Estonian

How Estonian lost and regained sole status

Estonian became the official language of the Republic of Estonia when it was founded in 1918. After the Soviet army invaded again in 1944 it became in effect one of two official languages, with Russian, and many immigrants from Russia settled in the country; pressure towards bilingualism grew in the 1970s. The restoration of independence in 1991 made it the only official language again, and in 2004 it became an official language of the European Union. By the 2022 census over half of first- and second-generation immigrants had adopted it.

When did written Estonian begin

The oldest records are 13th-century place names and fragments in the Livonian Chronicle of Henry. The Kullamaa prayers of 1524 and 1528 are the earliest connected text. A book printed in 1525 was censored and every copy destroyed, so the first surviving book is a German and Estonian catechism of 1535. The New Testament appeared in Võro, a South Estonian variety, in 1686 and in northern Estonian in 1715. Native literature begins with the poems of Kristjan Jaak Peterson in the 1810s, and his birthday, 14 March, is kept as Mother Tongue Day.

Where the spelling came from

The current orthography rests on the Newer Orthography of Eduard Ahrens, from the second half of the 19th century, modelled on Finnish. It replaced a 17th-century system based on German. Writing b, g and d where p, k and t are pronounced keeps a word's stem visible through its endings.

On Saaremaa the dialect has no õ, and a five-metre monument put up in 2020 marks the joking border between õ and ö. Nearly a third of the vocabulary comes from Germanic languages, much of it from Middle Low German.