Category:Estonian

From Namespedia - Names Meaning and Origins

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and more than 150 000 speakers in other countries such as Sweden, Canada, USA, Russia, Australia, Finland, Germany. It belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages and is closely related to Finnish.It is one of the few languages of Europe that is not part of Indo-European languages. Estonian is related to Hungarian, distantly though since there is no mutual intelligibility between the two. The difference between Estonian and Hungarian is about as significant as between German and Persian. The Estonian dialects are divided into two groups - the northern and southern dialects. The Northern group , associated with the city of Tallinn consists of the kesk or middle dialect that is also the basis for the standard language.The Southern group, associated with the city of Tartu consists of the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto dialects