Page - 28 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

28 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 Czech as a scientific language and to become involved in fostering patri- otic scholarship. By 1847, 685 people had the highest and most expensive membership status, zakládatel (founder), with a growing percentage of them coming from the bourgeoisie.40 The establishment of Czech and Ruthenian as literary and scholarly languages, and their use in scholarly publications, remained largely unfin- ished business in 1848. Their use, together with an ever-growing number of publications in Polish, did begin to create an intellectual disruption in Habsburg cultural life, however. “Culture,” previously limited to elites and transregional social groups, extended to a broader population within geo- graphically delimited nations. The nineteenth century followed the model of eighteenth-century cameralism, which had abandoned Latin-based scholar- ship and introduced new ways to popularize knowledge for the public, thus inducing a growing rejection of the republic of letters and moving more toward a science for the people as part of provincial well-being. The change from transnational Latin to state languages had been perceived differently among different groups, since from the late eigh- teenth century languages were variously seen as either a neutral tool of communication or a symbolically laden medium. German and Polish were representational languages of loyalty in the Habsburg Empire and the now nonexistent Commonwealth, respectively, as well as for ideologies of (eth- nic) nationalism, which manifested itself only much later. Publishing in a language other than that of the state slowly built up a sense of belonging to something other than Habsburg society. In most cases, however, in 1848 it remained unclear what the new community would be. Czech activists had the option to be Bohemians (different from Moravians), Czecho-Slavs, or Czechoslovaks, among others. Ruthenians could opt for Russian, Little Russian, Rus’, Ukrainian, or local Galician/Ruthenian projects, with each movement using different, yet mutually understandable, vocabularies and having its own corresponding alphabet. Whether Austrians were just another Germanic people who needed a distinct language and whether Poles should modify their language to include groups regarded as minorities were fiercely debated in the early nineteenth century, although political identities still varied considerably. Scholarship conducted in vernacular languages was mostly locally ori- ented, encompassing descriptive and ethnohistorical disciplines and aiming for a broader fostering of culture. However, it lacked a public, an issue that came to light only later in the century. Still, in the early nineteenth century,