eestikeele

Estonian, known in Estonian as eesti keel, is a Finnic language in the Uralic language family. It is the national language of Estonia and is spoken as a first language by the majority of the country’s population, with a sizable community of speakers abroad, particularly in Sweden, Finland, and Canada.

Estonian uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics and has a standardized written form based largely on the Northern dialects. The orthography was codified in the 19th and early 20th centuries and has remained relatively stable since Estonia regained independence. The writing system represents phonemic distinctions such as vowel quality and length, as well as consonant contrasts, and it supports a rich system of inflections.

The language features a highly inflected grammar with extensive use of cases to express grammatical relations, no grammatical gender, and two numbers (singular and plural). Verbs encode tense, mood, voice, and aspect, and are conjugated for person and number. Estonian employs vowel harmony and consonant gradation, phenomena that influence the form of affixes and some pronunciation patterns. The word order is typically subject–verb–object but is flexible due to the case system, allowing emphasis and nuance through placement and inflection rather than fixed syntax alone.

Estonian has two broad dialect groups: Northern Estonian (the basis for standard Estonian) and Southern Estonian, which includes subdialects such as Võro and Seto. Standard Estonian is used in education, media, and official communication, while dialects remain vibrant in regional speech and literature. The language has incorporated loanwords from German, Swedish, Russian, and other languages over centuries, reflecting Estonia’s historical contacts.