Russian; pedagogy; attitude; collocation; quantitative linguistics

The chapter focuses on the perception of the Russian language in the Czech Republic from two perspectives – corpus research and pupils’ attitudes. First, data from the opinion journalism section of SYN v8 (Křen et al., 2019), a corpus comprising texts from 1990–2018, is analyzed for its collocations of “Russian.” Second, a survey of student perceptions of Russian (n = 200) is evaluated. The results show substantial differences in how the language is perceived: whereas the opinion journalism employs mostly neutral and general adjectival collocates, highlighting its pleasant sound and utility of the language, pupils tend to be more open and express multiple, often contradictory perspectives. The outcomes of the study provide new insights that can be of use to teachers of Russian and institutional recruitment initiatives, as they may fuel new strategies in deconstructing the stereotypical visualizations of the Russian language, culture, and peoples of the Russophone world.