The Estonian language is characterised by the following:

* a large number of cases - 14 productive cases;
* no grammatical gender either of nouns or personal pronouns. As the pronoun tema can refer to both man and woman (occasionally even to a thing), an Estonian speaker does not face problems of political correctness as do those who speak Indo-European languages;
* no articles (either definite or indefinite);
* differentiation between three quantities both in vowels and consonants. The 2nd and 3rd quantities are not distinguished in spelling; the meaning and pronunciation of the word becomes clear from the contents.

This sort of 3-quantity system was regarded as uniquely Estonian for a long time. Now the scholars have also discovered similar phenomena in a few North German dialects. It is assumed that the 3-quantity system in Estonian and in the German dialects developed simultaneously. The two languages did, after all, belong for centuries in the same cultural space marked out by the Hanseatic League.