Die Ungarische Spracherneuerung (1776–1825)

In the 2nd half of the 18th century, the Hungarian Language Renewal started. That is the process of standardising, renewing and establishing Hungarian as a language of scholarliness, literature, education and state. It formed one of the main cornerstones of the development of a modern Magyarian national identity.
But those discourses and developments were by no means unique for the early Magyarian national movement, but quite common for the upcoming national movements all over Europe. They are all embedded within the shift from the Latin dominated European Republic of Letters to a new, national determined scholarliness. The here proposed project for a three-year FWF Schrödinger-Scholarship, based on a sideaspect of the applicant’s PhD thesis, intends to research the Hungarian Language Renewal and its Central European dimensions for a better understanding of the importance of language for the construction of a collective identity as of the reciprocity with comparable movements in Central Europe. The chosen period from 1776 (= end of the Jesuit Order and of its baroque-Latin education ideals) until 1825 (= foundation of Hungarian Academy of Science) can be seen as the first, initial phase of a Hungarian Language Movement, which are followed by the Language Issues in the 1830’s and 1840’s and in the later 19th century. For the here applied time frame, three main aspects for the Hungarian Language Renewal are distinguishable, which create guidelines for this project: a) political b) linguistic, and c) literary dimension. These three dimensions are concerned with a) discourses about using Latin, German or Hungarian as language-of-state as of education, b) about standardising, and c) renewing the Hungarian language and about imitating ancient literature and of composing so-called “Original Works” (hun.: eredeti munkák). The project analyses these aspects by using theoretical and methodical approaches of Sociology of Knowledge (Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse in particular) and further methods of network and language analysis. Though different research clusters study the reciprocity of language and identity in the late Habsburgian Empire, Hungarian Language Renewal has received little attention from research. Most studies are either from the time about 1900 respectively interwar-period or focus on single representatives of Language Renewal. Only very few consider the Language Renewal as a multi-dimensional movement, which is the initial point of the here applied project. Still, the Central European context remains scarcely recognised. The project intends to start to fill this research gap and follow-up project shall presume this research purpose.
The project’s applicant, Daniela Haarmann (born 1987), has finished in early 2018 her PhD-Thesis, which was financed by a doctoral scholarship of ÖAW and concerned the reception antique history for the construction of collective identities in Hungary and Austria about 1800.