Dialects (and accents) of Russian

[panzeleche.livejournal.com]

Hello, once again, and thanks for the question regarding that previous piece of vocabulary. This community is awesome.

I have a question now about Russian as it is spoken around the world. Are there accents and/or dialects specific to Russian spoken in the Eastern Europe post-Soviet states (Ukraine, Belarus, etc.)?
What about Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.)? I can't seem to find much about that, but seeing that apparently 95% of Kazakhstan speaks Russian, I'd be interested in knowing if there are any differences.
I'm also interested in knowing about Russian in the east, such as in Sibera (I've heard that there are some native Siberian languages unrelated to Russian; does this perhaps influence how these people speak Russian?)
I've been informed that Russian throughtout Russia sounds more or less the same except for Okanye, Yakanye, and some other '-kanye's.
Basically, I'm interested in how Russian varies from country to country, or even from region to region. There is suprisingly little on this (or perhaps my Search-fu is weak).

A gazillion thanks to everyone who responds! :D

Comments

[alon_68]

Are you interested in dialects or accents? They are two quite different things. There were lots of people in the USSR who were not native speakers of Russian, but had to use it in everyday life. Such are, for example, most of Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians... Obviously, they speak Russian with some degree of accent and specific peculiarities. On the other hand, there are many people that switched from their genuine languages to Russian even in the family life, so that younger generations can be considered native speakers of Russian. Such are, e.g., many Ukrainians, Belorussians, Kazakhs, Moldovans. Besides that there are many ethnic Russians that live or used to live in those republics. They always used Russian but sometimes their speech bears some specific regional markers.