Russian Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Russian language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Watching a video with Russian speakers, I noticed two people who pronounced "г" as in Ukrainian, i.e. like a hard English "h". They also used аканье. As far as I know, they were Russians.
My questions: Is this a marker of a regional Russian accent, and if so, which region(s)? Or were these people more likely to be of Ukrainian descent?
More generally, what other distinctive markers of regional accents are there, and could somebody recommend a guide?
Fricative g is typical of the Southern dialect.
The Southern Dialects are spoken around Tula, Ryazan, Oryol, Lipestk, Tambov and most of Kaluga, Voronezh , and Kursk Oblasts. These dialects are also found in the southern part of Penza and the western part of Saratov, Don Voisko Oblasts.
The Northern Dialect of the Russian language is spoken North of Moscow and along the Volga River. The dialects of this region don’t exhibit typical vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. Among the dialects of the Northern Region are Pomor, Olonets, Novgorod, Vologda-Kirov, and Vladimir-Volga.
Language scholars insist on dividing the dialects into three groups; the above-named Northern and Southern dialects, as well as the Central Dialects. They maintain that the Central Dialects are spoken in and around Moscow.
(source orthography preserved)
Source: https://thetranslationcompany.com/resources/language-country/russian/russian-dialects.htm
Read more here in the Wikipedia article Russian dialects.
My questions: Is this a marker of a regional Russian accent, and if so which region(s)? Or were these people more likely to be of Ukrainian heritage?
It's observed around the ukranian border (pre-crimea). Every dialect in the world is a gradient (they call them continuums) so it's very rare that they follow the country border in how immediate the change is. As such, the russian language around those borders is influenced by the ukranian language. There's also a distinct dialect called "surzhyk" from around those lands. The closer the person to the former border, the more ukranian-like they would speak, both in pronunciation and the vocabulary.
This has nothing to do with heritage, only the geographical location.
More generally, what other distinctive markers of regional accents are there, and could somebody recommend a guide?
Other than the one you've already noticed, there's none. All the information you see online regarding russian dialects is outdated. Those classifications were last used in the 50s, and were compiled in the 1910th. However the spread of radio and TV during USSR, and more so today with the internet, the russian language became very uniform, to the point that you can no longer tell someone's origin (within russia) by the way they speak, with the only exception being the southwestern regions of russia as per my description above. You also mentioned аканье, which doesn't exist anymore either.
