Massively multicultural Vienna

Austria-Hungary is known for having been an extremely linguistically and culturally diverse nation, with no single ethnicity even being the majority. Germans however dominated the capital city of Vienna.

What would it take to make the demographics of Vienna roughly proportional to the entire country based on language? I.e Germans being no more than 25%, hungarians 20%, poles 10% etc. How would it impact Austria-Hungary?
 
Austria-Hungary survives and Vienna becomes so big it fuses with Bratislava? Not sure what the population requirement for a contiguous city like that would be.
 
Austria-Hungary survives and Vienna becomes so big it fuses with Bratislava? Not sure what the population requirement for a contiguous city like that would be.
Wasn't Bratislava (Pressburg) majority German until the 1900s? A great deal of cities in Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages were islands of Germans in a sea of other (rural) ethnicities. You'd probably need a PoD going back to the Early Middle Ages that results in a more urban Eastern Europe.
 
A great deal of cities in Eastern Europe since the Middle Ages were islands of Germans in a sea of other (rural) ethnicities. You'd probably need a PoD going back to the Early Middle Ages that results in a more urban Eastern Europe.

The great irony to this is the OPs suggestion would be putting huge islands of non-Germans in a sea of Germans. Vienna was a majority German city in substantial part because surrounding Austria proper was also majority German, and I'm a tad hard pressed to see how, if you build up a more urban Eastern Europe, a Transylvanian or Slovak peasent looking for urban work would pick Vienna rather than their regional metro
 
The great irony to this is the OPs suggestion would be putting huge islands of non-Germans in a sea of Germans. Vienna was a majority German city in substantial part because surrounding Austria proper was also majority German, and I'm a tad hard pressed to see how, if you build up a more urban Eastern Europe, a Transylvanian or Slovak peasent looking for urban work would pick Vienna rather than their regional metro
Wouldn't they just assimilate over time and become indistinguishable from their German neighbors except that their last name would be Materska instead of Muller?
 
Wouldn't they just assimilate over time and become indistinguishable from their German neighbors except that their last name would be Materska instead of Muller?

If there's a single language of bussiness, which Vienna is liable to have, than at least in the middle and upper classes yes. I don't think you can get the Slavic equivilent of the Chinatown.
 
If there's a single language of bussiness, which Vienna is liable to have, than at least in the middle and upper classes yes. I don't think you can get the Slavic equivilent of the Chinatown.
I'm guessing the Slavs in Vienna could be squatters...
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Hehehehe...
(I can make this joke, I'm 1/8 Polish)
 

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The great irony to this is the OPs suggestion would be putting huge islands of non-Germans in a sea of Germans. Vienna was a majority German city in substantial part because surrounding Austria proper was also majority German, and I'm a tad hard pressed to see how, if you build up a more urban Eastern Europe, a Transylvanian or Slovak peasent looking for urban work would pick Vienna rather than their regional metro
I guess you have a point. In that case, maybe the answer would be for German Austria to build up a substantial industry in the 19th century, thus attracting more workers. But wouldn't that be difficult with Austria's comparative lack of coal?
 
In the hyper nationalistic world of Central Europe circa turn of the century you had cities within Austria-Hungary that were strictly monolingual: German Vienna, Magyar Budapest, etc etc. it’s not that everyone in Vienna was ethnically German. There were plenty of Czechs. But there was pressure to assimilate and no concessions were made to the language. Maybe if the Austrian Germans were more laissez-fare on this subject you’d at least see a de facto bilingual German/Czech Vienna with lots of Czech business signs, etc. I don’t think there was a Little Prague neighborhood in Vienna so you’d probably see and hear Czech throughout the city. With this as a precedent perhaps this would happen on a lesser scale with new arrivals from other provinces.
 
I guess you have a point. In that case, maybe the answer would be for German Austria to build up a substantial industry in the 19th century, thus attracting more workers. But wouldn't that be difficult with Austria's comparative lack of coal?

... and lack of a viable mass market, which is the real kicker. Unless you squash Prussian ascendancy post-Napoleon, they are going to lose the German market as they can't join the customs unions without getting swamped by the north and west. Without that, who is ging to buy the output of their factories? The peasantry who just barely got out of feudal obligations in the mid-century and have no spare money?
 
If the lingua franca of Central Europe remained French (or even became English with the rise of the British Empire) then you may be able to slow or prevent Germanization.
 
If the lingua franca of Central Europe remained French (or even became English with the rise of the British Empire) then you may be able to slow or prevent Germanization.

Germanization without a lingua franca being French or English is not bound to happen. Even religion is enough to prevent Germanization. Eastern Orthodox Romanians, Serbs and Ukrainians can be saved from it just as Calvinist Hungarians.
 
So an English speaking Vienna could be multicultural in the way NYC is today. But it would not be multilingual as the OP (as I read it) suggested.

Speaking of NYC maybe you could get a scenario where the Inner Stadt and the wealthy burbs were German and the outer boroughs so to speak were made up of recent arrival communities. This did sort of exist with the Jews in Leopoldstadt. Could you see it evolve that way elsewhere in the city?
 
So an English speaking Vienna could be multicultural in the way NYC is today. But it would not be multilingual as the OP (as I read it) suggested.

The problem is, as long as Veinna is the capital of the Austrian Empire it's not going to be English speaking. The language of state bussiness and the long established merchantile community is German (a language with plenty of cultural clout to avoid getting shuffled out like Russian was is their court for French) so anybody moving in would have to learn it to have any hope of dealing with the existing power structure. The US got away with it because there was no national language and highly atomized governing structure prior to WW I (most citizens involvement with the Federal government amounted to using the postal system and not much else). No way you get that in the heart of the Habsburg Imperial capital.
 
The problem is, as long as Veinna is the capital of the Austrian Empire it's not going to be English speaking. The language of state bussiness and the long established merchantile community is German (a language with plenty of cultural clout to avoid getting shuffled out like Russian was is their court for French) so anybody moving in would have to learn it to have any hope of dealing with the existing power structure. The US got away with it because there was no national language and highly atomized governing structure prior to WW I (most citizens involvement with the Federal government amounted to using the postal system and not much else). No way you get that in the heart of the Habsburg Imperial capital.

I could not have explained it better.
 
If the lingua franca of Central Europe remained French (or even became English with the rise of the British Empire) then you may be able to slow or prevent Germanization.

French was the diplomatic language of the era, but a common person in Austria-Hungary would be unlikely to speak it. Even less so for English. German was their lingua franca. Those pockets of germanophones scattered across the empire are generally trading cities - commerce in the empire would typically be done in German.
 
If the lingua franca of Central Europe remained French (or even became English with the rise of the British Empire) then you may be able to slow or prevent Germanization.

French wasn't the lingua franca of Central Europe and have never been so. It was a prestige language spoken by a small elite, much as it was in most of Europe. I don't get why people get this weird idea that any language beside German had a realistic chance of being the lingua franca in the Austrian Empire. German was and is a high prestige language, spoken by vast amount of people as first language and German minorities lived spread out over the entire Habsburg domains and neighbouring countries.
 
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