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

[Charles Mills]

In my experience, this phenomenon is more widespread than you describe it.
I've encountered it a lot.  Many phonologists view Russian as having /w/ at
the grammatical level, realized as either [v] or [f] (Lightner, Harshenin,
Coats, Kiparsky, Hayes).  If that is true, it could be that they just
haven't assimilated the grammar of L2.  Overcompensation could be the
phonological analog of speakers who use "I" where they should use "me";
they know "w" is correct.  They just don't know when.


On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Simon Beattie <simon at simonbeattie.co.uk>wrote:

>  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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