# Ukrainian spoken with Russian influence?



## MYRNIST

Hello all,

I have noticed when conversing with Russian speakers who are from Southern Russia or Russophone Ukraine that they speak with a strong Ukrainian accent. Например: Мне кажется, *щ*о нос*ы*тели русского языка из Украины *х*оворят по-русски с акцентом.

Is there an equivalent of this in Ukrainian? What would someone whose primary language is Russian sound like when speaking Ukrainian? Please give examples!


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## sokol

This topic was discussed marginally in another thread - Slavic dialect continuum: there seem to be some transitional dialects in the Ukrainian/Russian region.

But lets wait for native speakers to confirm in more detail.


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## Adnyre

Well, Yanukovych and (particularly) Tymoshenko have a Russian accent, to name a few. This manifests itself in akanje (Russians tend to pronounce unstressed _о_'s as _а_'s); some sounds (Ukrainian _и_ and Russian _ы_, Ukr. and Rus. _ч_) are also noticebly different. Yanukovych speaks Russian (his native language) with a strong Ukrainian (actually Donbass?) accent, though.

Also, Russian is a stress-timed language, while Ukrainian appears to be a syllable-timed language (though I'm not 100% sure).


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## ectuohy

MYRNIST said:


> Hello all,
> 
> I have noticed when conversing with Russian speakers who are from Southern Russia or Russophone Ukraine that they speak with a strong Ukrainian accent. Например: Мне кажется, *щ*о нос*ы*тели русского языка из Украины *х*оворят по-русски с акцентом.
> 
> Is there an equivalent of this in Ukrainian? What would someone whose primary language is Russian sound like when speaking Ukrainian? Please give examples!




--Great question, and one that's always interested me...Hard to generalize for the whole country, of course; there are dialect-continua effects on both sides (for example, Galician Ukrainian pronunciation is in many ways intermediate to Polish, e.g., the masculine past tense endings, say, _Я хотів _and_ Я випив_are pronounced as "w", not as "v", cf. Polish_ wypił ._)  Native Russian speakers from eastern Ukraine and adjoining areas of Russia might not even observe _akanie_ or the "hard g" in Russian! (Some of the most vociferous defenders of the Russian language and opponents of "Ukrainianization" will nevertheless unselfconsciously pronounce г as "h" in things like "русский город Луганск."

For second-language Ukrainian speakers, then--often people in bigger cities in central/southern Ukraine who have to use the language at work or who were required to learn it at school--there are a few very obvious features (at least to me, who never heard them until moving to Ukraine--I had studied literary Ukrainian in the US):

In addition to the already-mentioned akanie, let me (non-native speaker warning) spell out what I hear as the "Russian accent":

-First, just reverse the three differences you identify:
a)) щ sounds like ш or ш+ь: Ющенко--"Юшьенка"; що--"шьо"
b)) И (basically the same sound in English "hit") is pronounced either as і or ы (ринок--"рінак").
c) G vs H (probably the most frequently-remarked difference between the two accents/languages). But: Ukrainian г is definitely not the same as Russian х; the former is closer to English h in "happy" [although voiced], the latter is articulated further back in the throat. An example is in the transcription of the author's name, which Ukrainian represents more accurately: Гемінґвей  vs. Хемингуэй

Second, consonant devoicing in many contexts, which is a feature of Russian but not [literary standard] Ukrainian: (_ніж-> _sounds like _ніш, зуб->зуп, дівчина->діфчіна, _etc.

Third, different palatalization patterns: ця is pronounced like ца, (eg "столиця"--> сталіца), dropping the soft sign from third-person verb endings (роблять--> роблат); dropping the soft sign from adjectival endings in -skyi. reversing e and є (one example of both these phenomena: американський--амєріканскій).

There are many more if that's not enough to satisfy your curiosity--especially if you define "accent" more broadly than just phonetics (stress patterns in certain words, esp. verbs: to take a really common example, я хочу--Ukrainian stresses the first syllable, but native Russian speakers often stress the second).  And then there's syntax, false friends (took me a while to realize that some speakers were using words like другий (UA--2nd, Russian "[an]other" or час (UA usually 'time' in general, RUS usually hour", and nevermind the colloquial contraction that sounds like "сшас", more popular than the literary Ukrainian "зараз" to mean "just a second"...

Anyway, thanks for the excuse to pontificate--and everyone, if i've mischaracterized anything, please do let me know!


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## Awwal12

> Russians tend to pronounce unstressed о's as а's


Actually, it isn't [a], but [ɐ] before stressed syllables or extremely reduced [ə] in other positions; these sounds are just phonematically interpreted as /a/ (since unstressed /a/ turns into the same sounds).


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## Adnyre

Awwal12 said:


> Actually, it isn't [a], but [ɐ] before stressed syllables or extremely reduced [ə] in other positions; these sounds are just phonematically interpreted as /a/ (since unstressed /a/ turns into the same sounds).


Ukrainians tend to pronounce them all as [a] ([pata'muʃta] instead of [pətɐ'muʃtə]) and don't reduce the time of their articulation.


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## ectuohy

Oh, here's  another example--from the far-right Svoboda party's pamphlets--of how Ukrainians "hear" Russian (never mind the content!)

"В Рассєі матом не ругаются...на ньом там разгаварівают"


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## Awwal12

Well, but you mentioned Russians and not Ukrainians there, didn't you? 
As for Yanukovich, Timoshenko and their "akanje" - how exactly they do that, with Russian reduction or in, er, Belarusian manner (with phonematical shift /o/->/a/, but without Russian unstressed allophones of the latter phoneme)?


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## ectuohy

Haha, I meant "hearing" only in phonetics--the idea that swearing is somehow "Russian" is one of the more ridiculous ideas one comes across in Western Ukraine [in fact, they're even more enthusiastic users of profanity, combining mat with borrowings from their Polish/Hungarian/Romanian neighbors as well. Курва блядь, куме!


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## Awwal12

Sorry, *ectuohy*, I was replying to Adnyre and just haven't refreshed the page...


> Oh, here's another example--from the far-right Svoboda party's pamphlets--of how Ukrainians "hear" Russian (never mind the content!)


I'm afraid that it's just Russian written in Ukrainian alphabet according to Ukrainian orthography (quite inconsistently, though - one unstressed "o" was changed to "a", another wasn't, and the word "Рассєя" obviously was used for sarcasm only). Anyway, the most of Ukrainians are bilingual, so they don't need "to hear" Russian in some especial way. )


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## Orlin

ectuohy said:


> Oh, here's another example--from the far-right Svoboda party's pamphlets--of how Ukrainians "hear" Russian (never mind the content!)
> 
> "В Рассєі матом не ругаются...на ньом там разгаварівают"


 
What is матом meant to be here? I understand the rest.


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## Duya

Orlin said:


> What is матом meant to be here? I understand the rest.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat'


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## Adnyre

Awwal12 said:


> As for Yanukovich, Timoshenko and their "akanje" - how exactly they do that, with Russian reduction or in, er, Belarusian manner (with phonematical shift /o/->/a/, but without Russian unstressed allophones of the latter phoneme)?


Mmm... Tymoshenko does that in the Russian manner (ми не дозволимо [mɨ ne dɐz'volɨmə]). As for Yanukovych, his _o_'s are better then hers, it's his sibilants, some endings etc that sound awkward, but he always speaks slowly and cautiously.

_Mat_ isn't at all Russian in origin, many of those words can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European.


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## Awwal12

> Mat isn't at all Russian in origin, many of those words can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European.


Of course they can. ) But as the sociolinguistic phenomenon, it is purely Slavic (not only Russian, though).


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## Adnyre

Awwal12 said:


> Of course they can. ) But as the sociolinguistic phenomenon, it is purely Slavic (not only Russian, though).


Don't the English four-letter words occupy the same niche? I thought such a phenomenon is common to most languages. Though there's an urban myth that Japanese lacked it once. (A bit off-topic, I know)


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## ectuohy

Well, due to the relative morphological simplicity of English, the four-letter words can't and don't lend themselves so readily to communicating complete thoughts [unlike mat]. 

You can find examples on the Internet that string together multiple senses/parts of speech of, say, "fuck," but unlike their Russian equivalents they sound really contrived.

I also think--but would love to hear the thoughts of Slavic native-speakers, not just UA/RUS, on this--that the English profanities are much less offensive than those in Slavic. Of course, the degree of offensiveness varies from country to country (Australia-least--->USA-most), generation to generation, and also according to religion and profession, but I definitely found in Ukraine and in neighboring countries that the "swear words" carried MUCH more force than those in English. 

It has been suggested--and I agree--that racial and ethnic slurs are replacing terms based on bodily functions or religion as *the* taboo words in English.

What do you guys think (perhaps a new thread?)


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## Awwal12

> Don't the English four-letter words occupy the same niche?


They do not. The English obscene vocabulary is much, much less tabooed and, I suppose, much less offensive; let alone it is comparatively small.


> Well, due to the relative morphological simplicity of English, the four-letter words can't and don't lend themselves so readily to communicating complete thoughts [unlike mat].


Yes, you're right. )

But it would be better to stop the off-topic discussions in this thread.


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