OTL Question: What was the linguistic situation in Bohemia prior to the 30 Years War?

I've often seen it asserted on here that Bohemia, even before the Thirty Years War, was dominated by Germans and the German language-in one thread a few weeks ago (which I'm too lazy to find), it was suggested that a Bohemia ruled by Frederick of the Palatine and his descendants would have Germanized and been a candidate to unite Germany.

This has always seemed a bit off-base to me. IOTL, much of the (Czech) Hussite and Protestant population-and the great majority of the Czech nobility-were expelled following Austria's reconquest of Bohemia in the Thirty Years War, replaced by Germans loyal to the Austrian Emperor. Bohemia was part of the German-speaking Austrian empire, its government dominated by Germans. Even so, Czechs remained the majority and eventually regained political dominance, with Germans only around a fourth of the population before WWII.

So, my question-what was the situation of German in the crown of Bohemia (Bohemia+Moravia+Lusiatia+Silesia) before the start of the Thirty Years War? If Bohemia had escaped conquest by Austria and survived the war as an independent country, would it have been primarily German or primarily Czech?
 
I think the main matter is that you didn't had clearly "German-speaking regions" and "Czech-speaking regions".
Towns (as all the medieval settings) tended to be multilingual, German having a prestigious and relativly dominant place; while Czech was still present in urban backgrounds, and clearly crushingly dominant in rural aeras.
 
I think the main matter is that you didn't had clearly "German-speaking regions" and "Czech-speaking regions".
Towns (as all the medieval settings) tended to be multilingual, German having a prestigious and relativly dominant place; while Czech was still present in urban backgrounds, and clearly crushingly dominant in rural aeras.

To what extent did German dominate, though? Were pre-1620's Czech cities any more German than, say, Polish cities of the same era?
 
To what extent did German dominate, though? Were pre-1620's Czech cities any more German than, say, Polish cities of the same era?

It's a bit different : cities were multicultural (not unlike the situation we can have today, with european cities mixed with different populations while the countryside remain largely unified on this regard).
German language could dominate, without being the sign of a particularly germanized (ethnically speaking) town.

I would tend to say, but someone with more knowledge about Bohemian history could probably disagree, that the overall situation was roughly similar to late XIXth century for rural settings; and cities being culturally mixed between German (that admittedly seems to grow before the TYW) and Czech features.
 
You have to differentiate between the Czech heartland and the Sudeten regions. The latter had been only sparsely settled by Czechs in the high middle ages and the Přemyslid Bohemian kings - especially Ottokar II (1253–1278) and Wenceslaus II (1278–1305) did invite ethnic Germans to boost the population and thus tax base of those mountainious border regions, leading to a German majority in those areas within a few decades. The Czech heartland was and remained overwhelmingly Czech. In the towns there were, sometimes sizable, german speaking minorities, most notably merchants and in Prague, especially since the Luxembourg dynasty, also courtiers, clergy and administrators. But that didn't mean they were a majority, it is noteworthy that 2 of the 3 catholics who were defenestrated in Prague in 1618 were ethnic Czechs. Royal documents, if they were not in latin, were mainly issued in Czech like Emperor Rudolf II's 1609 Letter of Majesty. Note the rather polish looking spelling of renaissance era Czech (W instead of V, CZ instead of Č, RZ instead of Ř &c.).

Majest%C3%A1t_Rudolfa_II_z_roku_1609.gif


It was indeed not until after the Battle of White Mountain after which the overwhelmingly protestant Czech upper class was either forced into exile (about five-sixths) with their property confiscated or in 27 cases even executed and replaced by a mainly german speaking new nobility, grovellingly loyal to the emperor, that German started to replace Czech as the language of government and administration, but even then it wasn't until Josef II that the use of German became compulsory.
 
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