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. More broadly, it will look at the influence French had on Russian culture and thought, especially on manners, social and political attitudes, national identity, and various forms of Russian nationalism.

Little research has previously been conducted in this area, chiefly because the use of French by the Russian nobility, as an aspect of elite culture, was of less interest to Soviet scholars working within a Marxist framework than were the phenomena that tended to break down that culture. Moreover, revelation of a strong foreign influence on Russian life and culture could be adversely perceived in a patriotic tradition of scholarship as capable of diverting attention from native Russian virtues.

The research team, led by Professor Offord, will draw on other disciplines, including sociology, cultural theory and history, and will work closely with an international advisory board of distinguished scholars (five from UK universities and one each from Belgium, Switzerland and Russia) who have expertise in diverse fields.

Speaking about the project, Professor Offord said:

‘The history of French in Russia seems to be one of those things that are such a familiar part of a landscape that hardly anyone ever notices them. 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. Two post-doctoral research assistants and a PhD student will be involved throughout the three years of the project. Members of all the departments of the School of Modern Languages at Bristol are likely to be involved in some way in the academic events that the research team will organise and to contribute to the publications that will come out of them.’