This article highlights the role investment in Hungarian-language skills played in
the social reproduction of the Romanian national elite in Dualist Hungary. At any
point during the era, little less than half of middle-class Romanian students attended
Hungarian-language high schools, which their parents largely considered as language
training institutions. Parental choices and the sons’ experiences gain significance
when set against the view that such investment in linguistic capital was a subversive
practice challenging nationalist mobilization. Based on former students’ memoirs,
school yearbooks, and histories, this article concentrates on the strategies of parents,
the class-based inequality of access to Hungarian, the language policies of schools,
and teachers’ ambiguous treatment of Romanian students.
