Army Slavic

Army Slavic
Armee-Slawisch
Created by	Austro-Hungarian Army
Setting and usage	Military communication
Era	after 1867 – 1918
Purpose	select vocabulary
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
The extent of Slavic people in Austria-Hungary (1910)   Slavs   Other ethnicities

Army Slavic (German: Armee-Slawisch) was a rump vocabulary consisting of about eighty key words, mostly of Czech origin. It was developed to help overcome language barriers in Austria-Hungary and was in use until the end of World War I.

Part of the reason for the existence of this specialized vocabulary was the fact that, while German and Hungarian were official languages, half of the soldiery was recruited from areas that spoke various Slavic languages. In all, there were eleven different official languages to contend with. While efforts were made to keep soldiers grouped by language, mixed language units still occurred.

References

• Deak, Istvan (1989), Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918, Oxford University Press, p. 100
• Scheer, Tamara (2020), Language diversity and loyalty in the Habsburg army, 1868-1918, Habilitation Thesis, University of Vienna, online https://utheses.univie.ac.at/detail/57914#, p. 184.
• Walter, John (1999), Central Powers' Small Arms of World War One, Crowood Press, ISBN 1-86126-124-1

See also

• Army German
• Controlled natural language