St Petersburg University philologist on how to predict a person’s eye colour by their voice in a Heinrich Terahertz podcast
Professor Pavel Skrelin, Head of the Department of Phonetics and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages at St Petersburg University, is the guest of the 18th episode of the popular scientific podcast of St Petersburg University ‘Heinrich Terahertz’. He spoke about the differences between the Russian language spoken in Moscow and St Petersburg, and about the past and future of Russian.
Professor Skrelin explained how the common speech differences between people from Moscow and St Petersburg, often referred to as the Moscow and St Petersburg dialects, came about. He noted that in the past, people lived in their own regions, rarely interacting with people from other regions. Thus the words often used in that period, such as: булочная (‘bakery’); поребрик (‘pavement edge’); or парадная (‘main entrance’) entered the Russian lexicon. The so-called Volga okanie (pronunciation of unstressed Russian ‘о’ as ‘о’ rather than ‘а’) also appeared at that time.
Currently however, the Internet and mass media have brought people together. As a result, linguistic differences are becoming less noticeable, while the Russian language is becoming more homogenised and less defined by regional variations than it once was.
Recently, Professor Pavel Skrelin together with his colleagues from the Department of Phonetics and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages at St Petersburg University won the annual award of the Government of St Petersburg for the development and implementation of the master’s programme ‘Artificial Intelligence in Speech Technologies’.
‘Nonetheless, we have observed — and perhaps we will study this phenomenon —people organising themselves into online interest groups, where distinct, non-territorial dialect emerge. This is a unique scenario in language evolution, and it will be fascinating to study how these dialects develop over time,’ Pavel Skrelin said.
Professor Skrelin also spoke about a study that was conducted at St Petersburg University at the end of the last century. In that study, the researchers found language patterns that enabled them to accurately characterise speakers, predicting not just their gender and age, but also their social status, temperament, and even eye colour. According to Pavel Skrelin, with enough practice, these patterns can be discerned through listening alone.