Urban multilingualisms compared: How language ideologies in late Habsburg cities differed from their current counterparts

It is often thought that in earlier centuries multilingualism was more a rural and "border" phenomenon, whereas today's pattern of immigrant multilingualism is an urban social fact, often even labeled, in a panic mode, as "super-diversity."  But in fact, the concentration of linguistic diversity in cities is anything but novel. Indeed, multilingualism was typical of the larger cities of the late Habsburg Empire. Yet, their patterns contrast strikingly with what we find today. This paper explores the particular forms of multilingualism in Budapest, Pozsony and Vienna during the late 19th century, showing that the language ideologies around cities at that time made those forms distinctly different from today's multilingualism in those same cities and in urban areas further west. I argue that we cannot understand multilingualism without close consideration of the varying ideologies that mediate it, in different eras. The evidence comes from memoirs and travelogues of the earlier era and ethnographic reports from the more recent one.