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
Agglutination would (in the largest scope ever proposed) include the Uralic and Turkic languages as well as Mongolian, Korean, Tamil and Japanese. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial. On the other hand, it is also the case that some languages that have developed from agglutinative proto-languages have lost this feature. For example, contemporary Estonian, which is so closely related to Finnish that the two languages are mutually intelligible, has shifted towards the fusional type. (It has also lost other features typical of the Uralic families, such as vowel harmony.) Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as