The talk maps out recurrent topoi about language and languages in Hungarian, Romanian and Transylvanian Saxon political discourses on Transylvania during the second half of the long nineteenth century. As a whole, they give insights into underlying assumptions of how language works in the social matrix. This linguistic common sense, which seems to have been more universally shared and changing at a slow pace, was used to stereotype the language of the ingroup and those of ethno-national others and thereby to stake various political claims.
Ágoston Berecz is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History at CEU. After a BA degree in Hungarian Philology at ELTE, and an MA at the Department of History at CEU, he is currently researching materials for his PhD dissertation entitled Empty Signs, Nationalist Imaginaries: Nationalizing Proper Names in Dualist Hungary. A number of publications is behind him, and his latest article was published in the Austrian History Yearbook 2016 under the title “Floreas into Virágs: State regulation of first names in fin-de-siècle Hungary.”
All students, faculty and staff members are welcome to attend!
Drinks to follow
Organized by:
Dr. Matthias Riedl (Head of Department), Ágnes Kelemen, Iva Jelušić, and Nikola Pantić
CEU Department of History
Budapest, 2016