Akanye (Russian Аканье) is the term in the Russian language for the merger of /o/ as /a/ in unstressed syllables. Because /a/ has its own unstressed allophones, unstressed /o/ will be pronounced as one of these allophones and not actually an open front unrounded vowel. For example, молоко ("milk") is pronounced [məlʌ'ko], identically to the hypothetical word малако. Russian (Russian: русский язык, russkiy yazyk, ) is the most widely spoken language of Eurasia and the most widespread of the Slavic languages. ... Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ...

Linguists have conjectured that this phenomenon appeared owing to the influence of Uralic languages, spoken by tribes who inhabited the region of what is now Russia before the arrival of the Slavs. ^{[citation needed]} Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages  Yukaghir  Samoyedic  Ugric  Finnic The Uralic languages form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. ... The Slavic peoples are defined by their usage of the Slavic languages. ...

Beginning students of Russian are often confused by this phenomenon, as the pronunciation does not correspond to the spelling. For the most part Russian spelling is phonemic or morphophonemic, but akanye breaks this convention and often results in words being misspelled, especially by school children. A phonemic orthography is a writing system where there is a one-to-one relationship between graphemes in the written form and phonemes in the spoken form of a language. ... “Morphophonemic” is an adjective that describes anything relating primarily to phonemes, but secondarily to morphemes. ...

Akanye is typical for the dialect of Moscow. In certain other Russian dialects literal pronunciation of o (also called okanye) has persisted to modern times (for example, in the accents of Kaluga and Vologda). Okanye is older and more similar to other Slavic languages such as Ukrainian. Akanye became a language norm in Russian by the middle of the nineteenth century. Government Russia District Subdivision Russia Central Federal District Federal City Mayor Yuri Luzhkov Geographical characteristics Area  - City 1,081 km² Population  - City (2005)    - Density 10,415,400   8537. ... Konstantin Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga, built in 1967 Kaluga (Калу́га in Russian) is a city in central Russia on the Oka River 188 km southwest of Moscow, administrative center of Kaluga Oblast. ... St. ...

Further differences of the Moscow dialect and modern Russian language from the written language are:

• Pronunciation of unstressed /e/ as /i/. For example, река ('river') is pronounced [rʲɪ'ka] (ikanye)
• Pronunciation of the ending -ого as /ava/. For example, белого ("white" gen.) is pronounced /ˈbʲelava/

The genitive case is a grammatical case that indicates a relationship, primarily one of possession, between the noun in the genitive case and another noun. ...

References

• This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
  You can help Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations.

See also

• Russian phonology
• vowel reduction
• Ikanye
• Yekanye