Reflection of the Russian Empire Foreign and Domestic Political Interests in the Vocabulary of “Notes of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society”

The article outlines lexical peculiarities of “Imperial Russian Geographic Society Notes” in their connection with extralinguistic factors. On the one hand, use of vocabulary in the magazine is in line with the tradition of describing territories in travel and geographical notes of the mid-19th century. On the other hand, this edition has the status of an official print body of the Russian Geographic Society, the activity of which completely met the interests of foreign and domestic policy of the Russian Empire. To get the correct results we divided the texts into three thematic categories: 1) description of domestic territories, 2) territories within the closest foreign interests, 3) exotic countries of potential interest in spreading the international influence in the future. The analysis demonstrate that each group of texts contains specific features of word use. The first group focuses on terminological vocabulary, providing a precise scientific description of territories, of special interest to authors are regional words helping to understand own national identity. These texts reflect the interest of educated society in the people’s language and vernacular words common for the epoch. A unique regional dictionary in one of the publications is quite indicative. The second group also demonstrates an active use of scientific terms, but the foundation of these texts is colloquial vocabulary with concrete meaning, making it possible to build up a tour guide for future expeditions, the word here becomes a means of creating a detailed description of the route. In the third group the word functions as a tool of cross-cultural communication, the word use largely corresponds to the tradition of travel literature; text-forming lexical resource includes exotisms accompanied by author’s comments. The innovation of the research lies firstly in the very address to the linguistic description of “Imperial Russian Geographic Society Notes”, and secondly, in combination of the historical approach to the vocabulary description and a historical and cultural aspect which is especially important for the work with such sources.

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