Estonian dialects and South Estonian language

Karl Pajusalu is a Professor of Estonian language history and dialects, a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. He studies the pronunciation and grammar of Estonian and its related languages as well as their changes, and has also dealt with historical sociolinguistics. His research has focused most of all on Southern Finnic languages, especially their word prosody. He is one of the founders of the University of Tartu Collegium for Transdisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics. He is currently involved in compiling the Typological Database of Uralic Languages and taking part in the Estonian ethnic history project and research projects on Inari Sámi prosody and Livonian heritage; he is also participating in the compilation of Seto, Mulgi, and Häädemeeste dictionaries.

Liina Lindström is a professor of Modern Estonian. Her main research interests are related to language variation and syntax of Estonian from the usage-based, functionalist perspective. Main focus of her research is on syntactic variation in Estonian and the role of different forces behind it. She has been in charge of compiliing corpora of Estonian, especially the Corpus of Estonian Dialects, and also uses mostly corpus data in her research and applies quantitative and qualitative methods on this data. Liina is also one of the main promoters of using digital methods in the Humanities at UT. Currently she is a leader of the project Interdisciplinary Corpus of Seto and is involved in other projects, such as teenager language corpus.

Sulev Iva (also known in Võro as Jüvä Sullõv) is a lecturer in South Estonian language and culture. He teaches Võro language from beginner to advanced and conversational courses, and more broadly on South Estonian languages and their history. He has studied in particular the morphology, phonology and phonetics of the Võro language. His dissertation dealt with the inflectional morphology in the Võro literary language. In addition, he is involved in various projects in the development of Võro dictionaries, teaching materials and language technology, and more broadly in the revitalisation and development of the Võro language and in international cooperation in this field.

Maarja-Liisa Pilvik works as a specialist of corpora and quantitative linguistics and is a PhD student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics. Her main areas of research so far have been Finnish verb semantics, morphosyntax of Estonian dialects, and the productivity of derivational morphology in different registers of the Estonian language. More broadly, she is interested in language variation, the entrenchment and cognitive organization of linguistic constructions, and the interplay, competition, and change of the forces guiding actual language use. In her work, she mainly uses corpus data and applies both qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods. She is currently involved in projects which are building the Seto language corpus and the corpus of teen speak, and in a project which is developing the tools for automatic language processing of the 19th century parish court records, as well as testing the potential uses of this important linguistic and historical resource.

Helen Plado is a research fellow and a lecturer of Estonian. Her main research interests are language variation and change. The main focus of her research is on syntax (mainly complex sentences), but in ddition to this, she has studied other morphosyntactic issues. Her research focuses on Estonian and Võro, latter of which she has studied on sociolinguistic perspective as well. Helen Plado uses mainly corpus data, but also the data collected during field work and linguistic experiments. She is the editor of the Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics.

Eva Saar is a research fellow in Finnic languages at the Department of Finno-Ugric Studies and the coordinator of the Centre for South-Estonian Language and Cultural Studies. His research focuses mainly on the minor Finnic languages spoken in Russia, but also on South Estonian. Her research interests include language history, phonology, morphology, and morphosyntax of the Finnic languages, as well as personal names and onomastics in general. Since 1997, she has carried out fieldwork in Votic, Ingriani, Lydic, Veps and Karelian language areas in Russia, as well as in the Mulgi, Seto and Võro language areas in Estonia. Since 2018, she is involved in compiling the typological database of Uralic languages (UraTyp). She is currently leading the project "Vepsian way of life and worldview in the 21st century", and manages the compilation of a Seto (South Estonian) dictionary.

Hanna Pook is a PhD student of Estonian Linguistics. In her research she has studied Estonian dialect syntax and the use of pronouns in spoken (dialectal) language. Her dissertation focuses on the use of the interrogative-relative pronouns kes and mis and the indefinite pronoun keegi. She has taken a corpus-based approach to her research, using quantitative and statistical methods. In addition to her PhD studies she works as a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Estonian Language, where she takes part in compiling the „Estonian Dialect Dictionary“ and „Seto Dictionary“.

Triin Todesk is a research fellow of the Komi language. In her dissertation, Triin investigated the use of the multi-based Komi clitic -dzhyk with verbs, more specifically the semantics of the clitic with different verb types, restrictions on the use of the clitic, and the possible influence of the clitic on the inherent properties of the modified situation. Triin is also involved with the project "The Grammar of Discourse Particles in Uralic" (led by Gerson Klumpp) which aims to find the similarities and differences in the use of discourse particles in Ingrian, Votic, Livonian, Erzya, Moksha, Udmurt, Komi, and Kamas. In addition to Komi, Triin also works in the field of Estonian dialects, especially Seto and Mulgi, and has field-work experience with dialect speakers both in Estonia and Russia. In Liina Lindström's project "Interdisciplinary corpus of Seto", Triin co-ordinates the transcribing of Seto recordings and takes part in recording new spoken material. With the Mulgi dialect, Triin researches its noun declension system and has created noun declension classes which will be used in the Mulgi dictionary to appear as collaborative work of the University of Tartu, Institute of the Estonian Language, and the Institute of Mulgi Culture.

Annika Kängsepp is a junior research fellow in linguistics, who studies the variation of indefinite pronouns keegi, miski, kumbki and ükski case forms and the factors affecting the variation. In her research, she uses corpus-based and experimental methods. In addition to language variation Annika is interested in Estonian dialects. She works on the project "Interdisciplinary corpus of Seto".