Russian accents/dialects

feargale wrote: »

I've just come across this thread. I hope it's not too late to post. I find what you say interesting. A tour guide in St. Petersburg told me that she couldn't tell a Russian's place of origin from their accent. I thought it must be because of huge population transfers, forcible transplantations etc after the Revolution, especially in Stalin's time. I'm fascinated that such a huge country should have less regional differences than the Netherlands, a small, flat country.

Definitely not too late. It's a topic I'm quite passionate about! It truly is fascinating.

Now - with that said, Russian isn't exempt of regionalisms but regionalisms and accents are totally different things. Regionalisms are also minuscule comparatively speaking when you take the example that you gave of the Netherlands, or even Ireland for that matter; think how easy it is in Ireland to distinguish the difference between a 'Dub' and a Kerryman yet a person from St Petersburg and a Person from Vladivostok (9,600km apart as the crow flies) are almost, if not, identical.

Russian 'accents' of which there are 'none' (in effect) are often segregated differently. In Europe generally, we focus on geographical areas: Dub vs Kerry, Southern Italy vs Northern, Southern English vs Northern, Glasgow vs Edinburgh, Bavaria vs Bonn etc. In Russia, ways of speaking are separated into two: Muscovite/Educated and Provincial (countryside).

As I mentioned I lived in provincial Russia quite a long time and my friends from Moscow would often comment: oh, you have a provincial accent but a provincial accent is pretty much a standard accent. Muscovites are known to have a particularly long 'a' sound in place of the sound 'o' in Russian. (SpasibAA instead of Sp-a-sib-uh: Spasibo). Replacing accents is often vocabulary: in a very general way, 'posh' muscovites (note the posh in inverted commas. It's probably a bad choice of word) will sometimes opt for more bookish, expressive and flavourful language (adjectives, verbs, nouns). This, in my opinion, has more to do with portraying an image of self to add an elitist Muscovite flare to ones speech but it is not a dialect nor an accent.

The one exception

There is one exception to the accentless country of Russia and that is the regions on the border of the Ukraine and in the far south of Russia (Rostov-on-Don, for example) where they are known to ''okat''). 'Okat'' is a verb in Russian which means to use lots of 'O' sounds. They are also known to pronounce 'G' as 'H'. Generally speaking, Russians view this as peasant speak. It should also be noted that again, this is not an accent, this is just a difference in pronounciation. The 'O' sounds and the G/H rule is actually the standard norm in Ukraine and Belarus. Compare the below sentences: (I've written these phonetically to try and distinguish between accent/pronunciation/dialect but in reality these would always be written the exact same way).

I live in the big city

MSK: Ya zhivu v bAl'shom gorAde
Provincial/Standard: Ya zhivu v b-uh-l'shom go-r-uh-de)
Ukraine, Belarus, Southern Russia, Peasant: Ya zhivu v bOlshOm HOrOde

Don't quote me on this but I do think that St Petersburg might also be partial to the 'Okat' sounds but I'm not entirely sure.