>"The ethnolinguistic affiliation of the Avars is uncertain. Although there is sparse knowledge about the Avar language, scholars have suggested that the Avars could have spoken Caucasian, Iranian, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Turkic. Over time Slavic became the lingua franca of the Avars."
What would make a group as powerful as the Avars adopt the language of their slaves and subjects? Any suggestions as to why one of the ruling class' languages didn't take hold?
..SO YOU BE SAYIN' WE WUZ HORSE-ARCHERS N SHIT
>>930936
I guess /his/ wasn't the place to ask about history.
The same reason why Ukraine and Russia speak Slavic instead of Norse, or why the French and German kings of England eventually spoke english, a minority will completely overwrite a population's language.
>>931197
*will not completely overwrite
>>931197
Hungary.
>>931664
Magyarisation of the Hungarian non-elite is a relatively recent phenomenon. for a large part of Hungary's history, Latin was the language of government and surprise surprise a good part of the population didn't speak Hungarian. this doesn't account for the Hungarian speaking elites, however, and later Turkic elements, such as the Cumans, did adopt Hungarian as their language after a certain period of time. unique case, nonetheless
>>931757
some of the Pannonian Slavs (Slovaks) managed to keep their language too, which makes it even spookier.
I dunno
Why did the Mongols adopt Persian?
Why did the Germans adopt Latin?
>>930911
probably because the Avaric elite were mixed between Caucasian, Turkic, Proto-Mongolic and Ugric languages.
The adoption of Slavic was most likely the convenience of a lingua-franca that could be used to talk to those nobles in the east while also being realy used to demand taxes/tribute from the natives
>>930936
this shit is getting reddit-tier. You should stop posting le ebin memes about everything
>>931765
the Pannonian plain is quite quirky from a linguistic and historical standpoint, in my opinion. can't be helped though, nice bit of real estate in the middle of everything and everyone coming and going. hard to make sense of it, really.
>>930911
Think of it this way. You own the capital city of Avaristan in the Pannonian Basin. Cool. You have a lot of Avars living there, along with any other horse people who joined up in your ride to Europe.
But what's this? All the farmers around your city use some kind of back-ward speak. Kind of sounds like they are are stuttering but they all seem to get it.
You speak to them in your logical, phlegm ridden horse tongue like any decent person would. They all stare back at you.
Whisper to one another, some even look at you while doing so.
You tell them to piss off before riding out to buy grain elsewhere. Uh oh. The other villages in your new-called Avaristan also speak the native backwards language.
You could try to fund large scale efforts to teach the 80% or so population now in your nation to speak your pony riding jargon... or you could simply pick up on their language while you are there. Maybe speak your horse tongue around the kids so they know what it is, but also have them learn how to talk with the locals for grain bartering and general things.
>fast forward two hundred years
Be Ivan Avarov, you have chinky eyes but the rest of you looks like the local farmers. You talk with them, laugh with them, remember the good times you had hunting that boar with Dmitri's cart and a couple of blunt objects. All seems well.
Until grandpa comes up to you shouting about how you've lost your Avar roots.
SO! You want me to speak a language brought here centuries ago by a few thousand people to speak with a few hundred thousand people that live in sparse, rural communities and barely understand their own people living across the valley?
Naw, better to learn both but use the more practical of the two.
Steppe peoples are remarkably good at fighting others, but tend to become overwhelmed once they enter any kind of feudal and bureaucratic governance. Rather than try to establish new education systems, it was easier to learn many ways of the locals
>>931841
>Be Magyar horselord
>part of a huge Turkic confederacy
>refuse to adopt Turkic language, and to speak as we did 100 years ago.
>break off from giant, collapsing Turkic confederacy along with some other tribes of bros
>bros are no longer bros because they don't understand why you're speaking the language your people spoke 200 years ago.
>Kick the shit out of the Bulgars and tell all the Avar elites in beyond the Carpathians to fuck off or die.
>all the local farmers use stuttering back-ward speak.
>don't give a fuck, I'm not learning this gay shit we're gonna keep talking like we did 300 years ago.
>Christians surround us, but we remain resolute and stick to our traditions and language we spoke 400 years ago.
>Locals are picking up on our language due to our stubbornness to abandon a language we spoke 500 years ago.
>The King has converted to Christianity and abandoned his pagan ways. They tell us to speak Latin but we won't give up the language we spoke 700 years ago.
Fast forward:
>The Turks have conquered us but we won't give up the language we spoke 1400 years ago
>The Austrian Habsburgs have a personal union with us and we live in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where we still speak the language we spoke 1600 years ago
>The Immigrants are coming into our country from the middle east and we've built a wall because they refuse to speak the language we spoke 1700 years ago.
Surely it was just the stubbornness of the Magyars that made it stick. Right?
>What would make a group as powerful as the Avars adopt the language of their slaves and subjects?
Do you see the English upper classes speaking French or Norman nowadays?
>>931973
Avars were mostly gone by the time Magyars invaded Pannonia, getting constantly blown the fuck out by various Germans, Slavs and Byzantines too.
>>931765
>Slovaks
>managed to keep the language
Top kek. The whole thing had to be reinvented in the 18th and codified in the 19th century.
>>931841
Why did Gauls and Iberians start speaking latin?
>>931984
No, but they also don't speak Anglo-Saxon.
>>933221
That's like saying French aren't speaking Latin. That's just change, French has much to do with Latin, just as English has much to do with Old English. They may not be mutually intelligible, doesn't mean they aren't directly related.
>>932019
>reinvented
It wasn't "reinvented"
Slovaks spoke a variety of diverse dialects
They were basically Slavs in the Upper Hungary
>>931841
>capital city of Avaristan
It was more of a main camp, not really a city
>>935516
It was reinvented, codified and standardized on the basis on some obscure dialect from Liptau.
>>930911
the franks did it, as did the visigoths. it could go either way, really.
>>935538
How could it be reinvented if there was no codified Slovak accepted by general populace before it?
Slovaks were indistinguishable Slavs cut off from their Slavic neighbours by Hungarian borders
Liptau dialect was selected for intelligibility. Slovak belongs to the West Slavic group but there are heavy South Slavic features present in Central Slovak dialects and East Slavic influences in the Eastern Slovakia
Someone using Záhorie dialect could hardly understand Zipser dialect
>>935538
If by reinvented you meant that Slovak dialects were already abandoned for Hungarian, then that's simply not true
Forceful Magyarisation started just at the end of the 19th century and it wasn't that successful
Identity in the Habsburg Monarchy was pretty tricky because you've had a lot if multi-lingual people and mixed marriages
>>935677
More like there wasn't a single Slovak language or even a Slovak ethnos to begin with. Until the 18th century all Slavs in upper Hungary were just called "Slavs".
"real" /his/torian here, Avars were Turkic people whos speaking proto-Turkic language then they mixed up with slavics (like balaton lake name its came from slavic) then germanics.
>>935721
They weren't generally, the first recorded mention of the word "Slovak" comes from 14th century but for the most part the local Slavs just kept calling themselves Slavs, like Matthias Bel.
>>931197
Other examples:
Visigothic Spain/Gaul didn't speak Germanic, Lombards abandoned Lombardic as soon as they settled in Italy, and we know about as much about the Bulgar language as we know about the Avar.
>>935734
They were calling themselves Slovaks, but they didn't see themselves as a nation separate from the other Slavs
"Slovania" - Slavs in Slovak was constructed later
>>935765
They pretty much viewed themselves as Slavic-speaking Hungarians (not the same thing as ethnic Magyars).
>>935774
Yes, I'm not denying that
Kingdom of Hungary has shaped Slovak ethnogenesis
Ethnic nationalism is more recent
>>935801
Agreed.
>>935822
When think about it, it was ethnic nationalism that destroyed multinational Habsburg Empire
>>932982
Latin did not catch on for a long time. It took a lot of Latin speaking immigrants, an organized government that was in place for centuries using a decent bureaucracy. After Rome fell, the barbarian kingdoms and remaining Italian states looked back on Rome with wonder. All that knowledge, technology, and philosophy... they used Latin because it served two purposes. It allowed them to harken back to any scrap of info not burned by their grandparents and it also served as a way of them trying to revive the dead empire.
>>935537
You got me there, but that large of a camp surely needed grains to sustain the people and oxen necessary to transport some of those large steppe style tents they built on mobile platforms.
>>931973
Cultural stubbornness might have something to do with it, yes. It could also be that there were more Magyars entering Pannonia than when the Avars rode in. Having numbers would make maintaining "muh heritage" easier.
>>931197
Not every time, in fact a lot of the time the original population will adopt the language of the new ruling class. For Example, the French speaking a Latin based Language, the English speaking a Germanic language, the entire middle east speaking Arabic.
>>935831
It was the Entente actually. Surely the unrest was created by nationalism, but without Entente winning the war the emprie would never get partitioned and would probably federalize based on ethnic lines.
>>931996
You're right about that, which made the Magyar incursion easier. It also made their original ferocious ways effective once they rode in. The locals were probably like:
