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 his 1931 book "Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century" (p. 338). Pedersen included both languages in his proposed Nostratic language family (ib.). A genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir was argued for in "Jukagirisch und Uralisch" ('Yukaghir and Uralic'), a 1940 work by Björn Collinder, one of the leading Uralic specialists of the 20th century (Greenberg 2005:124). Collinder was inspired by a 1907 article by Heikki Paasonen, which pointed to similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir, though it did not identify the two languages as genetically related (Greenberg, ib.). Uralic–Yukaghir is listed as a language family in "A Guide to the