Part of series. Fake Russian accents. Long. You know the drill.Rule 10. Ё (yo) is your friend. Russians love their letter "Ë" - or "yo". A relatively recent invention, and one that is uniquely Russian. Possibly apocryphally, it was invented when a Russian noblewoman asked a gathering of the Academy of Sciences to spell "ёлка" (which was, of course, not spelled like that at that point) and then asked whether it was right that more than one letter was being used for one sound. Its exclusive Russianness, the eminent sensibility of the shallow orthography argument that led to its creation, and its perceived "underdog" status make the letter well loved (see picture of lower-case ë statue). Of course, Ë is not for everyone. I've heard people argue whether it is a letter at all, and many people are too "cool" or "lazy" to use it in written Russian (or just too traditional: many typewriters didn't contain the letter, and people got used to reading without it). This in turn led to the tradition of transcribing it into the latin alphabet as "e", which is why there are people named "Fedorov", "Semin" etc. in the NHL. But then, its "nonobviousness" to the uninitiated just increases its appeal. Additionally, very few words begin with Ë, but among them is a universally favourite swearword, and the hedgehog, who is somewhat of an underdog Russian hero himself.
All this is by way of preamble to saying Russians enjoy using the letter Ë, but unfortunately English doesn't contain many opporunities to do so. "Yo, is Bjork yearning for your fjord?" pretty much exhausts the words where you could think of using it, and even in most of these cases it wouldn't be completely right. So what's a russophone to do? Why, use it where it doesn't make any sense, obviously. That is, to substitute for /ɝ/ in words like "bird", "burn" or "heard". Whether they follow this with an /r/ largely depends on whether they were first exposed to American English or RP. It'd actually be interesting to hear how russophones who are exposed to Scottish English (which distinguishes the vowel sounds in the three examples I gave) pronounce these words, but I've never met anyone with that kind of accent, so I don't know. So, examples:
mirth /mɝθ/ becomes [mʲo(r)s]
hurt /hɝt/ becomes [xʲo(r)t]
There are two caveats. One is that this shift doesn't usually happen when there isn't a palatalizable consonant preceding. Thus "earth", "worth" or "urn" are not pronounced with a [Cʲo]. The second is to remember that unstressed vowels are reduced (Rule 4!) and so you don't see things like "Robert" being pronounced ['robʲo(r)t]. As mentioned before, Ë doesn't exist in almost any other Slavic language, so following this rule will help distinguish your fake Russian accent from a generic Eastern-European one. To impress all those fake accent connoisseurs. (I like to imagine such people exist.) Conversely, if you want "general east-europeanness", don't do this (or, actually, a bunch of the other stuff we already talked about).
Bottom line:
In case you haven't clicked the above link about hedgehogs, it links to "Hedgehog in the Fog", which is amazing animation. You should check it out.
Also,
"normal" am. E.: burn /bɝn/
russ. acc. E.: bjo(r)n [bʲo(r)n]
