An Austrian Pidgin?

[Jim Rader]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I have doubts that the setting for a pidgin would have developed in
the Austro-Hungarian army.  The General Staff created incentives
for the mostly German-speaking officers to learn at least one other
language of the empire in order to communicate with their troops
(details in Istvan Deak's _Beyond Nationalism: A Social and
Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918_).  I
believe the units themselves were relatively homogeneous
ethnically.

Thinking about this reminds of the situation in Berlin where I did my
military service in 1972-74.  The monolingual American mess hall
cook at the site where I worked had as civilian kitchen help a
Spaniard, a native of Yugoslavia, and a Turk.  He communicated
with them in a sort of incipient pidgin German, heavily influenced by
English.  But I think such contacts were too ephemeral for a true
pidgin to have developed.

Jim Rader

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Hi all, a friend of mine who is not a linguist says he has read somewhere
> that there was once a pidgin language used in the multinational armies of
> the far-flung Austrian/Hapsburg empire.  I am wondering if anyone has any
> references to such a thing.  Thanks.  AMR