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 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 1869 (Pedersen 1931:336) but was received with little enthusiasm. Since then, the predominant opinion in the linguistic community has remained that the evidence for such a relationship is insufficient. However, quite a few prominent linguists have always taken the contrary view (e.g. Henry Sweet, Holger Pedersen, Björn Collinder, Warren Cowgill, Jochem Schindler, Eugene Helimski and Gert Klingenschmitt). There are two distinct questions here (cf. Greenberg 2005:325): At the same time,