English phonetic interference
English phonetic interferenceIt is unusual and perhaps impossible for an emigre’s native language to remain unaffected after living abroad for several years. Phonetic and spelling rules that may have been drilled into their minds in childhood quickly disappear while the emigre struggles to master the language of their new home. Almost all people claim to read in their second language more proficiently than they speak1, however, emigres who attend high school and college in a foreign country often find themselves writing more often in their second language than in their first. After time, the second language becomes the default language of writing for these emigres and the spelling in their native language deteriorates2.
As the second language becomes more frequently relied on than the first, several aspects of the second language will affect the first, which is why many emigre Russians will speak Russian with American accents or with English intonation. In this project, I wanted to test emigre Russians in America on their spelling and test the interference of English phonetic rules on Russian spelling.
Preliminary Work
This phenomenon captured my attention three years ago, while I was living with a Russian emigre student. I would ask her to correct my Russian homework each night, but she often corrected my homework rather poorly, as her spelling was less than stellar. She claimed that since leaving the Soviet Union 6 years earlier, she had only spoken Russian and having almost no reason to write in Russian, she had forgotten some of the most basic spelling rules. Further, she claimed that spelling in Russian was different than spelling in English. This last comment puzzled me until I lived in Russia last year and approached this topic with Russians. A good friend of mine took a diktant at Moscow University and made 45 spelling mistakes (the acceptable number was 6). A native of Moscow, he had been living in France for the previous 6 years and had only returned to Moscow one month prior to the diktant. When looking at his paper, I noticed that he had made the same mistakes over and over again: single instead of double ‘�’, ‘�’ instead of unstressed ‘�', ‘�’ after the intrinsically hard consonants instead of ‘�’, and soft signs in unnecessary places but usually before soft vowels- some of the most common mistakes made by my former roommate. We had a long discussion about how he was “spelling in Russian like [he] did in French”. He too claimed that he had been taught to spell in Russian differently than he had been taught to spell in French, and while living...
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