Thomas Rosén: Russian in the 1740s

Whilst the Russian language of the eighteenth century has received much attention, its state and development during the relatively quiet decade of the 1740s has not been the focus of much research. Thomas Rosén’s exploration of Russian in the 1740s is thus a welcome contribution to this area in the field of historical sociolinguistics. The work has three principal aims: (i) a sociolinguistic analysis of the Russian language during the 1740s, (ii) a study of the causes of any linguistic change (or of its absence), and (iii) an illumination of the relationship between usage in the textual material under analysis and the linguistic registers of Russian in the eighteenth century.

The book consists of nine chapters including introduction and conclusion. In the introductory Chapter 1, the author gives an overview of language and society in eighteenth-century Russia and presents his research questions. The extra linguistic questions ask about the societal structure of the Russian Empire in the 1740s, the educational system, literacy levels, and language management measures. Having established this background, Rosén turns to linguistic questions, which concern the differences between printed and handwritten texts and how those differences can be interpreted from a sociolinguistic perspective, what evidence of standardization can be found, and whether there was demonstrable linguistic change in the 1740s.

Rosén then moves on to a survey of existing research on the topic. The scholarly apparatus of this chapter and the discussion of available literature show that the linguistic situation in Russia of the 1740s has been neglected in research so far. To remedy the situation, the author puts importance on broadening the base of textual material to be analysed, so that one may arrive at soundly supported conclusions. The combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches Rosén employs is ideal to achieve a picture that depicts the linguistic situation as completely as possible.

Chapter 3 deals with the impact of society on language. A significant part of this chapter is devoted to the difficulty of determining literacy levels in Russia and describing such systems of language management as were in existence in the 1740s, including the declining role of the Russian Conference (русская ассамблея, a group established at the Imperial Academy of Sciences where translators exchanged views on possible lexical additions to Russian, mainly as a result of concepts and ideas in foreign texts). Rosén considers Russian language management activities in the 1740s to belong to the premodern stage, according to Neustupný’s categorization of language management based on modernity.^[1] Rosén considers analysis of language management (“explicit and observable efforts to modify linguistic practices or beliefs” (p. 5)) of premodern Russian possible despite obstacles (such as lack of data) because, and he quotes Sue Wright, “language policy making and language planning […] as an informal activity […] is as old as language itself” (p. 6; Wright 2004: 1).

There follows a survey of available sources in Chapter 4. Acknowledging the “bad data problem” (after Labov) affecting much historical sociolinguistic work, as material was not preserved or exists only in a fragmentary state, Rosén lists the sources that do exist for the student of 1740s Russian: electronic corpora (including a subcorpus, created by him, of 137 texts within the Russian National Corpus), printed books, newspapers, and archival material, which he has gathered from archives in Denmark, Finland, the Russian Federation, Sweden, and Ukraine.

According to Rosén, there is a dearth of extant ego documents of the 1740s, and overall, very little handwritten material. It is laudable to seek materials for analysis of language use “from below”, particularly in the case of Russian of the eighteenth century, as so much material was written by a tiny, elite subsection of the population. As stated in Chapter 3, literacy rates, though difficult to ascertain, were extremely low. It is thus not surprising to find a lack of letters and ego-documents from lower social strata. The inclusion of such personal letters of the 1740s that do exist, from noble families (for example those analysed in Tipton’s (2017: 38) study of correspondence of the Vorontsov family), might provide a useful comparison with other handwritten documents and contribute to a fuller picture.

One important point is made in passing in the conclusion to Chapter 4, where Rosén considers “the people behind the material” (pp. 76–77). He surmises that most people writing in the 1740s would have been between 20 and 70 years old. Thus, someone writing in 1740 may have been born as early as the 1670s, learnt to write in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and simply stuck to writing the way he learnt to, despite changes to writing conventions. The choices of writers, conscious or unconscious, are very difficult to discern, particularly in the absence of much (if any) metalinguistic comments by individual writers on, for example, spelling choices.

Chapter 5 is devoted to methodological considerations. The author argues for a combination of methodological approaches, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Rosén chooses register analysis as the most suitable method to study the historical material at hand. A register analysis has three parts: the situational context of the text (including a description of the participants and the relationship between them etc.), linguistic analysis which examines lexical and grammatical characteristics of the text, and functional analysis which aims to determine why specific formal characteristics are used for certain content in a text. Chapters 6–8 are given to the three parts of this analysis.

Chapter 6 contains a situational analysis of registers. The seven parts of this analysis (participants, channel, processing circumstances, setting, communicative purpose, topic) are all dealt with in subsections, the first are longer (due not least to long sections of quoted text), the latter three parts are only given one paragraph each (the section on topics not even that, at three lines’ length). Chapter 7, the linguistic analysis, is by far the longest chapter of the book. Rosén supplies extensive excerpts or complete original documents and analyses orthography, morphology, syntax and vocabulary (with an emphasis on orthography), how they differ between print versions of the same document, and gives a wealth of textual examples. The functional analysis of Chapter 8, on the other hand, takes up only eight pages. Rosén finds that much of the written Russian language sources of the 1740s rely on collocations and formulaic language, in official correspondence, administrative documents, newspapers, and private letters.

In the concluding chapter, Rosén reminds the reader of the list of hypothetical registers of Russian in the 1740s set out in Chapter 5: traditional literature and religious language, the language of printed texts, traditional administrative documentation, informal speech, professional language, and non-native Russian speech. He concludes that his analysis indicates a need for revision of these categories for Russian in the 1740s. Firstly, he states that vernacular printed texts constitute a separate register, as there are differences depending on what printing-shop produced a text. Rosén then discusses the need to subsume state documentation, administrative documents and private papers under the register of “vernacular handwritten language”. He found that the wide-ranging materials in this register all shared important features: the same graphic and orthographic principles are applied to handwritten high-status documents and simple notes, as are formulaic expressions.

Rosén’s work gives a succinct overview of Russian in the 1740s and will be welcomed by those who are interested in Russian in the eighteenth century and wish to know more about developments in the second quarter of that century. There are many examples of text, both printed books and archival material, which are highly useful for scholars who cannot consult such sources easily themselves. Rosén’s survey of available sources, too, gives a solid overview of what data is available and where future scholarship might be undertaken. Rosén does, however, not state what lay behind the choice of certain archives over others, information that would be very beneficial to those wishing to continue work on the subject.

Many quotations from primary sources, occasionally entire documents, appear in the text by way of examples, but without any discussion. For instance, Rosén cites a document officially authored by an institution (rather than an individual); this document (a description of a triumphal arch for Elizabeth I) is not described, or analysed further (p. 95). In another section, Rosén quotes a template for the imperial title, and a template for a letter of credit from 1744 (pp. 59–63). These documents run to four pages, and are followed immediately by the chapter conclusion, without discussion. Such instances of undiscussed quoted material are a missed opportunity, because when Rosén does analyse sections of quoted primary text, and compares them with other similar sources, the discussion is highly insightful, as in his description of advertisements in Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti (pp. 96–99).

Rosén’s work on Russian in the 1740s is a sound introduction to the topic and the materials available to scholars interested in this decade, and his findings will prove highly useful for further exploration as there is much of interest yet to analyse and discover from this period.