Changes in Russian pronunciation

[John Dunn]

Many thanks for the latest batch of comments.   I think that the issue with the speech in 'Partijnyj bilet' is the extent to which it differs from the standard Russian that we have all come to know from the post-war period.  There would seem to be three strands, which it would be interesting, though no doubt very difficult to disentangle:
1. The extent to which the actors are carrying over into the film traditional stage techniques of declamation;
2. The extent to which they are trying to imitate, however notionally, working-class or regional speech, especially in the case of actors playing characters of Siberian origin;
3. The extent to which Russian pronunciation has changed since the 1930s.

It seems to be a general rule that film and television starts off from the principle that supra-regional educated speech should prevail and that any departures should be very limited and highly stylised.  It is then interesting to see how and when in different cultures that principle breaks down and moves are made towards a more accurate reproduction of regional and other forms of speech that depart from the traditional standard.  In Britain the process probably starts in the 1970s, but with variable results, perhaps for reasons that are in part contingent.  A production set in the West of Scotland, for example, will tend to produce local speech pretty accurately, but I suspect that is partly due to the presence in Glasgow of an important drama school, which means that there is a readily-available pool of trained actors who are native speakers of Glaswegian. 

In Russia the process starts very late; in fact up to the point when I stopped watching Russian television on a regular basis (2006) it had not really started at all, which is why I found Richard Robin's comments particularly interesting.  A few years ago I took it upon myself to analyse the language of 'Khrjun Moržov', the computer-generated pig who was one of the main characters in a satirical television programme of the early Putin years.  The actor who spoke Khrjun's lines chose (or was told) to emphasise the robustly anti-intellectual standpoint his character was intended to represent by giving him an accent which contained a number of features (often present only inconsistently) that the audience would recognise as vaguely  South Russian, but which could not be assigned, even approximately, to a particular locality. 
 
John Dunn.

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