Estonian Language. Second Edition. Linguistica Uralica. Supplementary Series 1, Tallinn 2007

The Estonian language belongs to the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric lan­guage family. Today there are about 1.1 million native speakers of Estonian. Most of them (about 0.94 million) live in the Republic of Estonia, the rest (about 0.16 million) are scattered outside Estonia, with larger communities in Russia, the USA, Canada, and Sweden. The Estonian language developed on the basis of the converging tribal dialects (or languages) that were spoken in the Estonian area - the North Estonian dialect or the Maa dialect and the South Estonian dialect or the Ugala dialect - possibly in the 13th-16thcenturies. Standard Estonian started to develop in the 16th century. However, due to dialect differences at first Standard Estonian was not uniform but had two standard varieties - North Estonian or the Tallinn language and South Estonian or the Tartu language. Gradually Standard North Estonian started to predominate in the 18th century, especially after the publication of the North Estonian Bible in 1739. It gained the final victory over Standard South Estonian during the period of national awakening in the second half of the 19th century. The common standard lan­guage gave rise to the common spoken variety of educated Estonians and later the entire Estonian nation; the local dialects started to decline. The standard language became uniform by means of the language re­forms of the early 20th century. These reforms made it possible to use Esto­nian in all of its functions, including the language of science and higher education. Estonian was the official language ofthe Republic of Estonia in 1919-1940 and regained this status once again in 1988. Its use is regulated by the Language Law. Typologically Estonian is an agglutinating language but more fusional and analytic than the languages belonging to the northern branch of the Finnic languages. Estonian has been influenced by a number of languages, in the early period of the standard language especially by German but later also by Finnish and Russian. English is a major influence for the present-day usage. The first descriptions of the Estonian language were published as early as in the 17th century. However, the scientific research of Estonian started at the beginning of the 19th century. The year 1803 witnessed the beginning of teach­ing the Estonian language at the University of Tartu. National research into Estonian began at the end of the 19th century, during the period of national awakening. The first Estonian-language descriptions of Estonian were pub­lished during this period. More purposeful and fruitful research into Estonian developed after the professorship of the Estonian language was set up at the University of Tartu in 1919. There are very few general surveys of the Estonian language for the international reader, and the existing ones were published a long time ago. The most recent and the best one is Introduction to Estonian Linguistics by Alo Raun and Andrus Saareste (Ural-Altaische Bibliothek XII. Wiesbaden, 1965). The present volume attempts to fill this gap and to provide a comprehensive account of the Estonian language to the international reader - its structure, origin and development, standard language, dialects, spoken language, and the study of Estonian. The authors include Tiit-Rein Viitso, Professor of Finnic languages; Karl Pajusalu, Professor of History and Dialects of the Estonian Language; Mati Erelt, Professor of the Estonian Language (all three work at the University of Tartu); Tiiu Erelt, Senior Researcher at the Institute of the Estonian Language; Heli Laanekask, Lecturer in Estonian at the University of Oulu, and Leelo Keevallik, Researcher at the University of Uppsala. Enn Veldi, Associate Professor at the University of Tartu, made a significant con­tribution to this volume by translating a large part of the text into English. Mai Tiits, Researcher at the Institute of the Estonian Language, prepared the manuscript for publication. The writing and publication of this book was generously funded by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. The publication was addition­ally funded by the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Tartu and the Department of English of Tallinn Pedagogical University.