Seite - 59 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 2 ♦  59 positive: “In my opinion such congresses are not threatening to the state, as long as they remain limited to influencing public opinion and [influenc- ing] through public opinion and [through this] bring the Slav peoples in the monarchy to a clear awareness of what their national interests demand.”51 Apart from a complete change in the language of instruction, from German to provincial tongues, more moderate demands were put forth by Czech and Polish nationalists once their more excessive demands had failed. However, such a tempering of demands was also a product of the political at- mosphere; the revolutionary zeal had faded somewhat. Whereas in Bohemia support for Czech-German bilingualism was widespread,52 nationalists in Galicia sought monolingual universities. The removal of the German lan- guage was not the only objective: the Polish nationalists also fiercely rejected the introduction of Ruthenian as a medium of instruction at the gymnasia and universities, repeatedly claiming that that nation and language were only the ideas of Franz Stadion, the governor who had enacted privileges for Ruthenian to weaken Polish in Galicia.53 Polish nationalists attempted to legitimize their rejection of Ruthenian culture and language by claiming that Ruthenians were not a separate cultural entity. Critics of Ruthenian also emphasized the low cultural development of the language and its similarity to Russian, arguing that political support for Ruthenians’ national claims would lead to alignment with the Russian Empire.54 However, the proposed language changes were not simply part of the political process; they also caused the Viennese government to invest in the publication of specific vocabularies for gymnasia,55 textbooks, and even scholarly publications, such as those in Ruthenian by Vasyl’ Voljan (Василь Волян).56 After the constitutional guarantees for the ten provincial languages (Landessprachen) had been granted, these languages’ inability to seamlessly cover the issues of administration, which hindered the implementation of bilingualism in institutions, became obvious, leading to the creation of a commission whose aim was to prepare the Legal and Political Terminology for the Slavic Languages of Austria (Juridisch-politische Terminologie für die slavischen Sprachen Oesterreichs).57 The requirement of a “developed language” for educational purposes was thus not abstract; both regional and imperial politicians as well as many intellectuals were, with varying intensity, working on this idea. The claim that a language of instruction had to be developed to enable a university to fulfill its functions took various forms at different times. In the early nineteenth century, the communication value of language was