Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Le français langue seconde, langue de la relation intime, de la relation à soi et à l’autre
- Part I From French as a Language of the Bilingual Netherlands to the ‘Language of Universality’ in a Wider Europe (Sixteenth – Eighteenth Centuries): Du français langue du bilinguisme aux Pays-Bas à la ‘langue de l’universalité’ dans l’Europe élargie (seizième – dix-huitième siècles)
- Part II The Use of French as a Second Language: From Continuity to Geographical Growth (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries): De l’utilisation du français langue seconde. De la continuité à l’expansion géographique (dix-neuvième – vingtième siècles)
- Index
6 - The French Language in the Diaries of Olga Davydova: An Example of Russian-French Aristocratic Bilingualism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Le français langue seconde, langue de la relation intime, de la relation à soi et à l’autre
- Part I From French as a Language of the Bilingual Netherlands to the ‘Language of Universality’ in a Wider Europe (Sixteenth – Eighteenth Centuries): Du français langue du bilinguisme aux Pays-Bas à la ‘langue de l’universalité’ dans l’Europe élargie (seizième – dix-huitième siècles)
- Part II The Use of French as a Second Language: From Continuity to Geographical Growth (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries): De l’utilisation du français langue seconde. De la continuité à l’expansion géographique (dix-neuvième – vingtième siècles)
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The diaries of Olga Ivanovna Davydova (1813/14-1876) are located in the Scientific Technological Library of Novosibirsk. Amongst 20 copybooks, five are in French. They were written between 1830 and 1848 and relate the travels, the family life and the religious feelings of the young woman in European high society. This chapter presents the level of correctness of her use of the French language, her typical errors and transcoding markers between French and Russian, with some elements of other languages. Its conclusions are that the people from O.I. Davydova's social circle were not used to language switching and their level of French, but also English and German, was quite high, not only because of early learning (the so-called ‘gouvernante method’) but also because of lifelong learning, reading and travelling.
Keywords: Code-switching, bilingualism, foreign language acquisition, speech errors, diary, Russian aristocracy
The possibility of the equal mastery of two languages is the subject of continual discussion, not only in the scientific community but also among writers, for instance Nancy Huston and Lyuba Yurgenson. Publications on bilingualism are numerous and constantly increasing, following progress in cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics. In this chapter we will pay attention only to the particularities of the written speech of one bilingual person.
L.V. Sherba introduced the term pure bilingualism. He believed that in such bilingualism the language systems exist separately in the conciousness and assumed that such bilinguals have difficulty in translating from one language to another. As a typical example of such pure bilingualism Sherba proposed the linguistic situation in the Russian aristocratic community of the nineteenth century and the French-Russian bilingualism of the Russian nobility. Since the gouvernantes (nannies) who spoke only in French with their pupils were the ‘source’ of this bilingualism the direct learning method was named the ‘gouvernante method’. The language skills obtained from the nannies could be further perfected during travels abroad. References to this method can be found in all Soviet and Russian publications dealing with bilingualism. However when researchers discuss this type of bilingualism they more often remember Pushkin's Tatiana with her bad Russian and the characters of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which was written for French speaking Russian readers without translations of the novel's French passages.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- French as Language of Intimacy in the Modern AgeLe français, langue de l'intime à l'époque moderne et contemporaine, pp. 125 - 142Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016