Estonian eesti keel
Spoken in:	Estonia
Region:	Northern Europe
Total speakers:	1.1 million
Language family:	}}}  Finno-Ugric   Finno-Lappic    Baltic-Finnic     Estonian}}}
Official status
Official language of:	Estonia  European Union
Regulated by:	Institute of the Estonian Language / Eesti Keele Instituut (semi-official)
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	et
ISO 639-2:	est
ISO 639-3:	est

Estonian (eesti keel (helpinfo); IPA: [ˈeːs.ti ˈkeːl]) is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and by some ten thousand in various émigré communities. 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 IPA /toto/, /toːto/ and /toːˑto/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /totːo/, and /totːˑo/. In actuality, the distinction isn't purely in the phoneme length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.

Another feature that sets Estonian apart from most languages is the vowel õ ([ɤ]), a close-mid near-back unrounded vowel, which is farther back than the schwa ([ə]), but fronter than [o].

Revived language

Further information: List of revived languages

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 then the German-language 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 celebrated in Estonia as the Mother Tongue Day.^[1]

The domination of Estonia after the Northern Crusades, from the 13th century to 1918 by Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Russia resulted few early written literary works in Estonian language. Writings in Estonian became significant only in the 19th century with the spread of the ideas of Age of Enlightenment, during the Estophile Enlightenment Period(1750-1840). Although Baltic Germans at large regarded the future of Estonians as being a fusion with the Baltic Germans, the Estophile educated class admired the ancient culture of the Estonians and their era of freedom before the conquests by Danes and Germans in the 13 century. ^[2]

After the Estonian War of Independence Estonian language became the state language of the newly independent country. When the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940, the status of the Estonian language changed overnight. ^[3] In the second half of the 1970s, the pressure of Russification and bilingualism intensified. The Russian language was termed as ‘the language of friendship of nations’, and was taught to Estonian children as early as in kindergarten. At the same time teaching Estonian to non-Estonians was considered unnecessary^[4] During the Perestroika era The Law on the Status of the Estonian Language was adopted in January 1989. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the restoration of Republic of Estonia's independence. Estonian went back to being the only state language in Estonia.

Estonian literature

Main article: Estonian literature

The oldest records of written Estonian date from the 13th century. Originates Livoniae in Chronicle of Henry of Livonia contains Estonian place names, words and fragments of sentences. The earliest extant samples of connected Estonian are the so-called Kullamaa prayers dating from 1524 and 1528.^[5]The first known printed book in the language is a bilingual German-Estonian translation of the Lutheran catechism by S.Wanradt and J. Koell dating to 1535, during the Protestant Reformation period. For the use of priests an Estonian grammar was printed in German in 1637.^[6] The New Testament was translated into southern Estonian in 1686 (northern Estonian, 1715). The two dialects were united based on northern Estonian by Anton Thor Helle. Writings in Estonian became more significant in the 19th century during the Estophile Enlightenment Period (1750-1840).

In modern times Jaan Kross^[7] and Jaan Kaplinski^[8] remain as two of Estonia's best known and most translated writers.

Classification

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian is thus closely related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and is one of the few languages of Europe that is not Indo-European. Despite some overlaps in the vocabulary due to borrowings, in terms of its origin, Estonian is not related to its nearest neighbours, Swedish, Latvian and Russian, which are all Indo-European languages.

Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian (there is no mutual intelligibility between the two). It has been influenced by German (initially Middle Low German, later also standard German), Russian, Swedish and Latvian, though it is not related to them genetically.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is an agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost the vowel harmony of Proto-Finno-Ugric, although in older texts the vowel harmony is still to be recognized. Furthermore, the apocope of word-final sounds is extensive and has caused a shift from a purely agglutinative to an inflected language. The basic word order is Subject Verb Object.

Dialects

The Estonian dialects are divided into two groups - the northern and southern dialects, usually associated with the cities of Tallinn in the north and Tartu in the south, in addition to a distinct kirderanniku dialect, that of the northeastern coast of Estonia.

The northern group consists of the kesk or middle dialect that is also the basis for the standard language, the lääne or western dialect, roughly corresponding to Läänemaa and Pärnumaa, the saarte (islands') dialect of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa and the ida or eastern dialect on the northwestern shore of Lake Peipsi.

The southern group consists of the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto dialects. These are sometimes considered either variants of a South Estonian language, or separate languages altogether. Also, Seto is not usually considered a dialect of Estonian, but rather a variant of Võro.

Writing system

Alphabet

Like Finnish, Estonian employs the Latin alphabet, in addition to which the Estonian alphabet contains letters š, ž, ä, ö, ü, and õ. The letters c, q, w, x and y are limited to proper names of foreign origin, and f, z, š, and ž appear in loanwords and foreign names only. Ö, and ü are pronounced similarly to their equivalents in German. Unlike in standard German, Ä is pronounced [æ], as in English mat. The vowels Ä, Ö and Ü are, unlike in German, clearly separate phonemes and inherent in Estonian, although the letter shapes come from German. The letter õ denotes IPA /ɤ/, unrounded /o/, or a close-mid back unrounded vowel. (It has a different sound from the same letter in Portuguese. It is similar to the Ukrainian и, Russian ы, Turkish ı and the Vietnamese ơ.)

Orthography

Estonian orthography is essentially phonemic with each phoneme of the language represented by exactly one grapheme. Exceptions to this derive from historical agreements: for example the initial letter 'h' in words, preservation of the morpheme in declension of the word (writing b, g, d in places where p, k, t is pronounced) and in the use of 'i' and 'j'. Where it is very impractical or impossible to type š and ž, they are substituted with sh and zh in some written texts, although this is considered incorrect. Otherwise, the h in sh represents a voiceless glottal fricative, as in pasha (pas-'ha); this also applies to some foreign names.

Modern Estonian orthography is based on the Newer Orthography created by Eduard Ahrens in the second half of the 19th century based on Finnish Orthography. The Older Orthography it replaced was created in the 17th century by Bengt Gottfried Forselius and Johann Hornung based on standard German orthography. Earlier writing in Estonian had by and large used an ad hoc orthography based on Latin and Middle Low German orthography. Some influences of the standard German orthography — for example, writing 'W'/'w' instead of 'V'/'v' persisted well into the 1930s.

It should be noted that Estonian words and names quoted in international publications from Soviet sources are often incorrect back-transliterations from the Russian transliteration. Examples are the use of "ya" for "ä" (e.g. Pyarnu instead of the correct Pärnu) and "y" instead of "õ" (e.g., Pylva instead of the correct Põlva). Even in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" one can find "ostrov Khiuma", where "ostrov" means "island" in Russian and "Khiuma" is back-transliteration from Russian instead of correct "Hiiumaa" (Hiiumaa>Хийума(а)>Khiuma).

Phonology

Vowels

	Front		Back
	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
Close	i	y		u
Mid1	e	ø	ɤ	o
Open	æ		ɑ

1. The mid vowels are not close-mid or open-mid; the usual IPA notation uses these symbols.

There are nine phonemic monophthongs, with three phonetic lengths. Of these, simple and long are segmentally phonemic, and the third length level is suprasegmentally phonemic and aided by a distinctive tonal contour. The script distinguishes only short and long, marked by vowel doubling, e.g. öö "night". There are 19 segmental diphthongs^[9], and polysyllablic vowel clusters are also found. There are very few instances of vowel allophony: 'ä' may have pronunciations [æ] and [ɛ], and the phoneme /yː/ is pronounced as the diphthong [yi].

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	p pʲ		t tʲ			k kʲ
Nasal	m		n nʲ			(ŋ)[10]
Fricative		(f) v	s sʲ	(ʃ)			h
Approximant			l lʲ		j
Trill			r

Notes:

1. [ŋ] only appears as an allophone of [n] before [k]
2. [f] and [ʃ] are considered foreign sounds and they only appear in loanwords.

There is one series of stops, unvoiced unaspirated, with three phonemic lengths, written b d g, p t k and pp tt kk. The rest of the consonants also have distinctive length, but only short and long are distinguished in writing. As with vowels, two segmental length levels are phonemic, and the third level is suprasegmentally phonemic. For example, for 'n', short 'n' in lina "sheet", half-long 'n' in linna "town's", over-long 'n' in linna "to the town". The latter addition of length is traceable to a grammatical marker *-han that has elided.

The fricatives are s h, added with f š ž z for loans. The other consonants are j l m n r v, plus the allophonic velar nasal in nk and ng. Consonants may be palatalized; but this is not written in the orthography, as palatalization generally occurs before front vowels. About 0.15% of the vocabulary features fully phonemic palatalization, where palatalization occurs without the front vowel. The process is similar to that found in Eastern Finnish dialects, where word-final 'i' is elided, leaving the palatalization on the consonant. Thus, palatalization does not necessarily need a front vowel, and palatalized vs. plain continuants can be articulated.

Proto-Finnic, the ancestor of the Estonian language, lost palatalization, but Estonian is one of those languages which reacquired it from Slavic. Yet, it underwent further modification, which makes Estonian palatalization different from Russian palatalization. In Russian, palatalization causes some affrication and necessarily features a palatal approximant/fricative offglide, which is not the case in Estonian, where the consonant is otherwise unaffected.

The stress is on the first syllable; however, international loanwords and over-long consonants may alter this pattern. The stress is weak, and as length levels already control an aspect of "articulation intensity", most words appear evenly stressed.

Gradation

In Estonian language, sounds alternate between various grades of length and stress in different grammatical forms of a word.

Consonants

There are two principally different consonant gradation types in Estonian - qualitative and quantitative.

1) Qualitative changes
1a) deletion of a stop (g, b, d, k, t) or s (arg : ara, käskida : käsin, tuba : toa, uskuda : usun, mesi : mee)
1b) assimilation (kandma : kannan, vars : varre)
1c) replacement of a weak stop by rules b:v, d:j, g:j (kaebama : kaevata, rada : raja, märg : märja)
2) Quantitative changes
2a) alternation of long and short geminate (pikk : pika, sepp : sepa, võtta : võtan, kirss : kirsi)
2b) alternation of strong and weak stops (vilkuda : vilgub, kubjas : kupja, kartma : kardan).

The strengthening consonant gradation types of nouns are the following:
a) nouns that derived from a verb with consonant gradation, e.g.: hinne : hinde (verb hindama - hinnata - hindan)
b) nouns that end with s and are in weak grade in singular nominative, but singular genitive is in strong grade and the final s is deleted, e.g saabas : saapa
c) nouns that end with vowel + r (vaher : vahtra, tütar : tütre)
d) nouns that additionally to the gradating stem have stem final change e-me (liige : liikme, võti : võtme)

Vowels

Vowel gradation is the alternation of II and III grade (kool : kooli).

Grammar

Main article: Estonian grammar

Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to a fusional language. Over the course of Estonian history, German has exercised a strong influence on Estonian, both in vocabulary and syntax.

In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, 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 (except in the terminative, essive, abessive and comitative, where there is agreement only for the number, the adjective being in the genitive form). Thus the illative for "a yellow house" (kollane maja) — "into a yellow house" is (kollasesse majja).

The direct object of the verb appears either in the accusative (for total objects) or in the partitive (for partial objects). The accusative coincides with the genitive in the singular and with nominative in the plural. Accusative vs. partitive case opposition of object used with transitive verbs creates a telicity contrast, just as in Finnish. This is a 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").

Vocabulary

Although the Estonian and Germanic languages are of completely different origins, one can identify many similar words in Estonian and English, for example. This is primarily due to the fact that the Estonian language has borrowed nearly one third of its vocabulary from Germanic languages, mainly from Low Saxon (Middle Low German) during the period of German rule, and High German (including standard German). The percentage of Low Saxon and High German loanwords can be estimated at 22-25 percent, with Low Saxon making up about 15 percent.

Language example

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Estonian:

Kõik inimesed sünnivad vabadena ja võrdsetena oma väärikuselt ja õigustelt. Neile on antud mõistus ja südametunnistus ja nende suhtumist üksteisesse peab kandma vendluse vaim.

(All people are born free and equal in their dignity and rights. They are given reason and conscience and they shall create their relationships to one another according to the spirit of brotherhood.)

References

See also

External links

• Summer School of Estonian at Tallinn University
• Estonica.org article
• Estonian literary magazine
• Maps of dialect areas from the Institute of the Estonian Language
• (Estonian) Estonian Language Handbook (Eesti keele käsiraamat) — Institute of the Estonian Language
• Finnish and Estonian language with Japanese translation
• Õigekeelsussõnaraamat: shows the inflection of more than 100000 Estonian words, based on 90 patterns of nouns and 200 patterns of verbs
• Estonian verb conjugator and noun declinator
• Learn to speak Estonian

Dictionaries

• An Estonian-English dictionary (Institute of the Estonian Language)
• An English-Estonian-English dictionary (Institute of Baltic Studies) — based on a common school dictionary
• An English-Estonian dictionary / Inglise-Eesti sõnastik (ixl.ru)
• An Estonian-English-Estonian dictionary
• An Estonian-English-Estonian dictionary

•  • [ e] Official languages of the European Union
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Source: European Union website

Finno-Ugric languages
Ugric	Hungarian | Khanty | Mansi
Permic	Komi | Komi-Permyak | Udmurt
Finno-Volgaic	Mari | Erzya | Moksha | Merya† | Meshcherian† | Muromian†
Sami	Akkala Sami† | Inari Sami | Kemi Sami† | Kildin Sami | Lule Sami | Northern Sami | Pite Sami | Skolt Sami | Southern Sami | Ter Sami | Ume Sami
Baltic-Finnic	Estonian | Finnish | Ingrian | Karelian | Kven | Livonian | Ludic | Menkieli | South Estonian | Veps | Votic | Vro † denotes extinct