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 central contention, agreeing with Rédei's views, is that all of the lexical items claimed to be Indo-Uralic can be explained as loans from Indo-European into Uralic (see below for examples). The most common arguments in favour of a relationship between Indo-European and Uralic are based on seemingly common elements of morphology, such as the pronominal roots ("*m-" for first person; "*t-" for second person; "*i-" for third person), case markings (accusative "*-m"; ablative/partitive "*-ta"), interrogative/relative pronouns ("*kʷ-" "who?, which?"; "*y-" "who, which" to signal relative clauses) and a common SOV word order. Other, less obvious correspondences are suggested, such as