Talk: Estonian language

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The text claims that northern dialects of Estonian are mutually intelligible with Finnish. This is not true unless there is previous knowledge of the other language as many words are quite different. The different way of spelling also creates lots of difficulties especially if the speaker of the other language is speaking too fast. Then the final "bomb": _Southern_ dialects of Estonian are more easily to be understood by Finnish people as they have more of the same kind of "vowel harmony" and spelling as Finnish. There are also some common words between Finnish language and Southern Estonian dialects. These holds despite the geographical facts.

The Estonian dialect that is closest to Finnish is the littoral dialect of North East Estonia, featuring several common traits with Finnish among them even vowel harmony (by the way, its absence or presence does not affect intelligibility). But that dialect is more or less extinct.

I think that there is a high degree mutual intelligibility between Finnish and Estonian in evereday speech, since the basic vocabulary mostly coincides and grammars are close as well. The main difficulty is that Estonian words are "worn" shorter, so that Estonian speech is too fast to the Finnish ear. Andres 13:33, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

While Estonian and Finnish are quite similar, it is really because of Finnish tv (which was viewable and extensivly watched during the soviet time in the northern Estonia), why northern estonians can understand and to some extent speak finnish. Someone outside of the finnish tv coverage can understand finnish much worse, and it is not to be attributed to other dialects, as these are really dying in common usage.