Russian phonology

s and surrounding consonants, from . C is hard (non-palatalized) consonant, Ç is soft (palatalized) consonant. This chart uses frequencies to represent the basic vowel triangle of the Russian language.|left|class=skin-invert-image 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. 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 . For even less common words, spelling practice varied between , , and even in the first half of the 20th century. 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 . • 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). 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 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, 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: • [kərɐˈvaj] ('korovai'), which is from PSl. '''' etc. • Spelling those words with ⟨а⟩ was already common in the 18th century, but it co-existed with the spelling with ⟨о⟩ (), conforming to etymology of those words. Dictionaries often gave both spellings. Finally the spelling of those words with ⟨а⟩ was set by the 1956 orthographic codification (orthographic rules and spelling dictionary), based on the spread of usage. Vowel mergers In terms of actual pronunciation, there are at least two different levels of vowel reduction: vowels are less reduced when a syllable immediately precedes the stressed one, and more reduced in other positions. This is particularly visible in the realization of unstressed and , where a less-reduced allophone appears alongside a more-reduced allophone . The pronunciation of unstressed is as follows: • (sometimes transcribed as ; the latter is phonetically correct for the standard Moscow pronunciation, whereas the former is phonetically correct for the standard Saint Petersburg pronunciation; this article uses only the symbol ) appears in the following positions: • In the syllable immediately before the stress, when a hard consonant precedes: e.g. ('people, nation'), ('frost'), ('firewood'), and ('grass'). • In absolute word-initial position: e.g. ('vanguard'), ('kitchen garden'). • In hiatus, when the vowel occurs twice without a consonant between; this is written , , , or : ('to use common sense, to reason'). • appears elsewhere, when a hard consonant precedes: ('cloud'), ('berry'). • In absolute word-final position, may occur instead, especially at the end of a syntagma. • When a soft consonant or precedes, both and merge with and are pronounced as . Example: ('tongue'), ('hedgehogs') ( is written as in these positions; compare 'hedgehog'). • This merger also tends to occur after formerly soft consonants now pronounced hard (, , ), where the pronunciation occurs; e.g. 'to stir ~ to move ~ to bulge'. This always occurs when the spelling uses the soft vowel variants, e.g. ('wife') vs. ('wives') (but 'shock (n.)' vs. 'to shock (v.)'; unstressed spellings , are used only in loanwords). However, also occurs in a few word roots where the spelling writes a hard . Examples: • 'regret', whence ('to regret'), к сожале́нию ('unfortunately'). • ~ ('horse [sg. nom. & acc.]'), whence , ('horses' [pl. gen. & acc.]'). • in numbers: e.g. ('twenty [gen., dat., prep.]'), ('thirty [instr.]'). • ~ ('rye [adj. m. nom.]'). • ~ ('jasmine [n. sg. nom. & acc.]'). • After those now-hardened formerly-soft consonants (, , ) and in word-final position, unstressed and unstressed (the latter written as ) merge and are pronounced , as in: • ('pollen') vs. ('murderer, assassin'), • ('most strictly', adv.) vs. ('good', neut. predic. or 'well', adv.), • ('similar(ly)', neut. predic. or adv.), vs. ('fresh(ly)', neut. predic. or adv.), and • ('sapling, small tree') vs. its synonym . • Yet word-final unstressed after , , and is also pronounced by some speakers: e.g. , "trough, washing tub (diminutive) (nom. sg.)" (as it rhymes with "water (dim.) (gen. sg.)" in the song "the little chickens"). • These processes occur even across word boundaries as in ('under the sea'). The pronunciation of unstressed is after soft consonants and , and word-initially ( ('stage'); ('roe'); ; ('to surprise'), etc.), but after hard consonants ( ('to breathe'); (pre-1918 spelling: )). There are a number of exceptions to the above vowel-reduction rules: • Vowels may not merge in foreign borrowings, particularly with unusual or recently borrowed words such as , 'radio'. In such words, unstressed may be pronounced as , regardless of context; unstressed does not merge with in initial position or after vowels, so word pairs like and , or and , differ in pronunciation. • Across certain word-final inflections, the reductions do not completely apply. For example, after soft or unpaired consonants, unstressed , and of a final syllable may be distinguished from each other. For example, ('residents') contrasts with both ('[about] a resident') and ('(of) a resident'). Also, ('he goes') and ('they go'). • If the vowel belongs to the conjunctions ('but') or ('then'), it is not reduced, even when unstressed. Other changes Unstressed is generally pronounced as a lax (or near-close) , e.g. ('man'). Between soft consonants, it becomes centralized to , as in ('to huddle'). Note a spelling irregularity in of the reflexive suffix : with a preceding in third-person present and a in infinitive, it is pronounced as , i.e. hard instead of with its soft counterpart, since , normally spelled with , is traditionally always hard. In other forms both pronunciations and (or and after vowels, spelled ) alternate for a speaker with some usual form-dependent preferences: in the outdated dialects, reflexive imperative verbs (such as , lit. "be afraid yourself") may be pronounced with instead of modern (and phonetically consistent) . In adverbial participles ending on or (with a stressed suffix), books on Russian standard pronunciation prescribe as the only correct variant. In weakly stressed positions, vowels may become voiceless between two voiceless consonants: ('exhibition'), ('because'). This may also happen in cases where only the following consonant is voiceless: ('skull'). Phonemic analysis Because of mergers of different phonemes in unstressed position, the assignment of a particular phone to a phoneme requires phonological analysis. There have been different approaches to this problem: • The Saint Petersburg phonology school assigns allophones to particular phonemes. For example, any is considered as a realization of . • The Moscow phonology school uses an analysis with morphophonemes (, singular ). It treats a given unstressed allophone as belonging to a particular morphophoneme depending on morphological alternations. For example, is analyzed as either or . To make a determination, one must seek out instances where an unstressed morpheme containing in one word is stressed in another word. Thus, because the word ('shafts') shows an alternation with ('shaft'), this instance of belongs to the morphophoneme . Meanwhile, ('oxen') alternates with ('ox'), showing that this instance of belongs to the morphophoneme . If there are no alternations between stressed and unstressed syllables for a particular morpheme, then no assignment is made, and existence of an archiphoneme is postulated. For example, the word ('dog') is analysed as , where is an archiphoneme. • Some linguists prefer to avoid making the decision. Their terminology includes strong vowel phonemes (the five) for stressed vowels plus several weak phonemes for unstressed vowels: thus, represents the weak phoneme , which contrasts with other weak phonemes, but not with strong ones. Diphthongs Russian diphthongs all end in a non-syllabic , an allophone of and the only semivowel in Russian. In all contexts other than after a vowel, is considered an approximant consonant. Phonological descriptions of may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda. In such descriptions, Russian has no diphthongs. The first part of diphthongs is subject to the same allophony as their constituent vowels. Examples of words with diphthongs: ('egg'), ('her' dat.), ('effective'). , written or , is a common inflexional affix of adjectives, participles, and nouns, where it is often unstressed; at normal conversational speed, such unstressed endings may be monophthongized to . When stressed, this affix is spelled and pronounced . Unstressed may be pronounced (as if spelled ) in free variation with . In adjectives ending in , traditional Moscow norm prescribed the pronunciation (as if spelled ), but now those adjectives are usually pronounced according to the spelling, thus . The same can be said about verbs ending in . ==Consonants==

denotes palatalization, meaning the center of the tongue is raised during and after the articulation of the consonant. Phonemes that have at different times been disputed are enclosed in parentheses. ; Notes • Most consonant phonemes come in hard–soft pairs, except for always-hard and always-soft and formerly or marginally . There is a marked tendency of Russian hard consonants to be velarized, uvularized, or pharyngealized, though this is a subject of some academic dispute. Velarization is clearest before the front vowels and , and with labial and velar consonants as well as the lateral.), the higher the velarization degree. • and are always hard in native words (even if spelling contains a "softening" letter after them, as in , , , and ). A few loanwords are spelled with or ; authoritative pronunciation dictionaries prescribe hard pronunciation for some of them (e.g. , , , ) but soft for other ones (e.g. , ); may be pronounced either way. The letter combinations , , , , , and also occur in foreign proper names, mostly of French or Lithuanian origin. Notable examples include (Gölcük), (Jeune Afrique), (Jules Verne), (Gerhard Schürer), (Šiauliai), and (Šešuvis). The dictionary of prescribes soft pronunciation in these names. However, since the cases of soft and are marginal and not universally pronounced as such, and are generally considered always-hard consonants, and the long phonemes and are not considered their soft counterparts, as they do not pattern in the same ways that other hard–soft pairs do. • is generally listed among the always-hard consonants; however, certain foreign proper names, including those of Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, or German origin (e.g. , , , ), as well as loanwords (e.g., , from Chinese), contain a soft . The phonemicity of a soft is supported by neologisms that come from native word-building processes (e.g. , ). However, according to , really is always hard, and realizing it as palatalized is considered "emphatically non-standard", and occurs only in some regional accents. • and are always soft. • is also always soft. A formerly common pronunciation of indicates the sound may be two underlying phonemes: and , thus can be considered as a marginal phoneme. In today's most widespread pronunciation, appears (instead of ) for orthographical where starts the root of a word, and -з/-с belongs to a preposition or a "clearly distinguishable" prefix (e.g. , 'without a clock'; , 'to rule'); in all other cases is used ( , , , , , , etc.) • The marginally phonemic sound is largely obsolete except in the more conservative standard accent of Moscow, in which it only occurs in a handful of words; insofar as this soft pronunciation is lost, the corresponding hard replaces it: e.g. ~ . This sound may derive from an underlying or : , modern . For most speakers, it can most commonly be formed by assimilative voicing of (including across words): . For more information, see alveolo-palatal consonant and retroflex consonant. • and are somewhat concave apical postalveolar. They may be described as retroflex, e.g. by , but this is to indicate that they are not laminal nor palatalized; not to say that they are subapical. They also tend to be at least slightly labialized, including when followed by unrounded vowels. • Hard are laminal denti-alveolar ; unlike in many other languages, does not become velar before velar consonants. • Hard has been variously described as pharyngealized apical alveolar and velarized laminal denti-alveolar . • Hard is postalveolar, typically a trill . • Soft is an apical dental trill , usually with only a single contact. As of the twenty-first century are affricated in most contexts. This phenonomenon of affrication is known in Russian as tsekan'ye and dzekan'ye, and it is paralleled in Belarusian. • Soft is either laminal alveolar or laminal denti-alveolar . • are dental , i.e. dentalized laminal alveolar. They are pronounced with the blade of the tongue very close to the upper front teeth, with the tip of the tongue resting behind the lower front teeth. • The voiced are often realized with weak friction or even as approximants , particularly in spontaneous speech. • A marginal phoneme occurs instead of in certain interjections: , , , , , , . (Thus, there exists a minimal pair of homographs: 'aha!' vs 'agha'). The same sound can be found in (spelled , though in 'arsenal', is ), optionally in 'habitus' and in a few other loanwords. Also optionally (and less frequently than a century ago) can be used instead of in certain religious words (a phenomenon influenced by Church Slavonic pronunciation): , ... (declension forms of 'God'), 'Lord' (especially in the exclamation 'Oh Lord!'), 'good'. • Some linguists (like I. G. Dobrodomov and his school) postulate the existence of a phonemic glottal stop . This marginal phoneme can be found, for example, in the word . Claimed minimal pairs for this phoneme include 'narrowed' (a participle from 'to narrow', with prefix and root , cf. 'narrow') vs 'betrothed' (originally a participle from 'to judge', now an adjective; the root is 'court') and 'with Ann' vs '(by) Alex'. There is some dispute over the phonemicity of soft velar consonants. Typically, the soft–hard distinction is allophonic for velar consonants: they become soft before front vowels (e. g. 'wall', genitive , but 'hand, arm', genitive ) unless there is a word boundary, in which case they are hard (e.g. 'to Ivan'). Hard variants occur everywhere else. Exceptions are represented mostly by: • Loanwords: • Soft: , , , , , , , ; • Hard: , , , (), . • Proper nouns of foreign origin: • Soft: , , , , , , , , , , , ; • Hard: , , , , , . The rare native examples are fairly new, as most of them were coined in the last century: • Soft: forms of the verb 'weave' (, etc., and derivatives like ); /, /; and adverbial participles of the type , , , , , , (it is disputed whether these are part of the standard language or just informal colloquialisms); • Hard: the name of letter , acronyms and derived words (, ), a few interjections (), some onomatopoeic words (), and colloquial forms of certain patronyms: , , (where is a contraction of standard language's patronymical suffix -ович rather than a continuation of ancient ). In the mid-twentieth century, a small number of reductionist approaches made by structuralists put forth that palatalized consonants occur as the result of phonological processes involving (or palatalization as a phoneme in itself), so that there were no underlying palatalized consonants. Despite such proposals, linguists have long agreed that the underlying structure of Russian is closer to that of its acoustic properties, namely that soft consonants are separate phonemes in their own right. == Voicing ==

Final devoicing Voiced consonants (, and ) are devoiced word-finally unless the next word begins with a voiced obstruent. In other words, their voiceless equivalent will be used (see table on the right). Examples: • (story, tale) sounds like расскас • (knife) sounds like нош • (Ivanov) sounds like Иваноф ; and so on. also represents voiceless word-finally in some words, such as ('god'). This is related to the use of the marginal (or dialectal) phoneme in some religious words . Voicing elsewhere Generally, when a voiced consonant comes before a voiceless one, its sound will shift to its voiceless equivalent (see table). as in ('a daughter would'), ('bridge-head') and ('peas are ready'). Other than and , nasals and liquids devoice between voiceless consonants or a voiceless consonant and a pause: ) ('buttress'). ==Palatalization==

Before , paired consonants (that is, those that come in a hard-soft pair) are normally soft as in ('I drink') and ('I hit'). However, the last consonant of prefixes and parts of compound words generally remains hard in the standard language: ('departure'), ('Ministry of Justice (Russia)|Min[istry of] Just[ice]'); when the prefix ends in or there may be an optional softening: ('to travel'). Paired consonants preceding are also soft; although there are exceptions from loanwords, alternations across morpheme boundaries are the norm. The following examples show some of the morphological alternations between a hard consonant and its soft counterpart: Velar consonants are soft when preceding , and never occur before within a word. Before hard dental consonants and , labial and dental consonants are hard: ('eagle' gen. sg), cf. ('eagle' nom. sg). Assimilative palatalization Paired consonants preceding another consonant often inherit softness from it. This phenomenon in literary language has complicated and evolving rules with many exceptions, depending on what these consonants are, in what morphemic position they meet and to what style of speech the word belongs. In old Moscow pronunciation, softening was more widespread and regular; nowadays some cases that were once normative have become low colloquial or archaic. In fact, consonants can be softened to differing extents, become semi-hard or semi-soft. The more similar the consonants are, the more they tend to soften each other. Also, some consonants tend to be softened less, such as labials and . Softening is stronger inside the word root and between root and suffix; it is weaker between prefix and root and weak or absent between a preposition and the word following. • Before soft dental consonants, and often soft labial consonants, dental consonants (other than ) are soft. • is assimilated to the palatalization of the following velar consonant: ) ('lungs' gen. pl.). • Palatalization assimilation of labial consonants before labial consonants is in free variation with nonassimilation, such that ('to bomb') is either or depending on the individual speaker. • When hard precedes its soft equivalent, it is also soft and likely to form a single long sound (see gemination). This is slightly less common across affix boundaries. In addition to this, dental fricatives conform to the place of articulation (not just the palatalization) of following postalveolars: ) ('with a part'). In careful speech, this does not occur across word boundaries. Russian has the rare feature of nasals not typically being assimilated in place of articulation. Both and appear before retroflex consonants: ) ('money' (scornful)) and ) ('sanctimonious one' instr.). In the same context, other coronal consonants are always hard. Assimilative palatalization may sometimes also occur across word boundaries as in , but such pronunciation is uncommon and characteristic of uncareful speech (except in preposition+main word combinations). ==Consonant clusters==

As a Slavic language, Russian has fewer phonotactic restrictions on consonants than many other languages, allowing for clusters that would be difficult for English speakers; this is especially so at the beginning of a syllable, where Russian speakers make no sonority distinctions between fricatives and stops. These reduced restrictions begin at the morphological level; outside of two morphemes that contain clusters of four consonants: встрет-/встреч- 'meet' (), and чёрств-/черств- 'stale' (), native Russian morphemes have a maximum consonant cluster size of three: For speakers who pronounce instead of , words like ('common') also constitute clusters of this type. If is considered a consonant in the coda position, then words like ('quince') contain semivowel+consonant clusters. Affixation also creates consonant clusters. Some prefixes, the best known being вз-/вс- (), produce long word-initial clusters when they attach to a morpheme beginning with consonant(s) (e.g. ||+ || → 'flash'). However, the four-consonant limitation persists in the syllable onset. Clusters of three or more consonants are frequently simplified, usually through syncope of one of them, especially in casual pronunciation. All word-initial four-consonant clusters begin with or , followed by a stop (or, in the case of , a fricative), and a liquid: Because prepositions in Russian act like clitics, the syntactic phrase composed of a preposition (most notably, the three that consist of just a single consonant: к, с, and в) and a following word constitutes a phonological word that acts like a single grammatical word. This can create a 4-consonant onset cluster not starting in or ; for example, the phrase ('in an instant') is pronounced []. In the syllable coda, suffixes that contain no vowels may increase the final consonant cluster of a syllable (e.g. 'city of Noyabrsk' ||+ || → ), theoretically up to seven consonants: * ('of monsterhoods'). There is usually an audible release of plosives between these consecutive consonants at word boundaries, the major exception being clusters of homorganic consonants. Consonant cluster simplification in Russian includes degemination, syncope, dissimilation, and weak vowel insertion. For example, is pronounced , as in ('cleft'). There are also a few isolated patterns of apparent cluster reduction (as evidenced by the mismatch between pronunciation and orthography) arguably the result of historical simplifications. For example, dental stops are dropped between a dental continuant and a dental nasal or lateral: 'flattering' (from 'flattery'). Other examples include: Compare: 'solar, sunny', 'heart (adj.), cordial', 'Scotland', 'Marxist' (person). The simplifications of consonant clusters are done selectively; bookish-style words and proper nouns are typically pronounced with all consonants even if they fit the pattern. For example, the word is pronounced in a simplified manner for the meaning of 'Dutch oven' (a popular type of oven in Russia) and in a full form for 'Dutch woman' (a more exotic meaning). The orthographic combination is pronounced in the words [ˈzdrastvʊj(tʲe)] 'hello', [ˈt͡ɕustvə] 'feeling' (does not have related words with pronounced in the modern language, so the first in the spelling exists only for historical reasons), [bʲɪzˈmoɫstvəvətʲ] 'to be silent', and related words, otherwise pronounced : [bəɫɐfstˈvo] 'naughtiness'. In certain cases, this syncope produces homophones, e.g. ('bony') and ('rigid'), both are pronounced . Another method of dealing with consonant clusters is inserting an epenthetic vowel (both in spelling and in pronunciation), after most prepositions and prefixes that normally end in a hard consonant. This includes both historically motivated usage (from historical extra-short vowel ) and cases of its modern extrapolations. There are no strict limits when the epenthetic is obligatory, optional, or prohibited. One of the most typical cases of the epenthetic is between a morpheme-final hard consonant and a cluster starting with the same or similar consonant. E.g. 'from Wednesday' ||+|| → , not *с среды; 'I'll scrub' ||+|| → , not *оттру. The interfix (spelled after soft consonants) is also used in compound words: 'oesophagus' (lit. food path) ||+|| → . == Stress ==

Stress in Russian is phonemic and therefore unpredictable. It may fall on any syllable, and can vary drastically in similar or related words. For example, in the following table, in the numbers 50 and 60, the stress moves to the last syllable, despite having a structure similar to, say, 70 and 80: Words can also contrast based just on stress (e.g. 'ordeal, pain, anguish' vs. 'flour, meal, farina'). Stress shifts can even occur within an inflexional paradigm: ('house' gen. sg., or 'at home') vs ('houses'). The place of the stress in a word is determined by the interplay between the morphemes it contains, as morphemes may be obligatorily stressed, obligatorily unstressed, or variably stressed. Generally, only one syllable in a word is stressed; this rule, however, does not extend to most compound words, such as ('frost-resistant'), which have multiple stresses, with the last of them being primary. Phonologically, stressed syllables are mostly realised not only by the lack of aforementioned vowel reduction, but also by a somewhat longer duration than unstressed syllables. More intense pronunciation is also a relevant cue, although this quality may merge with prosodical intensity. Pitch accent has only a minimal role in indicating stress, mostly due to its prosodical importance, which may prove a difficulty for Russians identifying stressed syllables in more pitched languages. A stress defines a phonological concept of phonetic word — a sequence of morphemes clustered around one nuclear stress. A phonetic word may contain multiple lexical items. == Supplementary notes ==

There are numerous ways in which Russian spelling does not match pronunciation. The historical transformation of into in genitive case endings and the word for 'him' is not reflected in the modern Russian orthography: the pronoun 'his/him', and the adjectival declension suffixes -ого and -его. Orthographic г represents in a handful of word roots: легк-/лёгк-/легч- 'easy' and мягк-/мягч- 'soft'. There are a handful of words in which consonants which have long since ceased to be pronounced even in careful pronunciation are still spelled, e.g., the 'l' in ('sun'). The phoneme is often realized as before stressed vowels, especially in emphatic speech. Between any vowel and (excluding instances across affix boundaries but including unstressed vowels that have merged with ), may be dropped: ('my', pl.), ('stork'), ('does'). ( cites and other instances of intervening prefix and preposition boundaries as exceptions to this tendency.) Unstressed sequences and after vowels may be realized as , : ('big', f.), ('(I) know'). velarizes hard consonants: ('you' sing.). and velarize and labialize hard consonants and labialize soft consonants: ('side'), ('(he) carried'). is a diphthong or even a triphthong , with a closer lip rounding at the beginning of the vowel that gets progressively weaker, particularly when occurring word-initially or word-finally under stress. A weak palatal offglide may occur between certain soft consonants and back vowels (e.g. 'thigh' ). == See also ==