The “Slovakization” of 19th-Century Migrants from Upper Hungary to the United States: A Case Study in the Politics of Language Use

Use of the Slovak literary language was central to the Slovak nationalist political movement in the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. Yet beyond a Slovak nationalist intelligentsia of just 1,000 or so individuals, this idea had little purchase among the claimed nation of two million Slovak-speakers living in “Upper Hungary”—who Slovak nationalists typically understood as lacking sufficient “national consciousness” to support their political aims. As mass, transatlantic migration led to nearly half a million Slovak-speakers leaving Upper Hungary for the United States between 1870 and 1914, these linked issues of language use and “national consciousness” were carried over to the migrant colony. Rather than being a widely held sentiment among migrants from Upper Hungary, this article shows how Slovak national consciousness was generated within the Slovak American community in the final decades of the 19th century. This case study shows how a small group of nationalist leaders consciously promoted literary Slovak as the “print language” of the migrant colony to instill the idea of a common, Slovak nationhood among migrants living on the other side of the Atlantic—a project that helped in turn to create a Slovak national homeland in central Europe after the First World War.