Talk:South Estonian dialects

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[edit] South Estonian language!? Its a dialect not a language.

Anybody opposed to a move? --Alexia Death the Grey 07:44, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Guess not.--Alexia Death the Grey 16:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

This article needs a lot of work. It needs to be rewritten as an umbrella article for Tartu dialect and Seto and Võro languages. Unfortunately I'm not a linguist... --Alexia Death the Grey 16:25, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Agree, just that you missed out the Mulgi (or Viljandimaa) dialect--Termer (talk) 10:45, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

South Estonian isn't just a dialect group. The issue is much more complex. Linguistically there are two different Estonian languages: Estonian (or North Estonian) and South Estonian. The latter isn't linguistically and historically a dialect of (North) Estonian. South Estonian includes two very close languages (Võro and Seto) and two dialects (Tartu and Mulgi) that are very close to Võro but are also quite mixed with Estonian. Mulgi and Tartu can be observed as transition dialects from Võro to Estonian. But it's clear that they are dialects of South Estonian not (North) Estonian. South Estonian has also its own historical written language (so called Tartu or South Estonian literary language) which was used in Tartu and Võro linguistic areas (and it can not be named "old Tartu dialect"!!!). So the issue of South Estonian is quite complex but surely this language isn't merely a dialect group (of Estonian) as it was called in traditional Estonian dialectology. Many linguists (Sammallahti, Kallio etc) have refferred to South Estonian as to very ancient independent Baltic Finnic language (maybe even the oldest one) which has later become more similar to Estonian due to contacts. I agree that it would be nice to rewrite the article more clearly. But renaming the article "South Estonian language" to "South Estonian dialect group" is too radical solution and it doesn't reflect the real situation. I would compare rather South Estonian with Saami, Norwegian, Mari, Mordovian or Frisian languages which all are ingluding two or more (standardized or non-standardized) variants but still they can be named languages, not just dialect/language groups. That's whay I say that the renaming was'nt good idea and why I think the name of the article should be again "South Estonian language" as it was previously. --Võrolang (talk) 01:04, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

As I explained, I oppose move. The article should be moved back to the previous name. --Võrolang (talk) 15:37, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Edited and moved back to the "South Estonian language". --Võrolang (talk) 22:39, 6 January 2008 (UTC)