1.
Estonia
–
Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia, across the Baltic Sea lies Sweden in the west and Finland in the north. The territory of Estonia consists of a mainland and 2,222 islands and islets in the Baltic Sea, covering 45,339 km2 of land and water, and is influenced by a humid continental climate. The territory of Estonia has been inhabited since at least 6500 BC, in 1988, during the Singing Revolution, the Estonian Supreme Soviet issued the Estonian Sovereignty Declaration in defiance of Soviet rule, and independence was restored on 20 August 1991. Estonia is a parliamentary republic divided into fifteen counties. Its capital and largest city is Tallinn, with a population of 1.3 million, it is one of the least-populous member states of the European Union, Eurozone, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, OECD and Schengen Area. Estonia is a country with an advanced, high-income economy that is among the fastest growing in the EU. Its Human Development Index ranks very highly, and it performs favourably in measurements of economic freedom, civil liberties, the 2015 PISA test places Estonian high school students 3rd in the world, behind Singapore and Japan. Citizens of Estonia are provided with health care, free education. Since independence the country has developed its IT sector, becoming one of the worlds most digitally advanced societies. In 2005 Estonia became the first nation to hold elections over the Internet, in the Estonian language, the oldest known endonym of the Estonians was maarahvas, meaning country people or people of the land. The land inhabited by Estonians was called Maavald meaning Country Parish or Land Parish, one hypothesis regarding the modern name of Estonia is that it originated from the Aesti, a people described by the Roman historian Tacitus in his Germania. The historic Aesti were allegedly Baltic people, whereas the modern Estonians are Finno-Ugric, the geographical areas between Aesti and Estonia do not match, with Aesti being further down south. Ancient Scandinavian sagas refer to a land called Eistland, as the country is called in Icelandic. Early Latin and other ancient versions of the name are Estia and Hestia, esthonia was a common alternative English spelling prior to 1921. Human settlement in Estonia became possible 13,000 to 11,000 years ago, the oldest known settlement in Estonia is the Pulli settlement, which was on the banks of the river Pärnu, near the town of Sindi, in south-western Estonia. According to radiocarbon dating it was settled around 11,000 years ago, the earliest human inhabitation during the Mesolithic period is connected to Kunda culture, which is named after the town of Kunda in northern Estonia. At that time the country was covered with forests, and people lived in communities near bodies of water
2.
Estonians
–
Estonians are a Finnic ethnic group related to the Finns that mainly inhabit Estonia, a country located south of Finland and the Finnish Gulf. Their national language belongs to Finnic branch and is known as Estonian, Estonia was first inhabited about 10,000 years ago, just after the Baltic ice lake had retreated from Estonia. Living in the area for more than 5,000 years would put the ancestors of Estonians among the oldest permanent inhabitants in Europe. On the other hand, some recent linguistic estimations suggest that Fenno-Ugrian language arrived around the Baltic Sea considerably later, the oldest known endonym of the Estonians is Maarahvas. Eesti, the endonym of Estonia, is thought to be derived from the word Aestii. The Roman historian Tacitus in 98 AD was the first to mention the Aestii people, and early Scandinavians called the south of the Gulf of Finland Eistland. Proto-Estonians were also called Chuds in Old East Slavic chronicles, the Estonian language belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic family of languages, as does the Finnish language. The first known book in Estonian was printed in 1525, while the oldest known examples of written Estonian originate in 13th-century chronicles, Estonians are genetically closest to their neighbouring Tver region Russians and Latvians. However, Estonians are still the nearest genetic relatives of Finns, although Estonian national consciousness spread in the course of the 19th century during the Estonian national awakening, some degree of ethnic awareness preceded this development. By the 18th century the self-denomination eestlane spread among Estonians along with the older maarahvas, anton thor Helles translation of the Bible into Estonian appeared in 1739, and the number of books and brochures published in Estonian increased from 18 in the 1750s to 54 in the 1790s. By the end of the more than a half of adult peasants could read. The first university-educated intellectuals identifying themselves as Estonians, including Friedrich Robert Faehlmann, Kristjan Jaak Peterson and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, the ruling elites had remained predominantly German in language and culture since the conquest of the early 13th century. By the end of 1860 the Estonians became unwilling to reconcile with German cultural and political hegemony, before the attempts at Russification in the 1880s, their view of Imperial Russia remained positive. Estonians have strong ties to the Nordic countries stemming from important cultural and religious influences gained over centuries during Scandinavian and German rule, indeed, Estonians consider themselves Nordic rather than Baltic, in particular because of close ethnic and linguistic affinities with the Finns. An estimated 40,000 Estonians lived in Russia in 1920, in sum,37,578 people moved from Soviet Russia to Estonia. During World War II, when Estonia was invaded by the Soviet Army in 1944, many refugees who survived the risky sea voyage to Sweden or Germany later moved from there to Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States or Australia. Some of these refugees and their descendants returned to Estonia after the nation regained its independence in 1991 and this is at least partly due to the easy access to oscillating migration to Finland. Recognising the problems arising from low birth rate and high emigration, the country has launched various measures to both increase the birth rate and to lure migrant Estonians back to Estonia
3.
Language family
–
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
4.
Uralic languages
–
The Uralic languages /jʊˈrælᵻk/ constitute a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are languages of Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, the name Uralic derives from the fact that areas where the languages are spoken spread on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Also, the homeland is commonly hypothesized to lie in the vicinity of the Urals. Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the notion that Samoyedic split first from the rest of the Uralic family, such as Tapani Salminen. Gyula László places its origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland, E. N. Setälä and M. Zsirai place it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. According to E. Itkonen, the area extended to the Baltic Sea. P. Hajdu has suggested a homeland in western and northwestern Siberia, the first plausible mention of a Uralic people is in Tacituss Germania, mentioning the Fenni and two other possibly Uralic tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria and they assumed a connection but did not seek linguistic evidence. The affinity of Hungarian and Finnish was first proposed in the late 17th century and these two authors were thus the first to outline what was to become the classification of the Finno-Ugric, and later Uralic family. In 1717, Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, in the same year, the German scholar Johann Georg von Eckhart, in an essay published in Leibnizs Collectanea Etymologica, proposed for the first time a relation to the Samoyedic languages. Philip Johan von Strahlenberg in 1730 published his book Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia, surveying the geography, all the main groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted, still, in spite of this hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics travelled with Maximilian Hell to survey the alleged relationship between Hungarian and Sami. Sajnovics published his results in 1770, arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features, in 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date. At the beginning of the 19th century, research on this family was more advanced than Indo-European research. Progress resumed after a number of decades with the first major field research expeditions on the Uralic languages spoken in the eastern parts of Russia. These were made in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén and Antal Reguly, who focused especially on the Samoyedic, regulys materials were worked on by the Hungarian linguist Pál Hunfalvy and German Josef Budenz, who both supported the Uralic affinity of Hungarian
5.
Finnic languages
–
The Finnic or Baltic Finnic languages are a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by about 7 million people. Traditionally eight Finnic languages have been recognized, the major modern representatives of the family are Finnish and Estonian, the official languages of their respective nation states. The other Finnic languages in the Baltic Sea region are Ingrian and Votic, spoken in Ingria by the Gulf of Finland, spoken farther northeast are Karelian, Ludic and Veps, in the region of Lakes Onega and Ladoga. In addition, since the 1990s, several Finnic-speaking minority groups have emerged to seek of recognition as distinct languages, Northern Karelian, Tver Karelian and Livvi represent the three main dialect groups of Karelian, which earlier had been an unwritten language. Võro and Seto are spoken in southeastern Estonia and earlier were considered dialects of Estonian, the Meänkieli dialects and Kven are spoken in northern Sweden and Norway and have the legal status of independent languages. They were earlier considered dialects of Finnish and are mutually intelligible with it, the last native speaker of Livonian died in 2013, and only about a dozen native speakers of Votic remain. Regardless, even for these languages, the shaping of a standard language, the geographic centre of the maximum divergence between the languages is located south of the Gulf of Finland. The Finnic languages are located at the end of the Uralic language family. Innovations are also shared between Finnic and the Mordvinic languages, and in recent times Finnic, Samic and Mordvinic are frequently considered together, there is no grammatical gender in Finnic languages, nor are there articles nor definite or indefinite forms. One of the important processes is the characteristic consonant gradation. Two kinds of gradation occur, the radical and suffix gradation and this is a lenition process, where the consonant is changed into a weaker form with some oblique cases. For geminates, the process is simple to describe, they become simple stops, for simple consonants, the process complicates immensely and the results vary by the environment. For example, haka +-n → haan, kyky + -n → kyvyn, vowel harmony is also an important process. The original Uralic palatalization was lost in proto-Finnic, but most of the diverging dialects reacquired it, palatalization is a part of the Estonian literary language and is an essential feature in Võro, as well as Veps, Karelian, and other eastern Finnic languages. It is also found in East Finnish dialects, and is missing from West Finnish dialects. A special characteristic of the languages is the number of diphthongs. There are 16 diphthongs in Finnish and 25 in Estonian, at the time the frequency is greater in Finnish than in Estonian. There are 14 grammatical cases in Estonian and 15 in Finnish, the Finnic languages form a complex dialect continuum with few clear-cut boundaries
6.
Writing system
–
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
7.
Latin script
–
Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world, Latin script is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome, in the context of transliteration, the term romanization or romanisation is often found. Unicode uses the term Latin as does the International Organization for Standardization, the numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3. are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, the Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, the speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples, most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines, Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, however, the sound values are completely different. In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürks reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, although the only official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers. In 2015, the Kazakh government announced that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the system for the Kazakh language by 2025. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were written with the Roman characters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, a digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩ in English, a trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩
8.
European Union
–
The European Union is a political and economic union of 28 member states that are located primarily in Europe. It has an area of 4,475,757 km2, the EU has developed an internal single market through a standardised system of laws that apply in all member states. Within the Schengen Area, passport controls have been abolished, a monetary union was established in 1999 and came into full force in 2002, and is composed of 19 EU member states which use the euro currency. The EU operates through a system of supranational and intergovernmental decision-making. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community, the community and its successors have grown in size by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit. While no member state has left the EU or its antecedent organisations, the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union in 1993 and introduced European citizenship. The latest major amendment to the basis of the EU. The EU as a whole is the largest economy in the world, additionally,27 out of 28 EU countries have a very high Human Development Index, according to the United Nations Development Programme. In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, through the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the EU has developed a role in external relations and defence. The union maintains permanent diplomatic missions throughout the world and represents itself at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the G7, because of its global influence, the European Union has been described as an emerging superpower. After World War II, European integration was seen as an antidote to the nationalism which had devastated the continent. 1952 saw the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the supporters of the Community included Alcide De Gasperi, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Paul-Henri Spaak. These men and others are credited as the Founding fathers of the European Union. In 1957, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany signed the Treaty of Rome and they also signed another pact creating the European Atomic Energy Community for co-operation in developing nuclear energy. Both treaties came into force in 1958, the EEC and Euratom were created separately from the ECSC, although they shared the same courts and the Common Assembly. The EEC was headed by Walter Hallstein and Euratom was headed by Louis Armand, Euratom was to integrate sectors in nuclear energy while the EEC would develop a customs union among members. During the 1960s, tensions began to show, with France seeking to limit supranational power, Jean Rey presided over the first merged Commission. In 1973, the Communities enlarged to include Denmark, Ireland, Norway had negotiated to join at the same time, but Norwegian voters rejected membership in a referendum
9.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
10.
Specials (Unicode block)
–
Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
11.
Unicode
–
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
12.
Uralic language family
–
The Uralic languages /jʊˈrælᵻk/ constitute a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are languages of Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, the name Uralic derives from the fact that areas where the languages are spoken spread on both sides of the Ural Mountains. Also, the homeland is commonly hypothesized to lie in the vicinity of the Urals. Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the notion that Samoyedic split first from the rest of the Uralic family, such as Tapani Salminen. Gyula László places its origin in the forest zone between the Oka River and central Poland, E. N. Setälä and M. Zsirai place it between the Volga and Kama Rivers. According to E. Itkonen, the area extended to the Baltic Sea. P. Hajdu has suggested a homeland in western and northwestern Siberia, the first plausible mention of a Uralic people is in Tacituss Germania, mentioning the Fenni and two other possibly Uralic tribes living in the farthest reaches of Scandinavia. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria and they assumed a connection but did not seek linguistic evidence. The affinity of Hungarian and Finnish was first proposed in the late 17th century and these two authors were thus the first to outline what was to become the classification of the Finno-Ugric, and later Uralic family. In 1717, Swedish professor Olof Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, in the same year, the German scholar Johann Georg von Eckhart, in an essay published in Leibnizs Collectanea Etymologica, proposed for the first time a relation to the Samoyedic languages. Philip Johan von Strahlenberg in 1730 published his book Das Nord- und Ostliche Theil von Europa und Asia, surveying the geography, all the main groups of the Uralic languages were already identified here. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted, still, in spite of this hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit János Sajnovics travelled with Maximilian Hell to survey the alleged relationship between Hungarian and Sami. Sajnovics published his results in 1770, arguing for a relationship based on several grammatical features, in 1799, the Hungarian Sámuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date. At the beginning of the 19th century, research on this family was more advanced than Indo-European research. Progress resumed after a number of decades with the first major field research expeditions on the Uralic languages spoken in the eastern parts of Russia. These were made in the 1840s by Matthias Castrén and Antal Reguly, who focused especially on the Samoyedic, regulys materials were worked on by the Hungarian linguist Pál Hunfalvy and German Josef Budenz, who both supported the Uralic affinity of Hungarian
13.
Karelian language
–
Karelian language is a Finnic language spoken mainly in the Russian Republic of Karelia. Linguistically Karelian is closely related to the Finnish dialects spoken in eastern Finland, Karelian is not to be confused with the Southeastern dialects of Finnish, sometimes referred to as karjalaismurteet in Finland. There is no single standard Karelian language, each writer writes in Karelian according to their own dialectal form. Three main written standards have developed, for North Karelian, Olonets Karelian. All variants are written with the Latin-based Karelian alphabet, though the Cyrillic script has been used in the past, the Karelian language belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages, and it is closely related to Finnish. Earlier some Finnish linguists classified Karelian as a dialect of Finnish, sometimes known in older Finnish literature as Raja-Karjalan murteet, besides Karelian and Finnish, the Finnic subgroup also includes Estonian and some minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea. Karelian is spoken by about 100,000 people, mainly in the Republic of Karelia, Russia although notable Karelian-speaking communities can also be found in the Tver region northwest of Moscow. Previously, it was estimated there were 5,000 speakers in Finland, mainly belonging to the older generations. Due to post-World War II mobility and internal migration, Karelians now live scattered throughout Finland, Karelians in Tver Oblast have a national-cultural autonomy which guarantees the use of the Karelian language in schools and mass media. In Finland, Karelian has official status as a national minority language within the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The Karelian language has two varieties, which can be considered as dialects or separate languages, Karelian Proper, which comprises North Karelian and South Karelian. These varieties constitute a continuum of dialects, the ends of which are no longer mutually intelligible. The original Proto-Finnic long mid and open vowels have been diphthongized, *ee, *öö, *oo > /ie/, /yö/, /uo/, *aa, *ää > /oa/, /eä/ or /ua/, Karelian is today written using a Latin alphabet consisting of 29 characters. It extends the ISO basic Latin alphabet with the additional letters Č, Š, Ž, Ä, Ö and ʼ and this unified alphabet is used to write all Karelian varieties except Tver Karelian. The very few texts that were published in Karelian from medieval times through the 19th century used the Cyrillic alphabet, with the establishment of the Soviet Union, Finnish, written with the Latin alphabet, became official. However, from 1937–39 Karelian written in Cyrillic replaced Finnish as a language of the Karelian ASSR. Karelian is written with similar to Finnish orthography. However, some features of the Karelian language and thus orthography are different from Finnish, The Karelian system of sibilants is extensive, in Finnish, there is only one, Karelian retains palatalization, usually denoted with an apostrophe The letter ü may replace y in some texts
14.
Hungarian language
–
Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is spoken by communities of Hungarian people in neighbouring countries. Like Finnish and Estonian, it belongs to the Uralic language family, its closest relatives being Mansi and it is one of several European languages not part of the Indo-European languages, and the most widely-spoken European language that does not belong to the Indo-European family. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar or magyar nyelv, the word Magyar is used as an English and Hungarian word to refer to Hungarian people as an ethnic group. Hungarian is a member of the Uralic language family, the name of Hungary could be a result of regular sound changes of Ungrian/Ugrian, and the fact that the Eastern Slavs referred to Hungarians as Ǫgry/Ǫgrove seemed to confirm that. Current literature favors the hypothesis that it comes from the name of the Turkic tribe Onogur, there are numerous regular sound correspondences between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian /aː/ corresponds to Khanty /o/ in certain positions, for example, Hungarian ház house vs. Khanty xot house, and Hungarian száz hundred vs. Khanty sot hundred. The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondences are also regular, during the later half of the 19th century, a competing hypothesis proposed a Turkic affinity of Hungarian. Following an academic debate known as Az ugor-török háború, the Finno-Ugric hypothesis was concluded the sounder of the two, foremost based on work by the German linguist Josef Budenz. The traditional view argues that the Hungarian language separated from its Ugric relatives in the first half of the 1st millennium b. c. e. in western Siberia, east of the southern Urals. The Hungarians gradually changed their lifestyle from settled hunters to nomadic pastoralists, in Hungarian, Iranian loans date back to the time immediately following the breakup of Ugric and probably span well over a millennium. Among these include tehén ‘cow’, tíz ‘ten’, tej ‘milk’, increasing archaeological evidence from present-day southern Bashkortostan found in the previous decades confirms the existence of Hungarian settlements between the Volga River and Ural Mountains. The Onogurs later had a influence on the language, especially between the 5th-9th centuries. This layer of Turkic loans is large and varied, and includes words borrowed from Oghur Turkic, e. g. borjú ‘calf’, dél ‘noon, many words related to agriculture, to state administration or even to family relations have such backgrounds. Hungarian syntax and grammar were not influenced in a dramatic way during these 300 years. After the arrival of the Hungarians into the Carpathian Basin the language came into contact with different speech communities, Turkic loans from this period come mainly from the Pechenegs and Cumanians who settled in Hungary during the 12th-13th centuries, e. g. koboz ‘cobza’, komondor ‘mop dog’. Hungarian borrowed many words from especially the neighbouring Slavic languages, in exchange, these languages also borrowed words from Hungarian, e. g. Serbo-Croatian ašov from Hung ásó ‘spade’. Approximately 1. 6% of the Romanian lexicon is of Hungarian origin, on the basis of the growing genetic evidence, the accepted origin theory is contested by geneticists too
15.
Swedish language
–
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken natively by more than 9 million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, where it has equal legal standing with Finnish. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish, along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. It is currently the largest of the North Germanic languages by number of speakers, Standard Swedish, spoken by most Swedes, is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the rural dialects still exist. The standard word order is, as in most Germanic languages, V2, Swedish morphology is similar to English, that is, words have comparatively few inflections. There are two genders, no cases, and a distinction between plural and singular. Older analyses posit the cases nominative and genitive and there are remains of distinct accusative and dative forms as well. Adjectives are compared as in English, and are inflected according to gender, number. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes, complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles, the prosody features both stress and in most dialects tonal qualities. The language has a large vowel inventory. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless velar fricative, a highly variable consonant phoneme. Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, by many general criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Continental Scandinavian languages could very well be considered dialects of a common Scandinavian language. In the 8th century, the common Germanic language of Scandinavia, Proto-Norse, had some changes. This language began to undergo new changes that did not spread to all of Scandinavia, the dialects of Old East Norse that were spoken in Sweden are called Runic Swedish while the dialects of Denmark are referred to as Runic Danish. The dialects are described as runic because the body of text appears in the runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, from 1200 onwards, the dialects in Denmark began to diverge from those of Sweden. An early change that separated Runic Danish from the dialects of Old East Norse was the change of the diphthong æi to the monophthong é. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain, there was also a change of au as in dauðr into a long open ø as in døðr dead
16.
German language
–
German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, the German-speaking Community of Belgium and it is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg. Major languages which are most similar to German include other members of the West Germanic language branch, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Luxembourgish and it is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English. One of the languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide. The German speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of publication of new books. German derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, a portion of German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. With slightly different standardized variants, German is a pluricentric language, like English, German is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and also other parts of the world. The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, when Martin Luther translated the Bible, he based his translation primarily on the standard bureaucratic language used in Saxony, also known as Meißner Deutsch. Copies of Luthers Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region that translated words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Roman Catholics initially rejected Luthers translation, and tried to create their own Catholic standard of the German language – the difference in relation to Protestant German was minimal. It was not until the middle of the 18th century that a widely accepted standard was created, until about 1800, standard German was mainly a written language, in urban northern Germany, the local Low German dialects were spoken. Standard German, which was different, was often learned as a foreign language with uncertain pronunciation. Northern German pronunciation was considered the standard in prescriptive pronunciation guides though, however, German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire and its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality. Some cities, such as Prague and Budapest, were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain, others, such as Pozsony, were originally settled during the Habsburg period, and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest and Bratislava as well as cities like Zagreb, the most comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of the German language is found within the Deutsches Wörterbuch. This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between 1852 and 1860, in 1872, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook. In 1901, the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a standardization of the German language in its written form
17.
Middle Low German
–
Middle Low German or Middle Saxon is a language that is the descendant of Old Saxon and the ancestor of modern Low German. It served as the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League. It was spoken from about 1100 to 1600, Middle Low German is a term used with varying degrees of inclusivity. It is distinguished from Middle High German, spoken to the south, Middle Low German provided a large number of loanwords to languages spoken around the Baltic Sea as a result of the activities of Hanseatic traders. It is considered the largest single source of loanwords in Estonian, Latvian, Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, spoken all around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Traces of the importance of Middle Low German can be seen by the many found in the Scandinavian, Finnic
18.
Hanseatic League
–
The Hanseatic League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and their market towns. Growing from a few North German towns in the late 1100s and it stretched from the Baltic to the North Sea and inland during the Late Middle Ages and early modern period. Hanse, later spelled as Hansa, was the Middle Low German word for a convoy, the League was created to protect the guilds economic interests and diplomatic privileges in their affiliated cities and countries, as well as along the trade routes the merchants visited. The Hanseatic cities had their own system and furnished their own armies for mutual protection. The hegemony of Lübeck peaked during the 15th century, Lübeck became a base for merchants from Saxony and Westphalia trading eastward and northward. This area was a source of timber, wax, amber, resins, the towns raised their own armies, with each guild required to provide levies when needed. The Hanseatic cities came to the aid of one another, and commercial ships often had to be used to carry soldiers, Visby functioned as the leading centre in the Baltic before the Hansa. Sailing east, Visby merchants established a trading post at Novgorod called Gutagard in 1080, Merchants from northern Germany also stayed in the early period of the Gotlander settlement. Later they established their own trading station in Novgorod, known as Peterhof, in 1229, German merchants at Novgorod were granted certain privileges that made their position more secure. Hansa societies worked to remove restrictions to trade for their members, before the official foundation of the League in 1356, the word Hanse did not occur in the Baltic language. The earliest remaining documentary mention, although without a name, of a specific German commercial federation is from London 1157. That year, the merchants of the Hansa in Cologne convinced Henry II, King of England, to them from all tolls in London. The allied cities gained control over most of the trade, especially the Scania Market. In 1266, Henry III of England granted the Lübeck and Hamburg Hansa a charter for operations in England, much of the drive for this co-operation came from the fragmented nature of existing territorial government, which failed to provide security for trade. Over the next 50 years the Hansa itself emerged with formal agreements for confederation and co-operation covering the west and east trade routes. The principal city and linchpin remained Lübeck, with the first general Diet of the Hansa held there in 1356, other such alliances formed throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the League never became a closely managed formal organisation, over the period, a network of alliances grew to include a flexible roster of 70 to 170 cities. The league succeeded in establishing additional Kontors in Bruges, Bergen and these trading posts became significant enclaves
19.
Baltic Germans
–
The Baltic Germans are ethnic German inhabitants of the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Since their resettling from Estonia and Latvia during the upheavals and aftermath of the Second World War, the largest groups of present-day descendants of the Baltic Germans are found in Germany and Canada. It is estimated that several thousand still reside in Latvia and Estonia, for centuries Baltic Germans and the Baltic nobility were a ruling class over native “Undeutsche” serfs. The emerging Baltic-German middle class was mostly urban and professional, in the 12th and 13th centuries Germans, both traders and crusaders, began settling in the eastern Baltics. After the Livonian Crusade they assumed control of government, politics, economics, education, with the decline of Latin, German became the language of all official documents, commerce, education and government. After 1710 many of these increasingly took high positions in the military, political and civilian life of the Russian Empire, Baltic Germans held citizenship of the Russian Empire until 1918 and Estonian or Latvian citizenship until 1939–40. The Baltic German population never surpassed more than 10% of the total population, in 1881 there were 180,000 Baltic Germans in Russias Baltic provinces, but by 1914 this number had declined to 162,000. In 1881 there were approximately 46,700 Germans in Estonia, according to the Russian Empire Census of 1897, there were 120,191 Germans in Latvia, or 6. 2% of the population. Baltic German history and presence in the Baltics came to an end in late 1939, following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, almost all the Baltic Germans were resettled by Nazi Germany under the Heim ins Reich program into the newly formed Reichsgaue Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia. In 1945, most were expelled from these lands by the Soviet army, ethnic Germans from East Prussia and Lithuania are sometimes incorrectly considered Baltic Germans for reasons of cultural, linguistic, and historical affinities. However, the Germans of East Prussia held Prussian, and after 1871, Baltic Germans were not a purely German ethnic group. The early crusaders, tradesmen and craftsmen often married local females, some noble families, like Lievens, even claimed descent from native chieftains. Many of the German Livonian Order soldiers died during the Livonian war, during this time the Low German of the original settlers was replaced by the High German. In those cases where intermarriage occurred, the ethnic group frequently assimilated into German culture, adopting language, customs. They were then considered Germans, leading to the ethnogenesis of the Baltic Germans, barclay de Tolly and George Armitstead, who arrived from the British Isles, became part of the Baltic-German community. Livland, roughly the half of present-day Estonia and the northern and eastern part of todays Latvia, major towns, Riga, Wenden, Wolmar, Walk, Dorpat, Pernau. Kurland, roughly the half of present-day Latvia, major towns. Ösel belonging to present-day Estonia, major town, Arensburg, after the heavy defeat in the 1236 Battle of Saule the Livonian Brothers of the Sword became a part of the Teutonic Order
20.
Standard German
–
Standard German is the standardized variety of the German language used in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas. It is a pluricentric Dachsprache with three codified specific regional variants, German Standard German, Austrian Standard German and Swiss Standard German, adherence is obligatory not for everyday use but for government institutions including schools. Adherence to those standards by private individuals and companies, including the print and audio-visual media, is voluntary, until about 1800, Standard German was almost entirely a written language. In this time, people in Northern Germany, who mainly spoke Low Saxon languages very different from Standard German, learned it as a foreign language. Currently, local dialects are used mainly in informal situations or at home and also in dialect literature, in German linguistics, only the traditional regional varieties of German are called dialects, not the different varieties of standard German. The latter are known as Umgangssprachen and in the territory of Germany began to replace the traditional dialects beginning in the nineteenth century and they constitute a mixture of old dialectal elements with Standard German. In German, Standard German is often called Hochdeutsch, a misleading term since it collides with the linguistic term High German. To avoid this confusion, some refer to Standard German as Standarddeutsch, deutsche Standardsprache, or if the context of the German language is clear, simply Standardsprache. Traditionally, though, the language spoken in the mountainous areas of southern Germany is referred to as Oberdeutsch. The most accepted distinction is between different national varieties of standard German, Austrian Standard German, Germany Standard German and Swiss Standard German, additionally, there are linguists who posit that there are different varieties of standard German within Germany. Linguistic research of the different varieties of standard German began for the most part only in the 1990s, especially in Austria, the German federal state of Bavaria has promoted language diversity in the past in an effort to preserve its distinct culture. The different varieties of standard German differ only in a few features, especially in vocabulary and pronunciation, the variation of the standard German varieties must not be confused with the variation of the local German dialects. Even though the standard German varieties are to a certain degree influenced by the local dialects, in most regions, the speakers use a continuum of mixtures from more dialectical varieties to more standard varieties according to situation. Since the former have not undergone the High German consonant shift, under a socio-linguistic approach to the problem, even if Low German dialects are Abstandsprachen, they are dialects of German, because they lack Ausbau. However, Low German did influence the standard-based vernaculars spoken today in Northern Germany by language transfer, High German heavily influenced by Low German has been known as Missingsch, but most contemporary Northern Germans exhibit only an intermediate Low German substratum in their speech. Therefore, this situation has been called a medial diglossia, although Luxembourgish is no longer considered a German dialect today but a language, the situation can be compared to that of Switzerland. Standard German is also taught in schools in Luxembourg and close to 90% of the population can speak it and this accent is documented in reference works such as Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch by Eva-Maria Krech et al. Duden 6 Das Aussprachewörterbuch by Max Mangold and the materials at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Deutschlandfunk
21.
Russian language
–
Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
22.
Vowel harmony
–
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. A vowel or vowels in a word must be members of the same subclass, in languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other. Suffixes and prefixes will usually follow vowel harmony rules, many agglutinative languages have vowel harmony. The term vowel harmony is used in two different senses, in the first sense, it refers to any type of long distance assimilatory process of vowels, either progressive or regressive. When used in this sense, the vowel harmony is synonymous with the term metaphony. In the second sense, vowel harmony refers only to progressive vowel harmony, for regressive harmony, the term umlaut is used. In this sense, metaphony is the term while vowel harmony. The term umlaut is used in a different sense to refer to a type of vowel gradation. This article will use vowel harmony for both progressive and regressive harmony, harmony processes are long-distance in the sense that the assimilation involves sounds that are separated by intervening segments. In other words, harmony refers to the assimilation of sounds that are not adjacent to each other, for example, a vowel at the beginning of a word can trigger assimilation in a vowel at the end of a word. The assimilation occurs across the word in many languages. This is represented schematically in the diagram, In the diagram above. The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger while the vowels that assimilate are termed targets, when the vowel triggers lie within the root or stem of a word and the affixes contain the targets, this is called stem-controlled vowel harmony. This is fairly common among languages with vowel harmony and may be seen in the Hungarian dative suffix, the -nak form appears after the root with back vowels. The -nek form appears after the root with front vowels, some languages have more than one system of harmony. For instance, Altaic languages are proposed to have a rounding harmony superimposed over a backness harmony, even among languages with vowel harmony, not all vowels need participate in the vowel conversions, these vowels are termed neutral. Neutral vowels may be opaque and block harmonic processes or they may be transparent, intervening consonants are also often transparent. Finally, languages that do have vowel harmony often allow for lexical disharmony, for example, Turkish vakit, *vakıt would have been expected
23.
Dialect
–
That happens, for example, across large parts of India or the Maghreb. Historically, it happened in various parts of Europe such as between Portugal, southern Belgium and southern Italy, and between Flanders and Austria. Leonard Bloomfield used the dialect area. It is analogous to a species in evolutionary biology. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves, in this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. Instead, dialectologists map variation of language features across a dialect continuum. The influential Atlas linguistique de la France pioneered the use of a trained fieldworker and these atlases typically consist of display maps, each showing local forms of a particular item at the survey locations. Secondary studies may include maps, showing the areal distribution of various variants. A common tool in these maps is an isogloss, a line separating areas where different variants of a particular feature predominate, in a dialect continuum, isoglosses for different features are typically spread out, reflecting the gradual transition between varieties. A bundle of coinciding isoglosses indicate a stronger dialect boundary, as might occur at geographical obstacles or long-standing political boundaries, in other cases, intersecting isoglosses and more complex patterns are found. Standard varieties may be developed and codified from one or more locations in a continuum, in such cases the local variety is said to be dependent on, or heteronomous with respect to, the standard variety. The Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are cited as examples. Conversely, a defined in this way may include local varieties that are mutually unintelligible. The choice of standard is determined by a political boundary. As a results, speakers on either side of the boundary may use almost identical varieties, but treat them as dependent on different standards, the choice may be a matter of national, regional or religious identity, and may be controversial. In the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, a standard was developed from local varieties within a continuum with Serbia to the north, the standard was deliberately based on varieties from the west of the republic that were most different from standard Bulgarian. Now known as Macedonian, it is the standard of the independent Republic of Macedonia. Europe provides several examples of dialect continua, the largest of which involve the Germanic, Romance and Slavic branches of the Indo-European language family
24.
South Estonian
–
South Estonian is spoken in South-Eastern Estonia, encompassing the Tartu, Mulgi, Võro and Seto varieties. There is no consensus on its status, as some linguists consider South Estonian a dialect of Estonian whereas other linguists consider South Estonian an independent Finnic language. South Estonian is largely mutually intelligible with modern standard Estonian, although diachronically North and South Estonian are separate branches of the Finnic languages, modern standard Estonian has evolved on the basis of the dialects of Northern Estonia. However, in the 17th to 19th century in Southern Estonia literature was published in a form of Southern Tartu. This usage was called the Tartu literary language, the written standard was used in the schools, churches and courts of the Võro and Tartu linguistic area but not in the Seto and Mulgi area. After Estonia gained independence in 1918, the standardized Estonian language policies were implemented throughout the country. The government officials during the era believed that the Estonian state needed to have one language for all its citizens that led to exclusion of South Estonian at schools. The ban on the instruction and speaking of South Estonian dialects in schools continued during Soviet occupation, after Estonia regained independence in 1991, the Estonian government has become more supportive of the protection and development of South Estonian. A modernized literary form founded on the Võro dialect of South Estonian has been created, the present dialects of the South Estonian language area are Mulgi, Tartu, Võro and Seto. Võro and Seto have remained furthest from the standard written Estonian language and are most difficult to understand by speakers of North Estonian dialects, three enclave dialects of South Estonian have been attested. The Leivu and Lutsi enclaves in Latvia became extinct in the 20th century, the Kraasna enclave in Russia, still aware of their identity, has been assimilated linguistically by Russians. The distinction between South Estonian and North Estonian is starker than any other contrasts between Estonian dialects, and is present at every level of the language, the first South Estonian grammar was written by Johann Gutslaff in 1648 and a translation of the New Testament was published in 1686. In 1806 the first Estonian newspaper Tarto-ma rahwa Näddali leht was published in South Estonian Tartu literary language, comparison of old South Estonian literary language, modern South Estonian and modern standard Estonian, Lords Prayer in old literary South Estonian, Meie Esä Taiwan, pühendetüs saagu sino nimi. Sino tahtmine sündigu kui Taiwan, niida ka maa pääl, Meie päiwälikku leibä anna meile täämbä. Nink anna meile andis meie süü, niida kui ka meie andis anname omile süidläisile, nink ärä saada meid mitte kiusatuse sisse, enge pästä meid ärä kurjast, Sest sino perält om riik, nink wägi, nink awwustus igäwätses ajas. Lords Prayer in modern literary South Estonian, Mi Esä taivan, sino tahtminõ sündkuq, ku taivan, nii ka maa pääl. Mi päävälikku leibä annaq meile täämbä, nink annaq meile andis mi süüq, nii ku ka mi andis anna umilõ süüdläisile. Ni saatku-i meid joht kiusatusõ sisse, a pästäq meid ärq kur’ast, Lords Prayer in modern standard Estonian, Meie isa, kes Sa oled taevas, pühitsetud olgu Sinu nimi
25.
Estonian grammar
–
Estonian grammar is the grammar of the Estonian language. Estonian consonant gradation is a process that affects obstruent consonants at the end of the stressed syllable of a word. Gradation causes consonants in a word to alternate between two grades, termed strong and weak, depending on the grammar, some grammatical forms trigger the weak grade, while others have the strong grade. It is not predictable which form will have which grade, this must simply be memorised, in particular, words with stems of three or more syllables generally do not gradate, nor do words with stems of one syllable. Gradation correlates with the appearance of extra length on a syllable, when a syllable is long, the strong grade will always be accompanied by extra length. The weak grade may or may not have length, depending on other factors. These are mentioned at Estonian phonology - Suprasegmental length, some words show gradation only through the presence of absence or extra length, and the consonants themselves do not change. In this article, extra length is shown with a backtick before the vowel of the syllable, after a long vowel, or in a consonant cluster, the strong grade appears with a single voiceless consonant, while a voiced consonant appears in the weak grade. Long ss only gradates when it appears at the end of a cluster, patterns for single plosives are more varied and unpredictable. The weak grade may involve disappearance of the consonant altogether, with consequences for vowels. There are also four special assimilative patterns, When a consonant is reduced to zero in the weak grade and these vowels undergo several changes, If the first vowel is long, it is shortened. If either vowel is i, u or ü, it is lowered to e, o or ö respectively, Examples, nuga, noa, saagima, saen, süsi, söe. If the first vowel is an ending in e, the e becomes j. If the first vowel is an ending in u, the u becomes v. Examples, haug. If the first vowel is an ending in any other sound. Assibilation is a change happened in Proto-Finnic, the sequence ti became si. This change is no longer productive or predictable, but a number of nouns still display the effects in certain forms. The effect is visible in that sometimes s appears where there would otherwise be a t or d and this also creates new variants of the gradation patterns mentioned above, with s appearing in some of the forms in both the strong and weak grade
26.
Livonian Chronicle of Henry
–
The Livonian Chronicle of Henry or Henrys chronicle of Livonia is a document in Latin describing historic events in Livonia and surrounding areas from 1180 to 1227. It was written by a priest Henry of Latvia, apart from the few references in the Primary Chronicle compiled in Kievan Rus in the twelfth century, it is the oldest known written document about the history of these countries. Scandinavian rulers and German military knightly orders led by the German Prince-Bishops conquered and resettled the Baltic world, the Livonian Chronicle of Henry provides eyewitness accounts of the events, with an invaluable and deeply human history. The other famous early Livonian text, the Rhymed Chronicle has less value, as it was essentially intended as a patriotic. The chronicles consist of four books, the first book, On Livonia describes events between 1186 and 1196, the arrival of the first bishop of Ikšķile Meinhard and baptizing of Livonians. The original manuscript of the chronicles has not been preserved, there are sixteen different copies, dating from 14th to 19th century, the oldest of which is the Codex Zamoscianus, written on parchment and dating from the end of the 13th century. The Codex Zamoscianus is incomplete, as the text of the Chronicle ends in the 23rd chapter, the Codex Zamoscianus is presently kept in the Polish National Library in Warsaw. English online material on the chronicle is rather scarce, though there are some excerpts, the Latin copy in the Polish National Library is available online. The author of the chronicles is Henry of Latvia, the chronicles say that he was a Catholic priest who witnessed most of events described. Henry is thought to have been born between 1180 and 1188, Henry was probably German, bearing a German forename and consistently referring to Germans in the first person plural, but it is also possible he came from Livonia. His Chronicles are written from the point of view, that the history of the Church was the essential history of Livonia. The Chronicles may have originated as a report to the papal legate William of Modena, a modern translation was published in 1961, by James A Brundage, and is available through Columbia University Press. Ruth Williamson, Primary Source Analysis of the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia Indriķa hronika - Full translation into Latvian with comments
27.
Estonian literature
–
The oldest records of written Estonian date from the 13th century. Originates Livoniae in Chronicle of Henry of Livonia contains Estonian place names, words, the Liber Census Daniae contains Estonian place and family names. The earliest extant samples of connected Estonian are the so-called Kullamaa prayers dating from 1524 and 1528, the first known printed book is a bilingual German-Estonian translation of the Lutheran catechism by S. Wanradt and J. Koell. For the use of priests an Estonian grammar was printed in German in 1637, the New Testament was translated into southern Estonian in 1686. The two dialects were united by Anton Thor Helle in a form based on northern Estonian, writings in Estonian became more significant in the 19th century during the Estophile Enlightenment Period. The cultural stratum of Estonian was originally characterised by a lyrical form of folk poetry based on syllabic quantity. Apart from a few albeit remarkable exceptions, this form has not been much employed in later times. At a professional level, traditional folk song reached its new heyday during the last quarter of the 20th century, in modern times Jaan Kross and Jaan Kaplinski remain Estonias best known and most translated writers. As opposed to the recent nature of literature, the oral tradition, found in collections of Estonian folklore. Hurt coined the phrase which to this day shapes the mentality of the nation of one people, If we cannot be great in number. The earliest example of Estonian language poetry dates back to 1637, Otto Wilhelm Masing was the first literate who had a thorough mastery of the Estonian language. Cannot the tongue of this landIn the fire of incantationRising up to the heavensSeek for eternity, kristjan Jaak Peterson Those lines have been interpreted as a claim to reestablish the birthright of the Estonian language. Kristjan Jaak Peterson is considered the founder of modern Estonian poetry and he gathered his Estonian poems into two small books but never saw them published, this only occurred a hundred years after his death. One of Petersons projects was fulfilled in his lifetime, the German version of Kristfrid Gananders Mythologia Fennica, Petersons translation of Gananders dictionary found many readers in Estonia and abroad, becoming an important source of national ideology and inspiration for early Estonian literature. Its dominating influence extended through the first decades of the 20th century, the romantic ideology of the 19th century laid down the requirements for a national literature. The idea of an epic was the product of a humanist circle called the Learned Estonian Society, after Faehlmanns death in 1850 the society handed the manuscripts over to Kreutzwald. The first edition of Kalevipoeg was bilingual, the German text being presented side by side with the Estonian original, a popular Estonian edition in a single volume followed in 1862. Lydia Koidula was the initiator of a tradition of Estonian patriotic, in the late 19th-century a poet emerged who profoundly affected Estonian poetry as a whole – Juhan Liiv
28.
Reformation
–
The period is usually considered to have begun with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Luther in 1517 to the Thirty Years War and ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Protestant position, however, would come to incorporate doctrinal changes such as sola scriptura, the initial movement within Germany diversified, and other reform impulses arose independently of Luther. The spread of Gutenbergs printing press provided the means for the dissemination of religious materials in the vernacular. The largest groups were the Lutherans and Calvinists, Lutheran churches were founded mostly in Germany, the Baltics and Scandinavia, while the Reformed ones were founded in Switzerland, Hungary, France, the Netherlands and Scotland. The new movement influenced the Church of England decisively after 1547 under Edward VI and Elizabeth I, there were also reformation movements throughout continental Europe known as the Radical Reformation, which gave rise to the Anabaptist, Moravian and other Pietistic movements. The Roman Catholic Church responded with a Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent, much work in battling Protestantism was done by the well-organised new order of the Jesuits. In general, Northern Europe, with the exception of most of Ireland, southern Europe remained Roman Catholic, while Central Europe was a site of a fierce conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years War, which left it devastated. The oldest Protestant churches, such as the Unitas Fratrum and Moravian Church, the later Protestant Churches generally date their doctrinal separation from the Roman Catholic Church to the 16th century. The Reformation began as an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church, by priests who opposed what they perceived as false doctrines and ecclesiastic malpractice. They especially objected to the teaching and the sale of indulgences, and the abuses thereof, and to simony, the reformers saw these practices as evidence of the systemic corruption of the Churchs hierarchy, which included the pope. Unrest due to the Great Schism of Western Christianity excited wars between princes, uprisings among the peasants, and widespread concern over corruption in the Church, New perspectives came from John Wycliffe at Oxford University and from Jan Hus at the Charles University in Prague. Hus rejected indulgences and adopted a doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone, the Roman Catholic Church officially concluded this debate at the Council of Constance by condemning Hus, who was executed by burning despite a promise of safe-conduct. Wycliffe was posthumously condemned as a heretic and his corpse exhumed and burned in 1428, the Council of Constance confirmed and strengthened the traditional medieval conception of church and empire. The council did not address the national tensions or the theological tensions stirred up during the century and could not prevent schism. Pope Sixtus IV established the practice of selling indulgences to be applied to the dead, Pope Alexander VI was one of the most controversial of the Renaissance popes. He was the father of seven children, including Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, in response to papal corruption, particularly the sale of indulgences, Luther wrote The Ninety-Five Theses. The Reformation was born of Luthers dual declaration – first, the discovering of Jesus and salvation by faith alone, the Protestant reformers were unanimous in agreement and this understanding of prophecy furnished importance to their deeds. It was the point and the battle cry that made the Reformation nearly unassailable
29.
New Testament
–
The New Testament is the second major part of the Christian biblical canon, the first part being the Old Testament, based on the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Christianity, Christians regard both the Old and New Testaments together as sacred scripture. The New Testament has frequently accompanied the spread of Christianity around the world and it reflects and serves as a source for Christian theology and morality. Both extended readings and phrases directly from the New Testament are also incorporated into the various Christian liturgies, the New Testament has influenced religious, philosophical, and political movements in Christendom and left an indelible mark on literature, art, and music. In almost all Christian traditions today, the New Testament consists of 27 books, John A. T. Robinson, Dan Wallace, and William F. Albright dated all the books of the New Testament before 70 AD. Others give a date of 80 AD, or at 96 AD. Over time, some disputed books, such as the Book of Revelation, other works earlier held to be Scripture, such as 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Diatessaron, were excluded from the New Testament. However, the canon of the New Testament, at least since Late Antiquity, has been almost universally recognized within Christianity. The term new testament, or new covenant first occurs in Jeremiah 31,31, the same Greek phrase for new covenant is found elsewhere in the New Testament. Modern English, like Latin, distinguishes testament and covenant as alternative translations, John Wycliffes 1395 version is a translation of the Latin Vulgate and so follows different terms in Jeremiah and Hebrews, Lo. Days shall come, saith the Lord, and I shall make a new covenant with the house of Israel, for he reproving him saith, Lo. Days come, saith the Lord, when I shall establish a new testament on the house of Israel, use of the term New Testament to describe a collection of first and second-century Christian Greek Scriptures can be traced back to Tertullian. In Against Marcion, written circa 208 AD, he writes of the Divine Word, by the 4th century, the existence—even if not the exact contents—of both an Old and New Testament had been established. Lactantius, a 3rd–4th century Christian author wrote in his early-4th-century Latin Institutiones Divinae and that which preceded the advent and passion of Christ—that is, the law and the prophets—is called the Old, but those things which were written after His resurrection are named the New Testament. The canon of the New Testament is the collection of books that most Christians regard as divinely inspired, several of these writings sought to extend, interpret, and apply apostolic teaching to meet the needs of Christians in a given locality. The book order is the same in the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, the Slavonic, Armenian and Ethiopian traditions have different New Testament book orders. Each of the four gospels in the New Testament narrates the life, death, the word gospel derives from the Old English gōd-spell, meaning good news or glad tidings. The gospel was considered the good news of the coming Kingdom of Messiah, and the redemption through the life and death of Jesus, Gospel is a calque of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, euangelion
30.
Estophilia
–
Such people are known as Estophiles. The opposite of Estophilia is Estophobia, indigenous Estonian culture was largely restricted to the peasants. While vertical mobility was not impossible, the ethnic Estonians that became citizens or landlords tended to Germanise voluntarily, however, while this suppression largely isolated the Germanic administrators from Estonian lower classes, it did not destroy the native culture. The Enlightenment era brought with it greater tolerance and spread the desire to educate the uneducated, for example, the very first Estonian language periodical publication, the Lühhike öppetus, concerned medical techniques. Educated German immigrants and local Baltic Germans in Estonia, educated at German universities introduced Enlightenment ideas that propagated freedom of thinking and brotherhood, the French Revolution provided a powerful motive for the enlightened local upper class to create literature for the peasantry. The Estophile Enlightenment Period formed the transition from religious Estonian literature to newspapers written in Estonian for the mass public, the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder greatly influenced the Baltic German intelligentsia to see the value in the indigenous culture. Inspired by Herders collection of European and Estonian folk songs, they came to view native folklore as natural expressions of truth, otto Wilhelm Masing and Garlieb Merkel were prominent Estophiles. Masing was one of the advocates of peasant education and published a weekly newspaper in the Estonian language called Maa rahva Näddali Leht from 1821. Folklore being an easily identifiable collectible, a number of Estophiles have undertaken recording various folktales. An Estonian grammar was printed in German in 1637, Johann Heinrich Rosenplänter published the first academic journal in 1813 on an Estonian topic called Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniß der ehstnischen Sprache, aimed at developing written Estonian. In 1843, a grammar of the Estonian language was compiled by pastor Eduard Ahrens using the Finnish, while the significance of Estophiles has waned over the centuries, a number of people are still widely regarded as such. Since World War II, many of the Estophiles around the world have been in connection with various Estonian exile communities. One of the most active Estophile organizations is the Tuglas Society in Finland, in order to promote the study of Estonian language and culture, the Estonian Institute offers an annual scholarship. The objective of the scholarship is to research and studies conducted in Estonia by academically advanced students interested in Estonian language. The scholarship is financed by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, anglophile Fennophile Francophile Russophile Hispanophile Johann Gottfried, Georg Julius von Schultz, 1808–1875. Possibilities and Limitations of Estophilia among the Baltic Germans in the 19th century, ea Jansen, How Estonian literary culture was born
31.
Kristjan Jaak Peterson
–
Kristjan Jaak Peterson also known as Christian Jacob Petersohn, was an Estonian poet, commonly regarded as a herald of Estonian national literature and the founder of modern Estonian poetry. His literary career was cut short by the tuberculosis that killed him at the age of 21 and his birthday on March 14 is celebrated in Estonia as the Mother Tongue Day. Cannot the tongue of land, In the wind of incantation, Rising up to the heavens. Kristjan Jaak Peterson Those lines have been interpreted as a claim to reestablish the birthright of the Estonian language, kristjan Jaak Peterson gathered his Estonian poems into two small books but never saw them published, as this only occurred a hundred years after his death. Three German poems were published posthumously in 1823 and its dominating influence extended through the first decades of the 20th century. By nature, Peterson imitated the lifestyle of the Greek cynics and dressed extravagantly, including elements of Estonian traditional clothing in his dress
32.
University of Tartu
–
The University of Tartu is a classical university in the city of Tartu, Estonia. It is the university of Estonia. The University of Tartu is the only university in the country. It was established by King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632, there are nearly 14,000 students at the university, of which over 1,300 are foreign students. The QS World University Rankings ranked the University of Tartu 347th in the world in 2016, the university is also ranked 4th in the Emerging Europe and Central Asia region. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings placed it in the 301–350 range among world universities and it is the only university in the Baltic countries to place among the top 200 universities in Europe. UT belongs to top 1% of worlds most cited universities in 10 research areas, the historical buildings of the university are included in the European Heritage Label list as embodiment of the ideas of a university in the Age of Enlightenment. The University of Tartu is a member of the Coimbra Group, the Academia Gustaviana in the then Swedish province of Livonia was the second university founded in the Swedish Empire, following Uppsala University and preceding the Academy of Åbo. A precursor to the academy had been a Jesuit grammar school Gymnasium Dorpatense, founded by Stefan Batory in 1583 and existing to 1601, the first students immatriculated between 20–21 April 1632. The opening ceremony of Academia Dorpatensis took place on 15 October in the same year, the academy in Tartu functioned with Philosophy, Law, Theology and Medical Faculties enjoying the privileges of the University of Uppsala. On account of the Russian–Swedish war, the University of Tartu moved to Tallinn in 1656, in the 17th century the future outstanding Swedish scholars Urban Hiärne, Olof Verelius, Arvid Moller and others studied at the university. In 1690 Tartu became a university town again, Academia Gustavo-Carolina shortly after that moved from Tartu to Pärnu as a result of the coalition against Sweden and the Great Famine of 1695–1697. Academia Gustavo-Carolina, which had opened in Pärnu on 28 August 1699 was closed because of the surrender to Russian forces on 12 August 1710 during the Great Northern War, according to the terms of the capitulation, the Russians agreed to maintain the university in Pärnu. The university was re-opened by the Baltic Germans in Estonia in April 1802, the language of instruction at Dorpat was German from 1802 to 1893. During that time, Dorpat had a nature in that it belonged both to the set of German and Russian universities. Financially and administratively, the latter was important, intellectually and regarding the professoriate and students. Among the 30 German-language universities, of which 23 were inside the German Empire, in teaching, the university educated the local Baltic German leadership and professional classes as well as staff especially for the administration and health system of the entire Russian Empire. In scholarship, it was a university, the time between 1860 and 1880 was its golden age
33.
First language
–
A first language is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. If there are multiple L1, the designation first language is used for the L1 spoken the best or the one that is the basis for sociolinguistic identity. In some countries, the native language or mother tongue refers to the language of ones ethnic group rather than ones first language. Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, by contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than ones first language. Native speakers are considered to be an authority on their language because of their natural acquisition process regarding the language. That is achieved by interaction with the language and speakers of the language. Native speakers will not necessarily be knowledgeable about every rule of the language. Sometimes, the mother tongue or mother language is used for the language that a person learned as a child at home. Children growing up in homes can, according to this definition, have more than one mother tongue or native language. It is quite possible that the first language learned is no longer a dominant language. According to Ivan Illich, the mother tongue was first used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin. That is, the mother the Church introduced this term. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, on 17 November 1999, UNESCO designated 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The first language of a child is part of the personal, social and cultural identity, another impact of the first language is that it brings about the reflection and learning of successful social patterns of acting and speaking. It is basically responsible for differentiating the linguistic competence of acting and that has implications on the education of non-native speakers. The topic of native speaker also gives way to discussion about what exactly bilingualism is, one definition is that a person is bilingual by being equally proficient in both languages. A person who grows up speaking English and begins learning Spanish for four years is not necessarily bilingual unless he speaks the two languages with equal fluency, one can have two or more native languages, thus being a native bilingual or indeed multilingual. The order in which languages are learned is not necessarily the order of proficiency
Estonia
European Union
listen)) is the official language of Estonia, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people: 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 outside Estonia.[3] It belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family.
Definitions from Wiktionary
Media from Wikimedia Commons
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Travel guide from Wikivoyage
Data from Wikidata
