Phonetics and phonology
Research in phonetics and phonology focuses on pronunciation: how the linguistic message is articulated through motoric gestures, how the message is coded as an audible signal, and how the listener decodes the message. The main language in focus is Estonian, but several other Baltic-Finnic languages (like Livonian and Inari Sami) are studied as well. The main focus is on prosody (quantity, stress and intonation), but other aspects of pronunciation investigated here include the nuances of individual sounds (e.g. palatalisation) and social aspects of the variation in voice quality (e.g. creaky voice). An additional focus of research is L2 speakers’ pronunciation of Estonian.
In the field of phonology, the mora theory and optimality theory are developed. The main focus is on describing the Estonian quantity system in a theoretical context, in the interest of comparability with similar phenomena in Baltic-Finnic and other languages, as well as contributing to theoretical debate.
The Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech is developed and maintained, in order to confirm and contextualise results from experimental research.
Researchers related to the field
Eva Liina Asu-Garcia
foneetika kaasprofessor
Eva Liina Asu-Garcia is Associate Professor of Phonetics. Her research focuses on various prosodic aspects of Estonian including the phonetics and phonology of intonation, rhythm, stress, and quantity. She is also interested in segmental and prosodic features of Estonian Swedish and has studied them in comparison with other varieties of Swedish.
Pärtel Lippus
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics
Jakobi 2-408
Pärtel Lippus is Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics. His main research interest is Estonian prosody, focussing on the word-level features (the three-way quantity system and lexical stress), but also intonational aspects (prosodic marking of non-canonical questions) and socio-phonetic variability (creaky voice). He has also been involved in investigating the prosodical features of other Finno-Ugric languages. He teaches courses on phonetics, Praat, statistics and R. He is the editor of the Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics. He is one of the developers of the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech and the Archives of Estonian Dialects and Kindred Languages.
Pärtel Lippus
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics
Jakobi 2-408
Elena Markus
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Associate Professor of Finnic Languages
Jakobi 2-405
Elena Markus is Associate Professor of Finnic Languages at the Department of Finno-Ugric Languages. Her research is mostly concerned with documentation and description of the Votic and Ingrian languages and covers a variety of topics including phonetics, morphophonology, morphology, language contact and convergence. She has done extensive fieldwork in both languages and compiled a large collection of sound and video materials on Votic and Ingrian that are deposited in several language archives. In 2020-2025, she is involved in the project “The grammar of discourse particles in Uralic” led by prof. Gerson Klumpp, where she investigates discourse particles in Ingrian and Votic.
Elena Markus
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Associate Professor of Finnic Languages
Jakobi 2-405
Pire Teras
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics, Programme Director for Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, Programme Director for Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics
Jakobi 2-411
Pire Teras works as Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics. Her research has been related to the phonetics of the Estonian language and its dialects, as well as the Finno-Ugric languages. In her research she has used mainly the methods of acoustic phonetics, but also the methods of perceptual phonetics. As a researcher, everything related to variation in pronunciation draws her attention. Thus, she has studied the variation of Estonian pronunciation, e.g. the variation of word-initial and intervocalic /h/, diphthongs, palatalization and quantity, as well as the pronunciation and perception of Estonian dialects, more precisely the Võru long vowels, and the quantity of Southern Estonian dialects, including the Leivu dialect. She has been involved in the study of prosody of various Finno-Ugric languages. In 2006–2017, she led the compilation of the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech and continues to participate in the compilation of the corpus. She teaches various subjects, e.g. Estonian phonetics and phonology, general phonetics, Estonian for academic purposes and holds phonetics seminars with colleagues.
Pire Teras
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics, Programme Director for Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, Programme Director for Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics
Jakobi 2-411
Karl Pajusalu
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Academician, Professor of History and Dialects of Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-425
+372 526 7733 (6124)
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.
Karl Pajusalu
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Academician, Professor of History and Dialects of Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-425
+372 526 7733 (6124)
Sulev Iva
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in South Estonian Language and Culture 0.5 p
Jakobi 2-413
+372 737 5422
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.
Sulev Iva
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in South Estonian Language and Culture 0.5 p
Jakobi 2-413
+372 737 5422
Kaidi Lõo
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-405
Kaidi Lõo is a research fellow in Psycholinguistics. Her field of research is lexical processing, which deals with the production and understanding of language at the word level and it examines how words are stored in the mental lexicon. More specifically, Kaidi is interested in how word’s structure and language use affect processing. In her work, she applies experimental methods (e.g. reaction time and eyetracking experiments) and statistical modelling. At the moment, she is particularly interested in spoken language. She is also involved in different international eyetracking projects, teaches Experimental Methods seminar, and helps to organize TÜling lecture series.
Kaidi Lõo
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-405
Nele Ots
visiting research fellow
Nele Ots is a postdoctoral researcher in psycholinguistics at Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt (am Main). Nele studies the planning, pronunciation and perception of spontaneous speech mainly by employing phonetic and psycho-linguistic methods. She has mainly studied the production and perception of the three degrees of Estonian word quantity and sentence focus. The postdoctoral project "Planning sentences and sentence intonation cross-linguistically" is funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in Germany and applies psycho-linguistic methods (e.g., eye-tracking) to study the linguistic and cognitive factors that influence the planning of utterances and speech melody in Estonian and German.
Külli Prillop
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in Estonian Phonology
Jakobi 2-445
Külli Prillop is a research fellow in Estonian phonology. Her first job at the University of Tartu was to develop annotation software for old Estonian texts. Since then she has been interested in grammar and vocabulary of old literary Estonian. Over time this has grown into a broader interest in the history of the Estonian language and the ternary system of Estonian quantity. She has also developed a theory of universal phonological processes and repairs (the PRR theory). Currently, she is compiling the Dictionary of Old Literary Estonian. Külli is also involved in organizing the Estonian Linguistics Olympiad, as well as other linguistic competitions for secondary school students.
Külli Prillop
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in Estonian Phonology
Jakobi 2-445
Tuuli Tuisk
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Phonetics of Finnic Languages
Jakobi 2-409
Tuuli Tuisk is a research fellow of phonetics of Finnic languages. She defended her PhD thesis in the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics at the University of Tartu in 2015. Her scientific research interests are primarily related to the pronunciation of the Livonian language, as well as to the pronunciation of other related languages (Estonian, Veps). In her research, she has used an experimental phonetic approach. Since 2006, she has been involved in the Phonetic Corpus of Spontaneous Estonian Speech.
Tuuli Tuisk
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Phonetics of Finnic Languages
Jakobi 2-409
Helen Wilbur
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Phonetics (employment contract suspended) 0.5 p
Helen Wilbur is a Research Fellow in Phonetics. Her main research interests include acoustic and articulatory phonetics and word prosody. The focus of her research has been on consonantal quantity in Estonian and Inari Saami. She defended her PhD thesis on this topic in 2019. Helen continues studying quantity in Inari Saami in various collaborative projects. She has also participated in earlier projects regarding prosody of Finno-Ugric languages and has contributed to developing the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech and Estonian Wordnet.
Helen Wilbur
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Phonetics (employment contract suspended) 0.5 p
Joshua Wilbur
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society, University of Tartu
Lecturer in Digital Linguistics
Jakobi 2-417
Joshua Wilbur is currently Visiting Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Center for Digital Humanities and Information Society and associated with the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics. He holds a PhD in General Linguistics, and has a research focus on documentary linguistics, mophophonology, syntax, corpus linguistics, lexicography and language technology, especially concerning Pite Saami, a critically endangered Uralic language of Sweden.
Joshua Wilbur
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society, University of Tartu
Lecturer in Digital Linguistics
Jakobi 2-417
Katrin Leppik
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Junior Research Fellow in Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics 0.6 p
Jakobi 2–409
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Project Manager 0.4 p
Jakobi 2-409
Katrin Leppik is a PhD student in phonetics and a Junior Research Fellow. Her thesis focuses on second language acquisition and foreign accent. She analyses the perception and production of Estonian vowels and quantity degrees by native Spanish learners of Estonian. Katrin is also involved in developing an Estonian pronunciation training app. She has participated in other projects such as the development of the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech and the prosody and information structure of surprise questions in Estonian in comparison with other languages.
Katrin Leppik
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Junior Research Fellow in Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics 0.6 p
Jakobi 2–409
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Project Manager 0.4 p
Jakobi 2-409
Anton Malmi
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Phonetics
Jakobi 2-408
Anton is a Research Fellow who is interested in acoustic and articulatory phonetics. In his studies, Anton has been mainly studying how the phonemes are coarticulated in speech. In his PhD thesis, Anton used acoustic and articulatory methods to analyze Russian bilinguals living in Estonia and focused of the acquisiton of Estonian palatalization. Anton is also involved in developing a smartphone app that helps to train Estonian pronunciation and in annotating the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech.
Anton Malmi
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Phonetics
Jakobi 2-408
Liis Ermus
doctoral student
Liis Ermus is a PhD student. In her thesis she uses corpus based methods to research acoustic variation of Estonian plosive consonants and factors influencing it. Also, she researches the possibility of predicting plosive reduction from written text features in text-to-speech synthesis models. Liis works in the Insitute of the Estonian Language as a junior researcher and an archive specialist. She participates in projects of speech research and TTS and administers the archive of estonian dialects and finno-ugric languages. She teaches introductory phonetics course in Tallinn University.
Axel Jagau
doctoral student
Axel Jagau is a former lecturer of German philology at the University of Tartu, currently a PhD student in Estonian linguistics. His main research interests lie in the field of European minority languages, among these mostly Sorbian, Irish and Frisian. In addition, he works on the historical phonology of Estonian and other languages, especially in the context of language contacts. His PhD thesis represents a comparative study of German loanwords in Estonian and Sorbian.
At the University of Tartu, he has taught German language history, German dialectology, Lower German and Irish.
He has been one of the main organisers of the Estonian Linguistics Olympiad since 2003.
