Estonian (language)
| Estonian | |
|---|---|
| eesti keel | |
| Native to | Estonia |
| Ethnicity | Estonians |
|
Native speakers
|
1.1 million (2012) |
|
Latin (Estonian alphabet) Estonian Braille |
|
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
 Estonia European Union
|
| Regulated by | Institute of the Estonian Language / Eesti Keele Instituut, Emakeele Selts (semi-official) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | et |
| ISO 639-2 | est |
| ISO 639-3 |
Individual codes: – Standard Estonian – Võro |
| Glottolog | esto1258 |
| Linguasphere | 41-AAA-d |
 |
|
Estonian (eesti keel [ˈeːsti ˈkeːl]) is the official language of Estonia, spoken natively by about 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 outside Estonia. It belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family.
Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages, along with Finnish, Karelian, and other nearby languages. The Uralic languages do not belong to the Indo-European languages. Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian and to the Sami languages.
Estonian has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League and spoken natively in the area known today as Estonia by a sizeable burgher community of Baltic Germans, and later, standard German), and Russian, though it is not related to them genetically.
Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is a predominantly agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost vowel harmony, the front vowels occurring exclusively on the first or stressed syllable, although in older texts the vowel harmony can still be recognized. Furthermore, the apocope of word-final sounds is extensive and has contributed to a shift from a purely agglutinative to a fusional language. The basic word order is subject–verb–object.
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