Akanye

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Akanye (Аканье in Russian Cyrillic) is the term in the Russian language for the merger of /o/ as /a/ in unstressed syllables. Because /a/ has its own unstressed allophones, unstressed /o/ will be pronounced as one of these allophones and not actually an open front unrounded vowel. For example, молоко (“milk”) is pronounced [məlʌ'ko], identically to the hypothetical word (logatom) малако.

Linguists have conjectured that this phenomenon appeared owing to the influence of Uralic languages, spoken by tribes who inhabited the region of what is now Russia before the arrival of the Slavs. ^{[citation needed]}

Beginning students of Russian are often confused by this phenomenon, as the pronunciation does not correspond to the spelling. For the most part Russian spelling is phonemic or morphophonemic, but akanye breaks this convention and often results in words being misspelled, especially by school children.

Akanye is typical of the dialect of Moscow. In certain other Russian dialects, literal pronunciation of /o/ (also called okanye) has persisted to modern times (for example, in the accents of Kaluga and Vologda). Okanye is older and more similar to other Slavic languages such as Ukrainian. Akanye became a language norm in Russian by the middle of the nineteenth century.

Further differences of the Moscow dialect and modern Russian language from the written language are:

Pronunciation of unstressed /e/ as /i/. For example, река (“river”) is pronounced [rʲɪ'ka] (ikanye)
Pronunciation of the ending -ого as /ovo/. For example, белого (“white” gen.) is pronounced [ˈbʲɛləvə].