1031: Influences on Estonian Oct 5, 2017

As stated before, when speakers of two languages come into contact for long enough, some parts of one language will likely influence the other. Sometimes this can be obvious, such as how much of English's vocabulary comes from romance languages due to the Norman conquest of England and other events, but there is still often plenty of room for debate. Estonian, for instance, has been heavily influenced by (Low) German and Russian due to about 700 years of contact with Germans starting in the 13th century with the Teutonic order before Estonia became part of the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union. Since Estonian is a Uralic language, not an Indo-European language, one might assume that the influence from those aforementioned languages would be quite apparent, but this is not always the case. Certain verb markings to indicate tense, aspect etc. in Estonian are mostly similar to other Finno-Ugric languages, but other times it may differ slightly, in which case it is not always clear whether the grammar was influenced by German or Russian individually, though more often than otherwise the effects are attributed to Low German. The subject does need to be studied more, so perhaps within the next few decades new information will shed light on this issue.