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61-551: The name Ainaži may be derived from the Estonian language word heina(s)-tee 'hay-road'. Other possibilities include the Livonian words āina 'hay' or āinagi 'lonely, only'. Historically, the German language variants of the same name (e.g., Haynasch) , were used in most written records from the late Middle Ages until the first half of the 20th century. Ainaži existed for centuries as

122-554: A Finnic language rather than a variety of Estonian. Modern standard Estonian evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries based on the dialects of northern Estonia. During the Medieval and Early Modern periods, Estonian accepted many loanwords from Germanic languages , mainly from Middle Low German (Middle Saxon) and, after the 16th-century Protestant Reformation , from the Standard German language. Estonia's oldest written records of

183-552: A close-mid back unrounded /ɤ/ (but a close central unrounded /ɨ/ in Livonian), as well as loss of *n before *s with compensatory lengthening . (North) Estonian-Votic has been suggested to possibly constitute an actual genetic subgroup (called varyingly Maa by Viitso (1998, 2000) or Central Finnic by Kallio (2014) ), though the evidence is weak: almost all innovations shared by Estonian and Votic have also spread to South Estonian and/or Livonian. A possible defining innovation

244-414: A Livonian fishing village. The town itself was first mentioned in 1564, and through the ages, changed hands among various barons and estates. Ainaži entered a great period of growth in the 1870s when its history of shipbuilding and seafaring began. In the 19th century, Vidzeme and Courland were covered with vast forests of pine trees. Ainaži's strategic position on the sea and proximity to lumber made it

305-451: A broad classical education and knew Ancient Greek , Latin and French . Consider roim 'crime' versus English crime or taunima 'to condemn, disapprove' versus Finnish tuomita 'to condemn, to judge' (these Aavikisms appear in Aavik's 1921 dictionary). These words might be better regarded as a peculiar manifestation of morpho-phonemic adaptation of a foreign lexical item. Article 1 of

366-491: A dozen native speakers of Votic remain. Regardless, even for these languages, the shaping of a standard language and education in it continues. The geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located east of the Gulf of Finland around Saint Petersburg . A glottochronological study estimates the age of the common ancestor of existing languages to a little more than 1000 years. However, Mikko Heikkilä dates

427-544: A perfect place for shipbuilding. In 1864, Krišjānis Valdemārs sponsored the first naval school in Livonia (today Latvia ), training young Estonian and Latvian farmers to become ship captains for free. The school stood for 50 years until it was destroyed in World War I . With the opening of the school and shipbuilding industry, Ainaži grew for the rest of the 19th century. From 1857 to 1913, over 50 seaworthy vessels were built in

488-528: A rather different view. The following grouping follows among others Sammallahti (1977), Viitso (1998), and Kallio (2014): The division between South Estonian and the remaining Finnic varieties has isoglosses that must be very old. For the most part, these features have been known for long. Their position as very early in the relative chronology of Finnic, in part representing archaisms in South Estonian, has been shown by Kallio (2007, 2014). However, due to

549-564: A variety of areas, even after variety-specific changes. A broad twofold conventional division of the Finnic varieties recognizes the Southern Finnic and Northern Finnic groups (though the position of some varieties within this division is uncertain): † = extinct variety; ( † ) = moribund variety. A more-or-less genetic subdivision can be also determined, based on the relative chronology of sound changes within varieties, which provides

610-660: Is a Finnic language of the Uralic family . Estonian is the official language of Estonia . It is written in the Latin script and is the first language of the majority of the country's population; it is also an official language of the European Union . Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people: 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 elsewhere. Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of

671-426: Is a predominantly agglutinative language . The loss of word-final sounds is extensive, and this has made its inflectional morphology markedly more fusional , especially with respect to noun and adjective inflection. The transitional form from an agglutinating to a fusional language is a common feature of Estonian typologically over the course of history with the development of a rich morphological system. Word order

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732-734: Is based on central dialects, it has no vowel harmony either. In the standard language, the front vowels occur exclusively on the first or stressed syllable, although vowel harmony is still apparent in older texts. Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to a fusional language . The canonical word order is SVO (subject–verb–object), although often debated among linguists. In Estonian, nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender , but nouns and adjectives decline in fourteen cases: nominative , genitive , partitive , illative , inessive , elative , allative , adessive , ablative , translative , terminative , essive , abessive , and comitative , with

793-451: Is considerably more flexible than in English, but the basic order is subject–verb–object . The speakers of the two major historical languages spoken in Estonia, North and South Estonian , are thought by some linguists to have arrived in Estonia in at least two different migration waves over two millennia ago, both groups having spoken considerably different vernacular; South Estonian might be

854-738: Is pronounced [æ], as in English mat . The vowels Ä, Ö and Ü are clearly separate phonemes and inherent in Estonian, although the letter shapes come from German. The letter õ denotes /ɤ/ , unrounded /o/ , or a close-mid back unrounded vowel . It is almost identical to the Bulgarian ъ /ɤ̞/ and the Vietnamese ơ , and is also used to transcribe the Russian ы . Additionally C , Q , W , X , and Y are used in writing foreign proper names . They do not occur in Estonian words , and are not officially part of

915-488: Is pronounced) and in the use of 'i' and 'j'. Where it is very impractical or impossible to type š and ž , they are replaced by sh and zh in some written texts, although this is considered incorrect. Otherwise, the h in sh represents a voiceless glottal fricative , as in Pasha ( pas-ha ); this also applies to some foreign names. Modern Estonian orthography is based on the "Newer orthography" created by Eduard Ahrens in

976-698: Is the loss of *h after sonorants ( *n, *l, *r ). The Northern Finnic group has more evidence for being an actual historical/genetic subgroup. Phonetical innovations would include two changes in unstressed syllables: *ej > *ij , and *o > ö after front-harmonic vowels. The lack of õ in these languages as an innovation rather than a retention has been proposed, and recently resurrected. Germanic loanwords found throughout Northern Finnic but absent in Southern are also abundant, and even several Baltic examples of this are known. Northern Finnic in turn divides into two main groups. The most Eastern Finnic group consists of

1037-748: The idamurre or eastern dialect on the northwestern shore of Lake Peipus . One of the pronunciation features of the Saaremaa dialect is the lack of the 'õ' vowel. A five-metre monument erected in 2020, marking the "border" between the vowels 'õ' and 'ö', humorously makes reference to this fact. South Estonian consists of the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto varieties. These are sometimes considered either variants of South Estonian or separate languages altogether. Also, Seto and Võro distinguish themselves from each other less by language and more by their culture and their respective Christian confession. Estonian employs

1098-662: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Estonian and English: Finnic language The Finnic or Baltic Finnic languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples . There are around 7 million speakers, who live mainly in Finland and Estonia . Traditionally, eight Finnic languages have been recognized. The major modern representatives of

1159-688: The East Finnish dialects as well as Ingrian, Karelian and Veps; the proto-language of these was likely spoken in the vicinity of Lake Ladoga . The Western Finnic group consists of the West Finnish dialects, originally spoken on the western coast of Finland, and within which the oldest division is that into Southwestern, Tavastian and Southern Ostrobothnian dialects. Among these, at least the Southwestern dialects have later come under Estonian influence. Numerous new dialects have also arisen through contacts of

1220-700: The Germanic languages have very different origins and the vocabulary is considered quite different from that of the Indo-European family, one can identify many similar words in Estonian and English, for example. This is primarily because Estonian has borrowed nearly one-third of its vocabulary from Germanic languages, mainly from Low Saxon ( Middle Low German ) during the period of German rule , and High German (including standard German ). The percentage of Low Saxon and High German loanwords can be estimated at 22–25 percent, with Low Saxon making up about 15 percent. Prior to

1281-525: The Latin script as the basis for its alphabet . The script adds the letters ä , ö , ü , and õ , plus the later additions š and ž . The letters c , q , w , x and y are limited to proper names of foreign origin, and f , z , š , and ž appear in loanwords and foreign names only. Ö and Ü are pronounced similarly to their equivalents in Swedish and German. Unlike in standard German but like Swedish (when followed by 'r') and Finnish, Ä

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1342-524: The Proto-Finnic language , elision has occurred; thus, the actual case marker may be absent, but the stem is changed, cf. maja – majja and the Ostrobothnia dialect of Finnish maja – majahan . The verbal system has no distinct future tense (the present tense serves here) and features special forms to express an action performed by an undetermined subject (the "impersonal"). Although Estonian and

1403-513: The Sámi languages , has long been assumed, though many of the similarities (particularly lexical ones) can be shown to result from common influence from Germanic languages and, to a lesser extent, Baltic languages . Innovations are also shared between Finnic and the Mordvinic languages , and in recent times Finnic, Sámi and Moksha are sometimes grouped together. There is no grammatical gender in any of

1464-563: The Uralic language family . Other Finnic languages include Finnish and some minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia. Estonian is typically subclassified as a Southern Finnic language, and it is the second-most-spoken language among all the Finnic languages. Alongside Finnish, Hungarian , and Maltese , Estonian is one of the four official languages of the European Union that are not Indo-European languages . In terms of linguistic morphology , Estonian

1525-457: The oblique case forms. For geminates , the process is simple to describe: they become simple stops, e.g. ku pp i + -n → ku p in (Finnish: "cup"). For simple consonants, the process complicates immensely and the results vary by the environment. For example, ha k a + -n → haan , ky k y + -n → ky v yn , jär k i + -n → jär j en (Finnish: "pasture", "ability", "intellect"). The specifics of consonants gradation vary by language (see

1586-485: The 1870s to the 1890s) tried to use formation ex nihilo ( Urschöpfung ); i.e. they created new words out of nothing. The most well-known reformer of Estonian, Johannes Aavik (1880–1973), used creations ex nihilo (cf. 'free constructions', Tauli 1977), along with other sources of lexical enrichment such as derivations, compositions and loanwords (often from Finnish; cf. Saareste and Raun 1965: 76). In Aavik's dictionary (1921) lists approximately 4000 words. About 40 of

1647-926: The 1930s. There are 9 vowels and 36 diphthongs , 28 of which are native to Estonian. All nine vowels can appear as the first component of a diphthong, but only /ɑ e i o u/ occur as the second component. A vowel characteristic of Estonian is the unrounded back vowel /ɤ/, which may be close-mid back , close back , or close-mid central . Word-initial b, d, g occur only in loanwords and some old loanwords are spelled with p, t, k instead of etymological b, d, g : pank 'bank'. Word-medially and word-finally, b, d, g represent short plosives /p, t, k/ (may be pronounced as partially voiced consonants), p, t, k represent half-long plosives /pː, tː, kː/, and pp, tt, kk represent overlong plosives /pːː, tːː, kːː/; for example: kabi /kɑpi/ 'hoof' — kapi /kɑpːi/ 'wardrobe [ gen sg ] — kappi /kɑpːːi/ 'wardrobe [ ptv sg ]'. Before and after b, p, d, t, g, k, s, h, f, š, z, ž ,

1708-562: The 1990s, several Finnic-speaking minority groups have emerged to seek recognition for their languages as distinct from the ones they have been considered dialects of in the past. Some of these groups have established their own orthographies and standardised languages. Võro and Seto , which are spoken in southeastern Estonia and in some parts of Russia, are considered dialects of Estonian by some linguists, while other linguists consider them separate languages. Meänkieli and Kven are spoken in northern Sweden and Norway respectively and have

1769-512: The 19th century during the Estophile Enlightenment Period (1750–1840). The birth of native Estonian literature was during the period 1810–1820, when the patriotic and philosophical poems by Kristjan Jaak Peterson were published. Peterson, who was the first student to acknowledge his Estonian origin at the then German-language University of Dorpat , is commonly regarded as a herald of Estonian national literature and considered

1830-490: The 200 words created by Johannes Aavik allegedly ex nihilo are in common use today. Examples are * ese 'object', * kolp 'skull', * liibuma 'to cling', * naasma 'to return, come back', * nõme 'stupid, dull'. Many of the coinages that have been considered (often by Aavik himself) as words concocted ex nihilo could well have been influenced by foreign lexical items; for example, words from Russian , German , French , Finnish , English and Swedish . Aavik had

1891-516: The Coastal Estonian dialect group), Livonian and Votic (except the highly Ingrian-influenced Kukkuzi Votic). These languages are not closely related genetically, as noted above; it is a paraphyletic grouping, consisting of all Finnic languages except the Northern Finnic languages. The languages nevertheless share a number of features, such as the presence of a ninth vowel phoneme õ , usually

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1952-588: The Estophile educated class admired the ancient culture of the Estonians and their era of freedom before the conquests by Danes and Germans in the 13th century. When the Republic of Estonia was established in 1918, Estonian became the official language of the newly independent country. Immediately after World War II , in 1945, over 97% of the then population of Estonia self-identified as native ethnic Estonians and spoke

2013-595: The Finnic dialects that can be extracted from Viitso (1998) is: Viitso (2000) surveys 59 isoglosses separating the family into 58 dialect areas (finer division is possible), finding that an unambiguous perimeter can be set up only for South Estonian, Livonian, Votic, and Veps. In particular, no isogloss exactly coincides with the geographical division into 'Estonian' south of the Gulf of Finland and 'Finnish' north of it. Despite this, standard Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible . The Southern Finnic languages consist of North and South Estonian (excluding

2074-474: The Finnic languages date from the 13th century. The "Originates Livoniae" in the Livonian Chronicle of Henry contains Estonian place names, words and fragments of sentences. The earliest extant samples of connected (north) Estonian are the so-called Kullamaa prayers dating from 1524 and 1528. In 1525 the first book published in Estonian was printed. The book was a Lutheran manuscript, which never reached

2135-527: The Finnic languages, nor are there articles or definite or indefinite forms. The morphophonology (the way the grammatical function of a morpheme affects its production) is complex. Morphological elements found in the Finnic languages include grammatical case suffixes, verb tempus, mood and person markers (singular and plural, the Finnic languages do not have dual ) as well as participles and several infinitive forms, possessive suffixes, clitics and more. The number of grammatical cases tends to be high while

2196-527: The Germans from Ainaži and subsequently occupied it. After the war, Ainaži became part of Latvia after its inhabitants voted for Latvia in a referendum, but Estonia 's troops remained stationed there until 1920 and Estonia kept the northern section of the town, the Ikla village. In the years of independent Republic of Latvia (1918–1940) Ainaži was revitalized. The Ainaži fleet, sunken in the war, had completely barricaded

2257-665: The Latvia-Estonia border on the A1 road (Latvia) , which is part of the Via Baltica international highway, favors transit/transport industries. The population of Ainaži and the surrounding area in 2005 was 1,794 people, the smallest official town of Vidzeme . Latvians made up 92% of the inhabitants, Russians 3%, Estonians 2%, and others 4%. From 2004 the population had decreased by 5.08% (96 inhabitants). Estonian language Estonian ( eesti keel [ˈeːsʲti ˈkeːl] )

2318-410: The alphabet. Including all the foreign letters, the alphabet consists of the following 32 letters: Although the Estonian orthography is generally guided by phonemic principles, with each grapheme corresponding to one phoneme , there are some historical and morphological deviations from this: for example preservation of the morpheme in declension of the word (writing b, g, d in places where p, k, t

2379-512: The beginning of the diversification (with South Estonian as the first split) rather precisely to about 150 AD, based on loanword evidence (and previous estimates tend to be even older, like Pekka Sammallahti's of 1000–600 BC). There is now wide agreement that Proto-Finnic was probably spoken at the coasts of the Gulf of Finland. The Finnic languages are located at the western end of the Uralic language family. A close affinity to their northern neighbors,

2440-413: The case and number of the adjective always agreeing with that of the noun (except in the terminative, essive, abessive and comitative, where there is agreement only for the number, the adjective being in the genitive form). Thus the illative for kollane maja ("a yellow house") is kollasesse majja ("into a yellow house"), but the terminative is kollase majani ("as far as a yellow house"). With respect to

2501-422: The end of the 20th century has brought the proportion of native Estonian-speakers in Estonia now back above 70%. Large parts of the first- and second-generation immigrants in Estonia have now adopted Estonian (over 50% as of the 2022 census). The Estonian dialects are divided into two groups – the northern and southern dialects, historically associated with the cities of Tallinn in the north and Tartu in

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2562-553: The family are Finnish and Estonian , the official languages of their respective nation states. The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingrian and Votic , spoken in Ingria by the Gulf of Finland , and Livonian , once spoken around the Gulf of Riga . Spoken farther northeast are Karelian , Ludic , and Veps , in the region of Lakes Onega and Ladoga . In addition, since

2623-584: The founder of modern Estonian poetry. His birthday, March 14, is celebrated in Estonia as Mother Tongue Day. A fragment from Peterson's poem "Kuu" expresses the claim reestablishing the birthright of the Estonian language: In English: In the period from 1525 to 1917, 14,503 titles were published in Estonian; by comparison, between 1918 and 1940, 23,868 titles were published. In modern times A. H. Tammsaare , Jaan Kross , and Andrus Kivirähk are Estonia 's best-known and most translated writers. Estonians lead

2684-537: The harbor and had to be removed. The harbor was then deepened, and the port was rebuilt in 1923 with new breakers. In 1930 the Ainaži lighthouse was built. In World War II , however, Ainaži was destroyed again. The second naval academy burned down, the port was bombed, and the warehouses were plundered. Though the port was partially rebuilt after the war, Ainaži was overshadowed by nearby Pärnu , and lost its fish-processing factory to Salacgrīva . After Latvia's independence

2745-452: The language. When Estonia was invaded and reoccupied by the Soviet army in 1944, the status of Estonian effectively changed to one of the two official languages (Russian being the other one). Many immigrants from Russia entered Estonia under Soviet encouragement. In the 1970s, the pressure of bilingualism for Estonians was intensified. Although teaching Estonian to non-Estonians in local schools

2806-520: The large number of diphthongs . There are 16 diphthongs in Finnish and 25 in Estonian; at the same time the frequency of diphthong use is greater in Finnish than in Estonian due to certain historical long vowels having diphthongised in Finnish but not in Estonian. On a global scale the Finnic languages have a high number of vowels. The Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum with few clear-cut boundaries. Innovations have often spread through

2867-543: The legal status of independent minority languages separate from Finnish. They were earlier considered dialects of Finnish and are mutually intelligible with it. Additionally, the Karelian language was not officially recognised as its own language in Finland until 2009, despite there being no linguistic confusion about its status. The smaller languages are endangered . The last native speaker of Livonian died in 2013, and only about

2928-408: The number of verb infinitive forms varies more by language. One of the more important processes is the characteristic consonant gradation . Two kinds of gradation occur: radical gradation and suffix gradation. They both affect the plosives /k/ , /t/ and /p/ , and involve the process known as lenition , in which the consonant is changed into a "weaker" form. This occurs in some (but not all) of

2989-473: The old dialects: these include e.g. the more northern Finnish dialects (a mixture of West and East Finnish), and the Livvi and Ludic varieties (probably originally Veps dialects but heavily influenced by Karelian). Salminen (2003) present the following list of Finnic languages and their respective number of speakers. These features distinguish Finnic languages from other Uralic families: Sound changes shared by

3050-755: The reader and was destroyed immediately after publication. The first extant Estonian book is a bilingual German-Estonian translation of the Lutheran catechism by S.   Wanradt and J.   Koell dating to 1535, during the Protestant Reformation period. An Estonian grammar book to be used by priests was printed in German in 1637. The New Testament was translated into the variety of South Estonian called Võro in 1686 (northern Estonian, 1715). The two languages were united based on Northern Estonian by Anton thor Helle . Writings in Estonian became more significant in

3111-492: The second half of the 19th   century based on Finnish orthography. The "Older orthography" it replaced was created in the 17th   century by Bengt Gottfried Forselius and Johann Hornung based on standard German orthography. Earlier writing in Estonian had, by and large, used an ad hoc orthography based on Latin and Middle Low German orthography. Some influences of the standard German orthography – for example, writing 'W'/'w' instead of 'V'/'v' – persisted well into

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3172-516: The separate article for more details). Apocope (strongest in Livonian, Võro and Estonian) has, in some cases, left a phonemic status to the phonological variation in the stem (variation caused by the now historical morphological elements), which results in three phonemic lengths in these languages. Vowel harmony is also characteristic of the Finnic languages, despite having been lost in Livonian, Estonian and Veps. The original Uralic palatalization

3233-419: The sounds [p], [t], [k] are written as p, t, k , with some exceptions due to morphology or etymology. Representation of palatalised consonants is inconsistent, and they are not always indicated. ŋ is an allophone of /n/ before /k/. While peripheral Estonian dialects are characterized by various degrees of vowel harmony , central dialects have almost completely lost the feature. Since the standard language

3294-405: The south, in addition to a distinct kirderanniku dialect, Northeastern coastal Estonian . The northern group consists of the keskmurre or central dialect that is also the basis for the standard language, the läänemurre or western dialect, roughly corresponding to Lääne County and Pärnu County , the saarte murre (islands' dialect) of Saaremaa , Hiiumaa , Muhu and Kihnu , and

3355-532: The strong areal nature of many later innovations, this tree structure has been distorted and sprachbunds have formed. In particular, South Estonian and Livonian show many similarities with the Central Finnic group that must be attributed to later contact, due to the influence of literary North Estonian. Thus, contemporary "Southern Finnic" is a sprachbund that includes these languages, while diachronically they are not closely related. The genetic classification of

3416-467: The town, and in 1902 a working port and railway station opened. By World War I, Ainaži was the fourth-largest port in all of Latvia and chief in Vidzeme, overtaking neighboring Salacgrīva . The town also had its own windmills, fish-processing plant, and brick kiln. In World War I Ainaži was heavily damaged. The port was ruined and the entire shipping fleet destroyed. In February 1919, the Estonian army drove

3477-514: The wave of new loanwords from English in the 20th and 21st centuries, historically, Swedish and Russian were also sources of borrowings but to a much lesser extent. In borrowings, often 'b' and 'p' are interchangeable, for example 'baggage' becomes 'pagas', 'lob' (to throw) becomes 'loopima'. The initial letter 's' before another consonant is often dropped, for example 'skool' becomes 'kool', 'stool' becomes 'tool'. Estonian language planners such as Ado Grenzstein (a journalist active in Estonia from

3538-461: The world in book ownership, owning on average 218 books per house, and 35% of Estonians owning 350 books or more (as of 2018). Writings in Estonian became significant only in the 19th century with the spread of the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment , during the Estophile Enlightenment Period (1750–1840). Although Baltic Germans at large regarded the future of Estonians as being a fusion with themselves,

3599-522: Was formally compulsory, in practice, the teaching and learning of Estonian by Russian-speakers was often considered unnecessary by the Soviet authorities. In 1991, with the restoration of Estonia's independence , Estonian went back to being the only official language in Estonia. Since 2004, when Estonia joined the European Union, Estonian is also one of the (now 24) official languages of the EU . The return of former Soviet immigrants to their countries of origin at

3660-502: Was lost in proto-Finnic, but most of the diverging dialects reacquired it. Palatalization is a part of the Estonian literary language and is an essential feature in Võro , as well as Veps , Karelian , and other eastern Finnic languages. It is also found in East Finnish dialects, and is only missing from West Finnish dialects and Standard Finnish. A special characteristic of the languages is

3721-602: Was restored in 1991, a wind turbine was built in Ainaži, as well as a customs house on the Estonian border. Today, the building of the naval school hosts the Museum of Ainaži Naval School  [ lv ] ( Ainažu jūrskolas muzejs ), dedicated to the history of the school and the tradition of shipbuilding along the Vidzeme coast. Ainaži has a humid continental climate ( Köppen Dfb ). The most important industries are forestry, woodworking, and trade. In addition, its location at

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