Abstract (eng)
This master’s thesis deals with the relationship between the language policy of the former Crown Land of Moravia and the linguistic affiliation and competence of the students at the four grammar schools (Gymnasien) in Brno between 1867 and 1918. Sources used were on the one hand contemporary legal texts and on the other empirical information on the linguistic situation in Brno, i. e. census figures from 1880, 1890, 1900 and 1910 as well as the yearbooks, chronicles and statistics of the two German and the two Czech grammar schools in Brno.
From 1867, there was an obvious tendency for students to choose a school whose language of instruction corresponded to their native language. However, until about 1890 up to 25% of Czech speakers still attended a German school. At the beginning of the 20th century two national types of school had been established.
As the Constitution of 1867 made it illegal to force citizens to learn a second official language, these languages were only taught as “relatively obligatory” subjects. However, in Czech schools German classes were de facto compulsory and therefore attended by all students. The percentage of German students studying Czech, on the other hand, depended strongly on the type of school and most of all on the political situation. Thus attempts to establish both Czech and German as official languages in the 1880s and 1890s and the Moravian Compromise of 1905 led to significant increases in the number of German students learning Czech.
A comparison with schools in other Czech-speaking areas shows that all Czech pupils spoke German. But the share of German-speaking grammar-school students who learned Czech in school also rose towards the end of the Habsburg monarchy – and not just in towns and cities with a high share of Czech speakers, such as Brno.