This volume is an attempt to connect the study of language and nationalism with Habsburg studies and to situate linguistic practices of the late imperial period within the changing understanding of the meaning of Austria-Hungary's imperial nature. Its aim is critical as far as it relates language and language use to a complex set of social factors (urban-rural divide, social status and language, profession, etc.) and not just to nation and nationalism, and it stresses the commonalities of the Habsburg case with similar phenomena across space and time, up to the present. Thus, it consciously departs from, as the editors and the author of the first chapter, Pieter Judson, make clear, analyses based on statistical evaluation and instead looks for the social practices of language use. Most of the chapters make good on this promise, with the exception of that of Csilla Fedinecz and István Csenricskó on the areas of Northeastern Hungary inhabited by Rusyns/Ruthenians, which is a rather traditional macro-overview—admittedly the first of this kind—that stresses group characteristics and statistics of the mostly illiterate Greek Catholic and Slavic-speaking population. However, even this text emphasizes the indistinct, blurry nature of how people saw themselves as opposed to the neat delineation that nationalists would draw around their supposed people.
But this book is not just another attempt at pinpointing national indifference. The case studies, especially because of their narrow focus and occasional comparative angle, offer leverage on many other features of linguistic practices. Power—either local or national/imperial—and adjustment to it is one such feature. Martha Verginella demonstrates how Slovene was only used as a language of testaments in and around Trieste when and where Slovenes were in power. If this was not the case, Slovene speakers opted for Italian or occasionally German, even those whose support of Slovene cultural or political activism was public. In contrast, in dualist Hungary, cities in which elites (or groups within the elites) spoke languages other than Hungarian could keep bi- or trilingual administrative records—as well as non-Hungarian language minutes—as long as they pretended to adhere to the nationalizing ideas of the state. Similar pragmatism of the governing power is demonstrated by Rok Stergar, whose chapter outlines the willingness of Ljubljana military authorities to go out of their way in accommodating some of society's linguistic demands through the broader use of Slovene in communication with the population. Finally, the newspaper Die Bosnische Post, analyzed in a detailed institutional history by Carl Bethke, was a government-friendly, sometimes semi-official German language organ in the annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. One of the first newspapers run by a female editor in chief, Milena Mrazović, between 1889 and 1896, it was managed by a series of immigrants from Cisleithania and Croatia. German language was, however, not associated with any nationality, let alone a German imperial center; rather, it was seen as a medium of communication between constituent groups of imperial society, a position also manifested in the newspaper's careful navigation of thorny political issues in Bosnia.
The biographies of these editors certainly had an imperial twist, moving from the metropole to the periphery in the service of the empire, just as the Romanian generals of the imperial army had. Irina Marin's chapter, however, finds in this case not national indifference or careful positioning between national groups but rather strong dynastic loyalty coupled with conscious engagement in activities that promoted the Romanian language and literacy. Professional career was one element in the apparent popularity of the k. k. (and not K. u. K) Staats-Oberrealschule in Teschen among the local bourgeoisie and the aspiring middle class, mainly because of the share of natural science subjects in the curriculum. As Mattheus Wähowski demonstrates, national composition of pupils (the majority of whom were German speakers, mainly from Silesia; Polish speakers as a significant minority, even after the founding of a Polish language secondary school; and a not insignificant number of Czech speakers), the teaching body, and even the curriculum, was stable beyond the fall of Austria-Hungary. While not an island of multiculturalism, it was a space in which imperial loyalty and the ties within imperial society bridged national differences, a feature eliminated only by the new border dividing the city and the Polonization efforts coming from Warsaw.
Finally, the rural-urban divide and the social differences within urban society are nicely highlighted by Jan Fellerer's study of everyday language use—based on the innovative reading of documentation from court cases in Lemberg—and Jeroen van Drunen's chapter on Bukovina. Both of them stress that multilinguality was neither symmetric nor did it mean perfect language skills. It developed mainly through everyday interactions, and the social status of languages and of their speakers, as well as their official use, impacted its development. Ruthenians from around Lemberg, for example, learned and spoke Polish as much as they had to within work relations, and Ruthenian was rarely spoken by Polish speakers. Orthodox clergy in Bukovina accommodated the linguistic context in which they lived, while the population began to mix phrases and develop slightly hybridized dialects. The German spoken in the Slavonian city of Osijek was also a locally formed and informed dialect, but, according to Anamarija Lukić, Croatian became the dominant language around 1910 as a result of broader social transformation—not because of nationalizing policies—and therefore “Esseker” was still widely accepted and used.
As case studies, these chapters rarely answer broad historical questions, but they successfully highlight the multiple factors behind individual decisions as regards to language use and practices and their impact on the institutional world. Most of them—like those of Verginella, Fellerer, and Berecz—deploy and analyze convincingly sources rarely used by historians. This is a significant innovative aspect of the volume, and one that enriches its methodology. The diversity of case studies makes it less successful in substantiating the thesis of Pieter Judson's chapter: that the role of the specific institutional setting of Austria-Hungary—instead of the existence of multilingual contexts—was the source of the nationalist politicization of language use. They are more successful in showing that Judson's other key thesis—that linguistic diversity is not to be automatically taken as multiculturality—is a warning to heed for historians as well.
