The chapter explores what type of sources can help us understand multilingualism in the past. Since direct observation and elicitation techniques are not available, tackling the “poor data problem” is one of the key issues in the study of historic multilingualism. The chapter focuses on the late Habsburg Monarchy and its linguistically exceptionally diverse populations. Scholars frequently draw on the ethnographic maps, demographic data, and language laws that have come down to us from historic times to make sense of this diversity. Important as these sources are, they only offer a bird’s eye view of the realm’s multilingualism. Other sources are needed to explore its functioning in day-to-day life in particular communities. The chapter argues that memoirs, late-Habsburg satirical magazines, and criminal court records can all serve this purpose. They afford unique glimpses into everyday life in the past and allow us to reconstruct the workings of historical multilingualism in terms of its social underpinnings and linguistic outcomes.

This chapter examines the many roles played by signs in dissonant languages, that is languages no longer spoken on city streets, in the urban linguistic landscape. These ghost signs are examined in four cities designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as World heritage sites: Toledo, St Petersburg, Palermo, and Lviv. Primary data comes from my fieldwork, which included site visits, participation in tours in relevant languages, interviews with tour guides and visitors, and analyses of UNESCO reports, tourist guides, media, and travelogues. A critical analysis of the data shows that multilingual ghost signs perform multifaceted urban identity work: promoting attractive narratives of harmonious past diversity, they recontextualize the cities as “welcoming” and “cosmopolitan” and deflect attention from present-day suppression of minority languages, be it Uzbek in St Petersburg or Russian in Lviv.

As the war plans of the great powers unfolded, few foresaw the stalemate that would set in by the end of 1914. Under Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, seven of its eight field armies were to attack France and achieve victory within six weeks, after which most of the troops would be withdrawn for action against Russia. In the meantime, Russia would have to be checked by Austria-Hungary, which Germany expected to abandon its own priority of crushing Serbia. The French, with the help of the British Expeditionary Force, won at the Marne against the Germans, who then dug in to consolidate their conquests. In “the Race to the Sea,” a series of failed flanking maneuvers by both sides established trench lines north to Flanders. By December 1914 a continuous Western front existed from the English Channel to Switzerland. Meanwhile, in the east, Germany’s Eighth Army, under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, defeated two Russian armies at Tannenberg, but Austro-Hungarian forces divided between Serbian and Russian objectives failed to conquer Serbia, were defeated by the Russians at Lemberg, and ultimately held the line of the Carpathians in a bloody winter campaign. The Ottoman Empire entered the war, creating another front against Russia in the Caucasus.