Perceived Regional Variation in Spoken Russian Among Young Russians, 2015

The main purpose of the project was to explore naïtive language users' view on regional variation in spoken Russian. 59 interviews with Russian adolescents in three Russian cities: Moscow, Perm and Novosibirsk. The main topic of the interview was regional variation in Russian. other topics include stylistic variation and general variation in Russian. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The interviews were semi-structured and followed 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. Data from the project was used to study potential measurable differences in speech production in the area of prosody or phonetics which can be ascribed to the regional variety of Russian in each city (Post and Vardoy 2015). The conversations were analysed and compared to find out what is similar and different when russians speak, from a lingustic perspective. No connection was found between individuals' perception of their own speech and phonetic measures of those individual speech.