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Abstract

The authors strive to present the social status of women in Croatian cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries on the example of the multilingual city of Osijek. The main goal of the paper is to determine the social position of women at that time and to examine whether and to which extent it was influenced by their knowledge of three languages spoken in the multilingual milieu of the city: Croatian, German, and Hungarian. The corpus of the research encompasses job announcements and advertisements related to women in two local newspapers in the German language Die Drau and Slawonische Presse that were published in the city of Osijek in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In the introduction, the political background of Croatian society at that period is presented, and relevant legal regulations are analyzed from the point of view of the history of law. In the main part, newspaper announcements and advertisements concerning women and their multilingualism are researched and discussed from the perspectives of pragmatic linguistics and sociolinguistics. The method used in achieving this goal was fieldwork research into the original issues of two local newspapers in the German language Die Drau and Slawonische Presse, saved at the State Archives of Osijek. The research includes all the issues of Slawonische Presse from 1870 to 1918 and Die Drau from 1870 to 1927. In the final part, conclusions are drawn on the social status of women as influenced by their knowledge of two or more languages spoken in the multilingual city of Osijek in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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