Russian phonology

This article discusses the phonological system of standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect (unless otherwise noted). For an overview of dialects in the Russian language, see Russian dialects. Most descriptions of Russian describe it as having five vowel phonemes, though there is some dispute over whether a sixth vowel, ɨ, is separate from /i/. Russian has 34 consonants, which can be divided into two types: hard (твёрдый Ru-твёрдый.ogg) or plain soft (мягкий Ru-мягкий.ogg) or palatalized Russian also distinguishes hard consonants from soft consonants and from iotated consonants, making four sets in total: /C Cj Cj Cjj/, although /Cj/ in native words appears only at morpheme boundaries. Russian also preserves palatalized consonants that are followed by another consonant more often than other Slavic languages do. Like Polish, it has both hard postalveolars (/ʂ ʐ/) and soft ones (/tɕ ɕː/ and marginally or dialectically /ʑː/). Russian has vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. This feature also occurs in a minority of other Slavic languages like Belarusian and Bulgarian and is also found in English, but not in most other Slavic languages, such as Czech, Polish, most varieties of Serbo-Croatian, and Ukrainian. Russian has five to six vowels in stressed syllables, /i, u, e, o, a/ and in some analyses /ɨ/, but in most cases these vowels have merged to only two to four vowels when unstressed: /i, u, a/ (or /ɨ, u, a/) after hard consonants and /i, u/ after soft ones. A long-standing dispute among linguists is whether Russian has 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 allophony of the stressed variant of the open /a/ is largely the same, yet no scholar considers ä and æ to be separate phonemes (which they are in e.