After an economic crisis in the late Middle Ages, many epidemics, and the Turkish invasions of 1529 and 1532, a large portion of what was then western Hungary was devastated and deserted. These circumstances led to the pre-conditions for settlement by Croatian colonists. The settlement campaigns were organized by the lords of the manors (among them the aristocrats Nádasdy, Erdödy and Batthyány) who owned estates in western Hungary and central Croatia. Because of the Ottoman Empire's advance onto the Balkan peninsula, the lords of the manor thought it safer to resettle serfs from the southern lands to western Hungary. Strategic military considerations also played a role in this decision. For reasons of both supply and defense, the goal was to obtain a functional rural infrastructure to the southeast of the capital city of Vienna.

Conservative estimates indicate that in the 16th century, approximately 20,000 to 60,000 people were resettled in present-day Burgenland, the southeastern portion of Lower Austria, western Hungary, southern Moravia, and southwestern Slovakia. In several stages, streams of refugees mingled with the organized settlers, as is shown by surviving instructions of Count Batthyány from 1532.

The first traces of the Croatian settlers are found in the year 1515 in Urbaren (land registers and tax records) in the Eisenstadt district. In the 16th century, the Croatian settlers accounted for around 30 percent of the total population. The majority of them were farmers, but among them there were also priests, craftsmen, merchants, petty aristocracy and nobles.

A special legal status was enjoyed by the Vlahi, or Walachians, who had settled in 13 localities at the southern edge of the Günser mountain range in the area of Oberwart and who spoke their own dialect. They were required to pay very little taxes, were exempted from work and were called on by the landowning Batthyány und Erdödy families to do military and police service. In contrast to the other farmers, up through the 19th century they carried on pastoral farming and a flourishing livestock and wool trade between Styria, Lower Austria, Hungary and Bosnia.

In the mid-1700s opposition to the "foreigners" appeared. The Lower Austrian state called upon Emperor Maximilian II to forbid further Croatian immigration, to replace the Croatian settlers with German ones, and to no longer admit them to official posts. After initial misgivings, in December 1573 Maximilian II enacted a secret decree in which he complied with the demands of nobility and decreed the general legal discrimination against Croatian subjects.

After the turbulent period of migration, during which all or most of the deserted villages were settled, as well as some genuinely new ones founded (primarily in southern Burgenland), a phase of economic and cultural consolidation followed.

The Burgenland Croats brought along with them various Croatian dialects, such as Cakavian, Kajkavian und Shtokavian, so that the colloquial language varied considerably from place to place. The written language, which was standardized in the 19th century, also differs to a large degree from the modern written language of the Croatian Republic. The Croatian settlers also brought with them their Old Church Slavonic tradition with its Glagolitic script and liturgy. This may be seen in the case of the oldest written document of the Burgenland Croats, a handwritten entry in a mass book in Klingenbach (Klimpuh) dating from 1564. Glagolitic, however, disappeared rather quickly.

The first Croatian schoolbooks date back to the years 1746 and 1747 and were produced on private imitative. In 1806, the first real schoolbook was published for the Croatian schools in western Hungary called "Slabikar aliti jimen knyizicza", written by Father Johann Sigismund Karner. Around the same time, the first contacts with Croats in the old country were established. 
A milestone in the development of a Croatian standard language is doubtlessly the translation, though never printed, of the New Testament into the language of the Burgenland Croats at the beginning of the 19th century. The Croatian ethnologist and collector of folksongs, Fran Kurelac, studied the folksongs of the Burgenland Croats in the period between 1846 and 1848. They were first published in 1805 in the form of an almanac and became very popular among the general population, thus contributing to the dissemination and establishment of the Burgenland Croats written language.

The central government in Vienna supported efforts to foster the independent culture of the Burgenland Croats in the second half of the 19th century. As a consequence of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, the central authorities in Vienna started encouraging the independent cultural development of the small non-Hungarian ethnic groups in an attempt to weaken the liberal and anti-Habsburg camp in Hungary. Support was offered primarily by Catholic priests who were responsible for the entire primary education system in Hungary.

In 1853, the first schoolbook was published for Croats, which had to be specifically adapted to the Burgenland Croats. The Primary Education Act of 1868 stipulated primary education in one’s native language and demand for schoolbooks strengthened the position of an independent written language based on the Cakavian and Ikavian dialects and also the acceptance of modern Croatian spelling and punctuation rules.

The numerous song books of Michael Nakovich, Johann Vukovich and Jakob Dobrovich have helped to keep the folksongs of the Burgenland Croats alive to this day. Some of the tunes, for example, the folksong Jtro rano sam se ja stao (I Rose Early in the Morning) might have inspired Joseph Haydn to compose the old imperial anthem Gott erhalte, which later became the melody of the German national anthem Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (Germany, Germany, above all) and known world-wide today as the German anthem with the title "Unity and rights and freedom ".

The Golden Age of the literature of the Burgenland Croats was around the turn of the century and is reflected in the works of the priest Mate Meršic-Miloradic. The farmer’s almanac, Kalendar Svete Familije (Calendar of the Holy Family), which he published starting in 1903, contains unique and until that time unseen of works of poetic talent that gave the reputation of the poet of the Burgenland Croats. He also wrote the text of the Burgenland Croatian hymn "Hrvat mi je otac".

Cultural development was for a long time closely linked to religion. As a result of the lack of Croatian political and economic centers, the village, or rather the village community became the basis of Croatian life. As these small settlements were far removed from the urban centers and their social and cultural impulses, associations modeled after guilds having a reach beyond the individual regions did not evolve. The main impetus came from religious-cultural associations, which formed the base of Croatian communal life in Burgenland.

The campaign of the nationalist Hungarian governments between 1879 and 1918 to enforce the Hungarian language and suppress minority languages—also using the method of massive Magyarization measures in school education and official usage— were not very successful. According to the census of 1920, only 26.8 percent of the entire Burgenland population had a command of written and spoken Hungarian. However, the intellectual elite of the ethnic minority, especially the priests and teachers, were educated in Hungarian and tended to be pro-Hungarian.

Wine-growing and wine-selling, cereal farming and animal husbandry were the mainstays of the economy of the Burgenland Croats for centuries. Among the class of tenant peasants in the 19th century, a strong trend of labor migration set in, first as harvest workers, and later on as industrial and construction workers in the industrialized zones of the Vienna basin, Vienna and Graz. At around the same time, a large out-migration wave to the U.S. also started, which culminated at the turn of the century. By the time the Hapsburg empire collapsed, over half of the ethnic Croatian population of northern Burgenland worked in industrial jobs. In central and southern Burgenland by contrast, the share of the population working in agricultural was 67 percent. One of the main issues for the Croats during the First Republic was the land reform. The areas in Burgenland used for agricultural and forestry remained mainly in the hands of Hungarian and German-Austrian large landowners despite a few improvements for Croats. The Croats owned small and tiny holdings of two to five hectares as compared to the landholdings of over thousands of hectares. The attempt to form cooperatives modeled after the farm credit cooperatives in Austria (Raiffeisen organization) was not much more successful than the land reform. Many people were forced to emigrate.

One of the greatest problems for the new Burgenland was the fact that the large cities, which had been the local political, commercial and administrative centers, had remained in Hungary. The newly created German administration and the German nationalist propaganda of the school association Südmark resulted in a wave of assimilation.

The opinion of the Croatian-speaking population regarding the issue of the annexation of Burgenland by Austria in 1920-21 was overshadowed by the fear of being cut off from the industrial regions and markets of the much stronger economy of Austria, as well as by the fear of losing the right to primary education in Croatian under Austrian education laws. The Austrian Primary Education Act strictly separated the church and education. For many this implied the threat that primary education for Croats would not be in the Catholic native language.

For this reason, in 1920 the Croatian Culture Association "Hrvatsko kulturno društvo" headed by a clerical-conservative teacher and priest handed over a memorandum to the Border Commission of the Allied Powers demanding that the Croatian towns remain under the jurisdiction of Hungary. The consequence was that when the new border was drawn, Croatian towns next to the border with approximately 10,000 inhabitants were given to Hungary.

The weighting of the four languages of Burgenland (Romany, Hungarian, Croatian, German) changed after the annexation of Burgenland by Austria shifting the weight from Hungarian to German as the major public language. This new hierarchy of languages was soon assimilated by all the language groups of Burgenland. The constant pressure to have a better command of German than of Croatian, the steadily sinking competence of the members of the ethnic minority in their native language, the marginal significance of the ethnic group’s language in school and education, and finally, the cultural and ethnic assimilation in Burgenland caused by the loss of the language is a phenomenon that to this date continues to be valid.

During the time between the Wars, the Croatian minority was divided into two large political camps. The controversy ignited over the issue of education. In 1920 the Hungarian Education Act remained in force temporarily in Burgenland. When in 1922, the Social Democrats insisted on installing Austrian education laws in Burgenland and this was resolved at the provincial parliament, the measure was hindered by the governing Christian Socialists at the national level. In this manner, Christian Socialists enforced the maintenance of the Catholic primary education in Burgenland and thus the Catholic church kept control over school administration and curricula. As a reaction, the communities with predominantly Social Democrats, installed German-language primary schools.

The use of the written language of the Burgenland Croats had become a symbol of a Christian Socialist political orientation and the Social Democratic Croats rejected the language in schools and in official use, the Social Democratic newspaper "Naš Glas" (Our Voice) was discontinued. This resulted in reduced investments by the province in the Croatian school education. Although a school primer was published, major areas such as the further education of teachers or advanced education kept only the status of electives.

Croat organizations were became increasingly integrated into Christian Socialist party structures. The Croatian Culture Association, which was newly founded in 1929, was intended as a nonpartisan organization, but it never really succeeded in overcoming the deep political rifts. At the provincial parliamentary elections in 1925, one Croat Christian Socialist Party ran for election that missed the threshold to enter the Burgenland provincial parliament by only a slight margin. As a consequence, this party was integrated into the Christian Socialist Party and did not run for elections again. In its place, Croats were informally assured of two mandates for representatives of the ethnic minority on the Christian Socialist’s ballot. The Provincial parliamentary therefore had several Croats serving as representatives (also during the 2nd Republic) in both the Christian Socialist Party faction (later became Austrian People’s Party, ÖVP) and in the Social Democratic faction.

The political and ideological division of the Croatian-speaking population deepened even further in 1934 when the Croatian associations were integrated into the organizations of the authoritarian state. In 1937, a school inspector was appointed for the Croatian education system and an Ethnic Minority Education Act was passed that was very favorable for minorities and included lessons in the native language of the ethnic minority according to the proportion of the population. However, it was never implemented due to Austria’s Anschluss to the Third Reich in March 1938.

The structure of the NSDAP in Burgenland was characterized by the high percentage of Croatian and Hungarian-speaking members. Many unemployed and disappointed Social Democrats joined the illegal NSDAP already before the year 1938, which had succeeded in inspiring hopes of economic improvement in the Third Reich, but downplayed the threat German nationalism posed for ethnic minorities as being insignificant. The National Socialists had Croatian confidential agents in many communities and organizations of the ethnic minority. The NSDAP even organized party events in Croatian and Hungarian. Loyal Croats were given leading positions in Croatian Culture Associations. For foreign policy reasons Croatian politicians were saved from persecution in the beginning.

When in 1941 party officials in Berlin started mentioning the re-settlement of the Burgenland Croats, this move was thwarted by party officials in Burgenland. It was only in 1942 that the Croatian newspaper was closed down. However, the NSDAP was unwavering in educational issues. The Catholic schools were converted into public schools and the Croatian language was almost completely suppressed within a few months. In the villages, kindergartens were opened to teach the children German again. Croat teachers and priests who objected were either punished by being sent to other places or, as happened to the priest Matthias Semeliker, to the concentration camp in Dachau.

By contrast to the Slovene partisans who organized resistance in Carinthia, there was no resistance among the Croat ethnic minority. Only individual Croats joined the ranks of Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia on the grounds of their anti-fascist convictions.

After the Second World War, Dr. Lorenz Karall, a Croats from Veliki Borištof/Großwarasdorf, became the first freely elected governor of Burgenland. In 1945, he contacted the Tito government in Yugoslavia on behalf of the Burgenland Croats and achieved the release of Burgenland Croatian prisoners of war in Yugoslavia.
This action soon caused the Croatian Culture Association to become involved in political strife, because in 1947, Yugoslavia voiced demands at the peace conferences to exchange populations or to grant cultural autonomy to the ethnic minority. The population exchange was strictly rejected by the Burgenland Croats. After Tito and Stalin broke off relations in the year 1949, the Yugoslav proposals were no longer supported by the Soviet Union. The rights of the Croatian ethnic minority in Burgenland were defined in Article 7 of the State Treaty of 1955 as were the rights of the Carinthian Slovenes. However, these rights have not been fulfilled to this date.

The reconstruction of Burgenland after the war was delayed by the fact that it belonged to the Soviet occupation zone, and later on, due to its location right next to the Iron Curtain. The consequence was that the social structure of the Croatian villages remained unchanged for a long time. Only in the beginning of the 1960s when industrialization started gaining ground in Vienna, the Vienna basin region and Graz and transportation facilities improved, did many Croats starting taking on industrial jobs. Around 25% of employed persons in Burgenland commuted to workplaces in the agglomerations. They broke free of tradition and dissociated themselves from the influence of traditional authorities. This resulted in the crisis of the old Croatian extended family, the Croatian village communities and lead to individualization. The number of mixed marriages rose, bilingual education declined. While the communities in northern Burgenland were able to retain their total population although they experienced higher assimilation rates, most of the communities in central Burgenland and some communities in the south did not experience any assimilation, but rather very strong out-migration losses.

The political division of the Croatian-speaking population persisted for a long time, also in the Second Republic. While Croatian organizations gradually became more and more integrated into the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) who claimed to speak for the ethnic minority, the Social-Democrat-dominated Committee of the Mayors and Vice-Mayors of the Croatian and Mixed-language Communities of Burgenland voiced strong protests against this claim.

Native language education was re-introduced at the primary school level on the basis of the Minorities Education Act of 1937, which remained in force until 1995. Although the provisions of the State Treaty regarding higher education and bilingual signs were never fulfilled for the Croats in Burgenland, the Croatian-speaking group was considered the “silent majority” in the 1960s and 1970s. The electoral behavior in the bilingual communities deviates only slightly from the average in Burgenland.

A further hindrance to the general language and cultural situation of the Croatian ethnic group was the weak economy of Burgenland. A large share of Burgenland’s population is still forced to accept jobs outside of the province. For many of them, the home community has become merely a weekend residence.

Article 7 of the Austrian State Treaty signed in Vienna 

guarantees the population of Burgenland — in theory, at least — a well-secured position with regard to legal rights. In practice, however, for a long time these minority rights had little significance. It was only in 1976 that the Ethnic Minority Act took effect as the implementation of the State Treaty. The Croatian organizations took a negative view of the Act, since it meant a restriction of the rights, which they were guaranteed by Article 7 of the Austrian State Treaty.

This act regulated, in particular, the issues of topographic signs, official languages and assistance granted to ethnic minorities. Because of a lack of an implementation instrument, up until 1987 Croatian was completely excluded as an official language. It was not until December 1987, when individual citizens filed a complaint concerning the infringement of their constitutional rights that a portion of the Ethnic Minority Act was repealed and Burgenland Croatian was declared the second official language in 6 of 7 districts of Burgenland. The members of the ethnic group were granted the right to use their mother tongue from that time on as an additional official language when they so requested. It does not, however, provide for measures to promote the general use of Croatian as an official language. The responsible parties at authorities and public offices are only obliged to guarantee that Croatian may be used in official dealings.

The Ethnic Minority Act is drafted in the spirit of a rather outdated conception of minority rights as they were understood at the time ethnic minority rights were first taken into consideration and according to which the purpose of any regulation on official languages was to protect individuals from being discriminated against due to a lack of knowledge of the official language. The more modern approach assumes that functional bilingualism is a prerequisite for the preservation of the multilingualism of a region and was not taken into consideration. Outside of dealings with authorities—particularly services offered by public sector entities organized under private law (e.g. at post offices and train stations) —the right to use the language of an ethnic minority is not guaranteed. Official forms must generally be produced in German, and members of ethnic minorities only have the right to request an additional translation.

The Ethnic Minority Act restricts the right to have bilingual signs and place names to areas where the ethnic minority make up at least 25% of the population. According to the Ethnic Minority Act, the practical implementation is dependent on decrees issued by the federal government. The federal government has failed to issue the decree to install bilingual place name signs for the past 20 years.

In some communities, private associations, usually the local "Townscape Improvement Leagues", have posted bilingual welcome signs at the entrances of the towns. The Catholic church announces masses in both languages in some communities. Additionally, some communities have bilingual signs at municipal offices and community institutions (Municipal office/Opcinski stan, Raiffeisen credit union/Raiffeisenblagajna, Elementary School/ Osnovna škola, Fire Department /Ognjobranski stan, Warehouse/Poljoprivredno skladišce etc.) and bilingual street names.

In 1993, the Advisory Board for the Croatian Ethnic Group unanimously passed a recommendation to the federal government to install bilingual place name signs.

In 2000 protests, acitivities and campaigns organised by minority organisations finally succeded: a decree concerning bilingual place name signs has been adopted, 47 Croatian villages finally got such signs.

With regard to the printed media, the Croatian ethnic group has two weekly newspapers. Hrvatske novine is an important source of information; it has been published since 1910 and attempts to cover all areas of life. The Diocese of Eisenstadt publishes the second Croatian weekly paper, Crikveni glasnik ("The Church Herald").

PUT ("The Path"), the magazine for Burgenland Croats in Vienna, comes out six times a year, and is read in both Vienna and Burgenland. NOVI GLAS ("the New Voice"), the magazine of the Croatian Association of University Graduates, is published quarterly. In addition, other organizations have their own Croatian or bilingual publications, which come out on a more or less regular basis.

In 1978, as a result of a political campaign, an action committee succeeded in obtaining radio broadcasts via Ö2 in Croatian, there are now 300 minutes a week of such programming. Since 1989, there has also been a regional television program which transmits for a half hour each week.

Improvements in the area of education were achieved in 1989, when pilot projects were started at two upper secondary schools with Croatian as one of the compulsory subjects, and in 1992-93, when the bilingual upper secondary school Oberwart/Borta/Felsöör was opened.

Likewise, in 1989 in Burgenland a provincial act was passed which stipulated a minimum of six hours a week of bilingual care in kindergartens in communities which qualified as being bilingual. For many communities, this legislation meant a first step toward bilingualism; in many others, however, bilingualism was practiced even before the law was passed as the competence for kindergarten administration is granted to the local municipalities.

In 1995, a fundamental reform took place with regard to bilingual education. For the first time it became possible to be exempted from bilingual instruction. Bilingual instruction must be provided at primary schools of communities defined as bilingual. The scope of the Croatian portion of instruction, however, was not fixed, so that in practice it led to various interpretations. Difficulties in bilingual instruction also arise from the differing levels of language proficiency on the part of the children. Deficits which children have originating at home or at kindergarten are not compensated.

The lower secondary school in Großwarasdorf (Veliki Borištof), which held bilingual classes on a pilot project basis until 1995, was given a legal framework, as was the bilingual upper secondary school Oberwart/Borta/Felsöör instituted only a short time before. At several middle schools, Croatian is offered as an elective or a compulsory subject. Several organizations are active in the area of adult education, and offer both language courses and courses on various topics held in Croatian.

In Vienna, the Burgenland Croatian Culture Association organizes language courses for all age groups. One of the courses, which is also appropriate for self-instruction is Gradišcanskohrvatski glasi, was published in 1997; the series of three books and two CDs makes it possible to begin the study of Burgenland Croatian on one's own.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990, came a phase of more intense cooperation and collaboration between the Burgenland Croats in Austria and the other parts of the ethnic group which had remained in Hungary and Slovakia after the annexation of Burgenland to Austria in 1921. After Austria's accession to the European Union, this cooperation lost some of its initial momentum. Relations and cultural exchange with the Republic of Croatia have stagnated due to the war in former Yugoslavia.

After representatives were delegated to the advisory board for the Croatian ethnic group for the first in 1993, cultural and language policy activities of the Croatian ethnic group became more lively, and now the budgets available for these activities are larger. The federal government has appointed representatives of Croatian associations and organizations from municipal and provincial administrations, as well as from the Catholic Church to the advisory board.

In 2000 the Austrian Federal Parliament has adopted a provision for the protection of minorities in the Austrian Constitution: "The Republic (Federation, States and Local Communities) recognises its traditional linguistic and cultural plurality which is represented in its autochthonous national minorities. Language and culture, existence and preservation of these national minorities must be respected, secured and promoted." This provision does not provide new individual minority rights, but should be a guideline for all executive bodies.

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Breu, Josef: Die Kroatensiedlungen im Burgenland und in den anschließenden Gebieten. Wien 1970 (Franz Deuticke)

Geosits, Stefan (Hrsg.): Die burgenländischen Kroaten im Wandel der Zeiten. Wien 1986 (Edition Tusch)

Holzer, Werner, Pröll, Ulrike (Hrsg.): Mit Sprachen leben. Praxis der Mehrsprachigkeit. Klagenfurt/Celovec 1995 (Drava)

Holzer, Werner, Münz, Rainer (Hrsg.): Trendwende? Sprache und Ethnizität im Burgenland. Wien 1993 (Passagen Verlag)