This body of work grew out of an initial hypothesis that there are certain sociolinguistic parallels between Russia and the United States which differentiate the two countries from other industrialized societies. While both Russian and American English have spread across an entire continent, both have also remained relatively uniform.
Regional varieties are readily identifiable, but all are mutually intelligible.
Each language has a recognizable standard pronunciation, which permits a certain degree of internal variation but only within definite limits of normativity. These standards are rapidly gaining ground against regional speech forms and other non-standard varieties. In its own way, however, each society has evolved a strong egalitarian ethos, including considerable public emphasis on equality between the sexes. Experiments were devised to test these notions. The experiments involved a subjective-reaction test in which evaluators listened to a series of recorded voices, some using a stigmatized speech variety and others the corresponding prestige variety, and rated each one on a numerical scale for various specified attributes.