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The Estonian language (Estonian: eesti keel) is spoken by about 1.1 million people, of which the great majority live in the Northern European country of Estonia.

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Estonian is thus related to Finnish, spoken on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, and more distantly to the Hungarian language of the Ugric branch. Despite some minor overlaps in the vocabulary, in terms of its origin, the Estonian language is not related to its nearest western neighbour, Swedish, nor to its southern neighbour, Latvian, nor to its eastern neighbour, Russian, which are all Indo-European languages.

One of the distinctive features of Estonian is that it has what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that IPA /toto/, /to:to/ and /to::to/ are distinct, as are /toto/, /tot:o/, and /tot::o/. The distinction between long and overlong is, in practice, as much a matter of syllable stress (involving pitch) as duration. Long and overlong vowels are not distinguished in written Estonian; plosives, however, appear in writing with three "degrees": b,d,g; p,t,k and pp;tt;kk (all unvoiced plosives).