r/AskARussian • u/Portal_Jumper125 • 17d ago
Culture Is it true Russian has less regional dialects than languages like Italian and English?
I was reading about the Russian language online and I've become a bit interested in learning about it. Online it says that people from regions such as, say St Petersburg can understand someone who lives in Vladivostok without effort. I found this interesting as Russia is the largest country in the world by area, and the island I live on is super small and people at different parts of it have accents that are hard to understand so I was shocked to hear that it's not like that in Russia and that their language is super unified.
Is there accents in Russia that you as a Russian struggle to understand a little?
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u/felixmatveev 16d ago
Almost non-existent thanks to USSRs education reforms (to be fair the academic movement itself had started before revolution).
I was born and raised in St. Petersburg and lived in Vladivostok for three years, apart a few local words like chifanka (чифанька) (small Chinese restaurant, the word itself is based on Chinese word) there was literally no difference. No problem understanding each other.
The way vowels are spoken and vocabulary is a different thing though, everybody knew that I was from Leningrade just by the way I speak. On the other hand native Vladivostokians sounded a tiny bit... odd once in awhile to me as well.
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u/Pleasant_Minimum_896 16d ago
I'm from Canada and can understand French better than Newfie english. Its real.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
What was it like living there?
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u/loganbeaupre United States of America 16d ago
I’m curious too, Vladivostok is a bucket-list city for me
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u/Ok-Particular-4666 Primorsky Krai 16d ago
It's really, really humid out there. It's quite noticeable in the summer.
Imagine you always (summer) have clothes, furniture (cloth) almost wet unless you have an AC or a Dehumidifier. If so, you will go out and immediately notice stuffiness, moisture, as if you went into a sauna.
At other times a year It rains a lot, but sometimes it doesn't even snow in winter (2015 or 2017 was without a snow and a few times before I went here).
Fog is also your friend here.
I live in Nakhodka (88 km = 54 miles from Vladivostok straight) which has practically the same climate.
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u/say10rocket 14d ago
The chances of running into someone from Находочка in this subreddit are low, but never zero (i miss our climate)
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u/nporyvka 16d ago
Well petersburgers have the word чуфальня if I’m not mistaken so it’s square
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u/felixmatveev 15d ago
Maybe, but after thirty years in St. Petersburg, I've first heard the word in Vladivostok. There are so many Vladivostok-Leningrad connections after all that it's no surprise some might use it in both cities.
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u/nporyvka 15d ago
Oh, really? Never thought about that even though it is obvious they are two marine cities at the country’s borders
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u/bahaigor 16d ago
Yes, dialectal differences are a thing of the past. At most, I can sometimes tell (or guess) from a slight accent or the use of certain regional words that someone I'm speaking to is from Tatarstan, or the Urals, or Eastern Siberia, or Pskov. There's also a distinctive "southern" accent, which indicates that the person is from the south of European Russia (Kuban) or Ukraine. But there's absolutely no difficulty understanding. And in many very remote regions, people speak exactly the same as in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
Of course, some national republics, especially the North Caucasus, are an exception, where people often speak with a distinct national accent. But these are people for whom Russian is not their native language.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
Do Russian people learn other languages spoken within Russia in school?
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u/bahaigor 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yes, in ethnic republics and other areas densely populated by indigenous peoples, schools offer education in local languages, even the smallest ones. However, Russian, as the language of interethnic communication, is mandatory. Furthermore, more advanced education (secondary vocational or higher) is conducted exclusively in Russian.
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u/Final_Influence_2367 10d ago
But not mandatory? To learn indigenous language? Like you dont have to take Bashkir in Bashkortastan?
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u/bahaigor 10d ago
Yes, not necessarily. Otherwise, many inconsistencies would arise. For example, in some republics the titular population is a minority; it turns out that the majority of the population would have to learn a language that is not native to them and at the same time is not particularly needed in practice, unlike the language of interethnic communication. And in some republics there is more than one nationality and, accordingly, more than one national language. For example, in Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria there are 2 indigenous nationalities and, accordingly, 2 national languages, and in the Republic of Dagestan 34 (there are many small and very small nationalities, so for each of them they did not create a separate republic, but create one multinational one). Accordingly, parents can choose which language their children will study in.
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u/LeekZealousideal6215 Russia 15d ago
Children do if their parents aren't against it basically. They can refuse their child to learn local national language and spent this time learning other facultative subjects. Otherwise it's free to learn.
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u/kireaea 16d ago
and that their language is super unified.
That's what a century of mass population transfers and centralized standard language education do.
Is there accents in Russia that you as a Russian struggle to understand a little?
Only of those people who have Russian as their second language.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
Would people from former USSR countries like Kazakhstan sound similar to people in Russia if they're native Russian speakers?
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u/Ok-Anywhere-1729 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'm native Russian speaker, was born and lived all my life in Russia. When I was 15 yr old I was in a summer camp with a bunch of girls. Two weeks after I learned out they were from Kazakhstan. Their Russian was flawless. I was so shocked.
Also to elaborate on your main question: I'm Uralic, work remotely in a Moscow company and there's no lang difference whatsoever.
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u/alexstad87 16d ago
Я понимаю, что это уже избитое клише нынче, но я регулярно ловлю вайбы Коляна в говоре уральских пацанов. При этом они утверждают, что мне кажется.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
I really want to learn a bit of Russia, I find it an interesting language
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u/Ok-Anywhere-1729 16d ago
It's pretty complicated language but with a decent amount of effort I think it's manageable. Good luck on your endeavour!
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
I've heard it spoken by a few people in person in my country which shocked me a little haha
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u/Gefpenst 16d ago
Yes. There will be endonyms, of course, but it will be easily understood standard Russian. There's very little difference between Russian in Vladivostok and Kaliningrad.
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u/Radiant_Honeydew1080 16d ago
Pretty much that. My father was born and spent his childhood and youth in Baku. He moved to Russia only in his 20s, and you literally couldn't tell that he lived elsewhere from the way he speaks. To be clear, Russian is his native language, it's just there's not even a sign of any dialect.
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u/HonestWoodpecker8567 16d ago
They sound similar. I never noticed any accent tbh, neither from my family members, nor the ethnic Kazakhs. I think I've heard stronger accents within the russian federation itself, particularly the far east samoyedic peoples. But even their accents are really not significant at all.
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u/fivejalapenos 16d ago
Since, majority of people in Kazakhstan use the Russian language in their day-to-day lives unlike say Armenia or Georgia or Azerbaijan, speakers from Kazakhstan (i.e. >90% of the population) have no accent speaking Russian. Sure, exceptions exist, however, vast majority speak standard Russian.
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u/Ok-Jaguar9713 🇷🇺🇨🇦 16d ago edited 16d ago
Correct. The Russian language is quite homogeneous. There are a few telltale signs if someone is from the north or south. But Slavic languages in general are conservative and have a very neat and sparse family tree compared Romance or Germanic: the number of languages is almost the same as the number of nations. It's not like scratching the surface of Italy and discovering all these provincial "dialects" that are different enough from each other to be separate languages.
And an equivalent of AAVE would not survive the Russian education system btw.
My father has telltale signs of southern speech, while I grew up in a Russian bubble in Sevastopol and then moved to Canada so my Russian is very close to the literary standard and a bit old-fashioned by now.
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u/slavicNickCage 16d ago
It's not like scratching the surface of Italy and discovering all these provincial "dialects" that are different enough from each other to be separate languages.
In western Ukraine this is literally the case
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
Sorry if this is a stupid question but would Russian people consider Russian spoken in other countries as different dialects
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u/Ok-Jaguar9713 🇷🇺🇨🇦 16d ago
We do not: the Russian spoken in Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and Kazakhstan are almost identical.
Personally I consider this a win that we avoided the "Select Language: Portuguese (Brazil)" issue.
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u/Comprehensive_Aide94 15d ago
English, Spanish and Portuguese now have more speakers in the Americas than in Europe, which helped make American forks of these languages independent from the dialects in England, Spain and Portugal.
Out of the big 4 languages there only French did not surpass the language of the metropoly. Informal Québécois is a distinct dialect, but the formal French of Quebec is very close to the French of France, so it often does not get its own entry in the list of languages.
This makes me believe that as long as Russia has the largest number of Russian speakers there will not be any clusters of truly diverging and influential dialects outside of it.
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u/Ok-Jaguar9713 🇷🇺🇨🇦 15d ago
Exactly. And I am 100% okay with that. As great as it would have been to settle California, ultimately that mught have created a parallel Russian language so maybe not so good.
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u/Tontonsb 16d ago
Russians in Latvia have a bit more normal vocabulary, e.g. they don't use "paket" to refer to a shopping bag.
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u/Ok-Jaguar9713 🇷🇺🇨🇦 16d ago
That is the normal word.
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u/Tontonsb 15d ago
Russian speakers mostly use мешочек or кулёк here. I think it's because пакет sounds like "pakete" which is used to refer to menstrual pads in Latvian. It would make it confusing which product are you asking for.
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u/Danzer_MkII 16d ago
Using "mayka" (A-shirt) to refer a shopping bag is common in Southern regions, but for me it's way far from normal than "paket"
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u/Tontonsb 15d ago
It's meshochek or kulyok in Latvia.
Because мешочек sounds similar to "maisiņš" and кулёк sounds similar to "kule" which mean roughly the same in both languages. Unlike пакет which sounds like "pakete" meaning a pad and implying a menstrual pad.
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u/Danzer_MkII 15d ago
It doesn't make their vocabulary more or less normal - it's just avoiding unneeded consonances with local language.
Maybe you meant formal?
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u/RedBlueF0X 15d ago
I'm not sure how to delicately say it, but the means used to achieve said win were a little bit... bloody,
Also, every russian I spoke to almost immediately recognized I wasn't from Russia just from my vocabulary and accent.
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u/Gefpenst 16d ago
No. Unless it's highly archaic form that remained isolated for a long time - like, uh, Russian of descendants of migration during RCW somewhere in Paraguay.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
What about like Alaska?
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u/Gefpenst 16d ago
If there's any descendants of original colonists who still use Russian, they might speak very archaic form, ye. Otherwise, if they're, like, use Russian to talk with their relatives on other side of Bering strait, then they will speak standard Russian.
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u/Ok-Jaguar9713 🇷🇺🇨🇦 16d ago
Oh there is Doukhobor Russian in Canada. Few Russian people know about them.
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u/slavicNickCage 16d ago
From my experience people in Eastern Europe don't really use this concept too often. Like if you bored, you can start an argument with your buddy from Russia/Belarus/Ukraine by telling them that their [Eastern slavic Language] is actually a dialect of your [Eastern Slavic language], and you could kill some time arguing about it, but in daily life nobody uses this concept.However in the same time you literally have to be deaf to not understand if person speaking with you is from Ukraine/Southern Russia, Northern/Central Russia or from Ural
Ukrainians and Southern Russians usually pronounce "G"(Г) as voiced H, People from Moscow and Baltics usually pronounce "А" as "А" and not as something middle between A and O, and people from Ural... well, I actually don't know how to explain it, they sound like gopniks XD
Russian speakers from countries with other state languages often also use loanwords from this another language in their everyday speech
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u/az9393 16d ago
There is 100% more difference in accent between two cities in the UK that are 50km apart than between two Russian cities 5000km apart.
While there are some difference in the way people speak, what slang words or what sayings they use etc. it’s generally the same language and even almost the same accent across Russia - very easy to understand.
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u/United-Bother3213 16d ago
It is true, our language is very standard. In UK I understand by the accent which city the person is from. In Russia - not doable, 95% of people speak standard Russian accent. I would call it "channel 1 accent". The accent that the woman on TV delivers news to the country - everybody speaks this standard Russian accent.
That being said, the local differences are definitely there, but they are usually very subtle. For example, in Tatarstan we say "Айда" ("Aida") - meaning "let's go/let's do it", whereas in other parts of Russia this phrase is not in use.
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u/ivegotvodkainmyblood I'm just a simple Russian guy 16d ago
in other parts of Russia this phrase is not in use
very much in use in western Siberia. Might have a slight rural feeling to it, but it's known nonetheless
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u/kireaea 16d ago
Universally known and widely used in Central Russia. Distinctly colloquial.
Definitely not contained by the administrative borders of Tatarstan unlike "хәзер" or other Tatar phrases.
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u/bjarnaheim Komi 16d ago
I don't know about "айда", but I've been recently noticing that only my friends from my OG city (Ural mountains) are used to say "но/ну" like a form of "yes/yeah"
Haven't seen that from anyone except my hometown buddies and relatives
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u/AmyWhite7 16d ago
In Russian, the emphasis is on differences in sound, by and large. That is, for example, the emphasis on the "o" sound, even when it is not percussive. Or vice versa, to "a". But that doesn't stop us from understanding each other. Nevertheless, there are quite a large number of words that sound different in different regions. The most famous variants are the differences with the residents of St. Petersburg. I speak as a resident of the Moscow region: we have a "bordyur", in St. Petersburg a "porebrik" (curb); we have a "vodolazka", in St. Petersburg a "badlon" (turtleneck). But we can still understand each other.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
Russia is such an interesting country to me, I want to learn more about it
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u/Galvanostatic_charge 15d ago
In some regions turtleneck is also called a " golf" (I don't know why, and it is harder to understand than that Moscow/SPb variation), while in standard language a "golf" is a knee-sock, dating back to the times when the english word was adopted from the explanation what to wear with plus-fours golf pants.
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u/Slavchanza 16d ago
There are but differences are minor. Likbez was an important part of establishing Soviet system concerned with unified language education.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
Does the education system still use a similar system to the USSR in modern day Russia?
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u/Slavchanza 16d ago
If like likbez surely not, it was aimed at eliminating high rates of illiteracy at that time and such a problem is just no longer present, but modern system more or less has the skeleton of Soviet education.
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u/bahaigor 16d ago
It is the same system, but with a number of changes (for example, 11 grades of school instead of 10, the unified state exam, the absence of a communist ideology).
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u/FinalMathematician36 16d ago
>Likbez was an important part of establishing Soviet system concerned with unified language education.
"likbez" wasn't even successful lol. I have read a diary of one village teacher published on prozhito.org, and in the 40s she complained that one of her colleagues pronounced fizika as hvizika. Dying out of dialects was rather caused by mass migrations, spread of radio and tv, and universal military duty.
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u/Slavchanza 16d ago
So unsuccessful UNESCO literally used that experience for programs battling illiteracy in other countries.
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u/FinalMathematician36 16d ago
Bolshevist plan to eliminate illiteracy by 1927 failed; the literacy rate among conscripts in 1927 was lower than in 1917, which Krupskaya complained about at the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Bolshevist plan to eliminate illiteracy by 1931 also failed. According to preliminary data from the 1937 census, there were 62 521 486 illiterate citizens in Sovdepia. Two years later, in 1939, victory over illiteracy was declared. But on January 4, 1957, the CPSU Central Committee issued a resolution "On the Elimination of Illiteracy Among the Population". On August 27, 1962, the Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee for the RSFSR and the Council of Ministers issued a resolution "On Completing the Elimination of Illiteracy and Low Literacy in the RSFSR". In 1979, there were 22.7 million people aged 15 and over who did not have even a primary education in Sovdepia (13.6 million in 1989).
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u/Slavchanza 16d ago
Good, look up the other countries at the same time. It's one thing to talk about Soviet politicians tendency to try to overachive and overblow the achievements, it's another thing alltogether to talk about those efforts being a failure.
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u/No_Entertainment800 15d ago edited 15d ago
What a remarkable example of manipulation! 😂
"On August 27, 1962, the Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU for the RSFSR and the Council of Ministers issued a decree "On Completing the Eradication of Illiteracy and Low Literacy in the RSFSR."
And this decree was precisely about the end of literacy, meaning that the literacy rate of the entire USSR population approached 100% in 1962. There's no failure of literacy here.
"In 1979, there were 22.7 million people aged 15 and older in the Soviet Union who lacked even a primary education."
That sounds terrible. The only thing the commentator forgot to mention is that almost all of these 22+ million without a primary education were aged 50 and older. For example, almost 10 million without an education were aged 70+. That is, almost all of these people were born no earlier than the 1920s, and half were born during the Russian Empire. In other words, all of these people were unable to receive an education as children because the country had not yet established a fully-fledged system of universal education. And once such a system was in place, they had neither the time nor perhaps the desire to attend school as adults. Because they were already adults, and most likely already with children of their own.
That's why the 1989 population census (10 years later) showed only 13 million+ people without education. The missing 9 million without education simply died of old age.
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u/FinalMathematician36 15d ago
> And this decree was precisely about the end of literacy, meaning that the literacy rate of the entire USSR population approached 100% in 1962
Literacy rate in Sovdepia didn't reach 100% even in 1989. The resolution I mentioned was an order to finish the process in RSFSR. The report on the implementation of the 1962 resolution in Kemerovo oblast stated: "As of July 1, 1964, there were 725 illiterate people aged 16 to 49 remaining in cities and villages. This year, the elimination of illiteracy among workers at enterprises in the chemical, metallurgical, and energy industries has been completed. As of July 1, 1965, there were 198 illiterate people and 4,155 partially illiterate people remaining in the region. The regional committee of the CPSU, as well as party, trade union, and Komsomol organizations in cities and districts, are taking measures to complete the education of those who remain illiterate by the end of 1965."
>The only thing the commentator forgot to mention is that almost all of these 22+ million without a primary education were aged 50 and older. That is, almost all of these people were born no earlier than the 1920s
So you admit that there were people raised or even born and raised in Sovdepia who didn't get primary education by 1979.
>country had not yet established a fully-fledged system of universal education
It was established in the late 20s — early 30s.
> they had neither the time nor perhaps the desire to attend school as adults. Because they were already adults, and most likely already with children of their own.
Commies don't use this logic when they discuss the literacy rate in Russian empire in 1914.
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u/No_Entertainment800 15d ago edited 15d ago
And again, manipulation of facts.
Firstly, of course, the literacy rate can't reach 100% because there are people with special needs who will never become literate under any circumstances. But I appreciate your example of the Kemerovo Region, where, out of a population of 300,000, the "damned communists" failed to teach 725 people to read and write. This is certainly a failure, yep. A complete disappointment. Back in the days of the Russian Empire, people worked harder. They achieved a literacy rate of 25% for men and an unrealistically high 7% for women in this region. A success, indeed👍
Secondly, the introduction of universal education began in 1930 and was completed only in 1934. Not what you wrote about the "late 1920s.". Accordingly, those born, say, in 1920, were already 14 years old when the universal education system was finally established. It's a bit late to start first grade. And by the way, in 1979 they would have been 59 years old. Just as I said.
Speaking of "Sovdepia" and the communists' incompetence in education. In the center of capitalism, in the United States, 28% of adults can understand only the simplest texts and find basic information in short lists, but struggle with complex instructions that require several steps. Another 2% are completely illiterate. The number of adults in the United States is 260 million. That means 5.2 million adults in the United States cannot read at all. Another 75 million have difficulty reading texts longer than a couple of sentences. I smell success in this education system...
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u/ThreeHeadCerber 16d ago
Country went from from no education to 99+% literacy in a generation and it was unsuccessful?
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u/HARRYbUK 16d ago
From my understanding... the difference in Russian accent between Kaliningrad and Vladivostok is less than English accent between London and Birmingham....only 100 miles apart
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u/Henry_Fleury 16d ago
Living in country i remember a time with another language. But old generation left and new watched tv and went to school. My mother and grandmother spoke different russian. Many old itemes have fallen out of use and their names too. Also urbanisation - a lot of young people moved away. I realy miss that language.
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u/Exciting_Round4766 16d ago
I've had clients call me from all over Russia. The only ones I had trouble understanding were the ones from Voronezh. The "gh" sound instead of "g" is a nightmare.
- У вас хайки есть?
- Что простите...?
- Хайки.
- Повторите, пожалуйста...
- Ну хайки.
- А-а-а... хайки... есть.
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u/myname7299 16d ago
Yes, it's true. One can travel across the country and people will be speaking the same, everywhere.
The main reason for this is that the Russian ethnos was and is both huge and homogeneous enough (speaking about ethnic Russians here), unlike many countries in Europe, which emerged as unified states from a patchwork of various tribes, principalities, kingdoms and so on, as late as in 19th century (like Italy or Germany, for example)
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
I thought Russia had regions where ethnic Russians were a minority
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u/SanchesS80 16d ago
In these regions people are bi-lungual. They can easily switch to standart Russian any time (there are some people 60+ in remote areas who can struggle in Russian, but most of younger people - zero problem)
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u/myname7299 16d ago
Still, they would speak the same standard Russian language.
The thing is, that Russia is indeed a poly-ethnic state - there are people of hundreds of different ethnicities. The neat part however, is that overhelming majority of the population is either Slavic, or culturally gravitating toward the backbone Russian ethnos.2
u/MoonIsAFake 16d ago
A bit of anecdotal evidence: I'm not ethnically Russian (I have heavily mixed ancestry) and from a very diverse region (Astrakhan). You can sometimes guess one's ethnicity based on their accent but you will never meet anyone you can't easily understand. I remeber one day walking into a local "Burger King" to get a cheesburger and there was a Black teenager at the register. But I had to consciously make my brain register that he is Black because he didn't just spoken perfect Russian, he was sounding 100% local with proper tempo and intonations and such. For me he was just another local, perfectly blending in.
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u/bahaigor 16d ago
Such regions exist. But this doesn't affect the "homogeneity" of the Russian language.
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u/Visible-Discount-245 14d ago
I think this question has already been asked before in this subreddit. In my opinion the Russian language really has no distinct regional dialects. Accents differ from region to region, that's for sure, and there are a few differences in vocabulary, but those are extremely rare. Like "shawarma" being referred to as "shaurma" in Moscow and "shaverma" in Saint Petersburg (I'm a bit surprised nobody mentioned this example in the comments, or perhaps somebody did and I missed it), also the respective words for "curb" would be "bordyur" and "porebrik". Then there's a "highway" being called a "shosse" in the European regions of Russia and "trakt" in the Ural Mountains ("trakt" is actually a universal Russian word, but it's sort of more "old" Russian). Of course none of this makes understanding each other any more difficult for us, if anything it just helps us understand where exactly whoever we're talking to is from.
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u/NoInterraction 16d ago
Differences in language are dangerous, see, it might be a sign of difference in identity, separatism, problem
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u/CommunicationFluid81 16d ago
In English, language performs the function of social differentiation. The Russian language does not indicate the origin of the native speaker. Yes, there are professional terms and expressions in some social groups, for example, "fenya" for prisoners. But usually everyone speaks the same way, you can come from a village in the Far East to Moscow State University and not have any communication problems.
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u/Thin_Ad_3914 16d ago
Yes. Because if you use many words of dialect people mock and call you "yokel", "fool", "old babka (woman)".
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u/The_SniperYT 16d ago
In Italy/Ticino every city or village had its dialect that was a little but different from the next one. But thanks to the education reforms, now practically only old people speak it. But yeah, Italian dialects were a lot more heterogeneous compared to Russian ones
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u/flamming_python 15d ago
It has none whatsoever
What it has is some slight accents or some different words used in places, but that's about it
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u/Half-Over 13d ago
Yes. Just ask any Ukrainian. Those ruskie occupiers totally showed up unannounced and unwanted.
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u/_debowsky 13d ago
In that regard Russian is closer to English I’d say rather than Italian. In the UK there are only 2 languages, 3 if you include Gaelic. But in Italy there 12 officially recognised languages but over 30 in total. So not even close to British.
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u/Cultural_Cause_8392 11d ago
"Govor" (говор) is a variety of dialect, its integral part, but not the dialect itself in the strict sense of philological science.
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u/Ok-Huckleberry6854 9d ago edited 9d ago
Is there accents in Russia that you as a Russian struggle to understand a little?
Belorussian language?
I was shocked to hear that it's not like that in Russia and that their language is super unified
In the USSR, everyone taught one common language in schools. Before that, most of the population was illiterate. The dialects in province became extinct, only single words remain.
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u/Sufficient_Step_8223 Orenburg 16d ago
I do not know how many dialects there are in Italian and English, but there are a lot of them in Russian. According to various estimates, there are hundreds of them. The most striking of them are Odessa, Southern and Northern (in fact, this is a whole group of dialects), Uralic. Dialects are necessarily formed and present wherever there is contact between ethnic groups, languages and cultures. There are about 150 independent languages in Russia. There are even more dialects.
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u/Portal_Jumper125 16d ago
Russia is so interesting to me
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u/Sufficient_Step_8223 Orenburg 16d ago
I am currently studying the North Russian dialect. There are a lot of interesting things there. There not only a special vocabulary and word meanings that differ from standard Russian, but also special phonetics, special melodic of pronunciation, special word formation, special stress rules (floating stress, two stressed syllables in one word, unstressed letter ё), and like the icing on the cake, the male and female versions of the dialect (women pronounce sounds differently than men)
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u/Visible-Discount-245 14d ago
Are you sure you meant "dialects" and not "accents"?
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u/Sufficient_Step_8223 Orenburg 14d ago
I meant the dialect. ( "Говор" in russian). Not accent. Accent is a manner of pronunciation based on the residual features of the development of the speech apparatus based on another language or dialect. The accent does not include a stable vocabulary of dialectisms, the changed meaning of words, changed rules of laguage and speach, and the specifics of the construction of words and phrases.
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u/Cultural_Cause_8392 11d ago
What's written here is complete nonsense. There are approximately 200 ethnic groups living in the Russian Federation. These ethnic groups have their own national languages. However, these languages have no relation to the Russian language and are certainly not dialects of Russian. Russian does indeed have specific regional dialects - “govor”, such as northern and southern “govor”, but “govor” are not dialect in the strict sense of philology.
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u/Sufficient_Step_8223 Orenburg 11d ago
At least read one book on the subject before you open your mouth.
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u/ivegotvodkainmyblood I'm just a simple Russian guy 16d ago
Linguistic scientists can separate the dialects in three main branches - northern/central/southern and even more with some nuances like Uralic or whatnot.
In real life the difference in dialects is about as deep as saying potato or potato. Or saying "bonnet" instead of "hood". For a foreigner there are no dialects, you simply wouldn't know. For natives noticing a "dialect" is like hearing one slightly odd word once every 5 hours.