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| Estonian (Eesti) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Estonia |
| Region: | Northern Europe |
| Total speakers: | 1.1 million |
| Ranking: | Not in top 100 |
| Genetic classification: | Uralic languages Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Lappic Baltic Finnic Estonian |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Estonia |
| Regulated by: | - |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | et |
| ISO 639-2 | est |
| SIL | EST |
Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian does not have any language-family relationship to its southern neighbor Latvia, Latvian is a Baltic language related to Lithuanian. Estonian is related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and more distantly to Hungarian. One of the distinctive features of Estonian is that it has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that SAMPA /toto/, /to:to/ and /to::to/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /tot:o/, and /tot::o/. The distinction between long and overlong is, in practice, as much a matter of syllable stress (involving pitch) as duration. Long and overlong vowels are not distinguished in written Estonian; plosives, however, appear in writing with three "degrees": b,d,g; p,t,k and pp;tt;kk (all unvoiced plosives).
Like Finnish, Estonian employs the Roman script. The alphabet lacks the letters c, q, w, x, y, ("foreign letters"; except for foreign names and quote words and phrases) but contains the letters š, ž, ä, ö, ü, and õ. The last letter denotes a low, back, unrounded vowel (SAMPA /7/). (It has a different sound than the same letter in PortuguesePortuguese portugues is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts. It resembles VietnameseVietnamese (ting Vit, ting Vit-nam, or Vit-ngữ), a tonal language, is the national and official language of Vietnam (Vit-nam). It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Vit or người kinh), who constitute ab o-horn.)
Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to an inflected language. Over the course of Estonian history, GermanGerman (called Deutsch in German in which germanisch refers to prechristian times), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union. has exercised a strong influence on Estonian, both in vocabulary and syntax.
In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical genderIn linguistics, grammatical genders also called noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once. Source of d, but nouns and adjectives decline in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative, with the case and number of the adjective(s) always agreeing with that of the noun. Thus the illative for "a yellow house" (kollane maja) — "into a yellow house" is (kollasesse majja).
Unusually, the case system lacks an accusative case. Rather, the direct object of the verb appears either in the genitive (for total objects) or in the partitive (for partial objects). Genitive vs. partitive case opposition of object used with transitive verbs creates rough equivalent of the perfect vs. imperfect aspect opposition.
The verbal system lacks a distinctive future tense (the present tense serves here) and features special forms to express an action performed by an undetermined subject (the "impersonal").
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