This article needs additional citations for verification. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Estonia, spoken natively by about 1. 1 million estonian russian relations: 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 outside Estonia.
It is a Southern Finnic language and is the second most spoken language among all the Finnic languages. Estonian is closely related to Finnish and belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. Although the Estonian and Germanic languages are of very different origins, one can identify many similar words in Estonian and German, for example. Estonian is a predominantly agglutinative language, but unlike Finnish, it has lost vowel harmony, the front vowels occurring exclusively on the first or stressed syllable, although in older texts the vowel harmony can still be recognized. The oldest written records of the Finnic languages of Estonia date from the 13th century.
Originates Livoniae in Chronicle of Henry of Livonia contains Estonian place names, words and fragments of sentences. Estonian are the so-called Kullamaa prayers dating from 1524 and 1528. In 1525 the first book published in the Estonian language was printed. The book was a Lutheran manuscript, which never reached the reader and was destroyed immediately after publication. The first extant Estonian book is a bilingual German-Estonian translation of the Lutheran catechism by S. Koell dating to 1535, during the Protestant Reformation period.
An Estonian grammar book to be used by priests was printed in German in 1637. The birth of native Estonian literature was in 1810 to 1820 when the patriotic and philosophical poems by Kristjan Jaak Peterson were published. Kas siis selle maa keel Laulutuules ei või Taevani tõustes üles Igavikku omale otsida? Can the language of this land In the wind of incantation Rising up to the heavens Not seek for eternity?
1918 and 1940, 23,868 titles were published. In modern times Jaan Kross and Jaan Kaplinski remain as two of Estonia’s best known and most translated writers. After the Estonian War of Independence in 1919, the Estonian language became the state language of the newly independent country. Estonia considered itself ethnic Estonian and spoke the language. As with Latvia many immigrants entered Estonia under Soviet encouragement. During the Perestroika era, The Law on the Status of the Estonian Language was adopted in January 1989.
The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union led to the restoration of the Republic of Estonia’s independence. South Estonian consists of the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto varieties. These are sometimes considered either variants of South Estonian or separate languages altogether. Vietnamese ơ, and is also used to transcribe the Russian ы. Bengt Gottfried Forselius and Johann Hornung based on standard German orthography. Estonian words and names quoted in international publications from Soviet sources are often back-transliterations from the Russian transliteration. This article should include a summary of Estonian phonology.
See Wikipedia:Summary style for information on how to incorporate it into this article’s main text. There are 9 vowels and 36 diphthongs, 28 of which are native to Estonian. Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to a fusional language. The accusative coincides with the genitive in the singular and with nominative in the plural.
