Russian

INTRODUCTION

My breakdowns are structured around accent features and influences described by Knight-Thompson Speechwork, a 21st-century, skills-based approach to speech and accents that celebrates language diversity. KT Speechwork offers the “4 Ps” below as a framework for exploring many different facets of an accent:

    • PEOPLE. Who speaks with this accent? Where does this accent come from, historically? What common cultural elements might influence people’s manner of speaking?
    • POSTURE. What is the habitual shape of the vocal tract for speakers of the accent? We all have a habitual way of resting our mouths that allows us to move it into the speech actions of our accent as economically as possible. The posture of this accent might be different from your habitual one.
    • PRONUNCIATION. What are the sounds of this accent? I’ll be using both recordings and the International Phonetic Alphabet to describe speech actions and the sounds they produce. As you listen and read, listen with your mouth–can you make the shapes the speaker is making as you listen?
    • PROSODY. What are the musicality and rhythm of the accent like? What are the intonation, stress, and pitch patterns that speakers might use? This is the soul of the accent. We could nail the pronunciation, but it’s not a manner of speaking until we find how it flows.

 

PEOPLE

A Philosophy for Second-Language Accents

Acquiring the sounds of a second-language accent (an L2 accent) introduces new layers of complexity that we have not yet investigated while studying dialects of natively spoken English. The posture, pronunciation, and prosody features a speaker uses when they speak English will be influenced by the sounds of their language of origin. And they will also be influenced by the dialect of English that the speaker first learned. Here’s what I mean, as it relates to Russian.

About 258 million people worldwide speak Russian as a first language (L1) or second language (L2). It is the most spoken Slavic language worldwide, and the most spoken native language in Europe. Because of the history of the Soviet Union, its use covers a broad swath of territory including Russia, the former Soviet nations, and large parts of Central Asia and Asia. Just as different English dialects sound very different from Standard British or Standard American, different Russian dialects vary widely. The Russian heard in Moscow is different from Turkmen Russian, etc. To complicate matters, when people learn a new language, they learn a specific dialect of that language. Russian speakers often learn British English rather than American English, so their pronunciation and prosody patterns will reflect the sounds of Standard British, accented by the sounds of their own native dialect of Russian. A person from Moscow who emigrates to London may speak an Estuary English dialect accented by the sounds of Moscow, and a person from Belarus who emigrates to Atlanta may speak an American Southern dialect of English with a Belarusian Russian accent.

This is why primary sources—recordings of native speakers, not actors—are all the more critical when working on non-native accents. In order to create a character, you must both understand who the character is and also do research into the sounds of real people who reflect your character’s circumstances. You might not be able to find a primary source with exactly the same language-acquisition trajectory as your character, but what you can do is learn a little bit about the phonetics of their first language and make some educated guesses about how these sounds and prosody patterns might affect the character’s use of English. This guide outlines some very broad generalizations that you can use as a point of departure, as you begin to investigate both your character’s Russian dialect of origin and the English dialect they are speaking in the play.

 

Listen to Russian Speakers

Here are some samples to give you a sense of the variety of Russian accents. The first two IDEA samples represent a fairly typical Russian accent from the country itself, and the third is from the former Soviet state of Tatarstan.

 

When will you use an L2 accent?

A caveat: L2 accents are less common in English-language plays and films than native English dialects. From a bird’s eye view, it makes sense: writers explore what they know. English-language writers tend to write about native English-speaking characters. So, be aware that although there are many stories out there with a main character who speaks with an L2 accent, more often, you will find yourself using L2 accents in smaller roles. Importantly, you probably won’t use a Russian accent in plays about Russian characters set in Russia, like the Russian-language classics by Anton Chekhov in translation in English. In theatrical convention, directors tend not to set a play in Russia with native Russian-speaking characters speaking English to each other with Russian accents. It makes better sense to do these plays in the native English dialects of the actors, and allow the audience to suspend disbelief.

Finally, A Reminder

Characters speaking English as a second language want to make English sounds. They aren’t trying to speak with a “foreign accent” or to use the sounds of their first language. However, like all speakers everywhere, they adopt fluency strategies to get sounds out more quickly, because the point, ultimately, is ease of communication. So, as always, let’s put the character’s intention for speaking moment to moment ahead of “sounding Russian.” You might, however, carefully select places where, because of the character’s intention in the moment, precision with language isn’t their first priority, and more sounds from their first language might come out. Your playwright will also give you some of those “errors” or adaptations from the first language in the syntax and vocabulary of your lines, and you can consider how accent choices support that.

 

POSTURE

General vocal tract posture: Think about shifting everything down and back. The Russian language uses a lot of pharyngeal resonance, which means the tongue root is more active than in American English, and the vocal tract might just feel slightly more retracted than a General American “home base.” You’ve just been experimenting with Scottish, and that’s actually a decent starting position for Russian as well.

Imagine that you have something relatively large and round that you’re cupping on the middle or the back of the body of the tongue. You need to slightly retract your tongue root and curl your tongue tip up to keep it stable. That’s a proxy for the Russian vocal tract posture:

    • jaw: retracted, but perhaps also somewhat close
    • lip corners: the lips and cheeks have more fun in Russia—think about lip corners that are willing to protrude or round.
    • tongue: a lot of activity in the tongue tip. The back of the tongue does a lot of moving toward the soft palate and uvula, and the root may pull back toward the pharyngeal wall.

 

PRONUNCIATION

VOWELS

Lexical Sets & L2 Accents

To organize the vowel sounds I’m introducing, I’ll be using a tool called “lexical sets.” These sets, created by J.C. Wells, are lists of words that tend to share a vowel sound (for example, boat, although, and explosion are all in the GOAT set). For a full linguistic discussion of lexical sets, see Accents of English I: An Introduction by J.C. Wells (Cambridge University Press 1982). Or, for something geared specifically towards actors, check out Eric Armstrong’s (new!) open-source book, Lexical Sets for Actors. Or just google it! Believe it or not, the Wikipedia article on lexical sets will give you a decent introduction.

Lexical sets are a very useful tool for acquiring L1 English accents . . . but their use is a little more fungible for L2 accents. When we grow up learning a language as our first language, we develop deep-brain learning about the “rules” (or patterns) of that language’s grammar, syntax, and pronunciation. We might not be able to articulate those rules, but we follow them. Wells’s lexical sets rely on this deep-brain learning. I don’t really know why I know that boat and although need to share the same vowel sound, whether I’m speaking in an American English accent or an Australian English one, but I know it. Someone who speaks English as a second language might not have acquired this intuitive understanding of the language’s phonetics. This means that lexical sets are only a very rough guide for L2 accents; you don’t need to cleave to them religiously. There is a possibility, for example, that a Russian speaker might not intuitively know that the words race (the FACE set) and rice (the PRICE set) must have different vowel sounds. So we have some creative license for a character with an L2 accent to sometimes pronounce a word one way, and sometimes pronounce it differently.

 

Russian Vowel Substitutions

Russian speakers may substitute the closest approximation from the Russian language for these English vowels that don’t occur in Russian. These substitutions don’t need to be consistent. The “mistakes” might only happen when the speaker isn’t particularly able to focus on pronunciation, in a heated moment, for example, or when they are speaking quickly.

 

KIT → [i]

The /ɪ/ phoneme isn’t heard in Russian, and so speakers may occasionally use the closer vowel from the FLEECE set: [i].

 

TRAP → [e] or [ɛ]

As /æ/ is also non-native for Russian speakers, they may under-cup the front of the body of the the tongue, producing the more familiar Russian vowel [e] or perhaps landing half-way at [ɛ].

 

LOT/CLOTH/THOUGHT → [ɒ] or [ɔ̹]

These sets are in flux in much of the English-speaking world, and differentiating between them bewilders a lot of Americans, especially those from the Midwest (by which I mean… me), who tend to use [ɑ] in all three sets. Since Russians often learn British English, they sometimes follows the UK pattern of using [ɔ̹] in the THOUGHT set, and sometimes in CLOTH words as well, as in long. In LOT words, you may hear something more open: [ɒ].

 

STRUT → [ɒ]

The STRUT set may be realized in a more open and rounded position than it might be in native English dialects, perhaps approaching [ɒ].

 

FOOT → [u]

Russian speakers may target /ʊ/ but shift further back in the mouth, with more lip-rounding, producing [u].

 

FACE → [eː]

Diphthongs are shaped quite differently in Slavic languages than in English, often having a shorter onset. So Russian speakers might clip the English FACE dipthong, creating the Russian pure vowel: [eː].

 

GOAT → [ɔ]

The same shortening phenomenon as in the FACE set may happen with the GOAT diphthong, and it may also be realized in a much more open position: [ɔ].

 

“Intrusive Glide”: [j]

After nasals, especially /m/ and /n/, Russians may intrude a palatal approximant on their way to the vowel, particularly /i/ and /e/.

 

CONSONANTS

/ɹ/ → [r] or [ɻ]

/ɹ/ in the Russian language is realized as an alveolar trill. As Russian speakers acquire English, they may retain their native trill, or overshoot the English bunched /ɹ/, landing on something like a retroflex approximant [ɻ]. This may happen both in the initial position and following vowels.

 

/l/ → [ɫ]

Russians do not use the “clear” /l/ that appears in some dialects of English. They instead use a velarized lateral approximant. As your tongue tip rises toward your alveolar ridge, the back of the body of the tongue also lifts toward the velum.

 

/ŋ/ → [ŋk]

Russian speakers may intrude an unvoiced plosive release after the nasal consonant /ŋ/, producing [ŋk].

 

/θ, ð/ → [s, z] or [t̪, d̪]

Linguists sometimes call this TH-alveolarization or TH-stopping. The dental fricatives /θ, ð/, do not appear in most European languages, and so Russian speakers might approximate them with the alveolar fricatives [s] and [z], or the plosives [t̪] and [d̪]. This occurs for the spelling TH in any position in the word.

 

/w/ → [v]

The Russian language does not include the /w/ phoneme, and so speakers may substitute [v] as the closest approximation. As English learners begin to acquire the voiced labial velar approximant /w/, they may begin to swap the two speech actions: [v] for /w/ and also [w] for /v/.

 

/h/ → [x]

Because there is no glottal fricative in Russian, speakers may move the fricative forward in the vocal tract, perhaps producing the unvoiced velar fricative [x].

 

Consonant devoicing

This feature is something that occurs in the German accent as well. When voiced plosives and fricatives end a word, the speaker may let go of the vibration a little early, which is a feature of the Russian language, producing an unvoiced or devoiced version of the consonant: [b̊, v̊, d̊, z̊, ɡ̊].

 

PROSODY

  • Syllabic stress. Lexical stress — which syllable within a word is stressed — is often a feature that is very difficult for L2 learners to pick up. For Russian speakers, whose language has more aspirated and thus “stronger” consonants, this tends to manifest in more or less equal stress distribution throughout multisyllabic words. For me, this is the most important prosodic feature to play with, particularly if your playwright occasionally gives you lines where the grammar is stilted—stress may slow phrases down in those moments. This feature is particularly clear in the IDEA sample Russia-2, above.