North and Standard Estonian
Helle Metslang · 2022
Abstract Estonian belongs to the southern branch of the Finnic languages. Standard Estonian, now the sole official state language of Estonia, was developed mainly on the basis of North Estonian dialects. Estonian has been in contact with many languages and has especially been influenced by German. It has several features that are spread in the Circum-Baltic area. Estonian phonetics and phonology are characterized by three quantity degrees, palatalization, and lack of vowel harmony. The morphology combines agglutinative features with fusional. Existential, possessive, experiential, and resultative sentences display non-canonical subjects. Differential subject and object marking are conditioned by various semantic and syntactic features of the sentence. In addition to inherited and borrowed stems, Estonian language planning has created many completely new word stems.