Origins

Unique, rebellious and mythical – Estonian is almost the only language in Europe not belonging to the Indo-European linguistic family. It’s an Uralic language from the family of Finno-Ugric languages, closer to Finnish. It has a genetic relationship with Hungarian, a slight influence from Germanic languages and some mainly lexical impact from its neighbors, Russia and Lithuania. Estonian is known for carrying the pride and mystery of an old civilization – in fact, it has retained some really unique linguistic features, which seem to be a hint of former grandeur and singularity.

Official Language

Estonian is official in Estonia. Since the country joined the European Union in 2004, it has also become one of the EU official languages. It’s also spoken by immigrant minorities in various countries, thus forming an overall number of slightly above one million native speakers.

Varieties

There are two major dialect groups of Estonian, northern and southern. They’re based on regional divisions, centered around the cities of Tallinn and Tartu, respectively. Immigrant communities are too small in number to form distinct dialect groups.

Brief History

The first written documents in Estonian date back to the 13th Century. It’s commonly believed in Estonia that the nation inherited a glorious civilization and has struggled throughout its history to safeguard the cultural achievements of that past. The lack of written examples of that former period of civilization is explained by the unfortunate history of the nation. The Northern crusades led to domination by Germany, Sweden and Russia. The country was freed after the war of independence in the 18th Century. The revival of the culture, language and past glory flourished for more than a century.

The formation of the USSR was another unfortunate event for Estonia. In 1940, the country became dominated by Russia and Estonian soon intense Russification was launched. Russian was taught to kids in kindergartens, while teaching Estonian to non-speakers was declared unnecessary.

After the Russian perestroyka and the collapse of the regime, Estonian was immediately announced as the only official language, and re-established its former stature.

Did you know?

Estonian, though spoken by only 1,100,000 people, is unique in many aspects among European languages. Though Estonia neighbors Russia, Estonian has nothing to do with Russian except for a few lexical borrowings.

Estonian is similar to Finnish. As a writing system, it uses the Latin alphabet, with some letters from the Czech and Scandinavian versions.

Estonian was called 'the economic miracle', having achieved the fastest economic growth worldwide after the collapse of the Communist regime. Estonian culture is heir to an old civilization. Most of its history has reached us as legends.