Although people often speak of a language as if it were a monolithic unit, in reality any language has a great number of states of existence. Even for a native speaker, it is impossible to completely master all the variety a language can provide. A further question is whether it is reasonable to speak of different national varieties of Russian as we speak of different Englishes.

The question of whether it is feasible to talk about different varieties of Russian is a purely semantic one. It is evident that there are differences in speech even between different Russian cities. Moreover, it is obvious that the Russian spoken in Minsk or Almaty differs even more sharply from Moscow Russian. Nevertheless, whether these differences signify the existence of different varieties of Russian is another question entirely. In countries like Belarus and Kazakhstan, where official documents are written in Russian, a certain local norm must either have been deliberately determined or simply appeared through practice. In other countries where some Russian newspapers and other unofficial publications are circulated, the norm has no state-level support and is less stable.

Our department has a long tradition of studying non-standard forms of the Russian language. We have published two collections with more than 40 papers on the topic. Besides Finnish scholars, we have scholars from Russia, the US, Germany, France, Italy, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tadzhikistan. As a result of a joint research project, we have also taken part in the production of a book published by the European University in St Petersburg:

View the contents page of the book here

Below is my overview of the state of the Russian language:

Разновидности русского языка: анализ и классификация [Varieties of the Russian language: analysis and classification] // Вопросы языкознания, 2013: 5, 3-17.

Ekaterina Protassova has published prodigiously on various aspects of non-standard Russian, among others on children’s Russian and Russian spoken in Finland.

Merja Pikkarainen has also recently defended her doctoral thesis on the topic:

Merja Pikkarainen. Finnish and Russian as lingua francas: Joint activity in conversations. Slavica Helsingiensia 26. 2015.