| As is typical of small peoples, the Estonian identity is closely connected to the language; it is natural, therefore, that Estonians speak Estonian. It is used as a mother tongue by just under 1.1 million people. Approximately 950 000 of these live in Estonia; the remainder in Sweden, Canada, the United States, Russia and elsewhere. Estonian is one of the world's smallest cultural languages to include contemporary terminology for all major fields of life. |
| Language: |
Greek |
Japanese |
Hungarian |
Estonian |
Finnish |
| Speakers (mln): |
12 |
125 |
14,5 |
1,1 |
6 |
|
| Estonian, different from most spoken languages in Europe, does not belong to the Indo-European group; it belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, which also includes Finnish and Hungarian Estonian has 14 cases, but no articles or grammatical gender. Thus, the same pronoun is used to refer to a man, woman or even a thing. Estonian word order can be relatively lax, because relations between words are marked by case endings. For instance, the sentence: |
| koer |
hammustas |
poissi |
| the dog |
bit |
the boy |
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 |
| means exactly the same if one changes the word order to: |
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| or |
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In the course of their joint history, Estonian has borrowed from Low German, High German, Swedish and Russian. These languages and Latvian are connected with Estonian largely through reciprocal loans; the relationship between the Indo-European languages and Estonian is originally as distant as English is from Turkish. The Estonian language uses, and has always used, the Latin alphabet; nowadays, 32 letters are used in spelling. There are 18 consonants and 9 vowels in Estonian. Foreigners are certainly not accustomed to the vowels
õ
,
ä
,
ö
and
ü
which have been added to the usual 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' and 'u'. The role of vowels in Estonian is among the greatest in any European language, whereby a string of vowels can form meaningful words around the frame of few consonants. For example: hauaööõudused ('horrors of the night in the grave').
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