Russian language

Sounds

The phonological system of Russian is inherited from Common Slavonic, but underwent considerable modification in the early historical period, before being largely settled by about 1400.

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The language possesses five vowels, which are given separate letters depending on whether or not they palatalize a preceding consonant. The consonants typically come in pairs of velarized and palatalized, so-called hard and soft. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch, though not lexically distinctive. Stressed vowels are somewhat drawled, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to an unclear schwa.

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Russian syllable structure can be quite complex with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to 4 consecutive sounds. Using a formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant the stucture can be described as follows:

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(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)

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Consonants

Russian is notable for its distinction based on palatalization of most of the consonants. While /k, g, x/ do have palatalized allophones, only /kj/ can tentatively be considered a phoneme, though quite marginal and generally not considered distinctive. It should be noted that palatalization means that the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. In the case of /t/ and /d/, the height of the tongue is high enough to actually produce frication, thus making "palatalized" /t/ and /d/ affricate-like. There is no contrast between frication and no frication, though. {{IPA|/??, ??/}} can are postalveolar with a flat tongue (laminal retroflex).

Related Topics:
Palatalization - Allophone - Laminal - Retroflex

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