- published: 12 Apr 2011
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This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect (unless otherwise noted). For discussion of other dialects, see Russian dialects. Russian possesses five vowels and consonants which typically come in pairs of hard / plain (твёрдый [ˈtvʲo.rdɨj]) and soft / palatalized (мягкий [ˈmʲæ.xʲkʲɪj]).
A long-standing dispute among linguists is whether Russian possesses five vowel phonemes or six; that is, scholars disagree as to whether [ɨ] constitutes an allophone of /i/ or if there is an independent phoneme /ɨ/. The five-vowel analysis, taken up by the Moscow school, rests on the complementary distribution of [ɨ] and [i], with the former occurring after hard (non-palatalized) consonants and [i] elsewhere.
The six-vowel view, held by the Saint-Petersburg (Leningrad) phonology school, points to several phenomena to make its case:
The most popular view among linguists (and that taken up in this article) is that of the Moscow school, though Russian pedagogy has typically taught that there are six vowels.
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