Seeing @luulapants & others talking about issues with Ilya's representation as a second language speaker in fics made me want to list out some patterns of "Ilya speak" and how they do and don't align with real second language speakers of Russian.
My credentials: 2 graduate degrees researching multilingualism & second language phonology. Plus copyediting a book written by a first language speaker of Russian & Ukrainian after being her coworker for a decade <3
1. Pronoun drop: e.g. "is good". It is common with second language speakers, but I'm gonna support Luula's analysis of this as based on a mis-hearing of 'It's good' in a Russian accent - Russian has palatalized stops and the frication makes listeners reclassify them as fricatives. t^j -> s
2. Article issues: most common error, even amongst very fluent speakers. Includes mixing up indefinite (a/an) and definite (the) articles, dropping articles (e.g. 'I was going to store'), and hypercorrection (inserting unnecessary articles, e.g., 'I am going to the home').
3. Copula deletion: Russian has a null copula (when you can replace 'to be' with an =, that's the copula) so copula drop can happen in English (e.g., "I a teacher"). This one is drilled really hard for Russian learners so it doesn't come up as often as you would think. I can't think of canon examples of Ilya doing this.
4. Unfamiliarity with vocab: non-Russian fic writers - try checking a Russian/English dictionary because there are lots of English loanwords in Russian (or other Latinate loans) that share a common root. Luula's anon brought this up, but as an example, 'autism' in Russian is 'аутизм' and is basically pronounced the same - they are cognates. Ilya would have a very good guess of what this word means, along with other loanwords.
In my experience, idioms are some of the hardest/last vocab items to grasp because the words are common (so English speakers don't expect there to be a problem) but the meaning is non-obvious. Lots of English speakers won't even say the whole idiom, just expect people to understand from a partial recital. E.g. "When you assume..." ; "the best laid plans..." ; "speak of the devil" ; "when in Rome" etc.
5. Word order: English is pretty strict about word order, Russian has more free order (supported by their very robust case system + grammatical gender). This mostly comes up with subordinate clause order. For one example, I've noticed that English writers tend to put clarifying phrases before, Russian speakers after. (E.g., a Russian speaker might have written the previous sentence with 'as one example' at the end). These re-phrasings aren't necessarily ungrammatical in English, but they may come off as confusing (for very complex sentences) or the overall pattern across multiple sentences comes off as unnatural.
6. Question tags: fanfic writers love to give Ilya simple question tags as a vocab quirk (e.g. 'it's special, no?' ; 'You like this, yes?'. I haven't memorably experienced this from the Russian first language speakers I know, but Russian does have question tags like this (e.g., I understand that так is used pretty similarly to Canadian English 'eh?')
7. W vs V: I definitely exit out of fics if they give Ilya a use of "w" like Chekov from Star Trek. This is made up & fake.
8. Avoiding Do / Don't: English is weird about the verb 'to do' and lots of the time you can leave it out (even if native speakers would use it). Using question tags for yes/no questions is one way of avoiding constructions with 'do', another is using the target verb rather than replacing with do. E.g. 'Do you like to row?' An English native might reply 'yes, I do' while an ESL speaker might be more likely to use 'yes, I like to row' or 'yes, I like rowing'. Again, not incorrect but when it builds up as a pattern of speech it sounds less natural to a native speaker.
9. Skipping contractions: very common amongst all kinds of ESL speakers. English speakers will throw in a "had'nt've" and always use "doesn’t" over "does not". But lots of ESL speakers just pronounce each word always - especially if there is an auxiliary verb. It can be difficult to remember combinations like - is "I've not" or "I haven't" more natural (& the answer is different for different English varieties).
10. Verbs & nouns paired with prepositions: it's just really common to select the wrong preposition or drop it altogether. E.g., "baked with hands" instead of "baked by hand"; 'compliment about' vs. 'compliment on', etc.
Rule of thumb: just give Ilya good English. It's less inaccurate than 'caveman' Ilya and less xenophobic to boot!
REALLY good stuff!!
I'll add that not knowing a cognate can make sense in some situations. Like, if you've never used that word in English before, you don't necessarily know if it's the same in both without looking it up. But there are categories of words where it's reasonably assumed: science, medicine, academic studies. For those categories, you can generally say your word in an English accent, which might not be quite exact. For example, Ilya might guess 'hypertonia' instead of 'hypertension.'
(When I was learning Turkish, we would guess at 50-cent words by saying the French word in a Turkish accent - our prof was really mad about how often it worked lol)
