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

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Brian Hayden wrote:
> 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?

Language learners go through several phases as they acquire new sounds. 
Don't assume that this one has only the Russian inventory -- she may be 
in the process of acquiring /w/. "Mr. Chekhov" on the original Star Trek 
series sounds like this, too.

In that case, an L2 speaker with sketchy /w/ will produce a variety of 
sounds approximating /w/, and be inconsistent in their usage (often 
pronouncing the same word variably). So one intermediate phase will be 
that /v/ prevails but /w/ occurs occasionally, and not always where 
appropriate. As proficiency increases, /w/ is pronounced more accurately 
and used more appropriately, and in the end, it is pronounced well and 
used exactly where it should be.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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