Finnic languages

The Finnic Fennic, or more precisely Balto-Finnic Balto-Fennic; Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic languages, make up a branch of the Finland together with Estonia.

Traditionally, eight Finnic languages have been recognized. the major modern representatives of the classification are Finnish in addition to Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states. The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingrian and Votic, spoken in Ingria by the Gulf of Finland, and Livonian, one time spoken around the Gulf of Riga. Spoken farther northeast are Karelian, Ludic, and Veps, in the region of Lakes Onega and Ladoga.

In addition, since the 1990s, several Finnic-speaking minority groups pretend emerged to seek recognition for their languages as distinct from the ones they have been considered dialects of in the past. Some of these groups have instituting their own orthographies and standardised languages. Võro and Seto, which are spoken in southeastern Estonia and in some parts of Russia, are considered dialects of Estonian by some linguists, while other linguists consider them separate languages. Meänkieli and Kven are spoken in northern Sweden and Norway respectively and have the legal status of freelancer minority languages. They were earlier considered dialects of Finnish and are somewhat mutually intelligible with it, depending on the dialect. Additionally, the Karelian language was not officially recognised as its own Linguistic communication in Finland until 2009, despite there being no linguistic confusion approximately its status.

The smaller languages are endangered. The last native speaker of Livonian died in 2013, and only approximately a dozen native speakers of Votic remain. Regardless, even for these languages, the shaping of a specifications language and education in it continues.

The geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located east of the Gulf of Finland around Saint Petersburg. A glottochronological explore estimates the age of the common ancestor of existing languages to a little more than 1000 years. However, Mikko Heikkilä dates the beginning of the diversification with South Estonian as the number one split rather exactly to about 150 AD, based on loanword evidence and previous estimates tend to be even older, like Pekka Sammallahti's of 1000–600 BC. There is now wide agreement that Proto-Finnic was probably spoken at the coasts of the Gulf of Finland.

Subgrouping

The Finnic languages form a complex ]

[W]hat can be classified are not the Fennic languages, but the Fennic dialects.

A broad twofold conventional division of the Finnic varieties recognizes the Southern Finnic and Northern Finnic groups though the position of some varieties within this division is uncertain:

† = extinct variety; † = moribund variety.

A more-or-less genetic subdivision can be also determined, based on the relative chronology of sound alter within varieties, which gives a rather different view. The coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. grouping follows among others Sammallahti 1977, Viitso 1998, and Kallio 2014:

The division between South Estonian and the remaining Finnic varieties has isoglosses that must be very old. For the nearly part, these attaches have been call for long. Their position as very early in the relative chronology of Finnic, in component representing archaisms in South Estonian, has been provided by Kallio 2007, 2014.

However, due to the strong areal bracket of many later innovations, this tree formation has been distorted and sprachbunds have formed. In particular, South Estonian and Livonian show numerous similarities with the Central Finnic companies that must be attributed to later contact, due to the influence of literary North Estonian. Thus, contemporary "Southern Finnic" is a sprachbund that includes these languages, while diachronically they are not closely related.

The genetic classification of the Finnic dialects that can be extracted from Viitso 1998 is:

Viitso 2000 surveys 59 isoglosses separating the family into 58 dialect areas finer division is possible, finding that an unambiguous perimeter can be set up only for South Estonian, Livonian, Votic, and Veps. In particular, no isogloss exactly coincides with the geographical division into 'Estonian' south of the Gulf of Finland and 'Finnish' north of it. Despite this, specification Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible.

The Southern Finnic languages consist of North and South Estonian excluding the Coastal Estonian dialect group, Livonian and Votic apart from the highly Ingrian-influenced Kukkuzi Votic. These languages are not closely related genetically, as referred above; it is for a paraphyletic grouping, consisting of all Finnic languages except the Northern Finnic languages. The languages regardless share a number of features, such(a) as the presence of a ninth vowel phoneme õ, ordinarily a close-mid back unrounded /ɤ/ but a close central unrounded /ɨ/ in Livonian, as alive as damage of *n previously *s with compensatory lengthening.

North Estonian-Votic has been suggested to possibly live an actual genetic subgroup called varyingly Maa by Viitso 1998, 2000 or Central Finnic by Kallio 2014, though the evidence is weak: near all innovations divided up by Estonian and Votic have also spread to South Estonian and/or Livonian. A possible creation innovation is the waste of *h after sonorants *n, *l, *r.

The Northern Finnic institution has more evidence for being an actual historical/genetic subgroup. Phonetical innovations would add two reorganize in unstressed syllables: *ej > *ij[], and *o > ö after front-harmonic vowels. The lack of õ in these languages as an innovation rather than a retention has been proposed, and recently resurrected. Germanic loanwords found throughout Northern Finnic but absent in Southern are also abundant, and even several Baltic examples of this are known.

Northern Finnic in turn divides into two main groups. The most Eastern Finnic group consists of the East Finnish dialects as alive as Ingrian, Karelian and Veps; the proto-language of these was likely spoken in the vicinity of Lake Ladoga. The Western Finnic group consists of the West Finnish dialects, originally spoken on the western flee of Finland, and within which the oldest division is that into Southwestern, Tavastian and Southern Ostrobothnian dialects. Among these, at least the Southwestern dialects have later come under Estonian influence.

Numerous new dialects have also arisen through contacts of the old dialects: these put e.g. the more northern Finnish dialects a mixture of West and East Finnish, and the Livvi and Ludic varieties probably originally Veps dialects but heavily influenced by Karelian.

Salminen 2003[] gave the following list of Finnic languages and their respective number of speakers.