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Estonian Baby Names

Estonian is the official language of Estonia and belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language along with Finnish, Karelian, and other nearby languages. Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people in Estonia.

After the Estonian War of Independence in 1919, the Estonian language became the state language of the newly independent country. In 1945, 97.3% of Estonia considered itself ethnic Estonian and spoke the language.

Estonian has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League and spoken natively in the territories of what is today known as Estonia by a sizeable burgher community of Baltic Germans, later Estonian was also influenced by standard German), and Russian, though it is not related to them genetically.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Estonian is a somewhat agglutinative language, but unlike them, it has lost vowel harmony, the front vowels occurring exclusively on the first or stressed syllable, although in older texts the vowel harmony can still be recognized.

In the last decade of the 20th century, 19,158 different names were given to Estonian children. This variety consisted of native Estonian names (Malle, Vaike for girls; Endel, Meelis for boys). The multiplicity of names is increased by the use of varying spellings, the borrowing of more and more names, and even inventions or double-barrelled ones, borrowing on an older Estonian tradition.

Fashionable names in Estonia in earlier 16th century are Lembitu, Vootele, Meeme. Originally every Estonian only had a first name. After the Christianisation in the 14th century, they became more precise with additional names, created from names of professions, places or fathers' names. The additional names would change if a profession or location was not passed on to the next generation.