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Estonian (eesti keel; -fiˈeːsti ˈkeːlpronet-eesti keel is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities. It is a Uralic language and is closely related to Finnish.
One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest in linguists is what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phoneme length: short, long, and "overlong", such that /toto/, /toˑto/ and /toːto/ are distinct. In actuality, the distinction is not purely in the phoneme length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.
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