The Language of Street Signs in Dualist Transylvania and the Banat

Twice in the history of late Habsburg Austria, local conflicts over the languages used on street signs spilled out into all-out political crises on the imperial level – first in 1892, when the Prague municipality’s decision to replace the city’s bilingual signs with Czech-only ones and to rename a multitude of streets after Czech national heroes sparked violent demonstrations across the Empire’s German-speaking cities. Then in 1911, a plan to display street names in three scripts in Sarajevo led to a tug of war between the Bosnian parliament and the imperial authorities. If there were no such high-profile symbolic fights over urban spaces in the contemporary Kingdom of Hungary, that was not because Magyarizing policies had successfully purged the linguistic cityscape, as the earlier literature on the era may lead one to believe. The picture that unfolds from the sources employed here is indeed diverse. But unlike in the western half of the Empire, city fathers were more interested in papering over rather than playing up national conflicts. The story of street signs in Dualist Transylvania and the Banat is one of resistance and consensus, of complex power relations and of subtle ways to signal them.