Moscow dialect
The Moscow dialect or Moscow accent (Russian: Московское произношение, tr. Moskovskoye proiznoshenye; IPA: [mɐˈskofskəjə prəɪznɐˈʂenʲɪɪ]), sometimes Central Russian,[1] is the spoken Russian language variety used in Moscow. Influenced by both Northern and Southern Russian dialects,[2] the Moscow dialect is the basis of the Russian literary language.[3]
Overview
The 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica wrote:[4]
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Literary Russian as spoken by educated people throughout the empire is the Moscow dialect...
The Moscow dialect really covers a small area, not even the whole of the government of Moscow, but political causes have made it the language of the governing classes and hence of literature. It is a border dialect, having the southern pronunciation of unaccented o as a, but the jo for accented o before a hard consonant it is akin to the North and it has also kept the northern pronunciation of g instead of the southern h. So too unaccented e sounds like i or ji'.
Examples
| Dialect | понятно I see |
что what |
ничего nothing |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moscow and Central Russia | panjatna | što | ničevo | unstressed 'o' becomes 'a' 'č' becomes 'š' 'g' becomes 'v' |
| The North | ponjatno | što | ničevo | |
| Old St. Petersburg | panjatna | čto | ničego | |
| The South | panjatna | što | ničevo |
