Estonian people
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| c. 1.1 million | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Estonia: 905,805 |
|
 Finland
|
50,367 |
 United States
|
27,113 |
 Canada
|
24,000 |
 Sweden
|
25,509 |
 Russia
|
17,875 |
 Australia
|
7,543 |
 Germany
|
6,286 |
 Norway
|
5,092 |
 United Kingdom
|
3,400 |
 Ukraine
|
2,868 |
 Ireland
|
2,560 |
 Belgium
|
2,000 |
 Latvia
|
1,882 |
 Denmark
|
1,606 |
 Iceland
|
111 |
| Languages | |
| Estonian, Võro, Seto | |
| Religion | |
| Majority irreligious Historically Protestant Christian (Lutheranism) Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity minority |
|
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Finnic people | |
Estonians (Estonian: eestlased) are a Finnic ethnic group related to the Finns that mainly inhabit Estonia, a country located south of Finland and the Finnish Gulf. Their national language belongs to Finnic branch and is known as Estonian (Estonian: eesti keel).
Although Estonia is often geopolitically categorized as one of the Baltics, Estonians are linguistically, culturally and historically related to the neighboring Finns—both belonging to the Finnic people—differing from the non-Finnic Indo-European speaking Baltic peoples of Latvia and Lithuania.
Estonia was first inhabited about 10,000 years ago, just after the Baltic ice lake had retreated from Estonia. While it is not certain what languages were spoken by the first settlers, it is often maintained that speakers of early Uralic languages related to modern Estonian had arrived in what is now Estonia by about 5,000 years ago. Living in the same area for more than 5,000 years would put the ancestors of Estonians among the oldest permanent inhabitants in Europe. On the other hand, some recent linguistic estimations suggest that Fenno-Ugrian language arrived around the Baltic Sea considerably later, perhaps during the Early Bronze Age (ca. 1800 BCE).
The oldest known endonym of the Estonians is Maarahvas.Eesti, the modern endonym of Estonia, is thought to be derived from the word Aestii, the name given by the ancient Germanic people to the Baltic people living northeast of the Vistula River. The Roman historian Tacitus in 98 AD was the first to mention the "Aestii" people, and early Scandinavians called the land south of the Gulf of Finland "Eistland" ("Eistland" is also the current word in Icelandic for Estonia), and the people "eistr". Proto-Estonians (as well as other speakers of the Finnish language group) were also called Chuds (чудь) in Old East Slavic chronicles.
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Wikipedia