This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect (unless otherwise noted). For an overview of dialects in the Russian language, see Russian dialects. Most descriptions of Russian describe it as having five vowel phonemes, though there is some dispute over whether a sixth vowel, , is separate from . Russian has 34 consonants, which can be divided into two types: hard ( ) or plain soft ( ) or palatalized
Russian also distinguishes hard consonants from soft consonants and from consonant+ clusters, making four sets in total: , although in native words appears only at morpheme boundaries (, for example). Russian also preserves palatalized consonants that are followed by another consonant more often than other Slavic languages do. Like Polish, it has both hard postalveolars () and soft ones ( and marginally or dialectally ).
Russian has vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. This feature also occurs in a minority of other Slavic languages like Belarusian and Bulgarian and is also found in English, but not in most other Slavic languages, such as Czech, Polish, most varieties of Serbo-Croatian, and Ukrainian.
Vowels +Vowel phonemes FrontCentral Back Close () Mid Open
Russian has five to six vowels in stressed syllables, and in some analyses , but in most cases these vowels have merged to only two to four vowels when unstressed: (or ) after hard consonants and after soft ones.
A long-standing dispute among linguists is whether Russian has five vowel phonemes or six; that is, scholars disagree as to whether constitutes an allophone of or if there is an independent phoneme . The five-vowel analysis, taken up by the Moscow school, rests on the complementary distribution of and , with the former occurring after hard (non-palatalized) consonants (e.g. 'to live', 'thorn, spine', 'circus', etc.) and after soft (palatalized) consonants (e.g. 'shield', 'rank', etc.), at the word beginnings, and after vowels.In some cases the sound after vowels may be regarded as a realization of the underlying phoneme sequence : 'battle', plural . The allophony of the stressed variant of the open is largely the same, yet no scholar considers and to be separate phonemes (which they are in e.g. Slovak).
The five-vowel point of view is further supported by the following facts: Some endings have after soft consonants and after hard consonants, e. g. (gen. sg. of 'water'), (gen. sg. of 'ground, land, earth'). Proto-Slavic *y could correspond to either *ę̇ or *i after palatals (see Proto-Slavic language); in Russian, the soft-stem counterpart of the hard-stem ending regularized to . When a word or morpheme (root or prefix) beginning with is preceded by a hard consonant, becomes : 'name' — 'without name' and 'nameless', 'history' — 'events preceding, events leading up, backstory, prehistory', исла́м 'Islam' — панислами́зм [ˌpanɨsɫʌˈmʲizm], 'Pan-Islamism', изме́на 'treason' — госизме́на 'high treason'. According to the current spelling rules standardized in 1956, the letter is used instead of the morpheme-initial in words with Slavic prefixes (except меж- and сверх-) whereas words with non-Slavic prefixes and compound words conserve the morpheme-initial in the spelling. Pre-1956 spelling varied: whereas for common words such as the spelling with was well established long ago, less common words such as 'previous' were often spelled with in the 19th century; however, Yakov Grot prescribed spelling them with . Русское правописаніе. Руководство, составленное по порученію Второго отдѣленія Императорской академіи наукъ академикомъ Я. К. Гротомъ. Одиннадцатое изданіе. — Санктпетербургъ: Типографія императорской академіи наукъ, 1894. — С. 55. For even less common words, spelling practice varied between , , and even in the first half of the 20th century.Н. А. Еськова. Графическая передача фонемы <и> в начале морфемы, не являющейся флексией или суффиксом, после твердой согласной предшествующей морфемы // О современной русской орфографии. М., 1964. С. 5–17.
The six-vowel view, held by the Saint-Petersburg (Leningrad) phonology school, points to several phenomena to make its case: Native Russian speakers' ability to articulate in isolation: for example, in the names of the letters and .See, for example, ; ; . The traditional name of , yery; since 1961 this name has been replaced from the Russian school practice (compare the 7th and 8th editions of the standard textbook of Russian for 5th and 6th grades: , and . Rare instances of word-initial , including the minimal pair 'to produce the sound ' and 'to produce the sound ы', as well as borrowed names and toponyms, like , the name of a river and several villages in the Komi Republic. Morphological alternations between non-palatalized consonants without any following vowel or before and palatalized consonants before , like ('ready' adjective, masculine, short-form), ('ready' adjective, masculine), and ('to get ready; to prepare' verb, transitive), signifying that palatalizes an inherently non-palatalized underlying consonant while does not.
The different behaviour of the underlying combination "hard consonant+" in prefix-root and root-suffix bounds can be explained historically. In Old East Slavic, words such as (from 'under' + 'to take') had the extra-short vowel before ; the combination changed to , which is reflected in the modern Russian spelling 'to lift' (although contemporary Russian prefers the form with the epenthetic from 'to take off', from Old East Slavic 'off' + 'to take' but reanalysed as + ). The Old East Slavic prefixes ending in (, , etc.) did not have the final , but in Modern Russian after them becomes by analogy, except the verb 'to levy, to take monies'.
However, the alternations between hard and soft consonants occur not only when the soft consonant occurs before or , but also sometimes when the soft consonant occurs before or or without any following vowel (which is historically explained by origin of those vowels and vowel absence in Old East Slavic , , and ), which can lead to minimal pairs such as ('ready' adjective, feminine, short-form) — ('getting ready; preparing', adverbial participle), ('ready' adjective, masculine, short-form) — ('get ready; prepare', imperative). No matter whether the five-vowel or six-vowel point of view is used, the phonological explanation of those alternations requires either a separate "palatalization phoneme" or palatalization as a phoneme alternation occurring before particular morphemes (including null morphemes). Hence, the difference between and can be explained using the five-vowel point of view.
The most popular view among linguists (and the one taken up in this article) is that of the Moscow school, though Russian pedagogy has typically taught that there are six vowels (the term phoneme is not used).See, for example, ; ; ;
Reconstructions of Proto-Slavic show that and (which correspond to and ) were separate phonemes. On the other hand, after the first palatalization, Old East Slavic *i and *y contrasted only after alveolars and labials: after palatals only *i occurred, and after velars only *y occurred. With the development of phonemic palatalized alveolars and labials, *i and *y no longer contrasted in any environment and were reinterpreted as allophones of each other, becoming a single phoneme /i/. Even so, this reinterpretation entailed no mergers and no change in the pronunciation. Subsequently, sometime between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, the allophone of /i/ occurring after a velar consonant changed from [ɨ] to [i] with subsequent palatalization of the velar, turning old Russian into modern and old into modern .
Allophony + A quick index of vowel pronunciation Phoneme Letter(typically) Phonemicposition Stressed Reduced , , , , , , "C" represents a hard consonant only. "(C)" represents a hard consonant, a vowel, or an utterance boundary. "Cʲ" represents a soft consonant. is used after unpaired hard consonants (, , and , although some words are spelled with ) and on the root onset after a consonant-endingloaned (usually Latin or Greek) prefix(e.g. ). is used after unpaired hard consonants (, , and ) and after paired hard consonants in many loanwords; is mostly used word-initiallyand after vowels. Sometimes spelled after and . Reduced /o/ after and is written as (except in loanwords) and is mostly pronounced the same as reduced /e/. Reduced is written as , except in loanwords. Russian vowels are subject to considerable allophony, subject to both stress and the palatalization of neighboring consonants. In most unstressed positions, in fact, only three phonemes are distinguished after hard consonants, and only two after soft consonants. Unstressed and have merged to (a phenomenon known as ); unstressed and have merged to (); and all four unstressed vowels have merged after soft consonants, except in the absolute final position in a word. None of these mergers are represented in writing.
Front vowels When a preceding consonant is hard, is retracted to . Formant studies in demonstrate that is better characterized as slightly diphthongized from the velarization of the preceding consonant, implying that a phonological pattern of using velarization to enhance perceptual distinctiveness between hard and soft consonants is strongest before . When unstressed, becomes near-close; that is, following a hard consonant and in most other environments. Between soft consonants, stressed is raised, as in ('to drink'). When preceded and followed by coronal or dorsal consonants, is fronted to . After a cluster of a labial and , is retracted, as in ('to float'); it is also slightly diphthongized to .
In native words, only follows unpaired (i.e. the retroflexes and ) and soft consonants. After soft consonants (but not before), it is a mid vowel (hereafter represented without the diacritic, for simplicity), while a following soft consonant raises it to close-mid . Another allophone, an open-mid , occurs word-initially and between hard consonants. Preceding hard consonants retract to and so that ('gesture') and ('target') are pronounced and respectively.
In words borrowed from other languages, often follows hard consonants; this foreign pronunciation usually persists in Russian for many years until the word is more fully adopted into Russian. For instance, (from French chauffeur) was pronounced in the early twentieth century,As in Igor Severyanin's poem, . . . but is now pronounced . On the other hand, the pronunciations of words such as ('hotel') retain the hard consonants despite a long presence in the language.
Back vowels Source:
Between soft consonants, becomes , as in ('five'). When not following a soft consonant, is retracted to before /ɫ/ as in ('stick').
For most speakers, is a mid vowel , but it can be a more open for some speakers. Following a soft consonant, is centralized and raised to as in ('aunt'). More recently (2015) has been described as "a diphthongoid, with a closer lip rounding at the beginning of the vowel that gets progressively weaker [ʊo] or even [ʊɔʌ], particularly when occurring word-initially or word-finally under the stress". This phenomenon does not seem to be a recent development because the diphthongal nature of /o/ under stress has already been described in 1969.
As with the other back vowels, is centralized to between soft consonants, as in ('barely, slightly'). When unstressed, becomes near-close; central between soft consonants, centralized back in other positions.
Unstressed vowels
Russian unstressed vowels have lower intensity and lower energy. They are typically shorter than stressed vowels, and in most unstressed positions tend to undergo mergers for most dialects: has merged with : for instance, 'bulwarks' and 'oxen' are both pronounced (phonetically ).