Estonian language
Estonian
eesti keel
Spoken in
Estonia
Estonian immigrant communities
Region
Northern Europe
Total
speakers
1.25 million
Language
family
Uralic
Finno-Ugric
Finno-Permic
Finno-Volgaic
Finno-Lappic
Baltic-Finnic
Estonian
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 either:
est – Estonian (generic)
ekk – Standard Estonian
Estonian (
eesti keel ; pronounced [ˈeːsti
ˈkeːl]) is the official language of Estonia,
spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia
and tens of thousands in various émigré com-
munities. It is a Finno-Ugric language and is
closely related to Finnish.
One distinctive feature that has caused a
great amount of interest in linguists is that
Estonian has what is traditionally seen as
three degrees of phoneme length: short,
long, and "overlong", such that /toto/, /toˑto/
and /toːto/ are distinct. In actuality, the dis-
tinction isn’t purely in the phoneme length,
and the underlying phonological mechanism
is still disputed.
State Language
Cannot the tongue of this land
In the fire of incantation
Rising up to the heavens
Seek for eternity?
Kristjan Jaak Peterson
Those lines have been interpreted as a claim
to reestablish the birthright of the Estonian
language. Kristjan Jaak Peterson (1801-22)
the first student at the then German-lan-
guage University of Tartu to acknowledge his
Estonian origin, is commonly regarded as a
herald of Estonian national literature and
considered the founder of modern Estonian
poetry. His birthday on March 14 is celeb-
rated in Estonia as the Mother Tongue
Day.[1]
The domination of Estonia after the North-
ern Crusades, from the 13th century to 1918
by Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Russia
resulted in few early written literary works in
the Estonian language. Writings in Estonian
became significant only in the 19th century
with the spread of the ideas of the Age of En-
lightenment, during the