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 He lists 35 lexical cognates for Indo-European and Yukaghir. Of these cognates, 27 are common to Indo-European, Uralic, and Yukaghir. Even if one considers Greenberg's listings to be only the result of inspection, as they do not involve the construction of a comprehensive set of sound correspondences, they at least constitute a suggestive preliminary result. However, a large number of Proto-Uralic lexemes are traditionally explained as loanwords from Proto-Indo-European. The figures could also be skewed by the fact that the Indo-European and Uralic languages are much more heavily attested than the Yukaghir ones. However, the impressive figure is the 44