Kossuth’s language knowledge and usage

Abstract

Multilingualism was a natural phenomenon with the Hungarian political and social upper class and intellectuals in the first half of the 19th century. This characteristic was brought along partly by the nobiliary or bourgeois family circles, partly by the multinational and at the same time multilingual Hungarian society and partly by the school system. Latin was both the language of education and the one that they taught in school, but it was also the most important language in legal, public or political careers beside German, which was the required language in the Empire. Kossuth, the prominent figure of the Reform Age, the revolution and the War of Independence, was also a member of a multilingual generation, and in the years he spent in emigration he went on adding more languages to the ones he already knew. He used more than ten languages, in which he was familiar with not only the everyday usage but with terminology as well. Among others he was fluent in the language of law, publicism, diplomacy and certain fields of natural sciences. Besides his outstanding rethoric achievements, he was also a conscious developer of his mother tongue. Kossuth’s language knowledge can be approached by several aspects of language pedagogy, namely, the aspects of self-educated language learning, the process of natural acquisition of the language, language development, the interaction in being able to speak more languages and language policy. The presentation of the topic is  part of a large-scale research project in the history of education and language education in the Reform Age.