The researcher investigated and described the characteristic features of English of Russian EFL users in the context of World Englishes. Russian-like English in use is regarded at different levels, from pronunciation to syntactic structures and further to written and oral discourse. The Russian accent in English was studied through frequent and typical errors made by Russian natives and was interpreted as a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural phenomenon. Russian error analysis became the framework of this research. The analysis was made at several levels with contrastive analysis techniques involved and the results were explicated as negative interference. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were undertaken, the results of which were summarized and illustrated with examples. The quantitative evidence was provided of error spread and individual error profiles, i.e. the most numerous types of errors in each individual error count and the most common combinations of such error type peaks. The research was based on the analysis of a considerable corpus of written and oral discourse samples featuring Russian errors in English made by Russians and collected by the researcher during the years of teaching practice from 2000 to 2014. The research results are suggestive of regarding Russian accent in English as a performance variety of English.

World Englishes, English as a lingua franca, English as a foreign language, performance varieties of English, Russian English, the Russian accent, error analysis