Original vowel length has mostly been lost as well (with the exception of Northern Veps, which retains ii and uu).

Veps also shows some characteristic innovations such as the vocalization of original syllable-final *l, and the expansion of the local case system.

292 is the first known document in any Finnic language; it is considered to be closest to modern Karelian or Veps.

[8] According to Ethnologue there were 3,160 speakers of Veps in 2010, located in the Republic of Karelia and in the Leningrad and Vologda Oblasts.

[9] Veps shows substantial dialectal variation, affecting both phonetics and grammatical features.

Northern Veps is spoken in the Republic of Karelia along the coast of Lake Onega south of Petrozavodsk.

They are spoken around a long line stretching from Tervenichey in the Lodeinopolsky District of Leningrad Oblast to near Lake Beloye.

Characteristics of Southern Veps are: In general, palatalizable consonants are palatalized allophonically before a front vowel.

Compare: Russian loanwords have also introduced instances of non-palatalized consonants followed by /i/, which are much more frequent in that language.

[12] It consists of a total of twenty-nine characters: twenty-two are from the basic modern Latin alphabet, six are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization of the preceding sound.

Notes: Nouns have four principal parts, from which all other noun forms can be derived by replacing the endings: The illative singular stem is the same as the genitive singular stem, except that the final vowel is dropped in some cases.

The personal pronouns are of Finno-Ugric origin: Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: