Banat Swabians

Banat Swabians

German: Banater Schwaben
The coat of arms of the Banat Swabians (as part of the Danube Swabians)
Regions with significant populations
Banat (south-western Romania)
Languages
German (with the Banat Swabian dialect, a local type of the Swabian dialect)
Religion
Primarily Roman Catholicism
Related ethnic groups
Germans (most notably Swabians and Danube Swabians respectively)
Native to south-western present-day Romania

The Banat Swabians are an ethnic German population in the former Kingdom of Hungary in Central-Southeast Europe, part of the Danube Swabians and Germans of Romania. They emigrated in the 18th century to what was then the Austrian Empire's Banat of Temeswar province, later included in the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary, a province which had been left sparsely populated by the wars with the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War I in 1918, the Swabian minority worked to establish an independent multi-ethnic Banat Republic; however, the province was divided by the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. The greater part was annexed by Romania, a smaller part by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (since 1929 Yugoslavia) and a small region around Szeged remained part of Hungary.

Following World War II most Banat Swabians were expelled to the West by the Soviet Union and its subsidiaries, and after 1990 and the fall of the Soviet Union and its republics many of those remaining left for economic and emotional reasons.