Thread: Accent variation across Russia

Does anyone have any views on the way spoken Russian varies as you head East across the country from Moscow? I visited Irkutsk recently and, though my Russian is not perfect, I didn't really detect a significant accent. This seemed strange to someone who comes from the UK, where 2 hours on the train could land you in cities where a native speaker can feel lost!!

Was I just not picking it up?

Originally Posted by medzie

Does anyone have any views on the way spoken Russian varies as you head East across the country from Moscow? I visited Irkutsk recently and, though my Russian is not perfect, I didn't really detect a significant accent. This seemed strange to someone who comes from the UK, where 2 hours on the train could land you in cities where a native speaker can feel lost!!

Was I just not picking it up?

I'm sure that this topic was discussed many times here. The pronunciation may slighty differ across the country, but not to the point where a non-native speaker can tell the significant difference.
Thanks to television, radio etc. the Moscow Russian is broadcasted all over the country, people travel back and forth; so nowadays Russian is pretty much "equalized" between different parts of Russia.
But the above is true only for rather big cities and towns. If you go into rural area, you can find signigicant deviations from standard Russian in both vocabulary and pronunciation.
I even heard that there are languages unintelligible by native Russian speakers which only exist in some particular village and are spoken by, say, only 10 people.

I think that as far as the native Russian-speaking urban population is concerned, there are just two major variations in pronunciation that are significantly different from standard Russian: Moscow City and regions bordering Ukraine (actually, a very large part of ukrainian population itself would also fall into this category).
although there are some lexical differences, especially in jargon words and such.

but......I don't think the radio/TV argument holds water. These forms of communication have only been around for the past 100 years, and Russian (in one form or another) has been spoken for 10 times that long.
Also compared to Western European countries where mass communication has developed more quickly the variation is far smaller in Russia. Could it be the complexity of the language that makes it so consistent??

Originally Posted by medzie

but......I don't think the radio/TV argument holds water. These forms of communication have only been around for the past 100 years, and Russian (in one form or another) has been spoken for 10 times that long.
Also compared to Western European countries where mass communication has developed more quickly the variation is far smaller in Russia. Could it be the complexity of the language that makes it so consistent??

imo: there has always been a lot more variation in the language in the villages, as opposed to cities. The people in the rural areas spoke the local dialect, and those in the cities spoke "standard Russian" and looked down upon the villagers. This is somewhat different from, say, the US, where even the educated elite in the South spoke in the local dialect, rather than that of Boston or NYC.

I think the historically centralized political structure and maybe the lack of upward mobility (up until 1861 russian peasants, i.e. the vast majority of the population, were effectively the property of their landlords and couldn't leave their villages) might account for that, plus of course the pretty aggressive efforts of the central government to standardize things.

I don't think the Russian language is really any more complex than English or any other European language, so i don't think it has anything to do with that.

Originally Posted by medzie

but......I don't think the radio/TV argument holds water. These forms of communication have only been around for the past 100 years, and Russian (in one form or another) has been spoken for 10 times that long.
Also compared to Western European countries where mass communication has developed more quickly the variation is far smaller in Russia. Could it be the complexity of the language that makes it so consistent??

It's correct, but the first part of 20th century was a period when the Country was like a great alarmed beehive...Russain-Japanese war, 3 revolutions, Civil war, 2 World wars. There were greate changes of language, written language since 1917. There is no village that wasn't visited by agitators or troops. And of course, the great word: "КОЛХОЗ" - everyone could learn only one language there - language that Communist Party speak (and the Party really took care about that)...

Perhaps my question is better put the other way around. Why is there so much diversity in the speaking of English in such a small place like the UK, or France where the population have been traditionally very mobile and similar feudal structures as you describe reigned supreme until the 19th Century.

I have never before lived in a country as vast as Russia, but there seems to me to be no logical reason why 2 people who live 3 days train ride apart (and that train has only been running for 100 years) speak an almost identical variant of a language.

My speculative conclusion is that Russian is less prone to variation because when spoken even slightly inaccurately it is incomprehensible. Accents have therefore been irradicated by a process of natural selection. English and French (the other two languages I speak) can be spoken in a vast array of accents and dialects and still be understood. Those variations have therefore survived and flourished.......so despite your adamant rejection, maybe I am back to the technicality argument!?

Originally Posted by medzie

My speculative conclusion is that Russian is less prone to variation because when spoken even slightly inaccurately it is incomprehensible.

If that were true, learning Russian would be a waste of time: no mater how hard you try, you would unlikely reach a point where you would speak without even a slight inaccuracy. And therefore your speech would be incomprehensible.
Variations of Russian may be incomprehensible for you because there are many things about Russian that you don't know. One step away from what you learned - and you're lost. But a native Russian speaker can easily tolerate even bigger differencies.
In fact, it is not that hard for a native Russian speaker to understand, for example, Ukrainian (and vice versa). And this is not a dialect, it's a separate language with different alphabet and pronunciation.

I found this subject also discussed at gramota

http://www.gramota.ru/forum/read.php?f=15&i=545&t=545

the point of view that Russians travelled a lot against their will (not only in XX century, let's remeber Siberian banishments) seems quite reasonable, too.

Originally Posted by medzie

Perhaps my question is better put the other way around. Why is there so much diversity in the speaking of English in such a small place like the UK, or France where the population have been traditionally very mobile and similar feudal structures as you describe reigned supreme until the 19th Century.

I have never before lived in a country as vast as Russia, but there seems to me to be no logical reason why 2 people who live 3 days train ride apart (and that train has only been running for 100 years) speak an almost identical variant of a language.

My speculative conclusion is that Russian is less prone to variation because when spoken even slightly inaccurately it is incomprehensible. Accents have therefore been irradicated by a process of natural selection. English and French (the other two languages I speak) can be spoken in a vast array of accents and dialects and still be understood. Those variations have therefore survived and flourished.......so despite your adamant rejection, maybe I am back to the technicality argument!?

Are the regional differences in France now still so large (as you are putting it into the same category with the UK)? I thought for some reason that it was not the case anymore and that they were closer to Russia in this respect, but then, I've never been there...
As for bad Russian being incomprehensible, that is emphatically not the case. Ask anyone with experience and he'll tell you that Russians rank on the very top when it comes to understanding and tolerating badly spoken Russian, compared to other countries.

Originally Posted by mishau_

I found this subject also discussed at gramota

http://www.gramota.ru/forum/read.php?f=15&i=545&t=545

the point of view that Russians travelled a lot against their will (not only in XX century, let's remeber Siberian banishments) seems quite reasonable, too.

Also true. Actually it seems to me that there are few people whose family histories do not have stories about whole villages of people moved across the country when they were sold by their landowners, or used to settle a debt, or even exchanged for dogs (hunting dog breeding seems to have been quite an expensive and popular hobby back then), etc...

I doubt Russian is so standardized because of its complexity; think of all the instances of terrible English you've heard, but could understand. The media is an attractive answer, as well, but look at Arabic: a more or less standardized media in MSA, but mutually unintelligible dialects, and Arabic is at least as old as Russian, and also spoken over a vast area, so can't be an answer in itself. I think the reason why languages in, say, England and France are so diverse is that these were diverse areas linguistically to begin with: Gaelic and Germanic languages had existed there at different times long before the rise of modern English, so it shouldn't be surprising that areas that previously spoke, say, Welsh (and still do, in some cases) are going to differ markedly from places where the Vikings from Norway had more influence. It's the same with Breton, for example, in France, although you could make the argument too that vulgar Latin "decayed" in different ways over different areas.

So, Russian. Perhaps it's so standardized because the move from what was Rus has occurred relatively recently, displacing, for example, Altaic speakers; in places where Altaic or Causcasian languages still exist (or did), there are examples of variation (Г becoming a voiced velar fricative in South Russia), or because the power structure of the country has been such that the prestige dialects (Saint Petersburg, Moscow) have been in relatively closer contact with the rest of the country (with the rural/city variations that you could expect with such distance, but which haven't made speech unintelligible), at least among ethnic Russians.

I guess it could also be interesting to compare all the East Slavic languages as a whole with the Romance languages, rather than looking at just "Russian" and "French." The changes from the original languages of Rome (Latin to Vulgar Latin to Romance languages) and, say, Old East Slavic which gave rise to Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, etc could be similar if we consider all of these to be "vulgar" forms of Old East Slavic, which existed around 1000 years ago; in which case the languages' differentiation is 1000 years younger than those of the Romance languages, many of which are even [partially] mutually intelligible today. I can speak Spanish and understand a lot of Portuguese; it's said Columbus, who spoke both, may not have been able to tell the difference, a position in our relative time scale 400 years in the future. So the real question becomes, not why [relatively young] Russian is not as varied as it is, but why the variations between East Slavic languages are as they are (more or less mutually intelligible to the point where there's debates as to whether, say, Ukrainian is a different language).

Anyway, just food for thought.

A thougtful, well-written and intelligent post if ever I saw one.

Am I on the right forum?

In Russia we have a wide variety of different accents and dialects. Native speakers can easily tell which part of the country you come from. People from rural areas tend to have thicker accents. Also, the higher on the social ladder you are, the closer to standard Russian is your accent. Just go to the villages in Lyeshukonye, you won't understand jack shit if you listen to native speakers converse. (I don't, being a native speaker from another area) However, when they address a stranger, they will tone their accents down for his/her benefit - that's probably why you never heard much difference. To hear a thick accent you should go to places where Russians have lived for centuries, not some relatively young cities like Irkutsk, etc. Go to Kurskaya, Bryanskaya, Vologodskaya, etc. oblasts.

P.S. I can pick up subtle differences in the accents of native Petersburgers (not recent migrants!) from different city districts (docklands vs. north-east, etc.)

Native speakers can easily tell which part of the country you come from.

Although I've been about here and there, I'm afraid I can't detect which area you could come from. I can only say that for me now it is closely associated with exhebitions where people from almost all over the country are gathered. So, now when I hear an accent different from mine, an impression appear like this: "Oh, he (or she) is going to elaborate on some technical parameters of the products his company exposes"


I can't notice that in Russian movies heroes (actors) have strong accents. That's strange. However, when I watch very old movies, I can see that modern Russian pronunciation is certainly different, but I can't explain how exactly.

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

P.S. I can pick up subtle differences in the accents of native Petersburgers (not recent migrants!) from different city districts (docklands vs. north-east, etc.)

I'm sorry, where are the docklands?

The "промышленный район порта" - people from there have a very distinctive accent.

Серьёзно? Я что-то совсем не замечал такого....а поясните в чём там особенность, если не лень канечно...

Originally Posted by Paxan

Серьёзно? Я что-то совсем не замечал такого....а поясните в чём там особенность, если не лень канечно...

The accent of the docklands is very nasal. Also, they tend to use уо instead of о quite a bit (двор may sound almost as двуор, etc.).

Originally Posted by token_287

So the real question becomes, not why [relatively young] Russian is not as varied as it is, but why the variations between East Slavic languages are as they are (more or less mutually intelligible to the point where there's debates as to whether, say, Ukrainian is a different language).

Anyway, just food for thought.

The real question is where you get that absurd information. They are not "more or less mutually intelligible" any more than French and English are mutually intelligible.

Having never lived in Ukraine or studied Ukrainian, I have no clue what the following is saying:

У разі нагальної необхідності запобігти злочинові чи його перепинити уповноважені на те законом органи можуть застосувати тримання особи під вартою як тимчасовий запобіжний захід, обрунтованість якого протягом сімдесяти двох годин має бути перевірена судом. Затримана особа негайно звільняється, якщо протягом сімдесяти двох годин з моменту затримання їй не вручено вмотивованого рішення суду про тримання під вартою.

Something about laws and courts. Maybe.