Compulsory Education and Identities in the Habsburg Empire

In 1884, Janez Trdina — a retired history teacher, a reasonably popular writer, and a Slovene nationalist activist — published a series of ethnographic reports about the peasant inhabitants of Lower Carniola. In one, he pointed out to the educated readers of the magazine Slovan (The Slav) that the Lower Carniolans were still not very familiar “with their own national name.” Apparently, they still often referred to all Slavs as Slovenci , even though the Slovene language already had a new word, Slovani , for the people belonging to this language group. The word Slovenci was now only supposed to refer to the members of the Slovene nation, a much smaller entity. The Lower Carniolan peasants — Trdina also reported — were somewhat familiar with the modern meaning of the word, but they did not think it applied to them. Namely, peasants also used the word Slovenci as a label for the bourgeois supporters of the so-called national party; that is, Slovene nationalists. To them, the Slovenes — Trdina explained — were “some kind of special caste” that spoke Slovene and sang Slovene songs. Their own language, the peasants had assured Trdina, was not Slovene, but rather Carniolan and so were their songs (Trdina 1884, 118).