Estonian and Russian are the most common
2007-02-01 05:05:38
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answer #1
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answered by Katie♥ 2
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Estonian language
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Estonian
eesti keel
Spoken in: Estonia
Region: Northern Europe
Total speakers: 1.1 million
Language family: Uralic
Finno-Ugric
Finno-Lappic
Baltic-Finnic
Estonian
Official status
Official language of: Estonia, European Union
Regulated by: Institute of the Estonian Language / Eesti Keele Instituut (semi-official)
Language codes
ISO 639-1: et
ISO 639-2: est
ISO/FDIS 639-3: est
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.
Estonian (eesti keel (help·info); IPA: [ˈeːs.ti ˈkeːl]) is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and by some ten thousand in various émigré communities. It is a Finno-Ugric language but is not closely related to Finnish.
One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest in linguists is that Estonian has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that IPA /toto/, /toːto/ and /toːˑto/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /totːo/, and /totːˑo/. In actuality, the distinction isn't purely in the phoneme length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.
Another feature that sets Estonian apart from most languages is the vowel õ ([ɤ]), a close-mid near-back unrounded vowel, which is farther back than the schwa ([ə]), but fronter than [o].
God bless you :)
2007-02-01 05:11:31
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answer #2
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answered by Anonymous
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Estonian, which is closely related to Finnish and, together with Finnish, Sami and Hungarian, represents the only four Finno-Ugric languages spoken in Europe.
2007-02-01 10:37:34
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answer #3
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answered by Sterz 6
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Estonian
2007-02-01 04:59:34
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answer #4
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answered by Justina 4
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mainly swedish, which is NOT derived from Latin. Only Romance languages are. There may be some "lap" (sami) dialects spoken in the north - those would be related to finnish, and they do not belong to the germanic language group
2016-05-24 02:10:41
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answer #5
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answered by Anonymous
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