Estonian language brotherhood.)</poem> Estonian language The Estonian language ( ) is the official language of Estonia, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people: 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. Alongside Finnish, Hungarian and Maltese, Estonian is one of the four official languages of European Union that is not of an Indo-European origin. Despite some overlaps in the vocabulary due to borrowings, in terms of its
Indo-Uralic languages Whether the "e" placed in parentheses is inherently part of the word is disputed but probable. The "ḷ" in Indo-European "*pḷlu-" represents a vocalic "l", a sound found in English in for instance "little", where it corresponds to the "-le", and "metal", where it corresponds to the "-al". An earlier form of the Indo-European word was probably "*pelu-". An asterisk (*) indicates reconstructed forms. A tilde (~) means 'alternating with'. Indo-Uralic languages Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic. A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in