The History of Written Lutsi

Lutsi has never been a written language. Linguists have recorded it using phonetic transcription and in some individual cases there are records of researcher Paulopriit Voolaine seemingly attempting to encourage the practice of writing Lutsi among its speakers in the years before World War II. There are at least several letters written in Lutsi by Voolaine himself or along with a number of Lutsi community members to Oskar Kallas, the first researcher to study the Lutsis, who, during Estonia’s first independence period was Estonia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and several other countries. During those same pre-war years, the Livonians, another of Latvia’s Finnic minority nations, were publishing a newspaper and books in Livonian. Nothing of the kind happened for the Lutsis during that time.

One of the goals of my current research is to write a primer for learning about Lutsi. In order to write this kind of a book, it was necessary to first create a practical orthography — a writing system that could be read and used with ease by readers who were not professional linguists. Also, as there are no living fluent speakers of Lutsi today,I wanted to create a written form for Lutsi that conveyed the pronunciation of Lutsi as clearly as possible. This is so that readers could pick up the primer and even in the absence of Lutsi speakers to consult could sound out each Lutsi word with reasonable accuracy. The Lutsi writing system is based on the orthographies of Latvian and Latgalian. The orthographies of these languages are particularly well-suited for writing Lutsi and, in addition, all Lutsi descendants today speak one or both of these languages. The writing of some sounds and other features had to either be invented or added to the Lutsi writing system from the current South Estonian (Võro-Seto) writing system in use in Estonia.