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Estonian
| Estonian | |
|---|---|
| Language code (ISO 639-1) | et |
| Language code (ISO 639-2) 3-char | est |
| Native speakers (L1) | 1200000 |
| 2nd language speakers (L2) | |
| Wikipedia page to check | wikipedia:Estonian language |
Estonian (eesti keel [ˈeːsʲti ˈkeːl]) is a Finnic language and the official language of Estonia.
It is written in the Latin script, and is the first language of the majority of the country's population; it is also an official language of the European Union.
Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people; 922,000 people in Estonia, and 160,000 elsewhere.
According to linguistic typology, the Estonian language is considered a part of the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. Other Finnic languages include Finnish and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia.
Estonian is typically subclassified as a Southern Finnic language, and it is the second-most-spoken language among all the Finnic languages.
Alongside Finnish, Hungarian, and Maltese, Estonian is one of the four official languages of the European Union that are not typologically considered Indo-European languages.