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 between Uralic and Yukaghir, but for a Uralic–Yukaghir language family, in his "Introduction to the Uralic Languages" (1965:30): Collinder goes on to compare Uralic with Indo-European (1965:30–34). He begins by saying, "An Indo-Uralic affinity is far from being strictly proved", and emphasizes that he has not been able to find as many "plausible" cognates for Uralic and Indo-European as for Uralic and Yukaghir, at most about twenty. He then goes on to list 15 of these cognates, with reflexes in Uralic and Indo-European languages, and to discuss similarities between Uralic and Indo-European in morphology. He makes no explicit statement on