Finland and Estonia are situated a mere 80 km apart from each other across the Gulf of Finland. The languages of these two countries, Finnish and Estonian, were the same language (Late Proto Finnic) around 2000 years ago, but have grown apart since then. And while you might expect that Estonian would form a dialect continuum with Finnish, there is a distinct separation between Northern Finnic and Southern Finnic (which includes Estonian, except for a couple of dialects on the northeastern coast of Estonian).
That 80 km gap and the resulting isolation of each side from the other over a long period of time is one factor that led to Finnish and Estonian being rather different. Don’t get me wrong, they are closely related, and speakers of either language will understand some words in the other language, but their mutual intelligibility is quite limited.
In the most recent Langfocus video I compare Finnish and Estonian:
Finnish and Estonian vocabulary
The lexical similarity of Finnish and Estonian is slightly lower than 50%. That means a little less than half of the words in either language has corresponding cognate words in the other. This is an oversimplification, but that basically means in any given sentence, a monolingual speaker of the other language will recognize about half of the words. Some examples of words that are the same or very similar:
Finnish – yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi – “One, two, three, four, five”.
Estonian – üks, kaks, kolm, neli, viis – “One, two, three, four, five”.
Finnish – lapsi – “child”
Estonian – laps – “child”
Finnish – jumala – “God”
Estonian – jumal – “God”
Finnish – järvi – “lake”
Estonian – järv – “lake”
While Finnish and Estonian share many cognate words, that doesn’t mean those words look or sound exactly the same. They’re generally somewhat different and might require some decoding. For example, both languages have a word meaning “morning” that originated with the Proto Finnic word hoomen.
Finnish: huomen (a literary word).
Estonian: hommik (the everyday word for “morning”).
We can see that the two cognates are formed somewhat differently. The stem of the Estonian word is actually homme, which came directly from hoomen but its meaning developed into “tomorrow”. The suffix “ik” is added to homme to create the word hommik (morning).
Let’s look at how they are used in the phrases meaning “Good morning”.
Finnish: Hyvää huomenta.
Estonian: Tere hommikust.
Here they have additional endings that are different. These are case endings, and the Finnish and Estonian phrases use different cases. The Finnish one is in the partitive case, and the Estonian one is in the elative case. But even if they were in the same case, the case endings are different in each language. A difference in case endings is not really a difference in vocabulary per se, but it results in the words looking and sounding rather different in their various inflected forms.
Finnish & Estonian False Friends
Finnish and Estonian have many words that appear similar in both spelling and sound, but actually have different meanings. For example:
Hallitus means “government” in Finnish, but it means “mold” in Estonian!
The Finnish word pulma means “problem”, but the Estonian word pulmad means “wedding”. Hopefully that’s not a Freudian slip!
In Finnish kassi means “bag”, but in Estonian kass means “cat”.
Those are just a few examples, but there are lots of false friends in these two languages. Obviously these can result in some awkward misunderstandings for Finnish and Estonian speakers trying to bridge the language gap without having studied the other language.
Vowel Harmony in Finnish and Estonian
One of the main differences in phonology between Finnish and Estonian is that while Finnish has vowel harmony, Estonian does not (anymore). In Finnish there are three classes of vowels: front vowels (in blue), neutral vowels (in green), and back vowels (in yellow). If a word (including its affixes) contains front vowels it cannot contain back vowels, and vice versa.
For example, the Finnish word for “today” is tänään, while in Estonian it’s täna. You can see that all of the vowels in the Finnish word are the same front vowel ä. In the Estonian word we see that there is both a front vowel (ä) and a back vowel (a). There is a lack of vowel harmony in the Estonian word.
Finnish and Estonian Grammar
Finnish and Estonian generally share similar grammatical features. Both are synthetic languages, which basically means that you can add meaning to a sentence by adding additional morphemes to a word, rather by adding more words to the sentence. But Estonian has lost some of its synthetic features.
Another difference is that Estonian word order is somewhat influenced by Low German and Old High German. For example, in subordinate clauses, the conjugated verb appears at the end of the clause. Also, when there are two verbs in a sentence, the conjugated verb is in second position if there is a pronoun before it, and the second verb moves to the end of the sentence. This is not set in stone in Estonian the way it is in German, and Estonian word order is flexible, but in an unmarked sentence that is the tendency. I show specific examples in the Langfocus video How Similar Are Finnish and Estonian?
If you’re interested in learning Finnish, check out FinnishPod101
