In the second half of the eighteenth century, the reform agenda of the Vienna court aimed at a tighter amalgamation of the Habsburg lands. Obviously, this challenged the dominance of the Latin language in Hungary and raised the question of its replacement by German. Robert Evans suggests that after the near collapse of the state in the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the issue was ‘whether the Austrian monarchy could create enough state loyalty and structural coherence to flourish among its increasingly centralised, tightly administrated European rivals’. It raised the problem of linguistic uniformity, and for administrative communities of all levels this pressure meant going beyond the simple ability of communicating orally, with a passive understanding of German. The present study deals with the following three issues. How was the German language imposed on the administrative elites of the Kingdom of Hungary? How did royal officials all over the country evaluate their own linguistic proficiencies in the 1770s? Moreover, what did the collective portrait of a central financial body look like from the linguistic point of view some fifteen years later? In this respect, the article refers to a case study on the problem formulated in 1993 by Peter Burke. He noticed that government control of language use is characteristic of the modern state, but that language policies were formulated long before the French Revolution; for this reason, it might be ‘good to see the governments, which first took an interest in the language of their subjects’.