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Czechoslovak Ruthenia's 1925 Latinization campaign as the heritage of nineteenth-century Slavism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Geoffrey Brown  and
Alexander Maxwell
Geoffrey Brown
Affiliation:
History Programme, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
Alexander Maxwell*
Affiliation:
History Programme, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
*
*Corresponding author. Email: alexander.maxwell@vuw.ac.nz
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Abstract

In 1925, two newspapers, both published in Uzhhorod, advocated using the Latin alphabet in the Czechoslovak province of Ruthenia. Efforts by the Czech Agrarian party to consolidate the Republic played some role, but the plans mostly emerged from a longer tradition of Slavic thought which imagined literacy in more than one alphabet, conforming to more than one literary standardization. We trace the nineteenth-century history of Slavic linguistic ideologies from the original Panslavism of Jan Herkel, the “Slavic Reciprocity” of Jan Kollár and his successors, to the Kollárian Czechoslovakism used to legitimate the first Czechoslovak Republic. We survey Ruthenia's status within Czechoslovakia and then contrast two 1925 Latinization schemes: a proposal from Czech chauvinist František Svojše and a proposal from Rusyn journalist Viktor Barany. While Rusyns mostly remained with the Cyrillic alphabet, arguments made for and against Latinization show that nineteenth century Slavic ideals endured far into the twentieth century.

Keywords

CzechoslovakiaCarpathian Ruthenialanguage codificationLatin alphabetPanslavism
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 44 , Issue 6 , November 2016 , pp. 950 - 966
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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