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
Finnic languages East Finnish dialects, and is only missing from West Finnish dialects and Standard Finnish. A special characteristic of the languages is the large number of diphthongs. There are 16 diphthongs in Finnish and 25 in Estonian; at the same time the frequency is greater in Finnish than in Estonian. There are 14 grammatical cases in Estonian and 15 in Finnish, which are denoted by adding a suffix. The Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum with few clear-cut boundaries. Innovations have often spread through a variety of areas, even after variety-specific changes. A broad twofold conventional division of the Finnic