Changes in Russian pronunciation

[Richard Robin]

*I myself am quite interested in the interrelationship between cinema
acting styles and real speech. Acting styles, I think, change faster than
real speech. Consider American acting styles of the 1930s when one of the
predominant speech styles was a hybrid of “educated” New York, New England,
and a tad of British thrown in. Think of Katherine Hepburn. Or listen to
recordings of 1930-40s American radio. The speech there bore little
resemblance to the American English recorded by “normal” people being
interviewed on the air, even those whose English matches what today we call
General American. Listen to intonation of almost any movie. Only recently,
perhaps starting with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” have we
seen actors speak with naturalistic intonation.

Of course, speech patterns have changed too, but not so drastically. See
Labov and the “Great Northern Vowel shift” in American cities.

The situation in Russia is just as striking but for different reasons
perhaps. I don’t want to address the 1930s question, because I haven’t
personally listened to enough soundtracks. But in films from the 50s
through perestroika everyone spoke the exact same Russian: perfect — with
intonation taken right out of Bryzgunova, except for the unnatural
predominance of IK-4 in place of IK-3 for many questions and non-final
syntagmas. This can be explained because (a) the speakers were ACTING!
(like in the Saturday Night Live “Master Thespian” routines) and (b) unlike
in North America, *everything* was redubbed in studio, even stuff shot on a
set. (See any фильм о фильме on a Russian DVD.) Probably a large part of
Russian declamatory overacting can be explained away by the vicissitudes of
the redub process.

Even today, the speech of Russian soap operas (mostly intonation and tempo)
has little to do with speech on the street. On the other hand, Valeria Gai
Germanika (Школа; Краткий курс счастливой жизни) achieves a level of speech
authenticity never before heard on TV. Just compare her Школа to the
Russian localization of Химия или физика (same topic; different levels of
reality).

More interesting in my view is the role that the media plays in molding the
speech (and in the case of Russian, the intonation and speed) of NSs.
Russian now has a well developed Valley Girl speech type, clearly audible
in the language of Ksenia Sobchak (lots of IK-2 and modified IK-2 that
sounds like American English declarative 1-3-2). But which came first,
Ksenia Sobchak or Russian teenagers? Who imitated whom? (Sobchak herself
was a teenager just as Russian Valley Girl speech was getting started.)

The speech patterns of advertising (some home grown and some borrowed from
American English) are everywhere on the air and, I believe, are beginning
to trickle down. But to what extent?

But as for the original comment, my take is that scripted movies,
especially those made under Soviet conditions, technical and political, can
probably not be taken as a model of everyday speech, just as few people in
the 1930s in the US spoke like Katherine Hepburn.*

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 1:31 PM, John Dunn <John.Dunn at glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:

> Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Ivan Pyr'ev's 1936 film 'Partyjnyj
> bilet'.  Leaving aside the debatable cinematic qualities of the film (some
> of which may be inferred from the title), I was struck by how different
> Russian, as spoken by the actors in the film, sounds in comparison to the
> present-day language.

-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Russkiy tekst v UTF-8

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/seelang/attachments/20120627/b080df7f/attachment.html>