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Estonian Words
Estonian
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Estonian Story
Estonian
Uralic/Finno-Ugric/Finnic/Estonian
There are about 1.5 million speakers of
Estonian, the vast majority living in the highly industrialized
Estonia, a former republic of the Soviet Union.
Estonian is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, which constitute a branch of the Uralic language family. Its closest relative is Finnish, spoken across the Gulf of Finland. The two languages are sufficiently similar to be mutually intelligible, at least for those Estonians who speak the dialect of the north. Estonian is not, as sometimes thought, in any way related to its nearest geographic neighbors, Latvian and Lithuanian.
Like Latvian and Lithuanian, however,
Estonian employs the Roma script, the three being the only ones
in the former Soviet Union to do so. The alphabet lacks the
letter c,q,w,x,y,z but contains the letter 
found in no other
language. Umlauts may appear over the letters a, o, and u.