April 2020 Archives

Ethnographic map of Austrian Monarchy (1855) - Wikimedia Commons

Fascinating map shows the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its acquisition of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and before its cession of the kingdoms of Lombardy and Venice to Italy in 1866. The map shows the 21 constituent krönlander -- the kingdoms, principalities, duchies and grand duchies that constituted the empire. Place names are in German (Lemberg instead of Lviv, Laibach instead of Ljubljana). Shading shows major linguistic/cultural groups -- Germans in red, speakers of Slavic languages in shades of green, speakers of Romance languages in shades of yellow, and Hungarians in white. Isolated language groups show up on the periphery of the empire, such as the Sudeten Germans in northern and western Bohemia and Hungarians and Germans in Transylvania.

Tables show land area of each division (in Austrian square miles, which is 22.2 square statute miles) and population by language by division. Numbers are divided with commas after millions and periods after thousands, and a raised dot for a decimal point. Longitude is in degrees east of the Ferro Meridian, named after the westernmost Canary Island and defined as 20 degrees west of Paris, or about 17.7 degrees west of Greenwich. Of the 36.4 million people in the empire, 7.9 million spoke German, 4.9 million spoke Hungarian, 14.8 million spoke a Slavic language (Czech, Moravian, Slovakian, Ruthenian, Polish, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian), 8.0 million spoke a Romance language (Italian, Romanian, Friulian, and Ladin).