Võro ( vro, võro kiilʼ, link=no , et, võru keel) is a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...
Estonian language
Estonian ( ) is a Finnic language, written in the Latin script. It is the official language of Estonia and one of the official languages of the European Union, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people; 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,0 ...
, but nowadays it has its own
literary standard
The literary norm or linguistic norm or linguistic standard or language norm is a historically determined set of commonly used language assets, as well as rules for their selection and use, which have been recognized by society as the most appropri ...
and efforts have been undertaken to seek official recognition as an indigenous
regional language
*
A regional language is a language spoken in a region of a sovereign state, whether it be a small area, a federated state or province or some wider area.
Internationally, for the purposes of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Lan ...
of Estonia. Võro has roughly 75,000 speakers (
Võros
Võros ( Võro: ''võrokõsõq,'' pronounced , et, võrukesed, fi, võrolaiset) are inhabitants of historical Võromaa (''Vana Võromaa''), a region in Southeastern Estonia (Võru and Põlva Counties with parts extending into Valga and Tart ...
) mostly in southeastern Estonia, in the eight
parishes
A parish is a territorial entity in many Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest, often termed a parish priest, who might be assisted by one or m ...
of the historical
Võru County
Võru County ( et, Võru maakond or ''Võrumaa''; vro, Võro maakund) is a county in southern Estonia. It is bordered by Valga County and Põlva County and is the only Estonian county bordering two countries - Latvia (Alūksne Municipality and ...
Kanepi
Kanepi is a small borough (') in Kanepi Parish, Põlva County in southeastern Estonia.
Hugo Treffner (1845–1912), educator, founder of the Hugo Treffner Gymnasium was born in Kanepi as a son of a family of local parish clerk.
Gallery
Fi ...
,
Põlva
Põlva () is a town in southeastern Estonia, the capital of Põlva County, and the centre of Põlva Parish.
Põlva is home for the Intsikurmu Song Festival Grounds, which regularly hosts concerts and summer activities, situated in a small for ...
, Räpinä and Vahtsõliina. These parishes are currently centred (due to redistricting) in Võru and
Põlva
Põlva () is a town in southeastern Estonia, the capital of Põlva County, and the centre of Põlva Parish.
Põlva is home for the Intsikurmu Song Festival Grounds, which regularly hosts concerts and summer activities, situated in a small for ...
Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia after the Northern European country's political and financial capital, Tallinn. Tartu has a population of 91,407 (as of 2021). It is southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres (152 miles) northeast of ...
counties. Speakers can also be found in the cities of
Tallinn
Tallinn () is the most populous and capital city of Estonia. Situated on a bay in north Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, Tallinn has a population of 437,811 (as of 2022) and administratively lies in the Harju ' ...
and
Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia after the Northern European country's political and financial capital, Tallinn. Tartu has a population of 91,407 (as of 2021). It is southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres (152 miles) northeast of ...
and the rest of Estonia.
History
Võro is a descendant of the old
South Estonian
South Estonian, spoken in south-eastern Estonia, encompasses the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto varieties. There is no academic consensus on its status, as some linguists consider South Estonian a dialect group of Estonian whereas other linguist ...
regional language and is the least influenced by Standard Estonian (which is based on Northern Estonian dialects). Võro was once spoken further south and east of historical Võromaa in South Estonian-speaking enclaves Lutsi, Leivu and Kraasna in what is now
Latvia
Latvia ( or ; lv, Latvija ; ltg, Latveja; liv, Leţmō), officially the Republic of Latvia ( lv, Latvijas Republika, links=no, ltg, Latvejas Republika, links=no, liv, Leţmō Vabāmō, links=no), is a country in the Baltic region of ...
and
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
. In addition to Võro, other contemporary variants of South Estonian include the Mulgi,
Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia after the Northern European country's political and financial capital, Tallinn. Tartu has a population of 91,407 (as of 2021). It is southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres (152 miles) northeast of ...
and
Seto dialect
Seto (; et, setu keel) is a dialect of Estonian or a separate language spoken by 12,549 people. It is sometimes identified as a dialect of Võro, or the two are described as one language, Võro-Seto. Setos () mostly inhabit the area near E ...
.
One of the earliest written evidences of South Estonian is a translation of the
New Testament
The New Testament grc, Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, transl. ; la, Novum Testamentum. (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christ ...
(''Wastne Testament'') published in 1686. Although the status of South Estonian began to diminish after the 1880s, the language began to undergo a revival in the late 1980s.
Present situation
Today, Võro is used in the works of some of Estonia's best-known playwrights, poets, and authors (
Madis Kõiv
Madis Kõiv (5 December 1929, Tartu, Estonia – 24 September 2014, Tartu, Estonia) was an Estonian writer, philosopher and physicist.
Education
Kõiv attended school in Tartu after the second World War, graduating in the early 1950s with a d ...
Jaan Kaplinski
Jaan Kaplinski (22 January 1941 – 8 August 2021 ) was an Estonian poet, philosopher, politician, and culture critic, known for his focus on global issues and support for left-wing/ liberal thinking. He was influenced by Eastern philosophical s ...
,
Ain Kaalep
Ain Kaalep (4 June 1926 – 9 June 2020) was an Estonian poet, playwright, literary critic and translator.
Biography and career
Kaalep was born in Tartu. He studied at the Hugo Treffner Gymnasium and at the University of Tartu, from which he gr ...
, etc.). One newspaper is printed in Võro: the fortnightly ''
Uma Leht
''Uma Leht'' (literally Our Own Newspaper) is the only newspaper in the Võro language which is spoken in Southern Estonia. The newspaper is owned by the Foundation Võro Selts VKKF and issued every fortnight
A fortnight is a unit of time ...
'' (literally ''Our Own Newspaper''). Twenty six public schools offer weekly special classes (mostly
extracurricular
An extracurricular activity (ECA) or extra academic activity (EAA) or cultural activities is an activity, performed by students, that falls outside the realm of the normal curriculum of school, college or university education. Such activities a ...
) in modern Võro.
Estonia's contribution to the
Eurovision Song Contest 2004
The Eurovision Song Contest 2004 was the 49th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest. It took place in Istanbul, Turkey, following the country's victory at the with the song "Everyway That I Can" by Sertab Erener. Organised by the European Broa ...
was the song " Tii", which was performed by Neiokõsõ in Võro.
The language is endangered, and according to Kadri Koreinik this is due to the government's lack of legal commitment to protect the language.
Orthography
Võro employs the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...
, like Estonian and Finnish.
Most letters (including ''ä'', ''ö'', ''ü'', and ''õ'') denote the same sounds as in Estonian, with a few exceptions. The letter ''q'' stands for the
glottal stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
and ''y'' denotes , a vowel very close to
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
'' ы'' (from 2005 written ''õ'').
Palatalization of consonants is marked with an
acute accent
The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
(´) or
apostrophe
The apostrophe ( or ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes:
* The marking of the omission of one o ...
('). In proper typography and in handwriting, the palatalisation mark does not extend above the
cap height
In typography, cap height is the height of a capital letter above the baseline for a particular typeface.http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/glossary.html Glossary of (some) Typographic Terms It specifically is the height of capital letters that are f ...
(except uppercase letters ''Ń'', ''Ŕ'', ''Ś'', ''V́'' etc.), and it is written above the letter if the letter has no ascender (''ǵ'', ''ḿ'', ''ń'', ''ṕ'', ''ŕ'', ''ś'', ''v́'' etc.) but written to the right of it otherwise (''b’'', ''d’'', ''f’'', ''h’'', ''k’'', ''l’'', ''t’''). In computing, it is not usually possible to enter these character combinations or to make them look esthetically pleasing with most common fonts, so the apostrophe is generally placed after the letter in all cases. This convention is followed in this article as well.
Phonology
Vowels
Vowel harmony
Võro has preserved the system of
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
that was present in
Proto-Finnic
Proto-Finnic or Proto-Baltic-Finnic is the common ancestor of the Finnic languages, which include the national languages Finnish and Estonian. Proto-Finnic is not attested in any texts, but has been reconstructed by linguists. Proto-Finnic is it ...
. This distinguishes it from Estonian and some other Finnic languages, which have lost it.
The vowel harmony system distinguishes front, back and neutral vowels, much like the system found in Finnish. A word cannot contain both front and back vowels; suffixes automatically adapt the backness of the vowels depending on the type of vowels found in the word it is attached to. Neutral vowels can be combined with either type of vowel, although a word that contains only neutral vowels has front vowel harmony. The only neutral vowel is ''i'', like in
Votic
Votic, or Votian (''vaďďa tšeeli'', ''maatšeeli'') vɑːdʔda ˈtʃɨlɨ, mɑːt.ʃɨlɨ is the language spoken by the Votes of Ingria, belonging to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages. Votic is spoken only in Krakolye and Luzhits ...
but unlike Finnish and Karelian, where ''e'' is also neutral.
*The vowel ''ɨ'' (in the Võro orthography written with ''õ'' or ''y'', see Orthography section) is considered a back vowel for harmony purposes, but does not participate in harmony itself, as it does not occur in suffixes and endings.
Some examples, with Estonian and Finnish included for comparison:
Consonants
All Võro consonants (except and ) can be palatalized. The
glottal stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
(q,
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
) is a very common sound in Võro.
Grammar
Nouns
Endings are shown only in the back vowel harmony variant. The ''e'' of the illative ending does not undergo vowel harmony, so it never changes to ''õ''.
Only the more common endings are shown. There are some unusual/irregular endings that are only found in a few words or word types.
Notes:
* The accusative is not usually considered a separate case in Võro grammars, as it is always identical to either the nominative or the genitive.
* When an ending beginning with ''d'' is attached to a stem ending in an obstruent, it is devoiced to ''t'' automatically.
Verbs
The 3rd person singular of the indicative mood can be either without an ending or, alternatively, with an ''s''-ending:
Among the Finnic languages, such double verb conjugation can be found only in the
South Estonian
South Estonian, spoken in south-eastern Estonia, encompasses the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto varieties. There is no academic consensus on its status, as some linguists consider South Estonian a dialect group of Estonian whereas other linguist ...
Võro has a negative particle that is appended to the end of the verb, whereas standard Estonian and Finnish have a
negative verb
Dryer defined three different types of negative markers in language. Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation. The negative predica ...
, which precedes the verb. In Estonian and Finnish, the negative verb ''ei'' (Finnish ''en/et/ei/emme/ette/eivät'') is used in both present and past negation, whereas in Võro the same is expressed by different particles ending with ''-i(q)'' or ''-s'':
Language examples
Written examples
Article 1 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal De ...
in Võro:
:
As comparison the same sentence in Standard Estonian:
:
In Finnish:
:
Recorded videos
File:WIKITONGUES-_Egle_speaking_Võro.webm, Egle speaking Võro
File:WIKITONGUES-_Sulev_speaking_Võro.webm, Sulev speaking Võro (with English subtitles)
File:WIKITONGUES- Pulga speaking Võro.webm, Jaan speaking Võro
File:WIKITONGUES- Maarika speaking Võro.webm, Maarika speaking Võro
File:WIKITONGUES- Toomas speaking Võro.webm, Toomas speaking Võro
See also
*
Finnic languages
The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 mi ...
Uma Leht
''Uma Leht'' (literally Our Own Newspaper) is the only newspaper in the Võro language which is spoken in Southern Estonia. The newspaper is owned by the Foundation Võro Selts VKKF and issued every fortnight
A fortnight is a unit of time ...
'', newspaper in the Võro language
*
Võro Institute
Võro Institute ( vro, Võro Instituut, et, Võru Instituut) is an Estonian state research and development institution dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the Võro language and culture.
History
Võro ( vro, võro kiil, links=no ...
References
Further reading
* Ehala, Martin & Niglas, Katrin (2007): "Empirical evaluation of a mathematical model of ethnolinguistic vitality: the case of Võro". ''Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development''.
*
Kalle Eller
Kalle Eller (pseudonym Kalle Istvan Eller; 7 May 1940 – 10 January 2023)Iva, Sulev; Pajusalu, Karl (2004): "The Võro Language: Historical Development and Present Situation". In: Language Policy and Sociolinguistics I: "Regional Languages in the New Europe" International Scientific Conference; Rēzeknes Augstskola, Latvija; 20–23 May 2004. Rezekne: Rezekne Augstskolas Izdevnieceba, 2004, 58 – 63.
* Iva, Sulev (2007): Võru kirjakeele sõnamuutmissüsteem (Inflectional Morphology in the Võro Literary Language). Dissertationes Philologiae Estonicae Universitatis Tartuensis 20, Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus (online English summary pp 144–146) (PDF)
* Iva, Sulev (pen name Jüvä Sullõv), (2002): Võro-eesti synaraamat (Võro-Estonian dictionary). Publications of Võro Institute 12. Tarto-Võro.
* Keem, Hella (1997): Võru keel (Võro language). Võro Instituut ja Eesti teaduste akadeemia Emakeele selts. Tallinn.
* Koreinik, Kadri (2007): The Võro language in education in Estonia. Regional dossiers series. Mercator. European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning (online PDF .
* Koreinik, Kadri; Pajusalu, Karl (2007): "Language naming practices and linguistic identity in South-Eastern Estonia". Language and Identity in the Finno-Ugric World. Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium at the University of Groningen, May 17–19, 2006. R. Blokland and C. Hasselblatt (eds). (Studia Fenno-Ugrica Groningana 4). Maastricht: Shaker.