Vowel reduction in a North Russian dialect: A case study

The paper investigates the rise of phonological vowel reduction of low and mid back phonemes, /a/ and /o/, in North Russian, one of the two major Russian regional varieties. The study is based on an analysis of synchronic variation across different generations of speakers in one rural community. Stress-independent discrimination of low and mid vowel phonemes /a/ and /o/ found within the older generation of speakers is compared to the stress-dependent neutralisation of these phonemes characteristic of middle and younger generation speakers of this variety. The analysis allowed me to link the emergence of this new pattern of allophonic variation to significant overlapping in the acoustic space of low and mid back vowels. It is hypothesised that this phenomenon is facilitated by stronger coarticulation effects found in less conservative individual sound systems of the dialect. This accounts for a larger spread of /o/ and /a/ allophones within the F1xF2 acoustic space and presumably leads to the neutralisation of these phonemes in unstressed syllables.