Russian pronunciation of English

Russian is one of the most widespread languages in the world. It occupies number 8 spot for the number of speakers worldwide¹, with around 258 million speakers worldwide². This is the official and cultural language of Russia, as well as other countries such as Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russian is also widely used in CIS countries and Baltic states, Central Asia and

1https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/ethnologue200, accessed 1 December 2021

2https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rus, accessed 18 October 2021

Caucasus³, making it one of the most widely distributed languages in Europe and the most popular Slavic language. Compared to other geographically distributed languages, like Arabic or Chinese, there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility not only between different distant regions of Russia, but also between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian (Comrie, 2018).

Pronunciation difficulties in different languages, specifically foreign accent, have long been studied by a multitude of different scholars. Munro and Derwing (1998) define foreign accent as

“the extent to which an L2 learner’s speech is perceived to differ from native speaker norms”.

However, there is distinct lack of papers that approach this subject from a data-driven point of view, and they rarely concern L1 Russian English accented speech. According to Munro (2018), most of the pedagogues have shifted their attention from linguistic sources to such classroom-oriented material as Nilsen and Nilsen’s (1971) Pronunciation Contrasts in English, despite the book being first published 49 years ago. This is also the case for Russian-based institutes of higher education – even though the students preferred more expensive, foreign books and the government prohibits the usage of books older than 2010, they are still used in classroom setting or just republished with slight adjustments (Pitina, 2015). A good example of that would be Gzhanyanz’s (1969) Korrektivniy fonetiko-yazikovoi kurs [Speech Pattern Course]. On the other hand, there is Sokolova’s (2008) Prakticheskaya fonetika Angliyskogo yazika [Practical

Phonetics for English Language], which is also a popular phonetics textbook, even though it is just a slightly revised version of an original book published in 1984.

Only a handful of international papers written in English focus on the problem of Russian L1 pronunciation in English language, namely Crosby’s L1 Influence on L2 Intonation in Russian Speakers of English, which is a longitudinal case study of one Russian-speaking student and L1 Russian language influence on L2 English intonation. One of the other papers that tackle this problem is Gildersleeve-Neumann & Wright’s (2010) paper on bilingual children in the US,

3According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language

speaking both English and Russian at home. Even though its’ main focus is bilingual children, it offers quite an extensive analysis of Russian phonetical system and its’ comparison to the English system. Despite the fact that the paper under discussion takes a very thorough approach to the problem of accented speech, the subjects of the studies – bilingual children between 3 and 5 years old – exist in a quite different environment compared to the subject of this research paper. The effect of L2 exposure cannot be understated, which has been proved by a significant number of researchers (Kibota et al., 2020, Zsiga, 2003, Swan, 1987). A good example of that would be Kibota et al. (2020) paper Losing access to the second language and its effect on executive function development in childhood: The case of 'returnees'. In this study, L1 Japanese speakers with prolonged exposure to L2 English, who returned to L1 environment for a while and came back, were studied to measure the effect of their exposure. The results show that there has been a noticeable improvement in proficiency in the language they have been exposed to.

This fact is quite important for this study, because even though the speakers who provided the recording for this paper, are ranging from B1 (Intermediate) to C2 (Proficient) in terms of their command of English language, they are exposed to the Russian language daily. This provides a unique opportunity to study the influence of L1 Russian on L2 English pronunciation, since all the studies mentioned above look at the speakers who are currently temporarily or permanently reside in L2 environment.

Since the English-speaking research papers on L1 Russian English pronunciation mistakes are scarce, one of the main sources for pronunciation errors has been Swan’s textbook on

pronunciation difficulties, titled Learner English. It features 22 different groups of speakers, with a meticulous description of what difficulties does each group encounter during their L2

acquisition process. It contains a very thorough description of the problems L1 Russian speakers of English encounter. This textbook contains the most extensive list of the phonetic difficulties a speaker might have, however, due to the scope of this research and in order account for the confirmation bias, this study will focus on some of the most obvious ones.

Another research that analyzes L1 Russian speakers’ phonetical difficulties is Gildersleeve-Neumann & Wright’s (2010) paper, which is also mentioned above. As already mentioned before, its’ main focus is not phonetic difficulties and thus it doesn’t explicitly give the list of the problems the L1 Russian speakers might encounter. However, the part of the research that talks about Russian phonetics and gives a comparison to English phonetics, implicitly shows some of the possible difficulties. The higher number of consonants that can also be palatalized in

Russian, combined with the absence of diphthongs in Russian and a shallower vowel resource, are among some of the difficulties obvious from the list presented. Even syllabic structures sometimes can present quite a challenge for an untrained L1 Russian English speaker, with Russian allowing such structures as CCCCVC (взгляд [vzɡlʲat], ‘glance’) or CVCCCC (монстр [monstr], ‘monster’) to exist.

Another extensive list is located in a textbook that is authored by Sokolova (2008). Since it is more classroom-oriented, it focuses on some of the most obvious linguistic features of a Russian accent and thus is not as extensive as the first one, but still gives a good idea of how of a

phonetics teacher teaches English phonetics in Russia. A very thorough analysis of phonetic mistakes, marked in the Tables 1 to 3 below, is almost an identical match of the mistakes Swan (2001) pointed out. Two of the four speakers recorded had linguistic training, which included this textbook in the curriculum. This might produce some interesting results when compared to the speakers who had no linguistic training beforehand.

Kichigina’s (2002) textbook on phonetics Uchebnoe posobie po phonetike / Phonetics textbook, holds a structured side-by-side comparison of problematic phonemes. Like Sokolova’s textbook, it also shows articulation process for various problematic vowels and consonants but doesn’t focus as much on intonation patterns and suprasegmental difficulties as Sokolova does.