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

[John Dunn]

I suspect it is a form of hypercorrection.  A Russian speaking English will know to make an adjustment to use the strange [w] instead of the more familiar [v] at the beginning of many words, but may sometimes get carried way and make the adjustment where it is not required.  I am not sure that it is all that unusual in native speakers of languages that do not contain [w], though it may be the case that it is encountered more often with German speakers than with Russian speakers.

John Dunn.  
________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Brian Hayden [bkhayden1990 at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: 17 September 2013 16:27
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: [SEELANGS] [w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English

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
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