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,
Indo-Uralic languages borrowed between them, most often from Indo-European languages into Uralic ones. An example of a Uralic word that cannot be original is Finno-Ugric *"śata" "hundred". The Proto-Indo-European form of this word was *"ḱm̥tóm" (compare Latin "centum"), which became *"ćatám" in early Indo-Iranian (reanalyzed as the neuter nominative–accusative singular of an "a" stem > Sanskrit "śatá-", Avestan "sata-"). This is evidence that the word was borrowed into Finno-Ugric from Indo-Iranian or Indo-Aryan. This borrowing may have occurred in the region north of the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 2100–1800 BC, the approximate floruit of Indo-Iranian (Anthony 2007:371–411). It provides linguistic evidence for the