Estonian language
The Estonian language (eesti keel) is spoken by about 1.101 million people, of which the great majority live in the Republic of Estonia.
| Estonian (Eesti) | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Estonia |
| Region: | Northern Europe |
| Total speakers: | 1,100,000 |
| Ranking: | Not in top 100 |
| Genetic classification: | Uralic languages Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Lappic Baltic Finnic Estonian |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | Estonia |
| Regulated by: | valign="top" |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | et |
| ISO 639-2 | est |
| SIL | EST |
Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian does not, as many believe, have any language-family relationship to its nearest geographic neighbors, the Baltic languages Latvian and Lithuanian, but is related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and Hungarian. It is not true, however, that the northern dialects of Estonian are sufficiently similar to Finnish for the two to be mutually intelligible.
One of the distinctive features of Estonian is that it has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that SAMPA /toto/, /to:to/ and /to::to/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /tot:o/, and /tot::o/. The distinction between long and overlong is, in practice, as much a matter of syllable stress (involving pitch) as duration. Long and overlong vowels are not distinguished in written Estonian; plosives, however, appear in writing with three "degrees": b,d,g; p,t,k and pp;tt;kk (all unvoiced plosives).
Like Latvian and Lithuanian, Estonian employs the Roman script. The alphabet lacks the letters c, q, w, x, y, ("foreign letters"; except for foreign names and quote words and phrases) but contains the letters ÃÂ, ÃÂ, ä, ö, ü, and õ. The last letter denotes a low, back, unrounded vowel (SAMPA /7/). (It has a different sound than the same letter in Portuguese. It resembles Vietnamese o-horn.)
Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to an inflected 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. Thus the illative for "a yellow house" (kollane maja) ÃÂ "into a yellow house" is (kollasesse majasse).
Unusually, the case system lacks an accusative case. Rather, the direct object of the verb appears either in the genitive (for total objects) or in the partitive (for partial objects).
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").
See also: List of tongue-twisters
External links