Hi everyone my name is Julie, and today we’re back to the Baltics.
We’ve seen Latvian before, and today we’re looking at another language of this region
- Estonian.
These two languages might be neighbours but they couldn’t be more different.
“Tere” and welcome to the Estonian language.
Estonian is the second smallest national language in the world (the first one is Icelandic).
It is spoken by around 1.1 million people and is the national language of Estonia,
one of the 3 Baltic states, that are located in the North-East Europe.
The other 2 Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania, have their national languages that are from
the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family, but with Estonian it is a completely
different story.
So let’s discuss that.
First of all, Estonian is not an Indo-European language, and it is not related to
almost any other European language, except for Finnish and Hungarian
or other smaller Northern European languages.
These languages in fact are members of the Finno-Ugric branch of a larger Uralic family,
which is spread all across Northern Eurasia.
It is named like that because the birthplace of this language family is considered to be
southern Ural mountains.
Around 3500 BC the Uralic language started to disintegrate into sub-groups with Finno-Ugric
people group travelling west and arriving to the Baltic region around 2500 BC and stayed there
evolving progressively into modern languages.
The name Aestii is found in Roman chronicles, but this was the name of some baltic tribes
that used to lived nearby.
When Germans arrived to the region they used to call Estonians by this name, and it stayed this way.
The ancient Estonians however used to call themselves "Maarahvas" or "the land people", and
their language "Maakeel".
From the 13th century until the beginning of the 20th century the territory of Estonia was
under a foreign rule, first of Germans, then of Russians.
When Estonia became an independent state, Estonian became its national language.
By that time 2 main dialects developed - northern, with its capital in Tallinn,
and southern, with its capital in Tartu.
The modern Estonian is based on the northern dialect.
And now we are going to explore the standard Estonian in this video, starting with pronunciation.
As with all Baltic languages, Estonian uses the Latin script
The Estonian alphabet has 27 letters, and these 4 are the so-called “foreign letters”,
that are used only in foreign loanwords or names.
The remaining latin letters can also be used for foreign names.
From the native Estonian sounds the most unusual for English speakers could be these four vowels
that are pronounced as Õ, Ä, Ö, and Ü.
And the difference between these two is that Õ is pronounced from your throat,
but the sound Ö is pronounced from the front part of your mouth.
Vowels do have a special place in the Estonian language, as you can see there are 9 of them,
plus 36 diphthongs or vowel combinations.
If you try hard enough you could even make a long word consisting only of vowels.
For example this one that I’m not even gonna try to pronounce
And yeah, the meaning doesn’t make sense that much, but it’s just to illustrate that
these things are possible.
Another special thing about the Estonian pronunciation is the sound length.
Both vowels or consonants can be either short, long or super long.
And the length of the sound can change the meaning, like in the word koli ‘junk’,
kooli ‘of school’ and kooli ‘to school’.
And you see that the long and super-long versions do not differ in the writing, so you have
to know where to use which depending on the context.
So now let’s hear how all these things actually sound.
So yeah, in my opinion the abundance of vowels, 55% of Estonian words, and these different long sounds
make for a rather melodic language.
But now on to serious stuff – the grammar.
Estonian, like most of the Uralic languages is agglutinative with some elements of fusion.
What does it all mean.
In an agglutinative language you make complex words by adding morphemes without changing
these morphemes.
In a fusional language you would change the morphemes depending on the gender or person.
So Estonian has both of these things!
As in many agglutinative languages, in Estonian you can make unreasonably long words
There is a joke, that Estonian has no sex and no future.
While of course the country’s birth rate is pretty low, but this actually tells, that
in Estonian there is no gender and no future tense.
To express future they just use present tense.
There are also no articles or prepositions, because all the information you need is added
at the end of the word or coded in the cases.
And about cases.
In Estonian there are 14 of them!
Of course, it’s a bit better than Finnish with 16 or Hungarian with 18, but still
And what adds complexity is that these change with the plural tense, but not in Finnish or Hungarian
So mastering Estonian grammar would definitely take some mental effort
But how about its vocabulary?
You would think that a country surrounded by various people groups and being
under a foreign rule for so long would have a great amount of loanwords.
And you wouldn’t be wrong.
This is a cool pie-chart from Wikipedia that shows word origins in Estonian.
We can see, that around a half is native Estonian, around one third is Germanic, mostly words
relating to agriculture, technology and politics, like kuld 'gold' or kuningas 'king’, also
some Baltic and Slavic loanwords from the neighbours like kanep 'hemp' or aken 'window’.
Now this one, “artificial” is interesting.
So what happened is that in the end of the 19th century during Estonian national
awakening movement there was a need for Estonian to become a literary language
One of the most famous actors of this period is Johannes Aavik.
He believed that in order to survive the Estonian had to develop new vocabulary, that was missing.
The work of his life was researching on different languages and creating new words for Estonian,
that are based either on Estonian dialects, or Finnish, or other foreign languages
Sometimes he even created words just from his head, that had no other relation to any other language
And you too can have fun creating brand new Estonian words, as it is definitely going to be
fun and challenging time learning Estonian
Except if you are not a Finnish native speaker, then it should be pretty straightforward.
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Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
Bye bye!