalty or even as an incitement against the Hungarian state and nation. Clearly, this political-legal figment itself shows that the ultimate problem with Hungary's non-Magyar subjects was precisely that they were seen as alien and therefore unreliable.

The knee-jerk response to the perceived threat, especially among the Magyar elites of non-Magyar-majority areas, was not so much the heightening of genuine assimilationist expectations, but rather the demand that the authorities reduce the non-Magyar masses to a quiet resignation and the acceptance of their second-rate status. The assimilationist agenda could happily coexist with these drives in a harder or softer version, openly or in a concealed manner, as a legitimizing discourse or to blame peasants for being slow in acquiring knowledge of the state language. Many public servants and landowners were in fact not particularly enthusiastic about the possibility that non-Magyar peasant masses actually learn Hungarian, and many young radical nationalist Magyars gave up their belief in large-scale linguistic and cultural Magyarization after the turn of the century. But they could equally find pleasure in the newly devised disciplining strategy that put them in the position of being better able to pronounce some non-Magyar's “legitimate” first names than the bearers themselves.

A selection from Nem-magyar keresztnevek jegyzéke [List of non-Hungarian first names]: Romanian names and their Hungarian equivalents, Footnote ⁷⁴ by categories