Parish Chronicles: When Was German Overtaken by Slovenian?

Abstract

This article addresses the question of when German was replaced by Slovenian in parish chronicles. It also tries to show in which chronicle genres this happened earlier and in which later. For this purpose, a wider range of chronicle texts, including announcement books, has been considered. In the announcement books, the parish priest or his deputy communicated to his congregation messages that were intended for all and therefore had to be understood by all. Since the vast majority of the faithful understood only Slovenian, the various types of direct announcements had to be delivered in Slovenian; however, the written basis for these oral messages remained in Ger­man for a long time.

Three types of sources support our account of the gradual rise of Slovenian in church chronicles, and they simultaneously represent the three stages of the transition from German to Slovenian: 1) Slo­venian marriage announcements of the Ljubljana cathedral parish of St Nicholas for the period 1737–1759. 2) Entries in the announcement book of the Franciscans in Ljubljana for years 1831–1835, where one finds the earliest parish announcements in Slovenian, according to current research. 3) The Dovje - Mojstrana parish chronicle, recorded successively by parish priests Janez Ažman and Jakob Aljaž between 1878 and 1925, where one can observe the transition from German to Slovenian. In contrast to announcement books, which speak about upcoming events, parish chronicles in the true sense of the word contain information about events that have already taken place and are situated in the narrator’s past. An even earlier source of this kind – the earliest known example so far – is the chronicle of the parish of St Daniel above Prevalje, where the vicar Jožef Skrbinc used Slovenian as the only language of the chronicle from as early as 15 August 1873.