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 vocabulary common to Indo-European and Uralic remains. As examples they advance such comparisons as Proto-Uralic *' (or *') : Proto-Indo-European *', oblique stem *', both meaning 'water', and Proto-Uralic *' (or *') : Proto-Indo-European *', both meaning 'name'. In contrast to *' and *', the phonology of these words shows no sound changes from Indo-European daughter languages such as Indo-Iranian. In contrast to *' and *"", they show no morphological affixes from Indo-European that are absent in Uralic. According to advocates of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, the resulting core of common vocabulary can only be explained by the hypothesis of common