Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on Dates, Transliteration and Other Editorial Practices
- Abbreviations Used in the Text, Notes and References
- Dates of Reigns in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 French and Russian in Catherine's Russia
- 2 The Use of French by Catherine II in her Letters to Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1774–96)
- 3 Language Use Among the Russian Aristocracy: The Case of the Counts Stroganov
- 4 The Francophone Press in Russia: A Cultural Bridge and an Instrument of Propaganda
- 5 Russian Noblewomen's Francophone Travel Narratives (1777–1848): The Limits of the Use of French
- 6 Russian or French? Bilingualism in Aleksandr Radishchev's Letters from Exile (1790–1800)
- 7 Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family
- 8 French and Russian in Ego-Documents by Nikolai Karamzin
- 9 Pushkin's Letters in French
- 10 Instruction in Eighteenth-Century Coquetry: Learning about Fashion and Speaking its Language
- 11 The Role of French in the Formation of Professional Architectural Terminology in Eighteenth-Century Russia
- 12 The Coexistence of Russian and French in Russia in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century: Bilingualism with or without Diglossia?
- Conclusion
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
7 - Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on Dates, Transliteration and Other Editorial Practices
- Abbreviations Used in the Text, Notes and References
- Dates of Reigns in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 French and Russian in Catherine's Russia
- 2 The Use of French by Catherine II in her Letters to Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1774–96)
- 3 Language Use Among the Russian Aristocracy: The Case of the Counts Stroganov
- 4 The Francophone Press in Russia: A Cultural Bridge and an Instrument of Propaganda
- 5 Russian Noblewomen's Francophone Travel Narratives (1777–1848): The Limits of the Use of French
- 6 Russian or French? Bilingualism in Aleksandr Radishchev's Letters from Exile (1790–1800)
- 7 Code-Switching in the Correspondence of the Vorontsov Family
- 8 French and Russian in Ego-Documents by Nikolai Karamzin
- 9 Pushkin's Letters in French
- 10 Instruction in Eighteenth-Century Coquetry: Learning about Fashion and Speaking its Language
- 11 The Role of French in the Formation of Professional Architectural Terminology in Eighteenth-Century Russia
- 12 The Coexistence of Russian and French in Russia in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century: Bilingualism with or without Diglossia?
- Conclusion
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
From the reign of Catherine the Great onwards we come across codeswitching in the writings of educated francophone Russians. Users move from one language to another in their correspondence, diaries and memoirs. This chapter is devoted to an analysis of this linguistic phenomenon as it is manifested in the form of switching between French and Russian in the correspondence of one Russian noble family, the Vorontsovs, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This case study of historical code-switching is facilitated by the abundance of published and unpublished material in the Vorontsovs’ family archives, by the diversity of the types of document in this corpus and by the fact that these documents were written over a long period from the 1730s until the 1850s (AKV 1870–95: see especially vols 5, 10, 21, 27, 31 and 32; RGADA, f. 1261).
The reasons for code-switching are not very well known and there is no agreed definition of the phenomenon. In modern sociolinguistics, codeswitching mostly refers to the spoken language within contemporary fully bilingual mixed communities (Romaine 1989: 110–64; Myers-Scotton 1997; Wardhaugh 1998; Holmes 2001). ‘Historical code-switching’ has only recently developed into a topic of research in its own right, with the current focus on medieval and early modern Britain (Schendl 2012: 520). For my purposes here, code-switching simply means the practice of writers, who may or may not be fully bilingual, when they move from one language to the other in the same document. Sometimes the codeswitching concerns a single name or word, at other times whole phrases or passages.
The letters from and to members of the Vorontsov family who were born in the 1710s and 1720s show that even in the reign of Catherine the Great, when francophonie was becoming more widespread among the Russian nobility, much correspondence was conducted entirely in Russian among the Russian aristocracy. The use of French as the main language for communication among this elite, moreover, was a new fashion in the eighteenth century, so it is not surprising that we see different code-switching habits among the different generations and individuals.
- Type
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- Information
- French and Russian in Imperial RussiaLanguage Use among the Russian Elite, pp. 132 - 151Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015