Why was french the lingua of the Russian nobility?

Why was french the lingua of the Russian nobility?

french was the lingua franca of the world m8

because it was lingua franca of all European nobility

these

it was the English of its time, and the Russian nobility really really wanted to be considered European in the time of Peter/Catherine

Peter and Catharine were LARPers

English is the lingua of the day but that doesn't make foreign anglophones speak amongst themselves in that language.

Why did the nobility of that time speak French amongst themselves?

I think it relates to what the anons said about the nobles wanting to be considered European.

Russians had an awkward identity crisis because Europeans considered them basically Mongolian primitives. The nobility wanted to set themselves apart from their dirty serfs.

It was the language of the transnational aristocracy, not exactly lingua franca

and diplomacy

Status symbol.
>heyho what, you speak perfect French? Oh, you must be of high birth and education!

>french wasn't the lingua franca

*laughs in Gaelic*

>doesn't make foreign anglophones speak amongst themselves in that language.
i'm pretty sure that does happen among the elite of former anglo colonies such as india. and if that hasn't happened already its going to happen in the future.

It does happen already. I know an Indian guy from Mumbai whose family is very wealthy and they all speak English to each other. His first language was English too.

Aramaic, the first lingua franca, has been the only worthy one. All the others came at the expense of foreign culture.

yeah but those country were colonized by England. Russian wasn't a French colony

>that doesn't make foreign anglophones speak amongst themselves in that language

As a brown man from brown land, they do. Especially younger generation and the very well off.

read

English isn't ubiquitous amongst educated Indians because of the British Raj, it's ubiquitous because of American hegemony. The main linguistic legacy of British imperialism in India is that they largely learn British English, not American English like the rest of the world. If not for America's huge cultural and economic influence English in India would be in roughly the same position as Japanese in the areas that were formerly part of Japan's empire, e.g. Taiwan - spoken semi-widely by members of the older generation but largely declining in usage.

Basically English in India today IS analogous with French in Russia, and India having been part of the British Empire isn't that relevant.

I think you have a point but your argument falls flat. I'm btw. Anyway, India is linguistically extremely diverse so English has in fact served as a lingua franca, which is why all government business and high politics is conducted in English. Second of all, elite Indians, and for that matter even elites from nonanglophone former-colonies, tends to either get their kids educated in Europe in some private boarding schools, where they learn english and use it because of the international settings of these schools, or they get educated in european-style schools in their own country manned by european or westernized teachers and given a western curriculum, and where they also learn english. It also probably helps that India has large diasporas abroad in anglo-speaking countries, so that can help the spread of the language, for example. I also think that the post-colonial elites, in this case in both the anglo and francophone world, as a matter of fact DESIRE to affect the manner of their former colonial masters, because a country like Britain or France encourages this so as to facilitate economic control of the former colony in collusion with the third world elite. So even without America I think English in India would still have been going strong because elite indians are angloboos, especially since they look to their former metropoles for models to achieve modernization in their own countries (no matter how much they spouted economic nationalist memes).

I'd contend that English's persistence as a lingua franca in India has a lot more to do with India's linguistic diversity (and the north-south divide that's kept Hindustani from being universally adopted) than with the Indian elite being "angloboos."

I'm not saying that without America, English would have gone *poof* and stopped existing in India (obviously the British Empire lasted a lot longer than Japan's, so the language was more entrenched). Maybe a better analogy than Japanese in Taiwan would be Russian in some of the non-European communist countries that fell under the USSR's sphere of influence, e.g. Mongolia.

Russian was a very high-prestige language in Mongolia back when it was a People's Republic, but generally a language being high-prestige isn't enough to keep it in use for more than a couple decades, its use also has to be necessary. Russian isn't obsolete in Mongolia by any means, it is still fairly useful and high-prestige, but it shares its place with English (above the others), Japanese, Korean, and increasingly Mandarin. That's how I'd expect to see English in India without American influence - fairly widespread but not dominant. I think Hindustani would be ubiquitous in the north and it is fairly likely there would simply be no universal lingua franca shared by north and south India at all.

Unfortunately there's no way for either of us to be proven correct but it's still fun to write impromptu linguistic alternate histories.

>Why did the nobility of that time speak French amongst themselves?

Maybe because they didn't want to be understood by servants?

France was the 3rd most populated nation in the world for much of history

The west meant France.

>foreign anglophones speak amongst themselves in that language.
This is exactly what is happening in Malaysia and Singapore, though.

No it wasn't and never was.
Since Veeky Forums has peddled the ludicrous assertion that English only began to proliferate after WWII due to the USA, let's explore.
>In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and franca is related to phrankoi in Greek and faranji in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", but the name was actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Empire.
Franca doesn't necessarily mean French.
>The Douglas Harper Etymology Dictionary states that the term Lingua Franca (as the name of the particular language) was first recorded in English during the 1670s,

Like the conquest of England, the proliferation of French as the language of power in the Mediterranean (and early medieval European courts) is almost entirely due to the Normans, rather than the French more generally.

From the coronation of the Sun King to the exile of Napoleon, France was the dominant power in Europe, French was of-course widely spoken in France but also by the educated European nobility in other courts. It was a sort of secular Latin. Almost all Russians wouldn't have spoken it, but the sort of nobility that belong in War and Peace would have been polyglots and used french often.

Regardless, the French speaking population in other countries would have been a rounding era, it being only the fourth most common mother tongue in the EU doesn't surprise me.

>French
>was the lingua franca

Really makes you think.

the English among Indians is largely due to the British Raj actually, it continues to be useful becouse American hegemony but there is still more residual cultural stuff from the Raj

The British nobility also spoke and learned French since Norman times (albeit, a different French).