Language Change and Contact in Southern Finnic with a Focus on Estonian: An Areal-Typological Study

The Southern Finnic branch has traditionally been defined as including Estonian, South Estonian, Livonian, and Votic. This study examines how phonological and morphosyntactic features contribute to the internal grouping of these varieties from an areal-typological perspective. The analysis covers 38 Finnic varieties (including 26 Southern Finnic varieties), and a total of 84 phonological and morphosyntactic features, primarily drawn from the UraTyp dataset and its extension EstTyp. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to compare groupings based on different feature sets. The results show that phonological and morphosyntactic features yield partly different groupings, e.g., Northeastern Estonian varieties pattern phonologically with Northern Finnic, while morphosyntactically they are closer to the North Estonian varieties. The most salient Southern Finnic features reflect either innovation or continuity, with morphosyntactic innovations being particularly prominent. Some of these features are also characteristic of the broader eastern part of the Circum-Baltic Area. The findings underline the importance of distinguishing between different levels of language structure when analysing language relationships. They also demonstrate that inheritance and language contacts interact in shaping Finnic variation.