Okane

a dialectal phonetic phenomenon of the Russian language. A characteristic feature of the northern subdialect, it consists in differentiation of the vowels a and o after hard consonants in unstressed syllables—for example, drová, “firewood”; golová, “head”; travá, “grass”; sazhál, “he [I] planted.” Complete okan ’e is accompanied by the opposed pronunciation of o and a in all unstressed syllables (the Novgorod, Olonets, Po-mor’e, and Vologda-Kirov accents and also many Siberian accents). Partial okan’e (the Vladimir-Volga Region subdialect group) distinguishes a and o in the first pretonic syllable; reduction occurs in the remaining unstressed syllables (gəlová, məlokó, “milk”).