An embroidery by Elgi Reemets depicting the poet and visionary		Although more than two thirds of Estonian peasants were literate by the early 19th century, they were still virtually excluded from political decision-making — for any upward mobility in society one had to be, or become, German. In 1818, the poet Kristjan Jaak Peterson, one of the first university-educated Estonians, could only sigh: "Shall our tongue ever be equal to other languages..." However, with the spread of the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, the local Baltic German version of the Ancient Régime also started to crumble. In the first decades of the 19th century Estonian peasants were freed from serfdom and given family names and limited self-government — steps that provided the native people with an incentive and readiness to become involved in what is nowadays called nation-building.
	A leading Estophile, Reverend Otto Wilhelm Masing, father of Estonian 'õ'
	To mark a vowel that occurs neither in Latin nor in German, Masing added a novel character to the Estonian alphabet and popularised its use in his primers

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