Votic is spoken only in Krakolye (now part of Ust-Luga) and Luzhitsy, two villages in Kingiseppsky District in Leningrad Oblast, Russia.

In the 2020–2021 Russian census, 21 people claimed to speak Votic natively, which is an increase from 4 in 2010.

Some linguists, including Tiit-Rein Viitso and Paul Alvre,[6] have claimed that Votic evolved specifically from northeastern dialects of ancient Estonian.

[7] Votic regardless exhibits several features that indicate its distinction from Estonian (both innovations such as the palatalisation of velar consonants and a more developed system of cases, and retentions such as vowel harmony).

World War II had a devastating effect on the Votic language, with the number of speakers considerably decreased as a result of military offensives, deliberate destruction of villages by Nazi troops, forced migration to the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia and to Finland under the Nazi government, and the Stalinist policy of "dispersion" immediately after the war against the families whose members had been sent to Finland under the Nazi government.

Thus, in the second half of the 20th century there emerged a generation of young ethnic Votes whose first language was Russian and who understood Votic but were unable to speak it.

In 1995–1998, Votic language courses were held in St. Petersburg, which were organized by Mehmet Muslimov.

[10][11] In 2015, a Votic study book called "Vad'd'a sõnakopittõja" was published by Heinike Heinsoo and Nikita Djačkov.

[15] A fourth dialect of Votic has often been claimed as well: the traditional language variety of the village of Kukkuzi.

[13] In particular, all phonological features that Votic shares specifically with Estonian (e.g. the presence of the vowel õ) are absent from the dialect.

The transcriptions based on Latin have many similarities with those used in closely related Finnic languages, such as the use of č for /t͡ʃ/.

[19] In some central dialects, the long mid vowels /eː oː øː/ have been diphthongized to /ie uo yø/, as in Finnish.

Some suffixes including the vowel o do not harmonize (the occurrence of ö in non-initial syllables is generally a result of Finnish or Ingrian loan words), and similarly onomatopoetic words and loanwords are not necessarily subject to rules of vowel harmony.

The lateral /l/ has a velarized allophone [ɫ] when occurring adjacent to back vowels.