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Estonian translations
If you are looking for a translator from Estonian or into
Estonian, we are please to offer the service of our extensive
pool of Estonian linguists to match your needs.
Our areas of expertise include Advertising & PR, Technol
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& Finance, Medical & Health, Automotive & Aerospace,
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and many other.
Some facts about Estonian language
The Estonian language (eesti keel) is spoken by about 1.1
million people, of which the great majority live in the Republic
of Estonia.
Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages.
Estonian is not related to its southern neighbor Latvian,
which is a Baltic language related to Lithuanian. Estonian
is related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf
of Finland, and more distantly to Hungarian. One of the distinctive
features of Estonian is that it has what is traditionally
seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and
"overlong", such that IPA /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 (involving pitch) as duration. Long and
overlong vowels are not distinguished in written Estonian;
plosives, however, appear in writing with three "degrees":
b,d,g; p,t,k and pp;tt;kk (all unvoiced plosives).
Vocabulary
Apart from the very clear links to the Finnish language,
Estonian retains many Low German loan words that can be identified
in English. For example:
Estonian "nurk" (corner) & English "nook",
Estonian "koer" (dog) & English "cur",
Estonian "tutar" (daughter) & German "Tochter"
Often English "b" is replace with a "p"
in Estonian: Estonian "poiss" English "boy",
Estonian "pikk" (long) English "big",
Estonian "pargipink" English "park bench",
Often an initial "s" is dropped from the Germanic
origin: Estonian "tool" (chair) from English "stool",
Estonian "kool" from English "school",
Estonina "tukk" from German "Stuck"
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