LANGUAGE IN RUSSIA
Russian Dialects
Considering languages spoken by natives across the world, Russia is the 8th most spoken language. Russian is a Slavic language, it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The Slavs are an Indo-European ethno-linguistic group who share a history of culture and language traits with people of Russia. These speakers are spread out over Russia and surrounding areas. There are a number of dialects in Russia, the dialects are into three groups, “Northern" dialect, "Central" dialect and "Southern" dialect, with Moscow making up the central region.
AREAS OF CONCERN FOR THE SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST
Word Order
Word order in Russian is not as complex as English. Russian sentences structure is more flexible and any combination of subject-verb-object is accepted. Although like English, word order is usually subject-verb-object, Russian word order can take any combination within the sentence. Few words can be used and the meaning of the sentence will not be lost. Speaking directly, such as saying “pass salt please” instead of “will you please pass the salt” is acceptable in Russia.
Creating sentences in Russian will be easier and may create difficulty in the Russian learner when trying to structure complicated English sentences. As far as receptively, English sentences will be more complex when attempting to decipher them. Instead of having a strict sentence word order like in English, in the Russian language the ends of nouns are changed. Points can be emphasized by changing the order of the words in a sentence.
Alphabet
There are only 6 letters of the Russian Alphabet that look like and sound very similar to letters of the English alphabet.
Vowels
The Russian language has 10 vowels compared to the English language that has 12 vowels plus 8 diphthongs.
Verb Tenses
In the Russian language, verbs have simply only 3 tenses—past, present and future. In English, we have several and
learning to use these tenses can be complicated for the English language learner. There are few auxiliary verbs in Russian as well.
Articles
The Russian language does not contain the use articles. Due to the complexity of the use of articles in English, this will most likely cause difficulty and frustration to the English language learner.
Gender
In the Russian language, nouns have genders. The gender of a noun is identified by its ending.
One-to-One Letter/Sound Correspondence
Russian is a phonetic language and there is a one-to-one letter sound correspondence. If you sound out each letter of a Russian word, you will most likely produce the word correctly.
The production of English words will not be so easy for the English language learner being that words do not always look as they sound.
Source:
http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED520566.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/Russian.htm