[w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English

[Brian Hayden]

Dear SEELANGers,

The pronunciation of one Russian in this broadcast (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH41sond7HA ) has me a little puzzled.
Around 3:14 she pronounces (as far as I can tell) the first consonant of
"very" more or less like an English speaker would, but then around 3:42 she
says something that might be either "very" or "wery", and then a few
seconds later she says "very" again, but definitely replaces the [v] sound
with a [w] sound.

This strikes me as strange for several reasons:
1) she doesn't replace [v] with [w] everywhere -- she didn't when she was
speaking more quickly around 3:14
2) standard Russian doesn't even have a [w] phoneme
3) this doesn't seem to be an especially common mispronunciation among
Russians. Having done quite a bit of English tutoring with Russians, there
are a few places where almost everyone I tutored had some issues --
pronouncing the first vowel and *r* of "Thursday" or "her" like <<ёр>> ("I
will tell хёр") comes to mind. That makes sense to me; Russian doesn't have
a sound exactly like the "ur" in "Thursday", so Russian-speakers substitute
it with the closest thing they have. But here Russians have the same [v]
sound as English-speakers do, but nevertheless it seems that a
Russian-speaker is replacing it with a sound that is foreign to standard
Russian.

Can someone explain to me what's really happening here?

Sincerely,

Brian Hayden

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/seelang/attachments/20130917/a4ae921c/attachment.html>