Re: languages in Russia

From: Keith GOERINGER (verbivore_at_comcast.net)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 19:39:30 -0400

In article <7df91bca.0408290850.6e3c824c@posting.google.com>,
 tyusha@freemail.ru (Xenia) wrote:

> Wiktor S. wrote...
> > Russian is the official language of Russia, but what languages do people
> > actually speak? Or the country is monolingual?
>
> Officially the country is polylingual but the Russian is universally
> comprehended.

"Comprehended" maybe, but definitely not equally well everywhere, as
your comment on Dagestan points out. It seems that in many parts of
Russia where Russian is not the native tongue of the main populace,
speaking bad Russian is something of a sign of defiance/disdain/national
pride (as it was in many if not most non-Slavic SSRs in Soviet days).

 Perhaps the worst Russian speakers are Muslim
> highlanders of Dagestan. They say there are 30 separate languages
> coexisting in that tiny stretch of Caucasus, and more than 300
> dialects.

It is amazing. At least 50 languages (I won't get into the
langauge/dialect argument) are spoken across the Caucasus, and the
majority of those 50 is in Dagestan.

 Russian is also used as lingua franca elsewhere in the
> former USSR. It is the language of everyday speech in Belarus,
> Kazakhstan and most of Ukraine.

In Belarus it may well remain that way for a while, given the overall
good relations between Russia and Belarus. But I would imagine that by
the time the current pre-teens are in their 30's or so in Kazakhstan and
the other Stans, and Ukraine, Russia will no longer be a lingua franca.
 
> > Are there significant differences between Russian spoken in Moscow and,
> > say,
> > Archangelsk?
>
> No difference at all. The particular feature of the Russian language
> is that it has virtually no dialects. On the huge territories,
> rivalling in size the whole of Europe, people have been speaking the
> same language, except certain differences in pronunciation of several
> letters.

Um, that's pretty much what a dialect is all about. I think that saying
Russian has *virtually* no dialects is misleading. There are dialects
with different types of akanie; there are dialects that in which okanie
is the norm; some dialects have a distinct reflex of <jat'> (as opposed
to MSR, where the reflex of <jat'> is <e>); there are dialects where <g>
is realized as a voiced glottal fricative; there are dialects (or at
least there were -- I assume the distinction remains) where the
realization of second pretonic vowel reduction differs -- Moscow vs. St.
Petersburg pronunciations of <moloko> or <gorodok>. And so on. These
are all phonetic/phonological issues -- not touching on differences in
lexical items.

 It is particularly striking if you think how often folk
> living in the same country across a river cannot comprehend each
> other's speech.

Well, yes...but that *would* be the case if Russian hadn't been the
language of the conquering people! I mean, people in Udmurtia or
Tatarstan would have been quite content to continue speaking Udmurt or
Tatar, if Russian hadn't been forced upon them. (And I'm not
necessarily damning Russians or the USSR -- the USSR generally had a
much better track record for preserving indigenous languages than, for
example, the U.S. does. We've already managed to obliterate dozens if
not hundreds of languages here, while at least in Russia many are still
hanging on, however tenuously.)

> More correctly, the only true dialects of Russian are Great Russian,
> Little Russian (traditional, or Shevchenko's Ukrainian), and White
> Russian (or Belarussian).

Not even going to touch that comment...

 During the last century these dialects have
> been promoted to separate languages, although the validity of this
> distinction is still challenged.

Ditto...

Cheers,
Keith

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