Moscow dialect
| Moscow dialect | |
|---|---|
| Moscow accent | |
| Московское произношение | |
| Pronunciation | mɐˈskofskəjə prəɪznɐˈʂenʲɪɪ |
| Region | Moscow |
Indo-European
| |
Early forms | |
| Russian alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| IETF | ru-u-sd-rumow |
The Moscow dialect or Moscow accent (Russian: Московское произношение, romanized: Moskovskoye proiznosheniye, IPA: [mɐˈskofskəjə prəɪznɐˈʂenʲɪɪ]), sometimes Central Russian,[1] is the spoken Russian language variety used in Moscow – one of the two major pronunciation norms of the Russian language alongside the Saint Petersburg norm. Influenced by both northern and southern Russian dialects,[2][3] the Moscow dialect is the basis of the Russian literary language.[4]
Overview
[edit]The 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica wrote:[5]
Literary Russian as spoken by educated people throughout the empire is the Moscow dialect... The Moscow dialect really covers a very small area, not even the whole of the government of Moscow, but political causes have made it the language of the governing classes and hence of literature. It is a border dialect, having the southern pronunciation of unaccented o as a, but in the jo for accented e before a hard consonant it is akin to the North and it has also kept the northern pronunciation of g instead of the southern h. So too unaccented e sounds like i or ji.
History
[edit]In the 15th century, the Moscow dialect was similar to the northern Russian dialects in its phonological system, except that, unlike now, it was not characterized by the ts–ch merger peculiar to Novgorod Russian.[6] It shared the phonetic and grammatical features of Rostov-Suzdal and Vladimir Russian, which were part of the Vladimir-Volga subdialect of northern Russian.[7] The changes in the system of sounds in Russian during the Moscow period (15th to 17th centuries) primarily include the spread of akanye, as well as the preservation of certain pronunciations of 'e' before hard consonants in the 'ecclesiastical style', the complete merging of 'е' and 'ѣ', and the sporadic use of [ɣ] for [ɡ] in a small number of words.[7]
Examples
[edit]| Dialect | понятно Understood |
что what |
ничего nothing |
Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moscow and Central Russia | [pɐˈnʲatnə] ⓘ | [ʂto] ⓘ | [nʲɪtɕɪˈvo] ⓘ | Unstressed /o/ becomes [ɐ] or [ə]. ⟨ч⟩ is pronounced [ʂ]. Intervocalic ⟨г⟩ is pronounced [v]. |
| The North | ponjatno | što | ničevo | |
| Old St. Petersburg | panjatna | čto | ničego | |
| The South | panjatna | što | ničevo | |
| Source: [1] | ||||
References
[edit]- ^ a b Rough Guide Phrasebook: Russian (Updated ed.). London: Penguin. 2012. pp. 16–17. ISBN 9781405390576.
- ^ Sokolʹskiĭ, A. A. (1966). A history of the Russian language. Impr. Taravilla. p. 106.
- ^ Matthews 2013, p. 144, "Linguistically the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century inclusive saw the gradual emergence of Moscow Russian, a dialectal type which geography and history were to endow with both North and South Russian characteristics".
- ^ Винокур, Григорий Осипович (1971). The Russian language; a brief history. Translated by Forsyth, Mary A. Edited by James Forsyth. Cambridge University Press. p. 15. ISBN 9780521079440.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Russian Language". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 913–914.
- ^ Matthews 2013, p. 144.
- ^ a b Matthews 2013, p. 145.
Sources
[edit]- Matthews, William Kleesman (August 2013). The Structure and Development of Russian. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-61939-5.