Which language is most similar to Estonian?
Estonian belongs to the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages, and it is most closely related to Finnish, Votic, Livonian, Ingrian, Karelian, and Veps.
Is Estonian close to German?
The Estonian language is strongly influenced by German. The Ethnic Germans, or the Baltic Germans were the inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic sea, which is today Estonia and Latvia.
How similar is Estonian to Finnish?
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.
What language Estonia speak?
EstonianEstonia / Official languageEstonian is a Finnic language, written in the Latin script. It is the official language of Estonia and one of the official languages of the European Union, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people; 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 outside Estonia. Wikipedia
What is harder Finnish or Estonian?
Estonian and Hungarian are more difficult than Finnish. Estonian more or less is Finnish; or at any rate Finns and Estonians claim to understand each other.
Can Estonians read Finnish?
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.
Is Estonian a hard language to learn?
Most Difficult Language To Learn. There are twelve cases in Estonian, more than two times the number of cases that exist in most Slavic languages. Apart from the fact that Estonian has many cases, this language is also hard because it has many exceptions in grammar rules, also, many words mean several different things.
What languages are spoken in Estonia?
The official language of Estonia is Estonian, a Uralic language which is related to Finnish. It is unrelated to the bordering Russian and Latvian languages, both of which are Indo-European (more specifically East Slavic and Baltic , respectively). The Estonian Swedes , are a Swedish-speaking linguistic minority traditionally residing in the coastal areas and islands of what is now western and northern Estonia.
How many languages are spoken in Estonia?
According to census figures for 2000, there are 109 languages spoken in Estonia as mother tongues, the majority language being Estonian (67.3\%) followed by Russian (29.7\%).
What is the closest language to Estonian?
Estonian (eesti keel) is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by roughly 1.1 million people in Estonia. Though it’s closely related to Finnish and distantly to Hungarian, Estonian bears almost no resemblance to any other European language in either vocabulary or grammar.