LANGUAGE REFORMS IN CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In Central and Southern Europe, conscious and planned language reform movements started to unfold in the late eighteenth century, culminating in the middle of the nineteenth. The emergence of specialized terminologies of Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian (as well as, to some extent, of Serbian) shows a number of similarities. Their mental roots can be found in the ideas of the enlightenment. Their fundamental aim was to express, in the respective mother tongues, the new terms of civilization in the broadest sense. That aim was served by the language reform movements whose earliest significant results were embodied in German-based terminological dictionaries of the various Slavonic languages published in the mid-nineteenth century. This paper deals with the reasons, antecedents, and results of those movements.