Fight over Bi-lingual City Signs Finally Ends in Southern Austria – After Decades

Austria took a step to end a decades-long rift with the country’s Slovenian minority this November, when parliament passed a law to double the number of communities allowed to use bilingual city signage, mainly in the region of Carinthia. In the future, Slovenes (Austrian citizens) of 164 cities will be able to read the name of their city in their own language (up from 75 cities in the past). The law came 56 years after Austria was obliged by Britain, France, Russia and the United States in a 1955 treaty to honour minority rights, including the use of bilingual signs. Despite that long history and the immense emotional disputes, chancellor Werner Faymann called the new development a ‘sign of commonality’. Austria’s ethnic Slovenes estimate that they number around 50,000, or nearly 10 per cent of Carinthia’s population.
In another Austrian region, Croatian language rights apply only to the Austrian citizens living in six (of seven) districts in the province of Burgenland, but not to those living in Vienna or any other region of the country. Language rights are administered according to the territorial principles. By moving out of the officially bilingual area, a minority speaker loses all his or her language rights.
A similar case of bilingual city signage, but much more constructive and positive, can be found in the North province of Serbia, where one of the biggest minorities is Hungarian. The issue of bilingual signs was resolved back in the 1960’s and since then most of the signs are both in Serbian and Hungarian language – with no disputes whatsoever.