Estonian 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. Its closest relative is Finnish, spoken across the Gulf of Finland. The two languages are sufficiently similar to be mutually intelligible, at least for those Estonians who speak the dialect of the north. Estonian is not, as is sometimes thought, in any way related to its nearest geographic neighbors, Latvian and Lithuanian.
Like Latvian and Lithuanian, Estonian employs the Roman script. The alphabet lacks the letters c, q, w, x, y, z, but contains the letter , found in no other language of eastern Europe. Umlauts may appear over the letters a, o, and u.
