Today no typical English-language portrayal of the fictional vampire Dracula would be complete without a Hungarian accent, an artifact of Hungarian Bela Lugosi’s indelible portrayal of the character.
But what language or languages would the real-life Vlad III Dracula have spoken? What language or languages did his subjects speak? I realize that he governed an area which is currently part of Romania, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people living there at the time spoke Romanian. Also, historically many ruling classes spoke a different native language than their subjects (e.g., Norman rulers in Britain), or used a fashionable foreign language amongst themselves (e.g., French among Russian aristocrats).
Vlad Dracul and Vlad Tepes were Wallachian nobility or royalty (autonomous princedoms kind of straddling the line). As such, they’d have spoken the Wallachian dialect of Romanian. Almost certainly they also spoke Turkish fluently.
The fictional Count Dracula, from northwest of the Principality of Wallachia in Transylvania (which has been part of Romania politically only since 1919, and spent several hundred years as an integral part of Hungary), would have spoken Transylvanian Romanian, Magyar, and probably German as well.
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So does the name Dracula translate into English? What would it be?
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Actually,IIRC, “Son of the Dragon”. Vlad Tepish (Tepish = “impaler”, given him by his subjects because of his favorite form of execution) was the son of a Wallachian Noble who was awarded the medal of the Order of the Dragon:
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His father, Vlad II Dracul, born around 1395, was an illegitimate son of Mircea the Elder, an important early Wallachian ruler. As a young man, he had joined the court of Sigismund of Luxemburg, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary, whose support for claiming the throne of Wallachia he eventually acquired. A sign of this support was the fact that in 1431 Vlad II was inducted into the Order of the Dragon (Societas Draconis in Latin), along with the rulers of Poland and Serbia. The purpose of the Order was to protect Eastern Europe and the Holy Roman Empire from Islamic expansion as embodied in the campaigns of the Ottoman Empire.
Wishing to assert his status, Vlad II displayed the symbol of the Order, (a dragon), in all public appearances, (on flags, clothing, etc.). The old Romanian word for serpent (Cf. drac) is nowadays the most common and casual reference to the devil - while the people of Wallachia did give Vlad II the surname Dracu (Dracul being the more grammatically correct form), any connection with a dark power was most likely coincidental. His son Vlad III would later use in several documents the surname Drăculea. Through various translations (Draculea, Drakulya) Vlad III eventually came to be known as Dracula (note that this ultimate version is a neologism in Hell.
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Actually, Stoker was following the ancient literary tradition known as “making it up” when he wrote this. Stoker’s research into Balkan history was fairly superficial. There was a group known as Szekelys in Transylvania but they were not a distinct ethnicity. They were essentially the people who lived in a border region so they were pretty much just a mixture of the surrounding populations (they spoke mainly Hungarian). Their supposed origins as the descendants of Attila’s Huns is mostly a legend.
Sheckley appears to be a variant of Shockley, meaning Goblin commonly from Cheshire, England, which arrived in America in 1671 or earlier. Or it could be from Swiss-German Schoechli, meaning Barn, according to this site.
The most famous being the American father of transistors and Nobel Prize winner, William Shockley.
