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<DIV><FONT face="Arial Cyr">I should say dialectiology and sociolinguistics are
quite alive here in Russia and every year we have at least some serious
dissertations in this field. The only problem that I think we should always bear
in mind is that in Soviet times we didn't have any difinite (fixed) classes (I
don't mean the party elite). Of course there were differences in the society and
hence in speech habits, but they were not so striking in at least urban areas.
Kids from various families attended the same schools and got same education.
Even if they had some "otherness" our Soviet school leveled them with
others. Nowadays differences in speech are much more explicit, as well-off and
poor kids get some very different education, they don't have the same
opportunities and that, of course, influences the way they speak. But all in all
speech discrepancies are much more significant in rural areas, as
countrymen have always lived in a "variant world". </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Cyr"> In the long run all the differences
that we are talking about are mostly at the level of vocabulary and in some way
grammar, in photetics they are not so crucial as for example in the States or
England. But that's of course my
point.
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