Siberian Estonians - Orientation

Currently, there are approximately 20,000 Estonians in Siberia. Most are descendants of the volunteer settlers who went there around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Today, some have started referring to themselves as "Eestlased"—Siberian Estonians. In western Siberia, Estonians live mostly in the Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, and Kemerovo regions and, in eastern Siberia, in the Krasnoyarsk and Primorsk regions. Estonians are the main population of the Estonian Republic (approximately 1.1 million people). There are also large numbers of ethnic Estonians living in Russia, Australia, Canada, the United States, and Sweden. The Estonian language belongs to the Baltic-Finnish Subgroup of the Finnish-Uric Group of the Ural Language Family. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet.