The period and place of my title are more strategic in the social history of language than might at first appear. They embrace two very distinct, indeed counterposed phases. On the one hand, Europe's last linguistic ancien régime; on the other hand, the roots of the continent's most dynamic process of linguistic destabilization, which would lead directly to the revolution of 1848 and beyond. Yet the former state of affairs has been grievously neglected; and even the latter process tends only to be studied in terms of the foundation of literary languages (usually considered separately from one another), and to some extent as part of the prehistory of the later ‘nationality question’ in the region. The actual workings of language interaction in the Hungarian past are hardly ever examined, at least by historians and those in allied disciplines. Yet those workings also raise wider questions about the ‘public sphere’, in the sense of access to group communication. To whom was this available, and on what terms? And what kinds of justification – practical or rhetorical – underpinned the claims of one language rather than another?

It is symptomatic that the only eminent treatment of my subject for eighteenth-century Hungary (or perhaps any other period) – by Daniel Rapant – has been buried, as a victim of the same divergent evolution. A Slovak, writing in the 1920s about larger issues of Hungarian linguistic culture, made little impact at home and was routinely dismissed unread elsewhere, if noticed at all.