suhtumisetes

Suhtumisetes is an Estonian linguistic term used to refer to the collective attitudes or stances expressed within social interaction. The base noun suhtumine means "relationship" or "attitude," and the form discussed here represents a locative plural inflection used to indicate "in attitudes" or "in relation to attitudes" contexts. In standard Estonian, the ordinary inessive plural is typically suhtumistes; the spelling suhtumisetes appears in some texts and may reflect dialectal variation, historical orthography, or compounding with related forms. As such, suhtumisetes is a niche term encountered mainly in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

In usage, the concept functions to describe how speakers position themselves toward others, align with interlocutors, or express evaluative stance within talk. Researchers examine which attitudes are invoked, how they shift during conversation, and how stance interacts with social identity, power, and topic management. The term thus intersects with broader notions of stance-taking, evaluation, and affect in pragmatics and conversation analysis.

Note that because the form suhtumisetes is not universally standardized, researchers may prefer suhtumistes or related constructions in corpus work. For this reason, readers should consult specific Estonian grammars or corpora when encountering variants. See also suhtumine, suhtlus, stance, discourse analysis, pragmatics.