Means of expressing distortions in the Russian speech of “Germans” – characters of Russian and Soviet literature

The article features the way fiction writers depict peculiarities of direct speech of characters who are nonnative speakers but are able to communicate effectively with those characters for whom these languages are mother tongues. The analysis of 32 works by both wellknown classical and less popular authors dating from the late 18th to the late 20th centuries shows how they depict the speech of Germans speaking Russian. Numerous examples are used to show language interference effect of the native tongue of the character on the learned Russian language. Accented speech used to define a character and identify his/her profession specifics was found in a wide genre variety of literary works. The paper offers the typology of language means marking the main kinds of errors committed by German native speakers while speaking Russian as Russian writers see it. Regular phonetic and graphical means were found to include devoicing and voicing, palatalization, consonant and vowel substitutions. Most frequent grammatical means included substituting the synthetic form of the future tense with the analytical one, violating subordination, omitting prepositions, changing predication. The results also demonstrate the trend towards reducing the role of phonetic and graphical means over time and a wider use of grammatical means. Cases of lexical compatibility violation, the use of foreign language inclusions and the preference for short and medium utterances were found, the latter being an attempt to decrease the number of errors.