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 The Uralic negative verb represents a worn-down formation and is therefore presumably an old one. (2) It is built on an obsolete verb ‘to be’. (3) Most decisively, it is found in all branches of Uralic, including Samoyedic. Therefore, it is at least as ancient as Proto-Uralic, that is to say, some 4,500 or 6,500 years old, according to the two prevailing current estimates. The Yukaghir negative verb is unlikely to be borrowed from Uralic, because morphological formations are rarely borrowed. Yet no evidence for the Uralic/Yukaghir negative verb formation is found in the Indo-European languages. It thus seems likely