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

[Dorian Juric]

        This has been a problem that has plagued me for a very long time. Hopefully someone with more insight and erudition will come on here and elucidate this for the both of us. I'm surprised that you're just noticing this now as the [v] and [w] swap for Slavic speakers is a very well known accent characteristic and shows up in much stereotyping (there's a line in the horrible fourth Indiana Jones movie where the hero tells the unknown soldiers that have kidnapped him that he could tell they were Russians by their "Wubble-'u's").
  
       My father has retained very little of his Croatian accent, yet this trait more than any other has persisted. He still often 'wolunteers' for things and picks 'flovers' in the 'walley'. I used to think that this was a product of his being taught the English language poorly, that the teachers had equated the 'w' to the Croatian 'v' as a reference for understanding (to this day Croatians in Croatia, when spelling out internet websites say "ve-ve-ve" for www.). But there are speakers today who have learned English in the modern day and still make this mistake. 

       I can't speak for Russian, only Croatian, but despite there being no alphabetical 'w' in Croatian, there IS a phonetic one and having learned that, I assume this process to be phonetic and probably some sort of allophonic problem. In Croatian words like 'uopće' the 'uo' combination does produce a 'w' sound, so it is THERE in the language. But to answer why, upon learning English, many Slavic speakers seem to substitute 'v's and 'w's at random, and why many speakers often use them almost perfectly inverted ('v' when a 'w' is required and vice-versa), that I can't answer and hope that someone more familiar with linguistics can.

Dorian Jurić, MA
McMaster Univeristy


Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 15:01:03 +0000
From: simon at SIMONBEATTIE.CO.UK
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] [w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU









Some German speakers certainly do this when speaking English.  Though I have always presumed it was some kind of hypercorrection on their part: they perhaps
 automatically pronounce a written w as [v], as in German, but they also know that [w] exists in English, so use it when they see the letter v.
 
Simon
 
 

From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
 [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Brian Hayden

Sent: 17 September 2013 15:28

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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