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
Uralic–Yukaghir languages In 1933, the pioneering Indo-Europeanist Holger Pedersen published a comparative study of the verb endings in Uralic and Indo-European. According to Pedersen (1933: §8), the Uralic negative verb was formed from a verb "*e-" meaning 'be' plus the personal endings, which are identical to the personal pronouns. For instance, for the verb "*mene" 'go', the Proto-Uralic forms would have been: 1s. "*e-m mene", 2s. "*e-t mene"; 1p. "*e-me mene", 2p. "*e-te mene" meaning 'I do not go', 'thou dost not go', etc., literally 'be-me go', 'be-thou go', etc. The Uralic negative particle "*ne" 'not' would have originally formed part of