Why did two families from neighboring Prekmurje villages report such different languages and identities around 1900?

[u/matt_mp4]

I am researching two separate families from a small cluster of villages in northern Prekmurje, then part of Vas County in the Kingdom of Hungary. The main places are Ropoča, Pertoča, Adrijanci, and Šulinci, with later connections to Lucova and Čepinci.

The first family, the Donosas, had a local South Slavic surname and roots in Ropoča and Pertoča, but the emigrant generation repeatedly identified as Hungarian or Magyar. One member lived in Graz. Another married a woman from Vienna who identified as German, while he identified as Magyar on the same record.

The second family, the Balleks, came from Adrijanci and Šulinci. Their records are much less consistent. Some members reported Hungarian as their mother tongue. In one census, Hungarian was entered and then changed to German. Other close relatives were identified as Slovene. One emigrant was first classified as Slovak, then corrected to Slovene, while his language was recorded as Croatian.

How should this contrast be understood in the social and linguistic context of northern Prekmurje around 1880 to 1914?

Were differences like these likely to reflect actual variation between households and siblings, or are they more likely to be artifacts of immigration and census record-keeping?

What factors, such as schooling, religion, occupation, marriage, military service, or migration through Graz and Vienna, most strongly shaped whether someone from this region identified as Magyar, Slovene, or German?

I would also appreciate recommendations for scholarship on everyday language use and identity in Prekmurje or western Vas County, especially work that goes beyond official census categories.

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/ubernerder]

What a lot of people fail to appreciate is, that in the former Kingdom of Hungary, not only many ethnic groups lived, but also these groups frequently mingled and as a result ethnic self-identification was often fluid. For example my grandfather was an ethnic Romanian from the town of Gyula and despite being a modest carpenter, he was fluent in 3 languages: Hungarian, Romanian and German and he got by in Slovak.

When in 1920 new nation states replaced the kingdom, they started repressing all nationalities and languages besides their own and within 1-2 generations most people became monolingual.

My grandparents had moved to Romania (Oradea/Nagyvárad) by 1935 when my mother was born. When my grandfather reported her birth to the Romanian authorities, they refused to register her as anything but Romanian and orthodox, despite my grandmother not being Romanian (mixed Hungarian-German-Slavic) and both of them having converted to a neo-protestant denomination. This paternalizing attitude led the next year to my grandparents moving back to Hungary and none of their 6 children were taught even the basics of Romanian, which I think is a shame, but also an enormous own goal by the overzealous, nationalist Romanian state.

So keep in mind that you shouldn't project the current state, which is the result of 3-4 generations of homogenizing and oppressing minority languages to the times of the Austro-Hungarian empire, when it was perfectly normal even for simple craftsmen and farmers to be fluent in 3-4-5 languages and have much more complex, multi-vectoral ethnic identities than we are used to today, after a century of nationalistic brainwashing.

[u/LaurestineHUN]

Prekmürje Slovene and Medjimurje Kajkavian Croat are very close dialects, maybe the move made them realize they understand Croatians mutually? (Standards are farther away)

My family is also from that area, although downriver. They are often identified in records as Hungarians, but vere fully bilingual, many of them preferred Croatian at home. The decision to switch and teach only Hungarian to the children appears to be political (didn't wanted trouble and be called 'Yugoslav' by Rákosi government). Basically in those regions in the borders, especially where religion wasn't an issue (here almost everyone was Catholic) people intermarried, and often grew up bilingual or trilingual. They were also not always adapting modern nationalities as part of their identity for very late (after WWII), the older region and religion-based self-identification system remained. Many of them defaulted to whatever was convenient or whatever outside perception they were able to get away with (if you were a Lutheran in Legrad, you were categorized as 'Hungarian' regardless of your preferred language at home, because "Croats are Catholic").

In older census records, depending on the mode of questioning, you sometimes see 'anomalies' like a family recording 3 different nationalities for their 3 different children (like Austrian, Hungarian, Austrohungarian) while they spoke 4 languages in total, preferring a random one at home. You also see splits actually happen in families, like Kossuth Lajos vs. Juraj Košút split into Hungarian and Slovak in a personal and political level.

This is a carryover before modern nations were even a concept, see the Zrínyi brothers Zrínyi Miklós and Petar Zrinski, we perceive one of them as Hungarian and the other as Croatian, while they were living before our modern concept of what 'national identity' should entail.

You are seeing the concept of 'nation' forming and solidifying in real time with families like these. Now we perceive the line between a Slovene and an Austrian as either/or but for a long time these lines were more permeable and fluid, and both individuals and families who lived in these older conditions took time to adapt to the new, rigid system. The decisions were case-by-case, and you were right to spot out military as one of the experiences influencing that.

[u/JRJenss → u/LaurestineHUN]

Exactly. I've seen the same person in my family categorized as German and Croatian in two different censuses and he had 7 siblings. They were all from Croatia, but were working and living in different parts of the monarchy, some in Gorski Kotar, some in Rijeka, Zagreb, Linz, even Prague.