Tuesday, August 23, 2005

IDEA: Runglish (Russian-English)

To continue from this,
Even though I'm interested to hear Irish-English or Scottish, I of course, couldn't miss the chance to check out my neck of the woods.
The Russian section features 8 recordings. And three of the participants came from Odessa, that authentic Russian city, ya know :-). Two others were from Riga and Tashkent and one guy from Moscow (but his accent was marked as poor).
As everyone else they were asked to read from a book but also featured some unscripted speech. It was interesting to hear their accents (I can always compare with my own) but it's the latter part that proved to be most interesting.
It was funny to listen how the woman from Odessa tried the disrepancy between her native city being situated in Ukraine and her being a native Russian speaker.
-"in the Soviet Union the language was Russian"
-"now it's Ukraine and they want us to speak Ukrainian but at my time 99,5% spoke Russian in Odessa."
Even if the number is somewhat exaggerated (I'm sure there more than 0,5 of Ukrainian speakers in Odessa even in the 70s) she's basically correct. And yet, there's something very quiant about the way she describes things....

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