Estonian (eesti keel), a member of the Finnish family of Finnish languages, is spoken by 1.1 million people, with approximately 950,000 of them in Estonia. The most important feature distinguishes the Estonian language from the other languages in the family is that it has three different shades, short, long and very long. It is a language that is read as it is written in Estonian.
Estonia is one of the countries in the Baltic region such as Latvia and Lithuania. After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, it declared its independence.