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Estonian

Estonian

Summary

Estonian is natively spoken by about 950,000 people, primarily in Estonia. It is a central part of Estonian cultural identity, known for its rich tradition in folk music, literature, and the unique Song Festival. Written in the Latin alphabet, Estonian grammar features a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, 14 noun cases, and vowel harmony, making it unique among Finno-Ugric languages.

Stats

  • Language Family: Uralic

  • Writing System: Latin

  • Writing System Type: Alphabet

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 14

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 4

  • Word Order: SVO

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 9 

  • Number of Consonants: 28

Areas Where Spoken

  • Estonia (official) (68.5%) (924 k)

Resources

Websites

  • EestiKeelt.com - Very large list of resources for learning Estonian

  • Keeleklikk - Well-formatted, practical and interactive course with animations

  • Loecsen - Vocabulary with audio

  • Book2 - Phrasebook course with audio


Videos

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