Estonian language 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 origin,
Indo-Uralic languages or from an indirectly attested cognate root noun "*wed-". Proto-Uralic "*toHį-" 'give' and PFU "*wetä-" 'lead' also make perfect phonologic sense as borrowings. The number systems of Indo-European and Uralic show no commonalities. Moreover, while the numbers in all Indo-European languages can be traced back to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European numbers, this cannot be done for the Uralic numbers, where only "two" and "five" are common to all of the family (roots for 3-6 are common to all subgroups other than Samoyedic, and slightly less widespread roots are known for 1 and 10). This would appear to show that if Proto-Indo-European and