It should be a relief that we use the Latin alphabet - no cyrillic or hieroglyphs, should you have had any experience with these.  We write our words out as they sound, i.e. phonetically - using the principle to have a letter for each distinct sound. So with a little practice of listening and reading, one should soon be able to pronounce well!  At least so we think.

We take pride in Estonian sounding melodic due to its abundance of vowels. Due to the phonetic principle we have some variations of the letters a, o, u to represent some distinct phonemes: ä, ö, ö familiar from the German alphabet and the letter õ.   We also have quite a selection of sibilants besides the regular s – namely š, z, ž. The latter are mainly used in adapted foreign words (šokolaad, for example). I have omitted the letters c, q, w, y that are used in written Estonian in a foreign proper names. Below you'll also find audio files with alphabet and sample words. As with other audios later, practice pronuncation! Click on the arrow on the left of music control panel to start.

APPI BEEBI KODU EMA FILM NÄGU HALL ISA JA KASS LAPS MUNA NOOR ON PERE RIKAS SUUR ŠOKOLAAD ZOOPARK žELEE TERE UKS VANA ÕLU ÄRI ÖÖ ÜLE