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In 1861, the principal of a school in Lower Styria entered the classroom and started asking pupils about their mother tongue. For Anton Šantel and his friends, the question was an awkward one, because they "were not used to such questions and not ready to answer them.” Šantel first answered that he can speak German and Slovene equally well, and only eventually told the principal that his mother tongue is Slovene. From then on, the school categorized him as a Slovene, in forms and reports his family name was changed from Schantel to Šantel, but most importantly, the proudly bilingual boy started to increasingly identify as a Slovene.
Ever since their establishment, Habsburg compulsory elementary schools employed various linguistic and national categorizations in the administration and teaching. At the same time, they were promoting imperial and provincial patriotism as well as dynastic loyalty. This influenced pupils' identifications, which was especially important because national identifications were not integral to primary socialisation in the family until very late, in some cases never.
The paper will trace the evolution of linguistic, proto-national, and national categorisations in Slovene-language schools and the slow emergence of Slovene as the dominant ethnolinguistic category. It will also try to evaluate the effects of this categorizations on pupils' identifications.