How many phonemes?
A general feature of Slavonic orthographies, as of many others, is that there are not enough letters for all the phonemes. An additional problem in the case of nearly all Slavonic languages is that there is no agreement even among professional scholars of linguistics about how many phonemes there actually are in the language. Very reputable and authoritative writers are in print as saying that Russian possesses somewhere between 37 and 41 different phonemes, and that of those phonemes either 5 or 6 are vowels. (To see this disagreement about the number of phonemes in perspective, one should remember that there is no agreement for English either.) The number of phonemes identified and ‘claimed’ can depend, in part, on which of the different styles of Russian pronunciation is being used, although it must be immediately pointed out that in spite of the vastness of the Soviet Union, there is no major dialect problem on the level of the national standard language. There is a clearly defined
