Proto-Karelian language

Proto-Karelian, also known as Old Karelian, was a language once spoken on the western shore of Lake Ladoga in Karelia, from which the dialects of the Karelian language (White, Southern and Livvi), Ludic, the Ingrian language, as well as the South Karelian and Savonian dialects of the Finnish language have developed. It was spoken around the 12th and 13th centuries, and the language was likely quite uniform with little regional variance. The Eastern Finnish dialects developed from Proto-Karelian when the language of the inhabitants who had moved to the area around present-day Mikkeli mixed with western, likely Tavastian, speakers of Finnish. The Livvi-Karelian dialect and Ludic developed from the mixture of the old Vepsian language spoken by the Vepsians of the Olonets Isthmus and Proto-Karelian.

Innovations in Proto-Karelian include: the disappearance of *d and *g between vowels, the plural stem *-lOi-, the labialization of *e in post-syllables before labial consonants and the use of "männä" (with ä instead of e) for the word "mennä" (to go). The Old Karelian language had already been in contact with Old Russian speakers within its early stages.