#uralangsestonian

Estonian is an Uralic language spoken by approximately 1,1 million people in mainly in Estonia but also in Sweden, the US and Finland. It is an official language of Estonia and the EU. Estonian belongs to the South-Finnic group of the Finnic branch of Uralic languages. Thus, Estonian is rather closely related to languages such as Finnish and Karelian and more distantly related to for example Hungarian and Mari. Estonian itself can be divided into two main dialect groups - northern and southern dialects. By some the two are even considered to be different languages. In addition, there is also Northeastern coastal Estonian, which has very few speakers left.

The oldest texts written in Estonian date back to the 13th century, the first book published in Estonian date back to mid 1520’s. Similarly to for example Finnish and Mari, the essential reason for the creation of written language was spreading Christianity. The Estonian literary tradition began in the early 19th century as the ideas of The Enlightenment spread across Europe. Around those times the language was heavily reformed and developed. A major figure in the birth of native Estonian literature was Kristjan Jaak Peterson whose birthday is nowadays celebrated as Mother Tongue Day in Estonia. Ever since Estonia became independent in 1918, Estonian has been a state language and was one even during the Soviet era, though at that time alongside Russian.

Estonian is an agglutinative language while also being relatively fusional compared to for example Finnish and Hungarian, which are noticeably more purely agglutinative. In Estonian there are 14 cases, which might sound scary but we can promise you it’s not that bad! The language that has affected Estonian the most is German, but also Russian and Finnish have had an effect on the language. An interesting part of the language’s history is the end of the 19th century when a lot of vocabulary was artificially created and integrated into the language.