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.
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?
there are differences in accent as you travel west to east across Russia, they're just more subtle. These differences are rather hard to detect as long as the people stick to standard vocab and grammar. but generally when a friend of mine's cousin came to our city from the Magadan area, I could clearly hear that he spoke differently. Like I said though, the difference was mainly phonetic and very subtle, his intonation was different, sort of curt. you know to my ear the way they speak out in the east is they tend to blurt sentences out, whereas where I'm from , west of Moscow as well as in Moscow itself the intonation is more sing song, with a bit of a drawl to it, thus out there you might get called a кзел while in Moscow they'll call you a каазиёол. There even exist longer equivalents to some grammatical forms, like I was typing up a document in word a few days ago and in one place I had to write that a substance gets neutralized before being deposited, so I just worte that bit in Russia and there instantly appeared a red wavy line under my word for neutralize which was "нейтрализовывается", the standard Russian for this is "нейтрализуется", so where I'm from we tend to lengthen things (that's not the only example, we also say "играются" for "играют" etc) drawl them out. So to sum it up there do exist different accents across Russia, they're just more subtle and they're accent rather than dialects in that the basic vocab and grammar are the same. Dialects are confined to rural areas.
Re: Accent variation across Russia
all of "нейтрализовывается", "нейтрализуется", "играются" and "играют" are correct words in proper literary Russian language. If MS Word doesn't know about that, it is its problem.
I also find it curious when people call the standard dialect "Moscow Russian", when it is one of the few major surviving and distinctly different accents in Russia.
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 am Russian and I have a reverse, very serious problem with English.
I could read books without a vocabulary in 3 years but even after 15 years I cannot tell many variations of spoken English. It is a real frustration bcs you cannot get this knowledge from books and my practice in speaking English is very limited.
Re: Accent variation across Russia
Quote:
Originally Posted by garans
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 am Russian and I have a reverse, very serious problem with English.
I could read books without a vocabulary in 3 years but even after 15 years I cannot tell many variations of spoken English. It is a real frustration bcs you cannot get this knowledge from books and my practice in speaking English is very limited.
That's only because, as you said, your practice in speaking English is limited... I wonder, why do you feel you need to distinguish English dialects though, if you don't have to actually converse with English speakers?