Russian Accent Research Articles

Venäläisen aksentin tunnistaminen suomen suullisen kielitaidon arvioinnissa

The paper focuses on the Russian accent in the Finnish oral proficiency test. The data consist of spontaneous monologues on an intermediate proficiency level from 10 speakers (about 90 s each). Raters (n=44) were asked to identify the accent in the speech samples as well as to give justifications for their recognition in their own words. The analysis is based on a classification of the raters’ comments as well as auditory and acoustic analysis by the author. The results show that the raters paid most attention to individual sounds, but also palatalization and intonation were mentioned as the reasons for detection of the Russian accent. To conclude, further and more detailed acoustic analysis is needed to gain more understanding of the phonetic features of Russian accented Finnish.

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse

Putin’s War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America’s Absence

Putin’s War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America’s Absence

Do smart speaker skills support diverse audiences?

Smart speakers with voice assistants like Google Home or Amazon Alexa are increasingly popular and essential in our daily lives due to their convenience of issuing voice commands. Ensuring that these voice assistants are equitable to different population subgroups is crucial. In this paper, we present the first framework, AudioAcc, to help evaluate the performance of various accents. AudioAcc takes in videos from YouTube and generates composite commands. We further propose a new metric called Consistency of Results (COR) that developers can use to avoid the incorrect translation of the produced results by rewriting the skill to improve the Word Error Rate (WER) performance. We evaluate AudioAcc on complete sentences extracted from YouTube videos. The result reveals that our composite sentences generated by AudioAcc are close to the complete sentences. Our evaluation of diverse audiences shows that first, speech from native speakers, particularly Americans, exhibits the best WER performance by 9.5% in comparison to speech from other native and nonnative speakers. Second, speech from American professional speakers has significantly more fairness and the best WER performance by 8.3% in comparison to speech from German professional speakers and German and American amateur speakers. Moreover, we show that using the COR metric could help developers to rewrite the skill to improve the WER accuracy, which we used to improve the accuracy of the Russian accent.

<i>Udareniye</i>: Diachronic and Lexicographic Description of the Linguistic Term and its Breaking Away from the Greek and Church Slavonic Tradition

The article is devoted to the study of the Russian linguistic term “udareniye” (“stress” / “accent”) from the historicolinguistic, etymological and lexicographic viewpoints. Currently, there are hardly any studies analyzing the term’s semantic development or attempts to present its semantic structure in a dictionary, based on textual and lexicographic sources ranging from the end of the 16th to the end of the 19th century, that would make it possible that would make it possible to trace the semantic changes of the term in the course of time. The existing studies mainly address the the issues of terminology developed in individual authors’ grammars, or describe the terminology of grammars related to a certain period of time or a specific epoch. The purpose of this article is to systematize etymological information about the term “udareniye”, to conduct an historico-linguistic analysis of its semantics, starting with the first Russian grammars and lexicons. The research uses comparative, definitional, etymological, semantic and lexicographic methods. The semantic structure of the term “udareniye”, when taking into account its two main meanings (emphasizing of some syllable in the word with voice and reflection of such an emphasis in writing by graphical means, e.g. diacritics), begins to take shape from its first written fixation in 1591 in Adelphotes and ends by 1830, when grammarians finally stopped associating the Russian accent, uniform by nature, with the sound length and modulations of the tone, and focused their attention on the study of intensity (pronouncing power), which can be regarded as the main acoustic feature of the stressed syllable in languages with dynamic stress. By this time, the type of the Russian stress stops being identified with the Greek and Church Slavonic patterns and the attempts to uncritically borrow the corresponding terminological nominations with their forms and meanings from Greek into Russian come to an end. The term “udareniye” got probably for the first time its lexicographic entry at the beginning of the 18th century due to Polikarpov-Orlov who described its meaning 1 in his dictionary. In its meaning 2 – based on the Greek-Church Slavonic tradition, – the term is found in almost all the text sources examined by the author, starting from Adelphotes, that is from the end of the 16th century. As for its first lexicographic fixation, it took place in 1763 in Poletika’s dictionary.

Systematic Approach to Teaching Academic Writing: Practical Experience

The article describes the practical implementation of an experimental model for teaching academic writing to non-linguistic students of humanities at three levels of higher education. Improving the quality of domestic scientific publications submitted to high-ranking journals requires new effective pedagogical technologies. Theory and methodology analysis, as well as empirical observations show that the problems faced by Russian-speaking authors of academic texts can be divided into two categories: strong Russian accent that creates the language barrier and hinders understanding, and flawed academic style that leads to the cross-cultural academic barrier. The described ten-year study involved 25 students of Petrozavodsk State University, aged 17 to 28, who subsequently completed bachelor’s, master’s and postgraduate programs. At each of the three stages, the participants completed a set of tasks aimed at consistent and systematic formation of academic writing competence through writing abstracts (bachelors), conference proceedings (master’s students) and full-text academic articles (postgraduate students). To collect and process the data, the researchers used an open-ended questionnaire, the observation method, expert assessment, and descriptive statistics. The study results showed that the systematic approach helps to effectively eliminate structural and stylistic writing problems over the course of studies. However, the difficulties associated with the manifestation of the Russian accent in written English-language academic discourse are more resistant. The authors make the conclusion that the systematic development of academic writing skills in English will help to overcome obstacles for the internationalization of Russian science.

The Phonological Analysis of Russian Accent in the Way Back Movie by Peter Weir

Many speakers around the world have their own way in pronouncing English words as International language. The unique way in pronouncing English words is called accent. This research aims at analyzing the deviances on segmental vowel quality and quantity made by the Russian speaker in The Way Back movie by Peter Weir regarding to English short and long vowels in Russian accent. The research method was descriptive qualitative method. The research data was collected from converted audio of The Way Back Movie by Peter Weir. The data was then trimmed, selected and extracted by Praat software analysis. The results show that the Russian speaker makes deviances in pronouncing English vowel quality and vowel quantity. The total amount of deviances is 169 deviances which are divided into three classifications; those are segmental vowel quality, combinatorial quality and segmental vowel quantity deviances. The deviance that is mostly made by the Russian speaker is segmental vowel quality deviance, whereas the deviance that is rarely made by the Russian speaker is combinatorial vowel quality.

The role of a foreign accent in the social and personal identification of a speaker

The intensification of migration processes in Europe necessitates studying the foreign accent as a means of social and personal diagnostics within multicultural communities in the light of the increased number of cases of the “accent-based” discrimination, since the foreign accent is perceived negatively by native speakers and causes less confidence in a speaker. Studies carried out in recent decades suggest that external signs are gradually losing their leading role in social identification, giving way to more reliable and objective means – pronunciation characteristics, since they are practically impossible to control. For this reason, an experimental phonetic research was carried out on the material of the German language in order to identify the nature of the influence of accentedness on the social identification of Russian-speaking immigrants from the position of German native speakers, as well as to determine the acceptation limits of accentedness degree of Russian-speaking bilinguals. With regard to the results of the study, it was found that a strong accent negatively affects the overall assessment of an individual in terms of the educational level, income and success of a speaker, while in terms of personal characteristics there is no pronounced negative attitude towards people speaking with a Russian accent, regardless of the degree of accentedness.

Russian accent in the global energy transition

Russian accent in the global energy transition

RUSSIAN ACCENT IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE AFFECTS THE PERCEPTION OF VOICE PLEASANTNESS BY BRAZILIANS

The field of foreign accents in Brazilian Portuguese is very poorly explored mainly in relation to perceptual impressions caused on listeners by foreign accents. The objective of this paper is to conduct a perceptual experiment to analyze the perception of voice pleasantness in relation to degrees of foreign accent. Our focus is on Russian accented Brazilian Portuguese. Despite the representativeness of the Russian community in Brazil, there are hardly any studies on Russian accented speech. T o evaluate the perception of voice pleasantness in relation to the Russian accented speech, we have selected, from our database, speech samples in Brazilian Portuguese from 12 native Russian speakers and six Brazilians, all of them residing in São Paulo. The speech samples were incorporated into an online questionnaire. The analysis of the 129 answers given by the native Brazilian Portuguese speakers showed a strong negative correlation between the degree of Russian accent in Brazilian Portuguese and the degree of voice pleasantness. Experience of interaction with foreigners or knowledge of foreign languages, including Russian, did not influence the result. We conclude that higher degrees of Russian accented speech in Brazilian Portuguese affect the perception of speakers´ characteristics by Brazilians in a negative way.

Russian Accent in English Written Discourse

Russian Accent in English Written Discourse

On the method of teaching Russian accent in Polish schools

Having analysed the results of teaching in experimental groups and types of mistakes made by students, the author suggests that the methods of teaching Russian accent should be based on: making students acquainted, particularly the older ones, with the norms and structure of Russian accent during the whole process of teaching; developing students’ perception abilities and their auditory memory with the help of special drills based on mechanical aids of teaching; analysing and comparing the characteristic features of Russian and Polish accents in order to eliminate the influence of the mother tongue. It has been experimentally proved that teaching Russian accent by means of its norms effectively helps students to master the correct Russian pronunciation and to acquire orthoepic habits.

Remembering an unsung catalysis superhero

The man looked over one shoulder, then the other, surreptitiously making sure no one was within earshot. Convinced the coast was clear, with a Russian accent, he said, “Ipatieff did the right thing to defect.” Northwestern University’s Tobin J. Marks doesn’t recall the cautious man’s name, but he does remember that the Soviet chemist waited to catch Marks alone in a quiet corner at a Gordon Research Conference on catalysis in the early 1980s to share his thoughts. At the time, the Cold War was dragging on. The man was referring to Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff, the self-taught chemist who, in the early part of the 20th century, laid much of the groundwork for catalytic organic chemistry and petrochemical refining, cornerstones of today’s global chemical enterprise. Born in Moscow just over 150 years ago, Ipatieff rose to prominence as a chemist during World War I. At the behest of Czar Nicholas

A Russian Accent in Slovenian: A Speech Portrait of the Russian-speaking Slovenian

A Russian Accent in Slovenian: A Speech Portrait of the Russian-speaking Slovenian

William Gerhardie: An English Writer with a Russian Accent ‒ on the Revolution and Civil War

The works of William Gerhardie, a witness of the two Russian revolutions and the Civil War, are the unique fruit of cultural interaction, and especially of Chekhovian influence on British culture. Gerhardie is a rare example of a person and writer on the Anglo-Russian cultural border. In the 1920s, he was well known in Britain and the USA, especially in literary circles: in the 1990s, after his books were published in English and translated into the main European languages, he received wide recognition. However, he is still poorly known in Russia, and his works have not been studied. The clash of two cultural and civilisational traditions – Russian and English – determined his double identity and the dramatic character of his life. However, in his works he synthesised and harmoniously combined the Chekhovian tradition with the English cultural tradition, rooted in the works of Sterne, English caricature (evolving from William Hogarth), Dickens, and Beckett, creating a vivid, modernist prose which gave a creative impulse to British writers of later generations – E. Waugh, G. Greene, O. Manning, A. Powell, W. Boyd, etc. Gerhardie, probably on more significant grounds than Katherine Mansfield, is often called an “English Chekhov” in literary criticism. It is a spectacular definition, but not quite accurate, since he was a writer of a different time and language who belonged to a different cultural and aesthetic tradition, which often led him to inner polemics with Chekhov. In this article, his early works are analysed from an imagological point of view, since it was between the 1920s and 1930s that he created an expressive image of Russia, Russians, and the English.

The political transformation of the Israeli ‘Russian’ street in the 2013 elections

The Great Aliya from the USSR and the post-Soviet states began a quarter of a century ago, bringing to Israel about 1.1 million Russian-speaking Jews and their family members. This population corresponds to approximately 19 Knesset seats, and is thus a crucial factor in Israeli electoral politics. From the late 1990s this community was almost equally divided in its sympathy between nationwide mainstream parties and Russian sectarian immigrant parties. However, if previously there were either purely sectarian or nationwide parties, in the past decade the majority of Russian Israelis prefer new types of political representation: either a ‘Russian party with an Israeli accent’ (mainly Israel Beiteinu) or an all-Israeli party with some Russian accent (i.e. Likud). Nevertheless, despite the similarities in the ideological orientations and socioeconomic views, the Russian-speaking supporters of both political parties represent two distinct political cultures among the Israeli community of former Soviet Union olim and their children. This may explain why the joint list of Likud–Israel Beiteinu during the 2013 Knesset elections experienced substantial losses of each party's traditional ‘Russian’ (as well as general) voters, many of whom opted this time for parties of the ‘contentious middle class’ – the right-wing Habayit Hayehudi and ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid. This article argues that in the coming years, the Russian community's politics in Israel will continue to search for an optimal model of combination of a party's ethnic base with a mainstream platform, and which constitute an exemplary model and inspiration of political participation for other ethnic or cultural identity oriented groups, such as English-, French- and Amharic-speaking immigrants, and for the ‘new haredim’.

Does Russian English Exist?

The researcher investigated and described the characteristic features of English of Russian EFL users in the context of World Englishes. Russian-like English in use is regarded at different levels, from pronunciation to syntactic structures and further to written and oral discourse. The Russian accent in English was studied through frequent and typical errors made by Russian natives and was interpreted as a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural phenomenon. Russian error analysis became the framework of this research. The analysis was made at several levels with contrastive analysis techniques involved and the results were explicated as negative interference. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were undertaken, the results of which were summarized and illustrated with examples. The quantitative evidence was provided of error spread and individual error profiles, i.e. the most numerous types of errors in each individual error count and the most common combinations of such error type peaks. The research was based on the analysis of a considerable corpus of written and oral discourse samples featuring Russian errors in English made by Russians and collected by the researcher during the years of teaching practice from 2000 to 2014. The research results are suggestive of regarding Russian accent in English as a performance variety of English.

Two Apostles of Loneliness: Caryll Houselander and Catherine Doherty on the Mystical Body of Christ

They met only once, briefly, after prayer on a gray afternoon in London: She was a very small woman with huge big spectacles through which she could hardly see. I first met her, not knowing who she was, in chapel of Grail in England. This person was praying and I was interested in little person. Anyhow, there was an air about her that I couldn't understand--I was drawn to her. So we had tea together, eternal good English tea, at 4pm and then I found out that she was Caryll. That didn't tell me anything for I hadn't read any of her books. She was very, very shy, andYvonne, who was in charge of Grail at time inkled that she was a writer. But it didn't penetrate until I got home and first read ThisWar is Passion. After that I collected everything that she wrote. (1) It must have been quite a meeting: Doherty, who scribbled those words in front of one of Houselander's books, was a former noblewoman, but she was a self-proclaimed recluse; Doherty was a baroness larger than life with a penchant for properly placed explicative. Houselander was relatively more restrained and rather frail; Doherty was forced to flee many lands, while Houselander rarely left her comfortable London surroundings. Doherty spoke with a thick Russian accent, Houselander with poshest of English. Yet, as different as they may have appeared socially, internally they shared same solitude: neither enjoyed secure intimacy with another, neither was able to delight in lifelong companionship, neither enjoyed comforts of life-long marriage and wonder of raising her own family. Both were quintessential pilgrims of twentieth century. For has a human soul escaped pains of loneliness. The solitude of Adam echoes throughout every human gaze and in every human act, each of us stretching outward for completion and wholeness. Such solitude compels us to spend our lives searching for a savior who can finally rescue us from our restlessness. Although inevitable and inescapable, there was something about past century that rendered social divisions all more urgent, more widespread, more institutionalized. From blistering battles to cold dictatorships, from loosening of basic human virtues to strangling of simple human joys, twentieth century beheld new types of political and intellectual systems that fostered human alienation. In economics, institutionalization of Marxist theories of alienation resulted in totalitarian regimes. In philosophy, radical existentialism argued that there could be no real knowledge of other; each of us is rather doomed and destined to remain locked within our own limitations. L'enfer c'est les autres--Hell is other people. Thinkers such as Sartre and Camus highlighted our inherent estrangement from one another as unique essence of human person. Theology moved from doctrinal precision to liberative praxis, scrambling to show that God is squarely on side of those in a particular economic class, social situation, or gender. Was it not in such turbulence that Christian West received one of its great life stories, The Long Loneliness? In response, however, these years consequently produced some of most significant reflections on solitude and solidarity as well. Where political ideologies inevitably failed, spiritual remedies mercifully arose. Take, for example, Pius XII's 1943 encyclical, Mystici Corporis. At height of Great War stood a pope amid the cities, towns and fertile fields strewn with massive ruins and defiled with blood of brothers ([section]4), calling world to find comfort in how Jesus Christ never ceases to look down with especial love on his spotless spouse so sorely tried in her earthly exile; and when he sees her in danger, saves her from tempestuous sea ([section]39). Out of these tempests of Nazism, Fascism, and atheism arose another Christian leader, Blessed John Paul II. …

The lexical representation of word stress in Russian

This paper explores the processing of metrical structure in Russian, a language with free lexical stress. According to the existing theoretical accounts, not all Russian stems are specified for accent in the lexicon. The present study employs event-related potentials (ERPs) to find evidence to support the underlying distinction into accented and unaccented stem types. The results of two EEG experiments using a stress violation paradigm reveal that Russian listeners are highly sensitive to changes of metrical structure and that prosodic manipulations may impede lexical retrieval. In the first experiment, in which the stimuli were not given prior to auditory presentation, metrical violations evoked a pronounced N400 effect for all stem types, and a late positivity for one of the stem types, indicating a difference in stress processing. In the second experiment in which the stimuli were visually introduced before auditory presentation, stress shifts to the second syllable induced late positive component (LPC) indicating an ease in the evaluation of the metrical form. Overall, the present findings partially support the division into lexically specified and unspecified Russian accent types. In addition, the results show a strong correlation between the patterning of ERP components and the direction of stress shift, suggesting a trochee to be the default foot type in Russian.

Vowel lengthening as a sociolinguistic feature of Vilnius speech

The paper focuses on vowel lengthening in Vilnius speech. This feature has been stigmatised by Lithuanian language planners as a feature of Slavic origin, which has influenced Vilnius speech and therefore has to be avoided as non-standard and incorrect. The aim of the study was to find out how frequent the lengthening of short vowels is in the speech of Vilnius and how it depends on linguistic and social factors and self-monitoring of speech. The research is based on the classical Labovian interview with seventeen second and third generation residents of Vilnius (aged 18–40), 4.5 hours of speech in total.The research has shown that vowel lengthening is far from common in Vilnius speech. It depends largely on the type of syllable and the place of stress; the lengthening mostly affects just stressed syllables and usually in word stem. The lengthening of short inflectional endings, which is highly associated with Russian or Polish accent and regarded as the worst feature of urban speech, seems to be extremely rare. It has also been shown that the tendency to lengthen manifests itself quite consistently; informants who lengthen stressed vowels in the stem of the word more often than others tend to lengthen syllables at the end of the word. This applies to all contextual styles.In spite of relatively big individual difference in speech of informants, the research revealed that vowel lengthening in Vilnius speech is mostly used by the oldest of our informants and by men more than women. The dependence of vowel lengthening on contextual style turned out to be quite controversial and may point to the development of different speech norms in Vilnius.