Wiktionary:About Karelian

Karelian is a Finnic language. It forms a dialect continuum between Livvi (also known as Olonets Karelian) and Ludic on one hand, and the eastern dialects of Finnish on the other. Karelian does not have a single standardized form.

Orthography
Wiktionary prioritises the standard orthography used by P. M. Zaykov and O. Karlova. This is a Latin-based system, highly akin to the Finnish orthography. Main characteristics are: Alternative forms and spellings should not contain etymological information unless specifically having to do with the written form. Other etymology should be added to the main entry.
 * ⟨c⟩ for (rather than ⟨ts⟩)
 * ⟨č⟩ for (rather than ⟨tš⟩)
 * ⟨y⟩ for (rather than ⟨ü⟩)
 * ⟨ʹ⟩ (MODIFIER LETTER PRIME) for (rather than any other accent, apostrophe or caron)

Identifying Karelian
Material called "Karelian" in various sources, especially from Russia, is often from the closely related Livvi (also known as Olonets Karelian), not from Karelian proper. Before creating Karelian entries, please ensure that your material in fact is from Karelian proper. See About Livvi for some diagnostic features between Livvi and Karelian proper.

Inflection
Karelian has the following parts of speech:


 * adjectives
 * nouns
 * numerals
 * pronouns

are.


 * verbs

are.


 * adverbs
 * conjunctions
 * interjections
 * morphemes
 * postpositions and prepositions
 * predicatives

are.


 * determiners

can either be or be, depending on the kind.

When provided, inflection ought to be signified by either the header  or , depending on the type of lemma.

Karelian nouns and adjectives ought to be preceded by and  respectively, rather than the common  template. The template will automatically ask for the genitive and partitive forms.

Pronunciation
The Karelian phonology is quite similar to that of Finnish. Some main characteristics:
 * Diphthongs should be transcribed using the non-syllabic diactritic ( instead of ).
 * ⟨n⟩ preceding should be transcribed as  ( instead of ).
 * ⟨c⟩ and ⟨č⟩ should be transcribed as and  respectively.

Lemmatisation
On Wiktionary, Karelian terms are lemmatised under two standardised forms: The North Karelian literary standard - more commonly known as Vienankarjala - and the South Karelian literary standard based off the Tver dialect - more commonly known as Tverinkariela.

Some developments of these two dialects from Proto-Finnic include:
 * *aa > ⟨ua⟩; *ada > ⟨ua⟩
 * *ää > ⟨iä⟩; *ädä > ⟨yä⟩ (V), ⟨iä⟩ (T)
 * *uda > ⟨uo⟩; *üdä > ⟨yö⟩
 * *ee > ⟨ie⟩; *oo > ⟨uo⟩; *öö > ⟨yö⟩

Terms exclusive to one of the two Karelian varieties (North or South) should be preceded by the label krl or krl respectively.

Every Karelian entry should be preceded by the template krl-regional, which displays the form in both literary standards.