Estonian language
The Estonian language (eesti keel) is spoken by about 1.101 million people, of which the great majority live in the Republic of Estonia.
Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian does not have any language-family relationship to its southern neighbor Latvia, Latvian is a Baltic language related to Lithuanian. Estonian is related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and more distantly to Hungarian.
One of the distinctive features of Estonian is that it has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that SAMPA /toto/, /to:to/ and /to::to/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /tot:o/, and /tot::o/. The distinction between long and overlong is, in practice, as much a matter of syllable stress (involving pitch) as duration. Long and overlong vowels are not distinguished in written Estonian; plosives, however, appear in writing with three "degrees": b,d,g; p,t,k and pp;tt;kk (all unvoiced plosives).
Like Finnish, Estonian employs the Roman script. The alphabet lacks the letters c, q, w, x, y, ("foreign letters"; except for foreign names and quote words and phrases) but contains the letters š, ž, ä, ö, ü, and õ. The last letter denotes a low, back, unrounded vowel (SAMPA /7/). (It has a different sound than the same letter in Portuguese. It resembles Vietnamese o-horn.)
Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to an inflected language. Over the course of Estonian history, German has exercised a strong influence on Estonian, both in vocabulary and syntax.
In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, but nouns and adjectives decline in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative, with the case and number of the adjective(s) always agreeing with that of the noun. Thus the illative for "a yellow house" (kollane maja) — "into a yellow house" is (kollasesse majasse).
Unusually, the case system lacks an accusative case. Rather, the direct object of the verb appears either in the genitive (for total objects) or in the partitive (for partial objects). Genitive vs. partitive case opposition of object used with transitive verbs creates rough equivalent of the perfect vs. imperfect aspect opposition.
The verbal system lacks a distinctive future tense (the present tense serves here) and features special forms to express an action performed by an undetermined subject (the "impersonal").
See also
