Estonian ( ) is the official language of Estonia, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various migrant communities. It belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest among linguists is what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phonemic length: short, long, and “overlong”, such that , and are distinct. In actuality, the distinction is not purely in the phonemic length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.
