Estonian language
The Estonian language is the native language of the Republic of Estonia, where it is spoken by about one million people, or two-thirds of the total population.
Estonian is one of the Finno-Ugric languages, which constitute a branch of the Uralic language family. Estonian is not, as is sometimes thought, in any way related to its nearest geographic neighbors, Latvian and Lithuanian, which are Baltic languages. Its closest relative is, in fact, Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and the northern dialects of Estonian are sufficiently similar to Finnish for the two to be mutually intelligible. One distinctive feature of Estonian is that it has three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that SAMPA /toto/, /to:to/ and /to::to/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /tot:o/, and /tot::o/. The distinction between long and overlong is, in practice, as much a matter of syllable stress as duration; they are not distinguished in written Estonian.
Like Latvian and Lithuanian, Estonian employs the Roman script. The alphabet lacks the letters c, q, w, x, y, z, but contains the letters ä, ö, ü, and õ, the last of which occurs in no other written language of eastern Europe (the letter does occur in Portuguese, but it denotes a different sound there).