Levéltári Közlemények, 93. (2022)

Angol nyelvű összefoglalók

Abstracts

Attila Réfi

“WHEN WE GOT TO KNOW THEM,

WE HAD TO BABBLE IN POLISH”

Linguistic diversity among the military officers of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries

One of the main pillars of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural conglomerate of the Habsburg Monarchy was the joint military force. In the middle of the 18th century, it was given a uniform German command and service language in the spirit of uniformization. However, the unified German language of the imperial-royal army remained an illusion due to the multi-ethnicity of the crew and officer corps. The corps of troops from the permanent military districts were ethnically and linguistically diverse. In addition, most of the non-native German-speaking crew only understood the most important German words and expressions necessary for the performance of their duties. At the individual level, multilingualism was thus mainly achieved in the officer corps. The members of the officer corps were considerably better educated and more linguistically literate than the lower ranks. They were also much more likely to be transferred from one unit to another. Thus, they often had to adapt both to the different nationality of their respective corps and to the conditions of their current station, which was often a foreign linguistic environment. From the investigations, it appears that the officer corps included few people with a single language, with the exception of a few native German speakers. However, despite their multilingualism, the dominance of German was clear among the officers. In the absence of proper practice, even the knowledge of the mother tongue often became stale. German, the official language of the army, thus became their primary language. The most important sources of information on the language skills of officers are the so-called “qualification lists” (Conduitelisten) kept in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna, which provide a more comprehensive picture of the language skills of the imperial-royal military officers of the period and their language skills through statistical data collection and analysis.

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