The coexistence, competition and commingling of the French and Russian languages in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia is a highly complex phenomenon, as the chapters of this volume have clearly shown. Authors have examined the language choices of a wide range of individuals, organisations and genres. This conclusion will draw together the functions of linguistic choices in various spheres, domains and genres that have emerged from the authors’ findings, summarise the manifestations and effects of Franco-Russian bilingualism in Russia which have been uncovered by this approach and then consider whether the Russian situation can be described as exceptional.

Our authors’ contributions can be divided into two types. Firstly, case studies examine the linguistic choices of individuals, families or social groups like Catherine II, Nikolai Karamzin, Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Radishchev, the Stroganov and Vorontsov families, and young noblewomen who travelled abroad. Secondly, there are contributions on the use of French and Russian in wider contexts, namely in periodicals and the fields of fashion and architecture. The case studies and wider-ranging analyses complement each other to provide a historicising approach to language use in Russia from around the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. The contributors demonstrate the value of a materialist methodology of the study of language use and attitudes, which Blommaert defines as ‘an ethnographic eye for the real historical actors, their interests, their alliances, their practices, and where they come from, in relation to the discourses they produce – where discourse is in itself seen as a crucial symbolic resource onto which people project their interests, around which they can construct alliances, on and through which they construct power’ (Blommaert 1999: 7). Such analysis aims to reveal the concrete reasons for and significance of linguistic choices.

To begin with, it is worth stressing that, from the point of view of sociolinguistics, discussion of the effects of bilingualism should not attempt to evaluate those effects as beneficial or detrimental. This sort of judgement would rely on criteria that cannot be neutral, and it would therefore be a manifestation of our own language attitudes.