Tuuli Oder: What Sort of English do Estonians Speak?

There is no uniform English language. Tuuli Oder, the head of the Tallinn University Language Centre, explains that actually we should be talking about English languages, which are mother tongues to around 380 million people in the world (e.g. British and American); nearly 500 million people use English as a second language (e.g. Indian and Singapore), and about a billion more use it as a foreign language.

In Estonian schools, mostly British English is taught, as most study materials come from the UK. At the same time, we must make a difference between learning and acquiring a language. In the latter case, people acquire in Estonia also American English, especially via films, music, social media etc. Thus, in Estonia, both American and British English are widespread.

In general, as it is common with small nations, Estonians are good at foreign languages. At the same time, we have trouble with types of words that do not exist in Estonian: articles (a and the) and prepositions (of, for, at, in, to, etc.). We also struggle with the dental fricatives (e.g. in the words three and these), as there is no such sound in Estonian.

At the same time, we are proud of our /ü/ sound and wish to use it in English as well. Sadly, this sound is non-existent in English, so we have to learn to use the sound /i/ in the words olympic and system. We also have trouble with word order, since the order of words in a sentence in Estonian is much less regulated than it is in English.

Even though we have difficulties with short English words (the aforementioned articles and prepositions consist of 1-3 letters), we love using the longer ones, especially we enjoy English nouns and verbs. We have even created a “new” language Estinglish, that is a mixture of English and Estonian. This mixed language could be characterised with the following sentence:

Copywriterite staffi breefil citycenteris räägiti refreshitud knowhowst ja updateitud appidest, jagati flyereid ja leaflette, pakuti uut cooli near waterit ja tõdeti, et brandi tuneitud slogan on olnud positively surprising. (At the copywriter staff brief in the city centre they talked about refreshed know-how and updated apps, gave out fliers and leaflets, offered a cool new near water and admitted that the tuned slogan of the brand has been positively surprising).

If you understood the first sentence, you already know Estinglish. However, a question remains– do we need Estinglish at all? The answer depends on whether we wish to become a part of the billion that speaks English as a first or second language, or would it be wiser to remain among the billion who uses English as a foreign language, preserving their beautiful mother tongue as well.

Therefore, which slogan do you prefer: “Long live Estinglish!” or “NO to Estinglish!”?