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

Tue Sep 17 18:15:08 UTC 2013

I can speak only for the Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian here as 
that is my native language and I often mistake v and w especially if 
they are in the same word or if there is aliteration, that is, 
would-be-aliteration in my mind. For example, "very worried" is a tongue 
twister for me.

As for the "uo" standing in for "w" phonetically, I would caution that 
it really depends on the dialect. Depending on dialect, the stress falls 
on either "u" or "o" and it is only with the latter that it approximates 
the "w" sound. Perhaps there are other examples that would approximate 
it better.

Regardless, I believe far more important in this case is the very logic 
of the BCMS alphabet by which the letters "v" and "w" look very alike 
and therefore should/ought to sound alike. In BCMS, it was Vuk 
Karadzic's famous "one letter, one sound" orthography that creates this 
association. At least among the non-linguists.

Marina Antic

On 9/17/2013 11:42 AM, Dorian Juric wrote:
>         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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