whoever first pointed out that ilya americanises his accent around other people but not around shane i owe you my fucking life
also the idea of like when its just the two of them ilya can like just slip back into the more comfortable rudimentary accent he had at the start of their relationship :’) and that in itself being nostalgic for shane :’)
this would also be linguistically accurate!
i speak english the most in day to day life and also think in english sometimes. my accent in english is americanized, pretty indistinguishable from a native (excluding sets of certain phonemes like /rl/) .
but if i’m really tired or spending time just around my wife (with whom i speak english), i sometimes switch to what i call ‘lazy english’.
what this usually consists of is i allow myself to speak english with the russian /r/ phoneme that is more natural for me, i drop articles, replace continuous and future tense with simple present, use the ‘….,yes?’ construct, avoid contractions (bc the verb ‘to be’ is dropped/implied in russian, so contractions aren’t always natural)
for example, when i’m in ‘lazy english’ mode, this is how my speech varies:
‘i’m making the bed’ = ‘i make bed’.
‘you’ll help me later, right?’ = ‘you help me later, yes?’ (for this one, in russian, the same phrasal construct ends with the word ‘yes’ instead of the word ‘right’)
‘can you give me a tissue?’ = can you give me tissue?’
‘where’s the pen? do you have it?’ = ‘where is pen? you have?’
if you pay attention, you’ll notice that a lot of these patterns also occur in ilya’s speech, especially earlier on. that’s why i’m particularly impressed with the writing of his dialogue — it doesn’t come across as stereotyping/caricatural because the way he speaks english is consistent with russian linguistic/grammatical rules. this is often how russian-speaking people speak english when it is their second language and they’re still learning.
i like to imagine ilya reverting to ‘lazy english’ or speaking in a similar manner to me around shane. it is linguistically consistent and a sign of comfort/deep familiarity with the person.
The next layer of linguistic accuracy would be for Shane to start occasionally modulating down into a similar "lazy english" that's reflective of Ilya's style. I forget the technical term for this, but it's a legit thing in linguistics -- if there's someone you love/admire/respect and you spend a lot of time with them, you unconsciously start picking up and mirroring a couple aspects of their idiolect (like a dialect but rather than being spoken by a group, it is a single person's unique linguistic fingerprint), whether that's gestures, vocabulary, or speech patterns.
So when Ilya says something like, "Where is pen? You have?" then over time Shane's response might naturally shift towards, "Yes, I have."
he already does this!!!
you still want?
i still want
!!!!!!
