INTEGRATION THROUGH LANGUAGE: THE MULTILINGUAL CHARACTER OF LATE MEDIEVAL HUNGARIAN TOWNS
Katalin Szende (Budapest)
The fact that the urban population in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary was far from homogeneous ethnically has been a subject of research and discussion for more than a century. The roles of the indigenous (Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian, etc.) and immigrant (German, Italian, Walloon, etc.), Christian and non-Christian elements in the process of urbanization have been investigated both on a countrywide basis and on the level of individual towns. In these studies, however, (except in some aricles by Andris Kubinyi) the question of language has not been given much attention; rather it was taken for granted that each language was only used by people who had it as their mother tongue.
The aim of this paper is to show, within the limits of sporadic references in diverse written sources, that the situation was more complex and that the inhabitants of towns were practically compelled to cope with a differentiated use of several languages. The main factors contributing to this situation were:
1. that the towns, due to their negative demographic balance, were dependent on constant immigration from the closer or farther countryside, often involving other ethnic groups than the (original) majority of the population
2. the need for communication with business and political partners within and outside the urban community, which made it necessary to use common language(s)
3. the wide discrepancy between the oral and written means of communication, so that practically all local vernacular languages, apart from German, were not put into writing until the end of the Middle Ages.
Through selected examples from the second half of the fourteenth to the first half of the sixteenth century, this paper will discuss the main areas of urban life where language became an issue, namely urban administration, pastoral care, and the spheres of crafts and commerce. Examples will be taken from from law codes, court cases, travellers' accounts, glossaries, and poetic fragments from a range of towns including Buda, Bratislava (Pozsony/Pressburg), Brasov (Brassó/Kronstadt), Cluj (Kolozsvár/ Klausenburg), Prešov (Eperjes/Preschau), Sopron (Ödenburg), and Zagreb (Zágráb), and will serve as a basis for surveying the various repsonses to the tension between socially and administratively fixed structures and the ongoing processes of ethnic change. The range of responses was extremely varied, from simply neglecting any rules to entering into open conflicts. The most usual solution, however, was neither complete assimilation nor total segregation or discrimination, but various degrees of integration. The gradual or abrupt changes in this process mirror the local interests as well as the internal and external power-relations of the towns examined.