Classification
Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages, along with Finnish, Karelian, and other nearby languages. The Uralic languages do not belong to the Indo-European languages. Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian and to the Sami languages.
Estonian has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League and spoken natively in the territories of what is today known as Estonia by a sizeable burgher community of Baltic Germans, later Estonian was also influenced by standard German), and Russian, though it is not related to them genetically.
Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is a somewhat agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost the vowel harmony of the hypothetical Proto-Uralic language, although in older texts the vowel harmony can still be recognized. Furthermore, the apocope of word-final sounds is extensive and has contributed to a shift from a purely agglutinative to a fusional language. The basic word order is subject–verb–object.
Read more about this topic: Estonian Language