Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1898 — A BABEL IN AUSTRIA. [ARTICLE]

A BABEL IN AUSTRIA.

Many Widely Different Tongues Spdk* en lit the Various Provinces. In the Austrian Alps the local dialects so vary as to be unintelligible from one district to another, and yet have been cultivated in passion plays and popular poetry. Over and above these dialects are scattered—chiefly in Lower Austria, but even round Vienna —Slavcolonies. Czechs, Slovaks, Croats. In Vienna itself the Czechs claim to b« 150,000. Slovenians spread over thret crownlands —Styria, Carinthia and Carniola—and dominate in the last, which contains also Uscoks, Roman Catholic Serbs, but the Slovenians seem to be retreating before the Germans. Of these a remarkable group occurs in the barren Gottscbee country, southeast of Laybach, only inhabited since the fourteenth century. Here again we find a dialect unintelligible to other Germans, yet rich in tales and poetry. Strange to say, the reawakening of the Slovenian race In the course of the last hundred years seems to have been determined by the first Napoleon, who replaced German In the normal schools of the so-called Illyrian provinces (six in number) by Slovene and called forth the passionate Sdmiration of the Slovenian poets. Tyrol and Vorarlberg, again, are divided between Germans, Italiani and “Ladins” (Latins), the so-called Romanseh of Switzerland. In the Tyrol also each valley has its own pronunciation, its own accent, its expressions unintelligible a few miles off. The Ladins were predominant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; toward the eighteenth century the Italians got the upper hand, but seem now to be becoming gradually outnumbered by the Germans. The Ladins form a curious little group of from 10,000 to 20,000 in Tyrol, with nearly 50,000 in Friuli (besides the 40,000 of the Grisons). Their language is nearer to Provencal or Catalonian than to Italian. They chiefly inhabit the valleys, while the German climbs the mountain sides, just as he has done in Bohemia, the Czechs mainly occupying the plains.—Spectator.