Thread: Accent variation across Russia

Peterburgers say конечно (and the like) with a hard ч.
Southerners and Ukranians pronounce г softly.

So, don't trust someone who says, "Конешно, я из Ленинхрад."

First thing I'd like to say, is that I clearly understand the text in Ukrainean provided above, without knowing Ukrainean. Still, Ukrainean has plenty difference from Russian, and can be considered a seperate language. Those people who spoke about Russian southern dialects actually meant the dialects that are in fact something average between Ukrainean and Russian and that are used in Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia.

Second, there're 4 major dialects in Russia - those spoken in Smolensk, Ryazan, Vladimir and Novgorod. Moscow Russian is an average of these four dialects. St. Petersburg Russian is a later modification of Moscow Russian. What you hear now in the street is an average of all this.

Somebody has posted a message that there's a difference in accent between modern and old Russian movies. In fact, what you hear in old movies is a good Moscow Russian. What you hear in modern movies is the average Russian. The reason for that is that Moscow Russian was and is considered the correct Russian, and in the past a lot of attenetion was payed to speaking good Moscow Russian in media. But during the last 50 years the population of Moscow has trippled due to migration, and Moscow Russian is not spoken that often even in Moscow anymore. And it turned out to be hard to preserve it in media.

Again, it;s not easy to find a Russian-speaker who speaks dialectal Russian. In fact, most of the country's territory is populated by settlers who moved there in the last 2 or 3 centuries. The biggest cities of Russia are located on the Volga, in the Urals, in Siberia - and they are populated by people who moved from Central Russia not so long ago. The population of the historical Russian territory is small (except Moscow), and the territiory has always been dominated by Moscow. In fact, the population of Moscow is bigger than the population of all other historical Russian territory.

Still, people who come from the towns located in the historical Russian territory usually have a thicker accent than those who come from the territiories taht were populated in the last 3 centuries, allthough the historical regions are closer to Moscow. But they are affected by media and education, that are all in Moscow Russian. In rural areas of these regions, people have wonderfull dialects that are not easy to understand even for a native-speaker. But they aren't proud of having such an accent I recall I've seen a guy in the street in Moscow, who asked me, where a hotel was. And he articulated the question with a VERY thick Vladimir accent, pronouncing "o" instead of "a", "ц" instead of "ч"... And he had to repeat his question three times before I managed to understand him! He turned red during the conversation, because he felt he was speaking "incorrect" Russian.

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

Also, the higher on the social ladder you are, the closer to standard Russian is your accent.

that isn't always the case, take Gorby for example, his russian is really awful, he speaks like a village retard, he routinely uses the ukrainian g and misplaces the stress in 80% of the words and yet he was as high as you could possibly get in the USSR. Or Chernomyrdin, while his pronounciation may not be as bad when it comes to sentence construction, you'd never guess the man is a native speaker. Looking at tranascripts of his speeches one might think the guy had botched brain surgery.

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.

Originally Posted by BlackMage

Peterburgers say конечно (and the like) with a hard ч.

So, don't trust someone who says, "Конешно."

Not true. At all.

Originally Posted by igorfa100

Originally Posted by VendingMachine

Also, the higher on the social ladder you are, the closer to standard Russian is your accent.

that isn't always the case, take Gorby for example, his russian is really awful, he speaks like a village retard, he routinely uses the ukrainian g and misplaces the stress in 80% of the words and yet he was as high as you could possibly get in the USSR. Or Chernomyrdin, while his pronounciation may not be as bad when it comes to sentence construction, you'd never guess the man is a native speaker. Looking at tranascripts of his speeches one might think the guy had botched brain surgery.

Those chaps are special cases

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.

Originally Posted by Paxan

Originally Posted by BlackMage

Peterburgers say конечно (and the like) with a hard ч.

So, don't trust someone who says, "Конешно."

Not true. At all.

Take it up with my teacher.

I'm gunna have to go with not true at all.

There are such things as bad teachers. People like to exagerate things.

It's just not true. Everybody(99%) say [што]

I'm not trying to be a good teacher. I'm not tryng to be a teacher at all. I just thought Black Mage would understand what Imean by that having so sophisticated but wrong information.
Пис

Originally Posted by Paxan

I'm not trying to be a good teacher. I'm not tryng to be a teacher at all. I just thought Black Mage would understand what Imean by that having so sophisticated but wrong information.
Пис

I didnt say u were a teacher. I was refering to blackies teacher. Why does everyone always misquote me all the time?

Originally Posted by Paxan

It's just not true. Everybody(99%) say [што]

I know that, I said that you shouldn't trust someone who says, "Конешно, я из Ленинхрада," because they are lying.

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.

Originally Posted by garans

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?

Only people who live in England can recognise all the different accents there, unless you're a linguist or something. To me they all sound the same only varying in strength. The only accents of Enlgish I can recognise at once are American, British, New Zealand, Australian, South African, Indian, Scottish and Irish.

basurero, what about Russian one?

I mean, of native English speakers... Of course there are also Russian accents, spanish accents, french, german etc......

I was kidding.

Yeah right....