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?
Re: Accent variation across Russia
Quote:
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.