Can a Finnish person understand Estonian?
Finnish and Estonian are mutually intelligible – to a point. The grammar, syntax and vocabulary are pretty similar, and you are very likely to understand the context.
Does Estonian sound like Finnish?
Estonian is Finnish 2.0. Yes, they are very very similar, but Estonian is the harder one of the two languages. Estonians can understand Finns just fine, but Finns have great difficulty with understanding Estonians. Expect more really odd sounding vowels when you hear Estonian.
What Finns think about Estonians?
If you meet Finns who praise Estonia/Estonians, they usually do it for the following reasons:
- Political. Especially if you’re a right-wing Libertarian / Conservative, you will praise the economic success of post-1990’s Estonia and the patriotism of the Estonian people.
- Travel.
- Romantic.
Is Estonian harder than Finnish?
But Estonian is considerably easier for a Finnish speaker! According to the Foreign Service Institute, Estonian is the fifth hardest language to learn and Finnish is the sixth. Differing by a rank, the two languages are hence comparatively easier for each other.
Are Finnish and Estonian mutually understandable?
Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible. They belong to different sub-branches of Finnic languages. Finns and Estonians can understand some words of each other’s language, and it is possible to create sentences that are mutually intelligible.
Are Estonians and Finns the same?
Estonians are seen as culturally similar to Finns. The Estonian language is similar to Finnish and both Finns and Estonians have a common origin that stretches back to several millennium ago in the Northern Russia and Ural. Sometimes Estonia is referred as the little brother of Finland.
Is Estonian older than Finnish?
The languages of these two countries, Finnish and Estonian, were the same language (Late Proto Finnic) around 2000 years ago, but have grown apart since then.
How similar is Finnish to Estonian?
Finnish and Estonian vocabulary. The lexical similarity of Finnish and Estonian is slightly lower than 50\%. That means a little less than half of the words in either language has corresponding cognate words in the other.