WI a Austrian language.

the Austrian empire was pretty diverse. So WI in order to try reduce ethnic tensions, somehow a language was made from mixing together German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Romanian , etc. And this language is used as the official language. Could this work and if so, How would this effect ethnic relations within the empire, and the nation as a whole.

Edit: when I say official language I mean it becomes Lingua Franca, like English in Nigeria or India.
 
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the Austrian empire was pretty diverse. So WI in order to try reduce ethnic tensions, somehow a language was made from mixing together German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Romanian , etc. And this language is used as the official language. How would this effect ethnic relations within the empire, and the nation as a whole.

You might be looking at Austroslavic.
 
the Austrian empire was pretty diverse. So WI in order to try reduce ethnic tensions, somehow a language was made from mixing together German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Romanian , etc. And this language is used as the official language. Could this work and if so, How would this effect ethnic relations within the empire, and the nation as a whole.

Who in the dominant class would allow a crazy plan such as this to happen?

Nobody. German and Hungarian were THE PRESTIGE LANGUAGES.
 
the Austrian empire was pretty diverse. So WI in order to try reduce ethnic tensions, somehow a language was made from mixing together German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Romanian , etc. And this language is used as the official language. How would this effect ethnic relations within the empire, and the nation as a whole.

Depends on when it happens, but in the most likely timeframe, the most likely result would be such that "backfire horribly" is an understatement.
People were attached to their languages, and having to learn a new one imposed from at what would be perceived as the whim of the court would go down rather badly.
You can pull off this sort of trick, to a point, with closely related linguistic forms, or varieties to which there is very little identity value attached (easier if it's both). However, Hungarian, German, Romanian and the several Slavic languages of the Empire are very different to each other (Hungarian in particular is quite unlike anything else around) in grammatical structure and a big part of lexicon (lexicon is probably the bit where resemblances are more common at first sight, because of several layers of shared loans). Also, several of these languages had already established written standards, prestige, literary tradition and connections, whatever imagined or creatively reconstructed, to historical political entities (unless you see this happening before c. 1800, which strikes me as odd). You could probably define a compromise standard between Czech, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovenian, and the Serbo-Croatian dialect continuum; some varieties would still be marginalized. But it is hard-to-impossible to fit German, Romanian and, worse, Hungarian in it. I mean, sure you can get linguists create a conlang from that. But having people actually using it, or accepting it... unlikely in the extreme, and very likely to rub a lot of people exactly the wrong way.
You might have a slightly better chance (that is, better than a snowball's in Hell) is the Austrian government, in a fit of utopian creativity, decides to go for experimenting Esperanto*. Pity that, by the time Esperanto existed, the Austrian government had not power whatsoever to enforce it in Hungary.

* I can actually see the Badeni or Taaffe suggesting it, in a fit of frustration at the endless linguistic bickering, in Bohemia and would-be Slovenia in the 1890s. It would be in character for Empress Elisabeth to support it (not that it matters much at the time, she was essentially estranged from the court). Won't work of course, but the idea is fun. :D
 
Another idea could be going for a simplified/modernized variety of Schleicher's reconstructed Indo-European. Essentially ASB, and would piss off the Hungarians royally and imperially, like they used to say, but makes somewhat more sense than trying to put together a conlang from scratch, and may sort of appeal to a vague shadow of supposedly shared identity in some minor circles at least.
In the end, the best chance at a unified official language for the Austrian Empire is probably either German or Latin.
 
Who in the dominant class would allow a crazy plan such as this to happen?

Nobody. German and Hungarian were THE PRESTIGE LANGUAGES.

There was enough craziness going in some circles in Vienna in the last decades that I could see someone proposing something like that. I won't be too surprised if it turns out that some middling administrator in the civil service wrote half-planned ideas of that kind IOTL, for instance.
Of course, this doesn't mean that it has any chance at all to get any traction.
 
There was enough craziness going in some circles in Vienna in the last decades that I could see someone proposing something like that. I won't be too surprised if it turns out that some middling administrator in the civil service wrote half-planned ideas of that kind IOTL, for instance.
Of course, this doesn't mean that it has any chance at all to get any traction.

You Sir, UNDERSTAND my logic!

Good.
 
More generally. States don't do this. They normally pick a variety (or more than one), usually the one(s) of the capital and/or some other linguistic form(s) possessing some historical prestige/literary tradition/identity value/greater diffusion, and select/enforce some sort of standard(s) to use out of it.
Specifics vary, and compromise standards are not unheard of (among closely related varieties, in all cases I can think of) but honestly, to the best of my knowledge there is no polity, ever, that managed to create a mixed conlang as it official medium and make it stick (I am not actually aware of any state where it was ever even tried, but I am not sure).
The closest thing you have historically is probably Israel, but of course, Hebrew is not a conlang and it has a huge identity value and prestige for the people involved (Israel is also a quite unusual case in other ways).
On the other hand, successful multilingual polities are fairly plentiful in human history.

I mean, nobody ever seriously considered to mix Walloon and Flemish to create "Belgian", or French (or Arpitan), German, Italian and Romansch* to create "Swiss". But Switzerland always managed quite nicely, thank you very much, to great costernation of many generations of theorists of linguistic nationalism. In Belgium, they saw fitter to impose French (not Walloon, note; French. Prestige) upon everyone at first, and bicker endlessly about the "Belgian linguistic question" later.

* And standardising the Romansch varieties into a single accepted standard has proven a complicated undertaking that the speakers involved take very, very grudgingly.
 
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Supposedly, both major branches of the Austro- Hungarian military forces had something like this anyway, "marinesprache" and Army German- basically agglomerations of loan words from all the commonly spoken languages of the empire patchworked together until almost everybody could understand a bit of it, on a very rough basis of italian for the navy and german for the army; although it was never exactly official, and would run very much against the austro- hungarian grain to accept a demotic creation.
 
Supposedly, both major branches of the Austro- Hungarian military forces had something like this anyway, "marinesprache" and Army German- basically agglomerations of loan words from all the commonly spoken languages of the empire patchworked together until almost everybody could understand a bit of it, on a very rough basis of italian for the navy and german for the army; although it was never exactly official, and would run very much against the austro- hungarian grain to accept a demotic creation.

This is what you could call a either a slang or a pidgin; better maybe an interlanguage of the kind that could evolve into a pidgin, with features of slang/jargon. I suppose that this would be a very ad hoc, haphazard phenomenon in which the actual linguistic use of a given ship or regiment would not be necessarily understandable to others. I also suppose that it in a sense, we are not talking about a "real" language, in the sense that communicative range of these varieties would be fairly limited, and much communication effectiveness would be strongly context-reliant (the military is by definition a very disciplined place after all). It would be fascinating to see if some linguistic analysis on such things has ever been done. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to standardize such things, and nearly impossible to keep them stable enough for serious officialization, even is there's political will (which won't).
 
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