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

[anne marie devlin]

Interesting points raised by both john and piper. SLA research has consistently shown that language acquisition is systematic and not as dependent on the L1 as might be supposed. Hence the difficulties experienced by Scottish learners. Piper's observation regarding the linguistic environment in which variation occurs is also widely studied. That is whether the phoneme occurs at the beginning, middle or end as well as what sounds proceed or follow. In this case it appears to act as a variable at the beginning of a word and when followed by \i\ or \I:\. It would he interesting to test this hypothesis. I'm not aware of any studies but if anyone out there is, I'd love to get the references.
AM

> Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 11:11:45 +0100
> From: John.Dunn at GLASGOW.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] [w] for [v] in the speech of Russians speaking English
> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
> 
> 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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