Troublesome Words : A Cultural History of Russian

Author: Franklin, Simon

Russian

Published on 17 August 2026 by REAKTION BOOKS in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Language Worlds' series.

Hardback | 304 pages, 47 illustrations
242 x 167 x 30 | 624g

Language can be a battleground of ideas, and nowhere is this more vivid than in the Russian context. Across 350 years, Russian has been shaped by competing visions of what it should be, from early grammarians defining a literary standard to digital-era debates about slang, obscenity and online identity. Simon Franklin traces how tradition and disruption have continually reshaped the language, including sections on the discovery by the educated elite of the language of ‘the people’, the linguistic experiments of writers and revolutionaries, politics and the rhetoric of empire. Clear, concise and engaging, Troublesome Words is both a history and a cultural portrait, examining the global diversity of Russian today and revealing how language reflects power, imagination and the changing world.