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,
Uralic–Yukaghir languages has vaguely implied the existence of a Uralic–Yukaghir genetic node, and in this he seems to have been followed by Ruhlen and Greenberg, followed in turn by Bomhard. The actual relations of these languages remain to be scrutinized in detail. No work of synthesis of a definitive nature has appeared on this subject. As in several other cases of this sort (see Ural–Altaic languages), that Uralic and Yukaghir are related has been argued for in some detail, but how they are related remains uncertain. It is therefore not surprising that, at the present time (2009), the validity of the Uralic–Yukaghir