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

[John Dunn]

It may be worth pointing out that one of the paradoxes of language learning is that the presence of a feature in a learner's L1 does not provide an automatic guarantee that this learner will not have problems in acquiring the same feature in L2.  I learned this when I was told that Scottish schoolchildren whose variety of English includes [ü] can have difficulty with this sound when they start to learn German (and, presumably, French).  The reason for this appears to be that for speakers of this variety of English [ü] replaces what in other varieties is [u], so that when they start to learn a foreign language they automatically substitute [ü] for the [u] sound in that language.  With South Russian and some other Slavonic varieties the problem is that [w] is a positionally-determined variant of [v] and the one position where it generally does not occur is at the beginning of a word before a vowel.  In other words the fact that Gorbachev tended to say со[w]сем and члено[w] would not necessarily help him with 'very' and 'worry'.

John Dunn.
________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jules Levin [ameliede at EARTHLINK.NET]
Sent: 17 September 2013 20:01
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] [w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English

There are Russian speakers and Russian speakers.
A clearly articulated labio-dental [v] like in English is a NGR, CGR,
and normative pronunciation (although as I recall--and I am doing all
this from memory), with less lip-spreading than in English.  As you move
to the South, it weakens.  Cf. Ukr., BR, SGR.  Gorbachev retained SGR
features--is he on UTube?--so I am sure there are many other SGR
speakers of standard who are a little weak with the labio-dentals.
Demographically the majority of Russian speakers are SGR speakers for
whom Standard Russian, like Standard English for many of us, is a mix of
native and what we learned in school.
Jules Levin

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