Perceived Regional Variation in Spoken Russian Among Young Russians, 2015

The main purpose of the current project is to explore naïve Russian speakers' view on regional variation in spoken Russian. The dataset consists of 59 interviews with Russian adolescents in three Russian cities: Moscow, Perm and Novosibirsk. The main topic of the interview is regional variation in Russian. Other topics include stylistic variation and general variation in spoken Russian. The interviews are semi-structured and follow an interview guide. As part of the interview, the informants were asked to draw any perceived regional differences in Russian on a blank map of Russia (perceptual maps). The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data from the project have been used to explore whether there were any phonetic or prosodic differences in the speech of informants which could be ascribed to regional variation in Russian speech, and whether there is a connection between these possibly regional features in individual informants' speech production and the same informants' perception of regional variation in their own speech (Post and Vardoy 2015). In this pilot study, no connection was found between the informants' perception of their own speech and phonetic measures of their individual speech, but this first study was too limited to draw any conclusions.