Im Spannungsfeld von Mehrsprachigkeit und Variantenvielfalt: Sprachpolitische Positionen zum Kroatischen im Burgenland am Beispiel Ignac Horvats

Abstract

Summary Among the Croatian speaking population and their elites in former Western Hungary and later Burgenland, standard written language issues have been debated throughout the 20th century. Various language policy entrepreneurs favored for a convergence with Serbo-Croatian / Croato-Serbian or the common Štokavian standard language, respectively. My article focuses on one such linguistic entrepreneur, Ignac Horvat, who was not a linguist by training, but as a priest, editor and writer one of the leading voices since the interwar period. His language policy articulated in newspaper articles as well as two typewritten and autotyped orthographic compilations vividly shows that minority languages always have to position themselves in a multilingual context and that language policy actors of such “small” languages try to follow the concepts of “bigger” standard languages. His linguistic policy, however, eventually failed and highlights that in standardization processes of minority languages ideologies are often oriented differently, rejecting stigmatization of local forms, but exaggerated emphasizing intelligibility as the main factor for language maintenance.