The Emigration Lists from the various German bishoprics and
principalities provide no satisfactory answer to the question of the destination
of those who set out for Hungary. In these lists, as far as we can tell, only
the name of the family and the number of family members are recorded along with
the amount of money or gold they were carrying. The specifications with regard
to a definite destination of the emigrants was only within the bounds of
probability and the place they planned to settled was often not where they
actually ended up.
The emigration records kept by the German princes and
nobles show no interest or concern about where the families came from and so we
need to look at the dialect spoken in the individual villages and communities;
researching each dialect in every village and comparing them with one another so
that conclusions can be drawn about the dialect and the region where it was
spoken in their former homeland. The many parallel settlement activities
of the individual estate and domain owners in Swabian Turkey as well as on the
Great Hungarian Plain resulted in an entirely different composition of settlers.
They lived among Magyars, Slovaks, Croats and Serbs and spoke a variety of
German dialects: schäbische (Swabian), mainfränische (Main River Valley and
Franconia), rheinfränkische (Rhine River Valley and Franconia), hessische
(Hessian), pfälzische (the Palatinate), stiffolerische (From the Bishopric of
Fulda). The number of emigrant families that first settled in a given village
was usually between 24 and 60. Every newly settled village was relatively cut
off from any of the other villages and led a life of its own in isolation from
others. Under those circumstances it is hardly any wonder that several German
dialects, especially those spoken in smaller villages have been retained to this
day in those cases where German is still spoken.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Johann Weidlein, undertook an
investigation to gain an overview of the dialects spoken in the German
linguistic island known as Swabian Turkey. Even though his research into the
geographical distribution of dialects rather than their origin and development
became his concern, his interests were in the direction of establishing where
the dialects were "at home" in what is now Germany. His work led to some
astounding results. With the help of the so-called Wenker Questionnaire Method
and other resources he was able to determine that there were no "niederdeutschen"
(Germans from the lowlands in the north) but rather--and this was only in
Swabian Turkey--that almost all "mittel and oberdeutschen" dialects were
represented, whereby the rheinfränkische far outweighs the others except for
Szakadát where a mittelfränkische dialect is spoken.
The first inhabitants of Szakadát who were settled there in
1723-1724 were: "compatriotae prope fluvium Saar" according to a Latin entry
in the parish records and were from the Saar region in the vicinity of
Zweibrücken (Westrich).
(Translator's note: The author compares this dialect with
various linguistic differences that are of technical nature as he will during
the rest of this portion of the article. His examples defy translation into
another language and only such information that might be of interest or
pertinent to an English reader will be translated.)
Closely related to this dialect spoken in Szakadát is the
Upper Hessian dialect of the villagers in Nagyszékely that is spoken in the
Vogelsberg region.
On the whole, the Hessian dialects can be divided into two
major groups. Those spoken in the Protestant areas and the Roman Catholic
regions.
The colonists who spoke the Protestant dialect emigrated
from the northern lying communities in Upper Hessen and a smaller portion from
the area below the Main River around Darmstadt, Grossgerau, Wiesbaden and
Mainz. It is rather striking, that to a great extent, the smaller dialect
groups in Swabian Turkey have adopted that of the later- arriving-settlers from
Schwalm and the Wetterau in Upper Hessen. That creates all kinds of
difficulties for a dialect researcher because he is confronted with blended
dialects.
The dialect spoken in the Lutheran village of Muscfa is
closely related to that of the Hessian Lutherans. Their dialect leads us to
their origins in the Odenwald (which their church chronicle specifically
identifies), while the pfälzer (Palatinate) dialect spoken in neighbouring
Bonyhádvarasd enables us to determine the settlers came from the region around
Worms.
The Fulda dialect is especially found in the Lower Baranya
where large numbers of emigrants from the Bishopric of Fulda arrived early in
the 18th century and settled on the estates of Prince Eugene of Savoy. In
addition to their numerous villages in the Baranya there were also villages
established by them in Mucsi and Závod as early as 1718 and 1720 on the Mercy
Domain.
The dialects continued to flourish in the villages of
Swabian Turkey. That was particularly true of the smaller communities that were
relatively isolated from the world around them. But it was inevitable that
dialects began to blend as neighbouring villages inter-acted with each other.
Hӧgyész itself is a prime example of this because of the special role the
community played because it was Mercy's residential headquarters in the Domain.
From early on, Hӧgyész was in close contact with most of the neighbouring
communities and naturally with other estates in the vicinity. This was
strengthened after 1753 when it was raised to the status of a market town with
four market days a year. This interchange with other communities was very
brisk. For that reason it is easy to see that various dialects have been
blended in the local dialects but some still remained dominant: the Franconian
and the Hessian which was influenced by the dialect spoke in the Palatinate.
Despite various assertions and some historical interpretations as well as the
parish register we are unable to state with certainty where the first settlers
in Hӧgyész originated. Whether they came from the Palatinate (the region around
Worms); the Darmstadt region as some claim (although the Roman Catholicism of
the settlers refutes that since Hessen-Darmstadt was entirely Lutheran); from
the Main River Valley region of Franconia (in the vicinity of Würzburg); or
perhaps the other most plausible variant is the Franconian and Swabian
borderlands. If the latter is true we are not only dealing with an historical
possibility but also a bitter irony. The descendants of the emigrants who
settled in Hӧgyész who were expelled from Hungary after the Second World War
were then re-settled in the area from which their ancestors had ventured from in
going to Hungary over two hundred years before. The Franconian town of Eschenau-Brandt
is now the new home of large numbers of former residents of Hӧgyész and in the
near vicinity of the ancestral homes of their forebears.
Next:
A
Portrait of the Settlement of the
Hӧgyész Domain
