Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language, specifically a Finnic language, and is the official language of Estonia. It is spoken by around 1.1 million people, primarily in Estonia, with a smaller diaspora presence elsewhere. While Estonian shares some vocabulary with its geographically close neighbors like Finnish, Swedish, Latvian, and Russian, it is not directly related to these languages due to its distinct linguistic origins. Here's a more detailed look at Estonian:

Estonian belongs to the Uralic language family, specifically the Finnic branch. This places it in the same family as Finnish, Hungarian, and several other languages spoken in Northern Europe and parts of Russia.

Despite geographical proximity, Estonian is not closely related to Indo-European languages like Swedish, Latvian, or Russian. It does, however, share some vocabulary with Finnish and more distantly with Hungarian. The majority of Estonian speakers live in Estonia. There are also Estonian speakers in diaspora communities in countries like Russia, Finland, Sweden, Canada, the United States, and Australia.

Estonian is the official language of the Republic of Estonia and one of the official languages of the European Union.

Estonian has a rich vowel system, a three-degree system of negation, and an agglutinative grammar. It also features 14 grammatical cases.

Germanic languages have significantly influenced Estonian vocabulary, with nearly one-third of Estonian words being of Germanic origin.

Estonian has both northern and southern dialectal forms. The northern dialect forms the basis of standard Estonian.