Estonian language

Estonian (eesti keel [ˈeːsʲti ˈkeːl] ^ⓘ) is a Finnic language and the official language of Estonia. It is written in the Latin script and is the first language of the majority of the country's population; it is also an official language of the European Union. Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people: 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 elsewhere.

By conventions of historical linguistics, Estonian is classified as a part of the Finnic (a.k.a. Baltic Finnic) branch of the Uralic (a.k.a. Uralian, or Finno-Ugric) language family. Other Finnic languages include Finnish and several endangered languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia. Estonian is typically subclassified as a Southern Finnic language, and it is the second-most-spoken language among all the Finnic languages.

Alongside Finnish, Hungarian and Maltese, Estonian is one of the only four (out of 24) official languages of the European Union that are not Indo-European languages.^{[citation needed]}

In terms of linguistic morphology, Estonian is a predominantly agglutinative language. The loss of word-final sounds is extensive, and this has made its inflectional morphology markedly more fusional, especially with respect to noun and adjective inflection. The transitional form from an agglutinating to a fusional language is a common feature of Estonian typologically over the course of history with the development of a rich morphological system.

Word order is considerably more flexible than in English, but the basic order is subject–verb–object.

The speakers of the two major historical languages spoken in Estonia, North and South Estonian, are thought by some linguists to have arrived in Estonia in at least two different migration waves over two millennia ago, both groups having spoken considerably different vernacular. Some linguists have classified South Estonian as another, separate Finnic language, rather than a variety of Estonian. Modern standard Estonian evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries based on the dialects of northern Estonia.

During the Medieval and Early Modern periods, Estonian accepted many loanwords from Germanic languages, mainly from Middle Low German (Middle Saxon) and, after the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, from the Standard German language.

Oldest written records of Estonian language date from the 13th century. The "Originates Livoniae" in the Livonian Chronicle of Henry contains Estonian place names, words and fragments of sentences.