Chapter 3 The Fight for the National Linguistic Primacy: Testimonies from the Austrian Littoral Marta Verginella 1 Introduction As in other multiethnic and multilingual areas of the Habsburg Monarchy, the recognition of linguistic rights in the largest urban centers of the Austrian Littoral became one of the central issues facing nationally competitive camps from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Pieter M. Judson maintains that in the Habsburg Monarchy the recognition of nations as “real corporate entities” occurred through the official use of a language: “While the state tried to avoid giving rights specifically to ‘nations,’ preferring to recognize the rights of ‘language groups,’ nationalist activists made sure that in public debate over issues such as the Imperial census results, linguistic issues were understood as national ones.”1 In the period of increasing nationalisms, lan- guage became a fundamental and publicly identifiable attribute of a given na- tionally imagined community.2 “Written language became the principal tool of creating national cohesion,”3 and the struggle for its instruction and official use became one of the central issues of nationalist struggles in multiethnic environments. Efforts aiming at the creation of ethnolinguistic homogeneity in the em- pire’s multiethnic environs were attributable not only to the national elites’ demands and actions but also to the very stance of the state that chose lan- guage as an ethnic marker.4 According to Tomasz Kamusella, by including the “linguistic question” into the official population census without enabling the recording of multilingualism, the monarchy “did not merely ‘measure nations,’ 1 Pieter M. Judson, “Introduction: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 3. 2 Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2016), 303–9. 3 Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 25. 4 Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe, 10. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004407978_004 The Fight for the National Linguistic Primacy 27 but rather created them.”5 By encouraging the decision to enter this or that national community, not only nationalist activists were in operation, but also the state, which with its laws and institutional practices directed individuals’ sense of national belonging and strengthened or weakened multilingualism in a given area. Excluding several research projects6 that attempted to encompass na- tionalization processes in the Austrian Littoral (in German, Österreichisches Küstenland; in Italian, Litorale austriaco; and in Slovene, Avstrijsko primorje) in line with concepts offered by internationally referenced studies of nationalism,7 we can state that the analysis of the nationalization process in this part of the Habsburg Monarchy8 has been insufficient in interrogating “the battle on the language frontier.”9 Not only have the Italian and Slovene historiographies 5 Ibid., 49. 6 Marina Cattaruzza, ed., Nazionalismi di frontiera: identità contrapposte sull’Adriatico nord- orientale 1850–1950 (Soveria Manelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2003); Rolf Wörsdörfer, Krisenherd Adria 1915–1955. Konstruktion und Artikulation des Nationalen im italienisch-jugoslawischen Grenzraum (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2004); Roberto Scarciglia, ed., Trieste multiculturale. Comunità e linguaggi di integrazione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); Borut Klabjan, “‘Scramble for Adria’: Discourses of Appropriation of the Adriatic Space Before and After World War I,” Austrian History Yearbook 42 (2011): 16–32; Vanni D’Alessio, Il cuore conteso: il na- zionalismo in una comunità multietnica: l’Istria asburgica (Naples: Filema, 2003); Dominique Kirchner Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 7 See, for example, Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions for National Revival. Comparative Analyses of Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Hroch, “The Social Interpretation of Linguistic Demands in European National Movements,” in Regional and National Identities in Europe in the XIXth and XXth Centuries, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Michael G. Müller, and Stuart Woolf (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1998), 67–96; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 8 In 1912, Angelo Vivante pointed out the similar organization of the Italian and Slovene national movements; however, for decades his transnational approach was deemed unac- ceptable both by the Italian and Slovene historiography, which were tied to the national or nationalistic paradigms. 9 Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2..