AHC: A European country turns another European country into a settler colony (before 1900)

Well, considering that most Oc and Oil languages, and the accompanying cultures, are now dead to French, with Breton and Basque in real poor situations and German and Alsatian are not spoken in Alsace, France could have assimilated more in Europe.
Oc and Oil areas were ruled by France for about a millennia by then, the rest of Europe was not.

It's like saying Germans can assimilate Poles because they assimilated Low Germans(or German regional identities in general), Frisians, Sorbs etc. in centuries.

I'd argue there is big distinction between assimilating what are mostly non self-conscious regional identities and what are self-conscious ones like Czech, Irish, Germans etc.
 

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Well, considering that most Oc and Oil languages, and the accompanying cultures, are now dead to French, with Breton and Basque in real poor situations and German and Alsatian are not spoken in Alsace, France could have assimilated more in Europe.
If the French Empire becomes chauvinistic enough to try to turn every German into a Frenchman through mandatory French-language education, though, then they're also going to be chauvinistic enough to send French settlers to Germany.
 
I think a cheat answer is Rome. The pre-Roman Britons were not as primitive as I first thought, so it seems they qualify as settled people rather than nomadic.
 
Oc and Oil areas were ruled by France for about a millennia by then, the rest of Europe was not.

It's like saying Germans can assimilate Poles because they assimilated Low Germans(or German regional identities in general), Frisians, Sorbs etc. in centuries.

I'd argue there is big distinction between assimilating what are mostly non self-conscious regional identities and what are self-conscious ones like Czech, Irish, Germans etc.

You forget that French wasn't only the conqueror's language, it was also a prestige language from Moscow to Lisbon way before France started annexing everyone for fun. In less than a century Brussels went from Dutch-speaking to French-speaking with very little demographic influence from France or Wallonia. Expect every major city within the French Empire to be firmly French even with a largely allophone countryside, French language surely will be even more relevant as a language of economic inclusion.
 
It honestly depends on the city. Brussels may not have been widely Francophone, but the elites of the Austrian Netherlands most definitely were. (That Dutch was so closely associated with the Protestant Dutch Republic did not help.)

I am not sure whether settlement colonialism, in the sense of the various neo-Europes overseas, is possible. There were few areas in OTL modern Europe where population densities were sufficiently low, or where governments were sufficiently ruthless. Ireland is one OTL example, as might be what is southern Ukraine taken from the Crimean Tatars and settled under Tsarism, as might the Hungarian plains following their conquest from the Ottomans by the Hapsburgs. The great Nazi experiment counts as something abortive, too.
 
Yes and no. It is a bit more complex than that. Only a small part of what is Finland today was programmatically settled by Swedish people on the orders of the Swedish state. Much more land, comparatively, was settled by ethnic Finns, who since the middle ages expanded north with state encouragement. While in the coastal areas some Finns were displaced by Swedish settlers in the 12th and 13th centuries, say, the extent of Swedish-majority settlement has always been pretty limited and generally we can say that in the centuries the areas that are now Finland were a part of Sweden, the areas settled by Finns expanded much more in geographical terms than the areas settled by Swedes. The main dynamic, really, was Finnish farming population either expanding into previously inhabited wilderness or then displacing (semi-)nomadic Sami people, forcing them to withdraw north to give room for the Finns' Swedish-supported expansion. So - Swedish settlement into Finland did not lead to the Finns experiencing decline, in the final accounting, in terms of either population numbers or the size of inhabited area, but the Swedish period was one of mutual growth where we can argue that the Finnish growth was even stronger than the Swedish. If anyone lost, it was the Sami.
Ingria under Swedish rule might be a settler colony, where Lutheran Finns from Savolax settled in some numbers, among a different Finnic Orthodox population (Izhorians and Votes). Other Finns from Savolax settled in the forests of western Sweden and even in Norway, but all those eventually assimilated.
 
Surely the colonization of the fallen Crimean Khanate's territory by Russia qualifies? Given that Tartars are vastly outnumbered by ethnic Russians to this day, I'd argue it better resembles New world settler colonialism then any other example raised in this thread.
 
It honestly depends on the city. Brussels may not have been widely Francophone, but the elites of the Austrian Netherlands most definitely were. (That Dutch was so closely associated with the Protestant Dutch Republic did not help.)

You're right to a certain extent, IMO it'll depend on how overextended this French Empire will be. I mean, certainly important cities like Milan or Rome wouldn't simply turn French within a century, but cities like Amsterdam and the Rhine-Ruhr area would probably be totally French within 2 or 3 generations of peaceful and progressive rule, as more people come to the cities not only from the surrounding areas, but from all over the empire.

It's important to put all the national awakening movements in the context of the social backlash of the Congress of Vienna. Depending on how this French Empire is seen by its subjects, French will probably still me seen as the "language of the revolution", what would be added to its natural role as supranational language par execellence. Also in this context nationalist movements will probably be promoted by the most reactionary parts of the conquered societies and, obviously, would not be as attractive to the lower classes as it was in OTL.

In OTL cities like Perpignan, Strasbourg and Nice (the birthplace of Garibaldi!) were almost completely francized during the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Realistically, I can see the Low Countries, the Rhineland, parts of Northern Italy and possibily Catalonia as a part of a functional Napoleonic Empire. IMHO If the empire manages to stay strong during the 19th century these areas could be as French as OTL Belgium before the Flemish Awakening.
 
I am skeptical of this. Southern France did have a highly distinctive indigenous language (or set of related languages) with millions of speakers, but southern France had also been part of France for centuries. Even in adjacent territories--a Kingdom of Piedmont that traced its roots to Francophone Savoy, an Austrian Netherlands that was partly Francophone and run by people who rejected Dutch as Protestant, even a Rhineland tied to France by trade and war--the French language had a privileged position.

The same cannot be said for territories beyond the Rhine (or, I suppose, much east beyond the Alps). French was certainly a prestigious language, but it was not a language that had become indigenized. More, in many territories French would come up directly against reasonably strong non-French languages and identities.

I do wonder about northern Italy. Given how standard Italian seems to have had a small footprint, given the similarity of northern Italian dialects to French, and given the apparent interest of revolutionary and Napoleonic France in establishing northern Italy as a French satellite, I wonder if French might have been able to take something of the place of standard Italian.
 
You're right to a certain extent, IMO it'll depend on how overextended this French Empire will be. I mean, certainly important cities like Milan or Rome wouldn't simply turn French within a century, but cities like Amsterdam and the Rhine-Ruhr area would probably be totally French within 2 or 3 generations of peaceful and progressive rule, as more people come to the cities not only from the surrounding areas, but from all over the empire.

It's important to put all the national awakening movements in the context of the social backlash of the Congress of Vienna. Depending on how this French Empire is seen by its subjects, French will probably still me seen as the "language of the revolution", what would be added to its natural role as supranational language par execellence. Also in this context nationalist movements will probably be promoted by the most reactionary parts of the conquered societies and, obviously, would not be as attractive to the lower classes as it was in OTL.

In OTL cities like Perpignan, Strasbourg and Nice (the birthplace of Garibaldi!) were almost completely francized during the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Realistically, I can see the Low Countries, the Rhineland, parts of Northern Italy and possibily Catalonia as a part of a functional Napoleonic Empire. IMHO If the empire manages to stay strong during the 19th century these areas could be as French as OTL Belgium before the Flemish Awakening.

I agree with this, the French language would be well-suited to organic growth in such a scenario. The growth of cities due to industrialization would be heavily concentrated on the Low Countries and the Rhineland, so a large number of Frenchmen would be going northwards to the French Empire's newer territories, primarily cities. Resource extraction and farming would probably still be dominated by locals for a long time, so I see the cities going French while the countryside stays local, as you said. France's love of spreading Parisian French should handle the spread of French to the local rural population so I'd see those regions as almost fully bilingual(in order to successfully engage in commerce with the booming industrial cities optimally) within two to three generations at the most. Northern Italy seems less economically relevant, but it's strategically valuable and the people have a language that has far more in common with the French than the Dutch and the Germans do. Assimilation seems plausible, it's around Tuscany southwards where I'd start to doubt the ability of French to penetrate without a large amount of migrant Frenchmen to push French into the spotlight as being the regional dominant language.
 
There are certainly a number of OTL examples, such as the Reconquista, but for an ATL possibility you could probably have Germany turn Denmark, or at least part of it, into a settler colony.

The PoD is that the Revolutions of 1848 are successful in uniting Germany (minus Austria) under the Prussian crown. The German forces are also completely successful against the Danes in the First Schleswig War which results in them annexing the entire Jutland Peninsular, as some German nationalists wanted to do on the grounds that it was occupied by Germans before the Danes came. Understandably the local Danes aren't entirely thrilled and aren't entirely cooperative. In order to better integrate this land into Germany the Germany government begins a program of mass German settlement, along with other Germanising policies. If such policies are successful they may be replicated in other historically German territories that get "reclaimed" at a later date.
 
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