Karelian alphabet

Karelian literature in 19th century Russia remained limited to a few primers, songbooks and leaflets.

Шондю-руохтынанъ святой і᷍ованг̧ели матвѣйста, Карьяланъ кїӗлѣлля) in the South Karelian Tver dialect, in 1820, they used vowels with breves, circumflexes, and г with a cedilla: In the Карельско-Русскій Букварь (Karelian–Russian ABC-Book), 1887: Another example: in the Русско-Корельскій Словарь (Russian–Karelian Dictionary), 1908, Tver State University Finno-Ugricist Lyudmila Georgievna Gromova points out in one great difficulty in these early Karelian Cyrillic alphabets, was the inconsistency in rendering the sounds a, ä, ja, jä, ö, jö, y, and jy.

The research into Karelian folklore of Maria Mikhailovskaya, a teacher from the Vozdvizhenskaya school of Bezhetsky District, was published in 1925.

[3] In 1930–31, a Karelian literary language using the Latin alphabet was standardized for the Tver Karelian community, south of the Karelian ASSR and north of Tver, with the following alphabet:[4] Aa Ää Bb Cc Çç Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Öö Pp Rr Ss Şş Tt Yy Uu Vv Zz Ƶƶ з ь ȷ Note the additional letters borrowed from Cyrillic: з (/dʒ/) and ь (/ɯ/), as well as the unusual Latin ƶ (/ʒ/) and ȷ (j without dot, to denote palatalization).

Kalinin, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee discussed the Cyrillization of the Karelian language.

The final orthography was approved by the Karelian Regional Committee on February 10, 1938 and published in the newspaper Karelʹskaya Pravda.

The effort was dropped in 1940 and Finnish (written as always in the Latin alphabet) once again became an official language of the Karelian SSR.

[11] The postalveolar consonants Č, Š and Ž can be replaced by the digraphs Ch, Sh and Zh when writing the caron is impossible or inconvenient—for example ruočči ('Swedish') may be written as ruochchi.

In native words, it is found in lʼ nʼ sʼ tʼ in North Karelian, in dʼ lʼ nʼ rʼ sʼ tʼ in Livvi Karelian, and in dʼ lʼ nʼ rʼ sʼ zʼ tʼ in Ludic and Tver Karelian, but other palatalized consonants are also used in names and loanwords from Russian.