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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages the subgrouping of the language family that must have existed if Uralic, Yukaghir, and Indo-European are all related. While the similarities he attributes to Uralic and Yukaghir, but not to Indo-European, such as the imperative endings, show closer kinship of Uralic and Yukaghir than of Uralic and Indo-European, the similarities he attributes to Uralic and Indo-European, but not to Uralic and Yukaghir, could also be placed in the balance, for example a plural in "*-i". Collinder appears to enumerate approximately as many morphological similarities between Uralic and Indo-European as between Uralic and Yukaghir and at least as many similarities in