Many languages — one town: royal free towns of Upper Hungary

Abstract

Early modern Hungarian society was characterised by the presence of multiple different languages. This was especially true for the kingdom’s urban communities where speakers of various tongues encountered each other in relatively small physical spaces. In this paper, the case of the Upper Hungarian royal free towns is discussed. As a result of the towns’ origins and late medieval development, the communities of burghers, and especially local elites, tended to cultivate their German cultural and linguistic identities. Moreover, in their political imagination, an especially important role was played by the ideals of communal harmony and unity. However, each of the towns was opened to the immigration of new inhabitants, who in many cases were people of non-German origin, and who thus presented potential sources of disharmony. Various measures were therefore developed to address the situation, ranging from the gradual integration of newcomers into the cultural fabric of every community to punitive measures aimed at excluding those ignorant of a specific language from positions of economic or political influence. An important phenomenon occurred with the Reformation with its stress on more prominent use of vernacular language in worship. The mainly indirect impact of larger political developments on the local sociolinguistic situation is also mentioned.