• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 543

Part of Session 154: A tale of six cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Trieste in the late 19th century Habsburg Empire: a multilingual city at a cross-roads of conflicting nationalities and languages

Authors: Rindler Schjerve, Rosita
Submitted by: Rindler Schjerve, Rosita (University of Vienna, Austria)

From the late 19^th century onwards Trieste has been a multicultural city characterized by the particularly conflictive encounters between Italians and Slovenes. The cultural divide between Italians and Slovenes which continues to persist, though less perceptible in more recent times, can be seen as the result of a historical legacy rooted in the inter-ethnic struggle over hegemonic power, ideological contest and ethno-linguistic self-determination in the 19^th century, when Trieste was the highly privileged and Italian-dominated città fedelissima in the Adriatic Lands of the Habsburg reign. Although the conflicting construction regarding language as a marker of social and national belonging was primarily restricted to Italians and Slovenes, it eventually also involved German as the language of the state power and of a small group of German-speaking elites.

The present paper will elaborate on the social constructions concerning the languages of the various speech communities which affected the communicative practices and perceptions of the people living in Trieste at the time. Here, the focus will be on reconstructing the values and meanings which the languages endorsed for their speakers in this urban context, and on identifying the power relations associated with the function and status assigned to these languages. It can be hypothesized that the intercultural controversies evolving from the social constructions of the various languages strongly emerged between 1880 and 1910, i.e. when the numerical strength of the nationalities was determined by language census. Relying on this assumption, the present study will concentrate on census data of the period in question as well as on discourses reflected in the local newspapers of the time.

With the help of discourse analytical approaches the study will show how in the late 19^th century Trieste as a traditionally Italian-dominated city turned into a multilingual setting of competing nationalities. The public space of the city which was linguistically dominated by Italians as the hegemonic local force well into the 1890es, opened up to the Slavic population in specific domains only at the end of century. German as the language of state power and of a small cultural elite maintained its privileged position and eventually lost ground with the collapse of the Empire.

The multilingual construction of the urban space is primarily to be seen in the light of rising nationalism, which the Habsburg policies of language equality attempted to appease through the implementation of the nationality rights laid down in the 1867 Constitution. Therefore, focusing on these tensions will help to further clarify how Trieste as a primarily Italian town re-defined its urban space in terms of a multilingual city which came to bear the stamp of the Italian, Slovenian and German encounters. Moreover, the study will show that the conflict between Italians and Slovenes, which still intensified after World War II, is deeply rooted in the historical development of the time when Trieste was still an old-Austrian city.