Central Russian dialects

• The territory of the primary formation (e.g. that consist of "Old" Russia of the 16th century before Eastern conquests by Ivan IV) is fully or partially modern regions (oblasts): Moscow, Tver, Vladimir, Ivanovo, Pskov, Novgorod, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl (in Rostov), Ryazan (in Kasimov) and the enclave of Chukhloma.
• The territory of the second formation (e.g. where Russians settled after the 16th century) consist of most of the land to the South-East of Moscow, that is the middle and lower Volga, Ural as well as Siberia and Far East. It also includes Saint-Petersburg, whose dialect is fairly close to Standard Russian.

Central Russian is a transitional stage between the North and the South, so some of its dialects closer to the North have northern features, and those closer to the South have the southern ones.^[1]

There are two types of internal differentiation of Central Russian dialects, the first is based on the methods of linguistic geography (areal classification),^[2] the second is based on typological patterns (structural-typological classification)^[3]

The most well known and widespread are areal classification.^[2]

The main groups in the Central Russian dialects:

• Pskov group of dialects
• Western group of dialects
• Eastern group of dialects

Pskov group is transitional to the dialects of the Belarus.^[4]

• Northern Russian dialects
• Southern Russian dialects
• Old Novgorod dialect
• Vowel reduction in Russian

• Crosswhite, Katherine Margaret (2000), "Vowel Reduction in Russian: A Unified Account of Standard, Dialectal, and 'Dissimilative' Patterns" (PDF), University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences, 1 (1): 107–172, archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-02-06
• Sussex, Roland; Cubberley, Paul (2006). "Dialects of Russian". The Slavic languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 521–526. ISBN 978-0-521-22315-7.

• R. Ronko, E. Volf, M. Grebenkina, M. Ershova, A. Okhapkina, A. Hadasevich, V. Morozova. Opochka Dialect Corpus. 2019 Moscow: Linguistic Convergence Laboratory, NRU HSE; Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.