2061: Language Use in the Austro-Hungarian Military Aug 6, 2020

One might wonder how the Austro-Hungarian Empire ran its military in such a multilingual society. This is especially true since the military was one of the few institutions that was not run separately between Austria and Hungary. First of all, every division would be arranged by language, though this was not always true of the officers; this will be the topic for the post tomorrow. That said, because this was run centrally, there was a list of 80 or so commands all in German which every soldier needed to memorize. Indeed, while the recruitment of soldiers roughty mirrored the wider demographic makeup including about a quarter of native German speakers, a majority of the officers were native German speakers and this was the language of command more generally.

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