Imperial and Royal - Other Uses

Other Uses

The ubiquity of this phrase in all administrative matters made it a synonym for the Habsburg administration, sometimes referred to as the "k. u. k. monarchy" in Central European publications through the present. Other languages of the Habsburg Monarchy retained the German abbreviation or used it interchangeably with their own − c. i kr. in Croatian, c. a k. or c.-k. in Czech, cs. és kir. in Hungarian, I.R. in Italian, c. i k. or C.K. in Polish, often hyphenated (cezaro-crăiesc) in Romanian, c. a k. in Slovak, c. kr. in Slovenian.

The abbreviation k.k. gave rise to the noun Kakania (spelling out the letter K twice as well as reminiscent of caca in the Central European languages). It was intended to describe the Habsburg Monarchy as a state of mind, bureaucratic and with a highly stratified formal society. A discussion of Kakania became a highlight of the first volume of Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities (1930).