Northeastern coastal Estonian
The northeastern coastal dialect is a Finnic dialect traditionally considered part of the Estonian language. The Estonian coastal dialects were spoken on the coastal strip of Estonia from Tallinn to river Narva. It has very few speakers left nowadays.
Treating the northeastern coastal dialect as a single unit dates back to Arnold Kask's classification of Estonian dialects from the year 1956. According to some authors, the coastal dialects form one of the three major dialect groups of Estonian.
Features
The characteristics of the dialect group are mostly shared with the Northern Finnic languages.- There are remnants of vowel harmony
- There is no palatalization
- Short plosives are unvoiced unlike in other dialects of Estonian
- Recent quantitative changes in consonant gradation are absent
- The negative verb inflects for person and number: en, et, ei, emma, etta, evad. Cf. Standard Estonian 'ei' for all persons sg/pl, versus Finnish en, et, ei, emme, ette, eivät.
- The plural is marked with -i-, in contrast to -de- being usual in North Estonian dialects: puhti käsiga, cf. Standard Estonian puhaste kätega, 'with clean hands'
- The preterite is marked with -i- as well, in contrast to -si- being usual in North Estonian.
- Unlike all other Estonian dialects, the coastal dialects have an inflected -nud participle, as in Finnish: .
The northeastern coastal dialect of Estonian is nowadays alternatively split into two dialects, the coastal dialect and the Alutaguse dialect, the former being more closely related to southern Finnish dialects, the Ingrian and Votic languages, whereas the latter has also been influenced by the central dialect of the Northern Estonian group.