An Exploratory Study on Sociolinguistic Variation of Russian Everyday Speech

摘要

The research presented in this paper has been conducted in the framework of the large sociolinguistic project aimed at describing everyday spoken Russian and analyzing the special characteristics of its usage by different social groups of speakers. The research is based on the material of the ORD corpus containing long-term audio recordings of everyday communication. The aim of the given exploratory study is to reveal the linguistic parameters, in terms of which the difference in speech between different social groups is the most evident. An exploratory subcorpus, consisting of audio fragments of spoken communication of 12 respondents (6 men and 6 women, 4 representatives for each age group, and representatives of different professional and status groups) with the total duration of 106 min and of similar communication settings, was created and fully annotated. The quantitative description of a number of linguistic parameters on phonetic, lexical, morphological, and syntax levels in each social group was made. The biggest difference between social groups was observed in speech rate, phonetic reduction, lexical preferences, and syntactic irregularities. The study has shown that the differences between age groups are more significant than between gender groups, and the speech of young people differs most strongly from the others.