ABSTRACT
The article explores language use in the multinational community of Russian diplomats in the eighteenth century. This community consisted of native Russians, subjects of foreign states, and the new subjects of the Russian Empire from the Baltic provinces conquered by Russia during the Great Northern War. Using the diplomatic correspondence of the College of Foreign Affairs from the 1740s to the 1780s, kept in the Archives of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire and the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents, the author examines the language practices and language proficiency of two Swedes born in Reval and well integrated into the Russian bureaucracy: Karl Gustav (Karl Matveevich) and Johann Matthias (Ivan Matveevich) Simolins.
