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I was taking a walk with a Russian friend the other day, and she said wherever she had been in Russia, from near Japan to Siberia to St Petersburg, she hadn't conceived much dialectal variation, and they couldn't tell whereabouts she came from either.

I didn't completely believe her, but I was still curious about the reason. She ascribed it to the regularizing policies of the USSR (central media, forcibly dispatching and scattering teachers and workers around the country, etc). I wonder how true it is.

therussianblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/…“Moscow,dialects%20between%20North%20and%20South.

Does anyone understand Corbyn's policies? He wants to tax private schools to pay for free dinners, and also abolish private schools which would need dinners paid for by... who?

And how is he going to seize their assets legally? They weren't paid for by the state, so who pays who?

Word of the day: moribundity

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@Færd that is a good overview. I would consult the Wikipedia article on the Moscow dialect for details. In a nutshell, it reduces unstressed vowels to schwas, and palatalizes and/or slurs various consonant groups.

It's a very lazy dialect in a way. But it's the undisputed norm.

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I do believe Russians have much greater difficulties telling dialects from one another than, say, the Germans or the English.

Unreduced Os are very apparent, and so are Caucasus dialects which are usually greatly exaggerated, often to the point of being comical.

But in-between the obvious extremes, the lines are very faint and blurry.

I for one can't tell the St. Petersburg accent from the Moscow accent. I might note the differences in vocabulary but not in pronunciation. But I know for a fact that some Russians are more sensitive than myself.

I remember when I studied translation at university, I showed up to the very first lecture, and as soon as I opened my mouth everyone there immediately laughed and placed me in Moscow. I was like WTF, what did I even say. Everyone talks like this, no.

At the time I didn't bother figuring out what exactly gave it away, and gave it away so quickly. In retrospect maybe I should have.

And yeah. the ones laughing the loudest and the quickest were the girls from St. Petersburg. I then spent a year studying with them, and I never noticed anything out of the ordinary with the way they spoke. I probably still wouldn't be able to tell that they were from St. Petersburg even today. But they could tell I was from Moscow right from the get-to.

So I would say it depends on the person, really. Some people have better ears. Some care more than others for political reasons. Some don't give a fuck.

And yeah if you know Russia, most Russians just don't give a fuck about anything no matter what. So your friend's general observation is probably quite accurate.

@RegDwigнt Even so, you and those girls were educated speakers.

In many countries, those are somewhat outside the dialect differences.

An educated Englishman from Newcastle who speaks RP is hard to distinguish from an RP-speaking Londoner.

Just as accents in Holland are mainly spoken by the lower classes, at least urban accents.

Provincial accents may be spoken by educated people too (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't).

Your last three sentences alone give it more thought than anything any Russian would give it over the course of their entire life.

I can tell if you're from Dagestan, Georgia or Lithuania. And I can tell from your vocabulary, though not accent, if you're from Ukraine or St. Petersburg. But I don't think I could possibly tell someone from Vladivostok from someone from Ekaterinburg.

And those are what, 5000 miles apart?

Your education does not matter. That, again, would manifest itself in vocabulary over pronunciation.

We should consider that all Slavic languages even today are still mutually intelligible to a frankly obscene degree. It's a well documented curiousity, as well as the fact that Holland and England are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, with even neighboring dialects sometimes being mutually unintelligible.

I have a co-worker from Sofia who speaks Bulgarian with her daughter. I understand everything they say even though I couldn't produce it myself. (And so conversely, I just speak Russian with them. And they don't bat an eye. And the girl is like four years old, she probably doesn't even know that Russian exists. But she's able to understand me.)

Now try being a Swabian and travelling just 50 miles east to Lotharingia, or 50 miles west to Bavaria. For all the mutual intelligibility you will experience, you might as well be coming from Mars.

And those are mere dialects of the same language. Whereas Russian, Bulgarian, and Polish are not just separate languages, but indeed languages from three different language families. Measuring thousands of miles across in every which direction.

So given how comparably tiny the difference is on such large a scale, it only makes sense that the differences within each language would be minuscule.

@Færd so no I wouldn't blame it on the USSR per se. This development, or rather lack thereof, goes back a full 1500 years.

@RegDwigнt Very interesting.

@RegDwigнt Thanks.

While riding with the club today we went by a big sign announcing "Yard Sale" ... I figured they must be converting to the metric system.