Estonian (Eesti Keel)
Estonian is the official language of the Republic of Estonia. It is spoken by about 950 000 in Estonia and 150 000 in various expatriate communities (in Canada, USA, Finland, Sweden, UK, Australia, Russia and other countries).
It is possible to follow the development of Estonian as a language from the beginning of the 13th century. The oldest examples of written Estonian are names, words, and phrases found in early 13th century chronicles. The first book containing a text in Estonian was published in 1525, but has not survived. An Estonian textbook first appeared in 1637. The first Estonian grammars and dictionaries were compiled in the 17th century: Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann published the comprehensive Estonian-German dictionary in 1869, and a grammar describing the Estonian language in 1875.
The Estonian language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group and is closely related to Finnish. The main difference between Estonian and Finnish is that Finnish has a lot of loan words from Swedish, while Estonian contains many words of German origin, plus some words from Russian, Latin, Greek and English. There is considerable mutual intelligibility between Estonian and Finnish.
Throughout its history the Estonian literary language has used the Latin alphabet and its variants. The Estonian alphabet consists of 32 letters: A, B, (C), D, E, (F), G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, (Q), R, S, , Z, Þ, T, U, V, (W), Õ , Ä, Ö, Ü, (X), (Y) The pronunciation of the Estonian literary language is relatively simple, i.e. its orthography is largely phonetic. There is no grammatical gender. There are fourteen nominal cases. There are no articles (either definite or indefinite).
Estonian is the official language of the Republic of Estonia. It is spoken by about 950 000 in Estonia and 150 000 in various expatriate communities (in Canada, USA, Finland, Sweden, UK, Australia, Russia and other countries).
It is possible to follow the development of Estonian as a language from the beginning of the 13th century. The oldest examples of written Estonian are names, words, and phrases found in early 13th century chronicles. The first book containing a text in Estonian was published in 1525, but has not survived. An Estonian textbook first appeared in 1637. The first Estonian grammars and dictionaries were compiled in the 17th century: Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann published the comprehensive Estonian-German dictionary in 1869, and a grammar describing the Estonian language in 1875.
The Estonian language belongs to the Finno-Ugric language group and is closely related to Finnish. The main difference between Estonian and Finnish is that Finnish has a lot of loan words from Swedish, while Estonian contains many words of German origin, plus some words from Russian, Latin, Greek and English. There is considerable mutual intelligibility between Estonian and Finnish.
Throughout its history the Estonian literary language has used the Latin alphabet and its variants. The Estonian alphabet consists of 32 letters: A, B, (C), D, E, (F), G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, (Q), R, S, , Z, Þ, T, U, V, (W), Õ , Ä, Ö, Ü, (X), (Y) The pronunciation of the Estonian literary language is relatively simple, i.e. its orthography is largely phonetic. There is no grammatical gender. There are fourteen nominal cases. There are no articles (either definite or indefinite).