Regiolect as a continuum

Abstract

The problems of norm, orthoepy and variation of pronunciation, including the regional one, were central to the interests of Ludmila Verbitskaya. Regional variation of pronunciation has been systematically studied in St. Petersburg University since the 1970s. However, there still remains a number of controversial issues in the sphere of regional variation of pronunciation (and language in general). The ongoing large-scale restructuring of Russian sociolinguistic system, associated with political and economic processes in society, has led to diminishing the role of classical dialects and their replacement by regiolects understood as regional language variants characterized by common features revealed in urban and rural speech across vast territories. The status of regiolects is still unclear in the sociolinguistic system of the Russian language. The native speakers of a regiolect are people belonging to different social strata, with different social characteristics; consequently, different regiolect speakers can use regiolect features with distinct frequencies which are often determined by the social parameters of the speakers. Thus, a present-day regiolect can be represented as a continuum that combines the features of a dialect (territorial) and diastratic (social) continua. It is possible to distinguish smaller language variants within the regional continuum, for example, a regiolect variant of the standard language (on the territorial axis), different kinds of sociolects (on the social axis). Hence, while describing such an object, it is essential to apply probabilistic methods used for discretization of а continuum. This issue is exemplified in the article by some phonetic phenomena of the Perm regiolect.