Dutch Loanwords in Russian: A Cultural-Historical Perspective

Abstract Compared with other loanwords in Russian, the borrowing of Dutch vocabulary has a clear historical and cultural motivation and is closely related to the reforms and westernization during the reign of Peter I (1682–1725) in the late 17th and the early 18th centuries. Dutch loanwords in Russian are mainly distributed in the fields of navigation and construction technology, with some nouns of new objects introduced through business transactions, many of which have become active vocabulary commonly used in modern Russian. Trying to break away from the barriers of traditional linguistic research, this article will analyze the motives, semantic fields, phonetic and grammatical characteristics of Dutch loanwords from the perspective of cultural history to explore and confirm the approaches and characteristics of cultural and technological exchanges between Russia and the Netherlands during the reforms of Peter I, as well as their presence in vocabulary.