Make Bohemia & Moravia 90-95% Linguistically & Ethnically German by 1800.

Hmm. A lot of these strike me as plausible ways to get an overwhelming German-speaking majority by 1900 (after the invention of railways, telegraphs, and state schools), but to effectively destroy Czechdom by 1800 I think you need to have a physical catastrophe on the scale of what happened in Prussia (which, by the way, was not genocide): an early and complete destruction of the local literate upper classes, large-scale German colonisation, and repeated epidemics and famines. All that together succeeded in doing in Prussian only in the early 18th century.


Absolutely.

I think the Hussite wars could do it. Say the Hussites are unsuccessful and get crashed very brutaly, the Czech loose 3% of their population (this is what happened in the peasant revolts), amongst them large parts of the leading classes.

The main point, though, is that if the Hussites are closely linked to the Czech, this may lead to implementation of nationalist "German" (aka anto-Czech) politics before nationalism evolves. For example, German priests may be employed for Czech communities. Harsh politics could help in establishing a czech identity as well, which may lead to further revolts, destroyed with similar brutality.
 
I agree that (pre-)Reformation events are very suitable to achieve that
a) at an appreciably late point in time,
b) with relatively little violence overhead over OTL ...

I think somewhat in that way can be done as late as in the Bohemian-Palatinian War. If the War is finished - at least for the time being! - in 1619 or 1620, then Austria will have more leisure to oppress Bohemia. If there is no revenger and no copycat to the Bohemian revolt, that might create an atmosphere where many influential Czechs will seek Habsburgs' appreciation by overdoing adaption not only to Catholicism, but also to the German language and other habits. Moreover, a large group of Czech nobles could be substituted preventively by more loyal characters; and these might happen to be native German speakers.

However, this will never bring German up to 90%. It will only make German the standard language in Bohemia in terms of culture, politics, and commerce. Even if we assume that after an alt-Industrialization, many people will be attracted to urban areas and adapt to the common language there, that will only make it a tie between German and Czech.

And this is no word yet about Moravia ...
 
In OTL Bohemia was one of the areas in medieval Europe least affected by the Great Plague in 1348 - 1350 with mortality rates below 10%, in some areas even below 5%. Had it been one of the most affected areas with mortality rates up to 70% and the surrounding german speaking areas would have had significantly lower mortality rates, an influx of german speaking population would have followed in the next decades.

Among those killed by the plague might also have been the ancestors of Jan Hus. Without Hus, there would have been no czech translation of the bible so that the first non-latin bibles available in Bohemia would have been german translations from the 16th century. Without the stabilizing factor of the Holy Scripture in czech, the czech language might have deteriorated to a point that 200 years later it would be considered a patois of backwoods rustics, thus no more acceptable to the educated middle classes.
 
I hope we're all clear that in 1815, the entire Bohemian aristocracy was German-speaking and German was the language of culture, politics, and commerce.

Language and identity were much more linked than blood. Have the Austrians make a major effort to force the German language on the Czechs after the 30 years war and the same effect could be had, especially if the peasantry was focused on, as much of the upper classes spoke Germany anyway and only re-adopted Czech later from the peasant classes during their national awakening.

It was very, very difficult to change the language of mostly-illiterate peasants by government policy. King James ordered that steps be taken towards displacing the Gaelic language in 1609 (another thing that we lowland Scots are pleased to blame on England... :rolleyes:); two-hundred years of highland rebellions and their suppression later, it was still spoken over pretty much exactly the same area.
 
It was very, very difficult to change the language of mostly-illiterate peasants by government policy. King James ordered that steps be taken towards displacing the Gaelic language in 1609 (another thing that we lowland Scots are pleased to blame on England... :rolleyes:); two-hundred years of highland rebellions and their suppression later, it was still spoken over pretty much exactly the same area.
That's really interesting because the displacement of the Celtic languages of the British Isles was essentially the pattern I had in mind for the progress of Czech in Bohemia-Moravia. Apparently my mental narrative is wrong. As it goes in my head, despite the clearances, Jacobite wars etc, there was no major ethnic cleansing of Scotland by the English yet Scots Gaelic essentially died out before being resurrected by ethnic nostalgia in the last 100 years or so. That narrative being wrong and Gaelic being more resilient substantially weakens my earlier certitude that Czech could easily be displaced without population replacement.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
That's really interesting because the displacement of the Celtic languages of the British Isles was essentially the pattern I had in mind for the progress of Czech in Bohemia-Moravia. Apparently my mental narrative is wrong. As it goes in my head, despite the clearances, Jacobite wars etc, there was no major ethnic cleansing of Scotland by the English yet Scots Gaelic essentially died out before being resurrected by ethnic nostalgia in the last 100 years or so. That narrative being wrong and Gaelic being more resilient substantially weakens my earlier certitude that Czech could easily be displaced without population replacement.

It didn't die out, it's still spoken in the same areas where it was spoken by the 1800s. You're confusing it with cornish.
 
I hope we're all clear that in 1815, the entire Bohemian aristocracy was German-speaking and German was the language of culture, politics, and commerce.

The reason for this is, that an estimated five-sixths of the Bohemian nobility went into exile soon after the Battle of White Mountain (1620) and their properties were confiscated and given to catholic nobles from german speaking or even italian Habsburg holdings. The few remaining czech nobles had no choice but to adapt to the language of the majority of their estate.
 
That's really interesting because the displacement of the Celtic languages of the British Isles was essentially the pattern I had in mind for the progress of Czech in Bohemia-Moravia. Apparently my mental narrative is wrong. As it goes in my head, despite the clearances, Jacobite wars etc, there was no major ethnic cleansing of Scotland by the English yet Scots Gaelic essentially died out before being resurrected by ethnic nostalgia in the last 100 years or so. That narrative being wrong and Gaelic being more resilient substantially weakens my earlier certitude that Czech could easily be displaced without population replacement.

Right, I'm Scots, I shall try to set the record straight. I cannot promise this is all entirely to the point, but we Scots love to blether on about Scotland and hopefully it's all interesting. Essay ahoy! ;)

The several Jacobites risings, it has to be remembered, were the final phase of a tradition - clannish warfare aligned with factions in other parts of Scotland and Britain - that had been going on for a long time, back into Cromwell's day and beyond. McDonalds massacred Campbells and Campbells massacred McDonalds and this was the highland way of doing things. The Risings, we must be clear, were "highland rebellions" only in that they were rebellions of highlanders and were not supported by all the highlanders: the powerful Campbells were consistently on the side of Protestantism and the Scottish or later British government (the Black Watch was originally heavily Campbell), and each rising saw its share of clans staying neutral, splitting, sitting on the fence, and outright fighting each other.

So, clannish ways of life (family-based loyalty, bearing arms, pre-feudal land tenure) were abolished not because the clans had rebelled - a good half of them had not - but because the kings of Scotland had been trying to enforce the civilisation of central Scotland (meaning first feudal land-tenure, then Protestant feudalism, then Scots-speaking Protestant feudalism) on the highland (and lowland!) clans since David I in the 1100s. It is quite wrong to see the Jacobite wars as highland against lowland (never mind Scots against English), but highland ways came to be seen as lawless and backward, which was why James VI passed that statute in 1609: like the border-reiving families, Scots-speaking lowland clans such as Graham and Armstrong, the Gaelic Highland clans got in the way of his ambition to be absolute monarch of a united British kingdom.

And after the '45 the government and its monopoly on the use of force, landlordism, Protestantism and so on had all prevailed. The power of the clans was broken by Marshall Wade and his military roads; the red-coated Black Watch in their forts replaced the old practice of getting Campbells to keep an eye on McDonalds; everybody wore trousers.

And the Gaelic language carried on through all of this largely undisturbed, even though the revenues from confiscated Jacobite estates were used to fund Scots-language schools. Why should it have died? The crofters and fishermen attended a kirk rather than a Catholic church, wore trousers, owed allegiance to a landlord who lived in Edinburgh or London and taught his daughters to speak French and play the piano - but for the highlanders life went on, and though very often able to speak Scots or English on the rare occasions when they had to address a lowlander, they continued to use the language that they learned on their mothers' knees. We say "mother tongue", after all, not "schoolmaster tongue".

It lasted just fine until 1809 (a date of no real significance except that it was my "200 years after 1609"), shortly after which the clearances began.

Now, the clearances. "Ethnic cleansing" is a tricky term - they were hardly intended to destroy highland culture in an "ethnic" sense - but what's certain is that they were deliberate, savage, and cruel and they were large scale population displacement, though not replacement: the glens, as the phrase goes, lie empty. However I must put the utmost stress on the fact that they were not done by "England" to "Scotland". They were done by some obscenely powerful, mostly Scottish landlords - Anglified in their ways, but so were all Scots nobles by that point - and their Edinburgh accountants because sheep were more profitable than people. But there were lowland clearances and indeed English clearances: the British people were systematically driven from the land in the early 19th century, and it happened to the highlanders first because their traditional agrarian way of life was the most fragile.

This was where Gaelic started to decline relatively: enormous numbers of highlanders fled to the cities of lowland Scotland (and England) and overseas - though I'd note that where they clustered together, these immigrants were able to keep their language alive even in other continents, as on Cape Breton island. A Gaelic-speaker who came to live and work in Glasgow, though, would have hardly any opportunity to speak his native language and so it died, just as the dialects of English and other languages were melted down in the industrial cities.

Among those who stayed in the highlands, however, Gaelic hung on and hangs on. It has been in nearly continuous decline until recently, including over most the last 100 years: in 1911 it was much more widely spoken in the highlands (two world wars did nothing to help), contrary to what you may have thought, and in fact the last speaker of Arran Gaelic died in our lifetime. Today Gaelic has basically retreated in everyday use to the Outer Hebrides islands. The people there, however, speak it as they have always spoken it and most Gaelic-fluents belong to continuous Gaelic-speaking lines - even though some of the present generation learned it from books because they regretted not learning from their parents. I know a girl who is a MacLeod from Harris living in my native Edinburgh and she speaks fluent Gaelic.

Nobody would deny that there is sentiment in the recent effort put into it - someone descended from a long line of Edinburgh petit-bourgeois like me wouldn't be trying to learn it if there wasn't ;) - but it is at bottom a matter of recognising the heritage of the highlanders themselves and ceasing to pretend that their language is somehow inferior to English. Some decades ago, there would have been in Edinburgh no Gaelic lessons, kirk services, clubs, bands, or anything at all for that Hearach friend of mine to maintain her facility with the language. Now there are - but the fact is, more lowlanders continue to regard Gaelic with a damaging snideness than are trying to help it. There is none of the sort of national status Irish has in Ireland, there is no such thing as compulsory Gaelic (it's actually hard to get voluntary Gaelic in some schools, but this is improving), and most Gaelic-speakers by far are actual highlanders.

There's an anecdote of an old highland land agitator who voted against devolution for Scotland. When asked why, he gave his simple reason: "In London they don't give a damn about us, but in Edinburgh they hate us."

Gaelic today is not a manufactured language like Hebrew. It is the continuously spoken language of a peasant people, (the highlanders of Scotland) just as Czech was in 1811 - and hopefully, now that the government is onside, it is about to undergo a not completely dissimilar revival.

It didn't die out, it's still spoken in the same areas where it was spoken by the 1800s. You're confusing it with cornish.

I think there's also an element of Irish in this view: in Ireland the story is much the same (shrinking language of Atlantic-coast peasants undone by rural-urban migration, Victorian callousness), but then there really was a big sentimental effort to promote the use of Irish as a "national language".
 
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