Building a Bilingual Elite: “National Indifference” and Romanian Students in Hungarian High Schools (1867–1914)

Abstract

Abstract This article highlights the role investment in Hungarian-language skills played in the social reproduction of the Romanian national elite in Dualist Hungary. At any point during the era, little less than half of middle-class Romanian students attended Hungarian-language high schools, which their parents largely considered as language training institutions. Parental choices and the sons’ experiences gain significance when set against the view that such investment in linguistic capital was a subversive practice challenging nationalist mobilization. Based on former students’ memoirs, school yearbooks, and histories, this article concentrates on the strategies of parents, the class-based inequality of access to Hungarian, the language policies of schools, and teachers’ ambiguous treatment of Romanian students.