This AHRC award presents an exciting opportunity to study in depth an important subject about which no-one has written a detailed or comprehensive account before.
Press release issued 16 February 2011 Professor Derek Offord from the Department of Russian has been awarded £800,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to conduct the first large-scale history of the French language in Russia. The project will span the period from c.1700 (before which France was unknown to most ordinary Russians) until the October Revolution of 1917 (after which most of the few remaining French-speaking Russian aristocrats emigrated, many of them to France). Its main focus will be on the period from the mid-eighteenth century, when French was coming to be widely used by the political and social elite, to the mid-nineteenth century, when social and cultural factors meant the use of French was becoming more restricted. It will include a brief examination of the status of French in Russia in the late tsarist period and in the USSR. It will explore how French influenced the Russian language. Much modern Russian phraseology and vocabulary is of French origin, for example the words avangard (avant-garde), debiut (début), dush (shower), garazh (garage), koshmar (nightmare), neglizhe (négligé), restoran (restaurant), taksi (taxi), trotuar (pavement). It will also examine how French affected the way Russians thought about their own language.
TO READ THIS ARTICLE, CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT
And extend your reading, free of charge and with no commitment.
