As opposed to most Indo-European languages, and similar to other Finno-Ugric languages, Estonian uses relatively many postpositions. For instance, instead of all laua 'under the table', an Estonian says laua all 'the table under'. However, there is a growing tendency to substitute prepositions for postpositions in modern Estonian, e.g. the expression teed mööda 'the way along' is more and more replaced by mööda teed 'along the way'.

Estonian is also characterised by a relatively free word order. A sentence can be fairly easily rearranged without it becoming ungrammatical. In many other languages, such as English, this would be almost impossible. The reason for this difference is that in Estonian, grammatical relations between words are signalled by case endings, but in English, which has no such endings, by the relative position of words. If grammatical relations are signalled by suffixes, the position of words in the sentence is not important, but if there are no case endings available, the only means of indicating these relations is word order.

As in most European languages, a typical affirmative Estonian sentence has the following structure SVO: subject - verb - object:

But in many cases, especially in poetic registers, word order can be quite different:

'Stars were often seen in the sky'