The Akanie and Ikania Rules. The akanie and ikanie rules are pronuniation rules which apply to the central dialects of Russian to which Muscovite Russian belongs. According to akanie , an unaccented 'o' is pronounced 'a' in the syllable immediately preceding the accent and 'uh' as in 'but' elsewhere. The ikanie rule states that unaccented 'e', ' ', and ' ' are pronounced the same as ' '. You may listen to the words exemplifying akanie and ikania in the table below by clicking them with your mouse.
Accented syllables are in boldface type.
Notice that an unaccented 'o' and 'a' sound identical in the syllable immediately preceding the accent and an unaccented 'e' sounds identical to ' '. In addition to the hard and soft consonants in Russian, the distinction 'voiced' and 'voiceless' consonants is also important. Table 3 shows the voiced-voiceless pairs of consonants in Russian. These consonants are identical except that the vocal chords vibrate when we produce the voiced consonants and they don't when we produced voiceless ones. In other words, if the final consonant is voiced, all will be voiced, if the final consonant is voiceless, all will be voiceless.