Vowel variation in the Belarusian vernacular. Comments on T. R. Ramza [2011] and an instrumental-phonetic study on the Belarusian ‘jakanne’

摘要

Belarusian vernacular is a phenomenon that is clearly marked in the linguistic landscape of Belarus. It is also rarely studied. T. R. Ramza’s book Belaruskae hutarkovae maŭlenne: sučasny stan ‘Belarusian colloquial speech: the current state’, that is the subject of the review part of this paper, deserves great credit for not only being the first example of an empirical investigation of this ‘current state’ of the Belarusian vernacular, but also for enabling further studies in this field. The second part of this paper can be seen as an example of this, dealing with vowel variation in certain unstressed syllables in the Belarusian vernacular. By means of an instrumental investigation based on T. R. Ramza’s data it will be shown that these vowel realizations sometimes differ from the orthoepic norms of Belarusian.