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Belarusians’ pronunciation: Belarusian or Russian? Evidence from Belarusian-Russian mixed speech

Произношение белорусов: белорусское или русское? На примере белорусско-русской смешанной речи

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Abstract

The study investigates the influence of Russian on the pronunciation of Belarusians (in Belarus). The central variety in which this influence can be observed is Belarusian-Russian mixed speech (BRMS). BRMS is practised by hundreds of thousands if not millions of speakers in non-official speech situations. Based on the analysis of two corpora, we will demonstrate the strength of the Russian influence on nine variables that can be counted as belonging to the most important phonetic differences between Russian and Belarusian. The variables subject to the strongest Russian influence are those that exhibit a certain degree of morphonologisation in Belarusian. Where purely phonic (phonological or ‘pure’ phonetic) differences exist between Belarusian and Russian, speakers tend more strongly towards the Belarusian pronunciation variant. But even for these variables there is a hierarchy of resistance toward ‘Russification’. The variations are by no means chaotic. This hierarchy of the variables mirroring the strength of the Russian influence is statistically constant in each of the seven towns investigated, across all speaker types and in different communication settings. Thus the hierarchy can be understood as evidence for a usus in BRMS. Furthermore, this hierarchy is also observed in ‘pure’ Russian and ‘pure’ Belarusian (and not mixed) parts of the discourse.

Аннотация

В настоящем исследовании рассматривается влияние русского языка на произношение белорусов. Это явление зафиксировано прежде всего в белорусско-русской смешанной речи (БРСР), которая в Беларуси используется в неформальных ситуациях сотнями тысяч, если не миллионами, белорусов. На основе анализа двух корпусов рассмотрены девять переменных, представляющих собой наиболее важные фонетические различия между русским и белорусским языками. Показано, насколько сильным в каждом из этих случаев является влияние русского языка. Более всего влиянию русского языка подвержены те переменные, которые в белорусском языке демонстрируют определенную степень морфонологизации (пусть и неполной). Для переменных сугубо звукового характера (фонологических или ‘чисто’ фонетических) у говорящих гораздо чаще наблюдаются белорусские варианты произношения, хотя и с некоторой градацией. Вариантность не хаотична: последовательность переменных, расположенных в порядке степени интенсивности русского влияния, остается статистически постоянной во всех семи обследованных городах, у различных типов респондентов и в разных коммуникативных ситуациях. Это значит, что переменные образуют стабильную иерархию в БРСР, являющуюся доказательством существования узуса в БРСР. Эта иерархия кроме того находит выражение и в ‘чисто’ русских, и в ‘чисто’ белорусских частях дискурса.

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Notes

  1. It was possible to name more than one language. But this was done rather rarely, as shown by the sum of the percentages (110 % as opposed to 100 %).

  2. It has frequently been established (e.g. Sjameška 1998, p. 41) that BRMS is perceived as Russian by some of its carriers.

  3. Cf. in shortened form Hentschel and Zeller (2012).

  4. Trasianka in Belarusian—a “mixed variety” as a product of the Belarusian-Russian linguistic contact. Language-based structure, sociological mechanisms of identification and language economics, managed by Gerd Hentschel, Slavic Studies, and Bernhard Kittel (now in Vienna), Social Sciences, in cooperation with David Rotman, Social Sciences, and Sjarhej Zaprudski, Belarusian Philology, at the Belarusian State University Minsk. The project is funded by the programme Einheit in der Vielfalt (‘Unity in Diversity’) of the Volkswagen Foundation. The homepage of the project is http://www.trasjanka.uni-oldenburg.de/.

  5. It was traditionally assumed that the velars in Russian and Belarusian are not part of the correlation of palatality and that they occur prevocalically as [g] or [ɣ] before /a, o, u/ and as [g’ (ɟ)] or [ɣ’] before /i, e/, implying that both phones are positional variants of /g/ or /ɣ/. Only the consideration of very rare cases (in terms of type and token frequency) of foreign words like gjaur ‘Giaour’ or in autochthonic cases like tkët, 3prs.sg of tkat’ ‘weave’, where in a certain context /e/ became /o/ in a specific Russian umlaut process, necessitates the assumption of three further phoneme pairs for Russian: /k–k’/, /g–g’/, /x–x’/. These problems do not affect the current investigation. The issue here is the opposition between plosive and fricative, regardless of palatality. In the following, whenever only ru. /g/ or blr. /ɣ/ are designated, the palatal equivalent is always included.

  6. The adjectives ‘Russian’ and ‘Belarusian’ (as well as ‘hybrid’ and ‘common’) will be put into single quotation marks when they mark classifications of corpus elements based on the algorithm described in Hentschel (2008, pp. 179–188). These quotation marks will be omitted in tables with quantifications.

  7. The lexeme oko ‘eye’ in Russian is, of course, antiquated.

  8. Without precisely defined criteria, a precise distinction between Belarusian and Russian in the text is only possible to a limited extent, as Suprun (1987, p. 16) pointed out. As said above (fn. 6), the classification of the spoken material (morphs, word forms, constructions) therefore proceeds according to a classification system described in Hentschel (2008, pp. 179–188). Attributes that are ascribed by this method are always written in single inverted commas, thus ‘Belarusian’, ‘Russian’, ‘common’ and ‘hybrid’. Therefore, ‘Belarusian’ is to be read as ‘Belarusian in the sense of the classification rules’, without inverted commas in the usual sense.

  9. But here the question arises of to what extent this lexicalisation is determined by the spelling with e, which is known to have been introduced by the Soviet codification of the Narkamaŭka in the 1930s.

  10. In the north-eastern region around Vicebsk there is a variant of the dissimilative Jakanje in which the prestressed [a] is also blocked if there is a stressed /e/. This need not be considered in the present analysis.

  11. We do not need to consider whether this is a ‘full’ [i] or a ‘reduced’, less high [ɩ].

  12. An analysis of the variables according to town yielded no distinctive results. The realisation without prothetic [v] clearly dominated everywhere.

  13. For the variable /r’/ vs. /r/ speakers from the town of Chocimsk—as qualified above—have been excluded; for the variable Jakanje – Ikanje the above mentioned lexical special cases and word forms with stressed /a/ from speakers from Chocimsk were again excluded; for the variable [u̯] / [u] vs. [v] the prepositions blr. ŭ / u and ru. v; and for the variable [u̯] vs. [ł] masculine preterite forms were also omitted.

  14. ∗ p<0.05, ∗∗ p<0.01, ∗∗∗ p<0.001. Because we hypothesise a positive relation, all tests of significance were one-tailed tests.

  15. As previously mentioned, it was not possible to collect data for this corpus in Minsk and instead of Baranavičy in the family corpus, interviews were conducted in neighbouring Slonim, cf. Hentschel and Zeller (2012).

  16. The variables H and I are not considered in ‘Belarusian’ and ‘Russian’ utterances. These are the variables that the pertinent literature has identified as morphonologised. This means that the corresponding Belarusian and Russian variants of the variables have already been considered in the morphological-morphosyntactic classification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Slavistik, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

    Gerd Hentschel & Jan Patrick Zeller

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  1. Gerd Hentschel
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  2. Jan Patrick Zeller
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Correspondence to Gerd Hentschel.

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Hentschel, G., Zeller, J.P. Belarusians’ pronunciation: Belarusian or Russian? Evidence from Belarusian-Russian mixed speech. Russ Linguist 38, 229–255 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-014-9126-1

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