English Phonetic Interference in the Spelling of Emigre Russians
It 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. This phenomenon captured my attention three years ago, while I was living with a Russian emigre student. I would ask her t
The Americans were less important to me as subjects, as Americans learn Russian through a much more phonetically-intense method, as they are not studying in the intense immersion situation that most Russians face when first emigrating to America. I wanted to compare their results to the Russians' in order to compare the types of mistakes made as well as the number. I decided to test for phonetic influence using a diktant in two parts, the first part being a simple paragraph and the second being a more complex selection, including words that the older Russians in my group should not have used on an everyday basis3. o 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
Some common words found in the essay are:
English Russian, , Moscow University, Selected Procedure, Russian French, Russians America, Soviet Union, Russian English, Russian Americans, Russian American, living france, reason write russian, write russian, spelling russian, difficult spell, spelling english, lived russia, russian subjects, emigre russians, english school, america studied,
Approximate Word count = 908
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
