Russian accents and dialects

So, first, I would like to tell you some word about the Russian language. It is a Slavic language spoken primarily in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and to a lesser extent, other countries that were once constituent republics of the USSR. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

As English has its RP or the Received Pronunciation there is also Standard Russian. The standard well-known form of Russian is generally called the Modern Russian Literary Language. It arose at the beginning of the 18th century during the reign of Peter the Great. It developed from the Moscow dialect under some influence of the Russian chancellery language of the previous centuries. It was Lomonosov who first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755. During the end of the 18th and 19th centuries Russian went through the stage (known as "Golden Age") of stabilization and standardization of its grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, and at the same time its world-famous literature flourished and it became the nationwide literary language.

Being spoken by such an enormous number of people, it naturally has its variations in different regions of the country. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying in the zone of transition between the two. Others divide the dialects into three groupings, Northern, Central (or Middle) and Southern, with Moscow lying in the Central region.

There are two principal chronological and geographic groups of all the Russian dialects:

1. The dialects of the territory of the primary formation, which consist of "Old" Russia of the 16th century before Eastern conquests by Ivan IV and this area roughly correlates with the modern Central and Northwestern Federal districts.

2. The dialects of the territory of the second formation, where Russians settled after the 16th century.

The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly and it is called okanye. It is their most remarkable feature and people from other regions can clearly hear this absence of the vowel reduction. Northern dialects are characterized by a number of words like, изба ('log hut'), озимь ('winter crop'), ухват, орать ('to plough'), жито ('rye'), беседки ('gathering'), шибко ('very much'), баской ('beautiful') and others. It has also about 200 words of Finno-Ugric origin.

The Southern Russian dialects are spoken in the lower European part of the country. To be more exact speaking about its territory we can mention such cities as Kursk, Lipetsk, Oryol, Ryazan, Smolensk, etc. and some southern parts of 3 regions Moscow, Pskov and Tver. Also it’s spoken in most of the land of lower Don and Volga, the Northern Caucasus as well as Southern Ural, Siberia, and Far East. Its main feature is akanie or aykanie that can be clearly heard by people from the Northern part, for example.

The city of Veliky Novgorod has historically displayed a feature called chokanye/tsokanye. So, ц апля ("heron") is pronounced ‘чапля’.

Among the first researches to study Russian dialects was Lomonosov in the 18th century. In the 19th, Vladimir Dal compiled the first dictionary that included dialectal vocabulary.

We should also mention that along with different accents and dialects, in our country there are many other interesting languages, which are spoken by different ethnic groups, for example in the Northern Caucasus.

The dialects often show distinct and non-standard features of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary and grammar. Some of these are relics of ancient usage now completely discarded by the standard language.

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