How Language in the Urals is Arranged

10:22, November 9, 2021

Philologist dispelled stereotypes about the Urals' unique features

There is a stereotype that all people in the Urals speak fast and accentuate the letter "o". The Village spoke with Maria Rut, professor at the Department of Russian Language, General Linguistics and Speech Communication at Ural Federal University, and shattered stereotypes that this is a native Urals feature, and also found out if our language has an identity of its own.

Vowel reduction came to the Urals from the north

I grew up in the village of Talitsa, and there were a lot of dialect speakers around. Even back then, I wondered why everyone around me was using words I did not understand very well. I particularly noticed this because, in contrast to everyone I knew, my parents spoke a strict literary language - they had moved to the Urals from St. Petersburg, and my mother also worked as a teacher, which also left an imprint on her speech.

First of all, since my childhood, I have been attracted by different pronunciations of the same words. For example, the characteristic of the Urals to emphasize the letter "o" in words. If my mother had to take a dictation, the school principal would come and dictate the sentences instead of her - children were used to the Urals' accent, and my mother's central dialect interrupted them. I also remember calling my grandmother in Moscow, she whispered: "Oh, you're my Ural girl," referring to my accent.

In Russia, the southern dialects retain the understressed "a", and the northern dialects retain the understressed "o". This is a striking distinction that allows us to classify all of our dialectal diversity. The peoples of the Russian North spread their accents with them to the Urals in the 17th century [The development of the Urals went mainly from the north to the south and in the 17th century acquired a mass character. Mostly the peasants and villagers of the Russian North moved to the Urals voluntarily, but some people were sent by imperial decree. - Editor's note].

Fast speech and swallowing of consonants came to the Urals from the south

The Urals were not only inhabited by peoples of the North: quite a lot of the territory of the Southern Urals was occupied by people from Central Russian and Southern provinces, so different parts of the region speak differently.

Another peculiarity of the Urals dialect comes from Turkic languages - it is simplification of affricates (consonantal sounds formed by the fused pronunciation of a stop and a fricative consonant sound, usually of the same place of articulation. - Editor's note). In other words, when instead of "ts" and "ch," "s" and "shch" are pronounced. In the 2010s, I still heard this kind of accent in Ekaterinburg, but now it has remained only in the villages. But a peculiarity of Urals speech, which can still be noticed in the speech of Ekaterinburg residents, is the squeezing of endings. This is characteristic even for some speakers on local radio and television.

Dialectologists at UrFU are in constant contact with specialists in the same field from Ural State Pedagogical University, and for several years there has been one dispute between us. My colleague from that university thinks that Ural people speak fast, and I don't think so. I even remember an aunt from Kazakhstan coming to visit me and constantly saying, "You all sing in the Urals". That's how she perceived our northern, slightly chanted speech with indistinct accents.

Some people from the Urals, however, do speak fast. Our colleagues from Urals State Pedagogical University measured speech rate of the residents of Kamyshlovsky region and it turned out that they speak about a hundred words a minute, whereas the normal rate is approximately 80 words a minute. The fact is that Turkic peoples have had a strong influence on this area, and the Tatars and Bashkirs, who are part of this group, do speak faster than the Russians. In addition, according to my observations, throughout the country, the villager speaks slower than the urban resident, regardless of the area in which he or she lives.

Most of the Urals' vocabulary consists of northern words

There used to be other features, tenses and declensions in our language, but in the 17th century a system of grammar developed that is still relevant today. In theory, we could even understand a person who lived at the time, but the vocabulary and the connections between words have changed dramatically over four centuries. After all, any discoveries bring new words into the language that appear in speech. We can only understand obsolete vocabulary because it has a pronounced internal form. The Uralic vocabulary is 70% northern and includes many ancient loanwords from Scandinavian and Finno-Ugric peoples, and 30% is formed in the Urals. When the northern peoples mastered our territories, they needed new words to call geographical objects, plant and animal species that were unfamiliar to them.

Different regions of the Urals formed their own vocabulary. In the northern part, there are many hunting terms and names for varieties of snow.  Some Ural dialectic terms have gone into toponymy. 

Why each village had its own dialect and how the regional vocabulary is disappearing

Previously, the language developed individually in each territory due to the urban disconnection, so the villages differed in their dialect. Since the 20th century, the attitude to dialect norms was negative - they were considered something barbaric. For example, in Soviet times, people paid a lot of effort to speak a single language throughout the country. Today, the residents of different regions watch the same programs recorded in central Russia, the speech of the inhabitants of which has become the literary norm, so the regions try to speak the same way, and the territorial vocabulary and accents began to disappear in the country.

Our modern literary language is not standardized, but rather free. Although all dialects are quickly erased in the cities, regionalisms in non-standardized speech have recently begun to appear. Local new words appear in the language today, but they quickly become universal due to globalization. On the one hand we want to preserve the folk vocabulary, because it is very interesting, but it definitely will not remain in speech - all these words mean the realities that have already left our lives. The creation of unified literary norms makes it easier to understand the language, which means that it also helps its development.