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
Languages of Estonia Languages of Estonia The official language of Estonia is Estonian, a Uralic language which is related to Finnish. It is unrelated to the bordering Russian and Latvian languages, both of which are Indo-European (more specifically East Slavic and Baltic, respectively). Standard Estonian is mainly based on the North Estonian language, while South Estonian comprises several dialects, specifically Võro, Mulgi and Tartu. Võro, being furthest away from Standard Estonian, is the only one to have been given an ISO 639-3 language code by SIL ("vro"). Võru is widely accepted to have a subdialect Setu, although some consider it a separate language.