Social Changes and Language Use in the Families of Banat Swabians Between the Two World Wars

Abstract

The paper investigates language ideology and language use in the families of Banat Swabians between the two world wars. It is argued that the linguistic practices of the Banat Swabians cannot be understood without insight into the historical context and the most important ideological nuclei of the Danube Swabians, as the ethnic group to which they belong. The analysis is therefore based on previous research on the Danube Swabians, primarily carried out by historians, anthropologists and linguists, and on contemporary field research carried out within the German Banat community. The paper shows that the Banat Swabians in the interwar period are characterized by the heterogeneity of language ideologies and practices, which depends on their family and social status, as well as on the changing socio-political circumstances in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Europe at that time. The language ideologies of the Banat Swabians, as shown in the paper, oscillated between national (standardizing) and local (vernacular). Language use was characterized by standard language culture and diglossia of Swabian (vernacular variety of German) and Hochdeutsch (literary, standardized variety). The social values attributed to local Swabian varieties in the school, in the local German press and within Swabian families also fluctuated between stigmatisation and admiration. As the Swabians inhabited areas where German was not the majority language, they praised and practiced multilingualism, especially in the public sphere. The language repertoire of all social strata included almost all the main languages of the Banat social environment – German, Hungarian, Serbian, Romanian, etc. Furthermore, we argue that the Banat Swabians perceived the entire area of the former Monarchy, and partly Germany, as interconnected cultural and social spaces. Transnational mobility was thus an integral part of their everyday and family life.