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6. Estonian language locale for Estonia, Narrative Cultural Specification

Ordering in Estonian is defined in Estonian standard EVS 8:2000 and in the Estonian Grammar ("Eesti keele grammatika II", Tallinn 1993, ISBN 9985-9002-1-9).

The ordering on the Latin script largely corresponds to the typical 'a' to 'z' order, common to the latin alphabet. Estonian sort order changes the default positions for one base character (<z>), s and z with caron and four accented vowels in the Estonian alphabet. <z> and all it's modifications are ordered after <s>. and are separate letters and follow the unaccented <s> and <z> respectively. All four Estonian vowels with diacritics - 'õ', 'ä', 'ö' ja 'ü' - are also sorted as separate letters after 'w'. 'w' is generally sorted as a separate letter except in registers of Estonian personal names where sorting 'v' and 'w' together is allowed. Thus the Estonian alphabet ends with

... r s z t u v w õ ä ö ü x y

All other aspects are specified and taken from ISO 14651 (International string ordering and ISO 10646 character repertoire). Nonaccented letters come before accented letters, and small letters come before capital letters, when words otherwise compare equally. Tailoring may be necessary to achieve this sort order.

Clause 2: Classification of characters

Estonian uses normal classification of Latin letters in uppercase and lowercase.

Clause 3: Numeric formatting

The decimal separator is COMMA <,>. Note that different separators are used in numeric and monetary formatting!
The thousands separator is NONBREAKING SPACE <nbs>
The grouping of large numbers is in groups of three digits. Grouping is not mandatory for numbers in the range 1000--9999.

Clause 4: Monetary formatting

The decimal separator is FULL STOP <.> Note that different separators are used in numeric and monetary formatting!
For amounts in the range 1000--9999 grouping is not mandatory.

International currency code	Domestic currency formatting
EEK 543.21	543.21 kr
EEK -543.21	-543.21 kr
EEK 9 876 543.21	9 876 543.21 kr

Euro is written as text (no abbreviations are used) or by the Euro sign. The use of the three letter currency code EUR is analogous to the use of other international currency codes.

Euro currency code formatting	Domestic formatting	Use of the Euro sign
EUR 543.21	543.21 eurot	543.21
EUR -543.21	-543.21 eurot	-543.21
EUR 9 876 543.21	9 876 543.21 eurot	9 876 543.21

Clause 5: Date and time conventions

English name	Weekday name in Estonian	Short weekday name*
Monday	esmaspäev	E
Tuesday	teisipäev	T
Wednesday	kolmapäev	K
Thursday	neljapäev	N
Friday	reede	R
Saturday	laupäev	L
Sunday	pühapäev	P

English name	Month name in Estonian	Short month name*
January	jaanuar	jaan
February	veebruar	veebr
March	märts	märts
April	aprill	apr
May	mai	mai
June	juuni	juuni
July	juuli	juuli
August	august	aug
September	september	sept
October	oktoober	okt
November	november	nov
December	detsember	dets

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* abbreviations are not normally terminated with full stop

Long date:	7. detsember 1999. a
Abbreviated day and time:	7. dets 1999. a
Long date with weekday:	teisipäev, 23. veebruar 1999
Numeric date:	23.02.1999
Time:	18:06:20

Both weekday and month names are written with an initial lower case letter in Estonian (Normal capitalization rules apply in the beginning of a sentence, etc.). In Estonia, a full stop is used to separate the elements of the abbreviated date (in other countries, a solidus or hyphen is also used).

In certain documents the date field may be padded with leading zero e.g. 07. detsember.

To present the time of the day, in Estonia the 24 hour system is used. Hours, minutes and seconds are separated through colons. If the fractions of seconds are to be marked, they are added to the time after a COMMA. According to the standards ISO 3307 and ISO 1000, the same separator has to be used as in representing quantities.

Clause 6: Affirmative and negative answers

Yes expressions	1JjYy	(= 1, Jah, Yes)
No expressions	0EeNn	(= 0, Ei, No)

Clause 7: National or cultural Information Technology terminology

The official Information Technology terminology is defined in ISO 2382 translation.

Clause 8: National or cultural profiles of standards

Most language and cultural elements used in Information Technology are grouped and described in EVS 8:2000 (Requirements on Information Technology in Estonian Language and Cultural Environment).

Clause 9: Character set considerations

The following is the Estonian alphabet:

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo
Pp Qq Rr Ss Zz Tt Uu Vv Ww Õõ Ää Öö Üü Xx Yy

Characters f, , z and only occur in loanwords. Personal names, placenames and quotations of foreign origin also need additional letters of the latin alphabet to be used, the most common ones are Cc Qq Ww Xx Yy. Since by convention all personal and placenames of latin origin are written preserving their original shape, full ISO/IEC 8859-15 character repertoire is commonly used in Estonian newspapers and books. The minimum character repertoire for official documents and databases (199 letters) can be found in Appendix A of EVS 8:2000.

According to the Estonian standard EVS 8:2000, ISO 8859-15 is the recommended character set, MS CP 1252 character set repertoire also meets the requirements in recent Windows versions where the zcaron and Euro symbol are added; for a bigger repertoire MES-2, MES-3B or ISO/IEC 10646-1 are recommended. ISO 8859-15 should be used instead of the basic code table presented in EVS 8:1993. The use of other possible character sets, namely ISO/IEC 8859-1, 8859-4, 8859-13, IBM CP 775, 850 and MS CP 1250, 1257 is deprecated.

For MIME encoding ISO 8859-15 is recommended.

For EDI encoding ISO 8859-15 is recommended.

Clause 10: Sorting and searching rules

Sorting in encyclopaedias also uses additional rules where numbers are sorted according to their textual representation and titles or prefixes are omitted in personal names.

Clause 11: Transformation of characters

There is no official widespread fallback scheme to write Estonian. One should avoid the so-called 'telegramme style' (Ä = AE, = SH) as it is both ambiguous and difficult to read and understand.

7-bit e-mail and Usenet news users mostly use the following fallback sequences:
- s^
- z^
õ - o~
ä - a"
ö - o"
ü - u"

Clause 13: Use of special characters

For quoting, the symbol pairs <„>...<“> (so called 99...66 pair) <«>...<»> <">...<"> are used, in the order of preference.
The use of quotes is the same also for enclosed quotes. Single quotes and smart quotes mainly mark meta-words or expressions in a text (like in the following sentence).
The unit of measure inch is written as 'toll', straight quotes are not used.

NUMBER SIGN <#> is seldom used, instead the abbreviation "nr" (in rare cases also deprecated "No") is used.

DIVISION SIGN <÷> should not be used for division. Use SOLIDUS </> or COLON <:> instead.

PARAGRAPH SIGN <¶> is not used. Paragraphs are marked with SECTION SIGN <§>, especially in legal documents.

AT SIGN <@> is not used for commercial purposes and it is generally understood as a symbol for Internet. It is used in Internet mail addresses.

Both EN-DASH and EM-DASH are used in texts. Most publications now use EN-DASH instead of the traditional EM-DASH. The latter is mostly found in books.
The dash marking stressed parts or clauses in a sentence (dash in a syntactic function) is separated from adjoining words by spaces both before and after the dash. In "from--to" constructions it is never separated by spaces.

Spaces separating words and spaces separating sentences are of equal width. Double space after a FULL STOP <.> is not used.

Punctuation marks ending a sentence or clause are placed inside quotation marks only if the quotation marks surround direct speech.

Symbols like <†> or <‡> are never used as references in a running text and page footers. References are best given using Arabic numbers.

Clause 14: Character rendition

Children can get their father's or mother's last name. Also in marriage the bride or the groom may take the other partner's last name or take a combination of his/her last name combined with the other name by a hyphen.

Personal names are commonly spelt with the full first name, while use of initials only is seen also. People are mostly addressed by voice by their first name. The formal address forms use "härra", "proua" or "preili" before the name, for certain officials the title is also added. Both "sina" (you - familiarity) and "teie" (you - formal) addressing forms are used.

Clause 17: Inflection

The Estonian grammar is defined in "Estonian Grammar" ("Eesti keele grammatika I--II", Tallinn 1993, ISBN 9985-9002-1-9). Estonian morphology is rich--nouns have 14 cases in singular and plural, verb paradigm has over one hundred cases and word stems may vary. Word-forms tend to be much longer than in English as word endings are used instead of pre- and postpositions and compound words are frequent. Word order in a sentence is quite free.

Clause 18: Hyphenation

The most recent authoritative source for spelling and hyphenation in Estonian is "Eesti keele käsiraamat", Tallinn 1997, ISBN 9985-851-40-4.

Hyphenation does not involve changes in individual characters or character sequences and is based on syllables. However, only such algorithm that analyses the word form to find it's components (suffixes or compounds) can provide good results.

The basic rules of hyphenation are:
- hyphenation point is preferably between word boundaries in a compound word
- hyphenation point is before the last consonant in a consonant sequence followed and preceded by at least one vowel
- hyphenation must not leave single characters before or after the hyphen.

Clause 19: Spelling

Clause 20: Numbering, ordinals and measuring systems

• the numbers from NNN,NN0 to NNN,NN4 are rounded down to the number NNN,NN,
• the numbers from NNN,NN5 to NNN,NN9 are rounded up to the number NNN,N(N+1).

See => Clause 3 and => Clause 4 for a description of numeric and monetary formatting.

The measurement system used in Estonia is the SI system, ISO 1000.

Temperatures are normally measured in degrees Celsius, the Kelvin scale is sometimes used in science.

Clause 21: Monetary amounts

See => Clause 4 for the formal specification.

Rules for rounding off the amounts in cents:

• the values KKK.S1 and KKK.S2 are rounded down to the value KKK.S0
• the values KKK.S3 to KKK.S7 are rounded to the value KKK.S5
• the values KKK.S8 and KKK.S9 are rounded up to the value KKK.(S+1)0

Starting from year 2000, the summer time is not used in Estonia and the time zone is permanently UTC+0200. Estonia may start using the daylight saving time in the future. The time zone code is EET.

Monday is the first weekday (as in ISO 8601). The same ISO standard is used to define the week numbers within a year. The first calendar week of a calendar year is the one that includes the first Thursday of that year. In the Gregorian calendar, this is equivalent to the week which includes 4 January.

The ISO 8601 format to represent the date (where April 13, 1999 is presented as 1999-04-13) is not commonly used.

Clause 23: Coding of national entities

Estonia is situated about 57--59 degrees North, and 21--28 degrees East. The closest neighbours are Finland, Russia, Latvia and Sweden.

Estonia has an area of about 45.000 km² and 1.4 mill inhabitants. Administratively Estonia is divided into 15 counties (maakond), which consist of communes (vald) and cities (linn).

The main language is Estonian. Russian is spoken by nearly one third of the population.

There are a number of standards giving a country code to Estonia:

ISO 3166 alpha-2	EE
ISO 3166 alpha-3	EST
ISO 3166 numeric	233
CEPT-MAILCODE	EE
UN Genéve 1949:68 Vehicle code	EST
ITU E.164 international telephone prefix	372
ITU X.121 numbering country code	248
EAN prefix	474
ISO 2108 ISBN book numbering	9985

The Alpha-2 code "EE" of ISO 3166 is for general use, and is used generally by the public as the abbreviation for Estonia.

The name of the country in Estonian is "Eesti".

The Estonian language code according to ISO 639-1 is "et".
The Estonian language code according to ISO 639-2/T is "est".
The Estonian language code according to ISO 639-2/B is "est".

The name of the Estonian language in Estonian is "eesti keel".

The currency is Estonian Crown, in Estonian, "eesti kroon". The ISO 4217 code is EEK. The native abbreviation is "kr". 1 "kroon" is equal to 100 "sent". See => Clause 4 for the formal specification.

Postal codes ("sihtnumber") are 5 digits. See => Clause 25 for their use.

Clause 24: Telephone numbers

The international telephone country code for Estonia is +372. Starting from 2004-04-01 all domestic telephone numbers consist of 7 to 8 digits without area codes or prefixes.

International formatting

The formatting for international numbers is "+372 telephone number, e.g. +372  123 4567.

National formatting

For national formatting neither the country code nor any prefixes or area codes are used. Telephone numbers are grouped by four digits starting from the end, e.g. 123 4567 and optionally prefixed by the BLACK TELEPHONE SIGN (Unicode U+260E), words 'telefon' and 'telefaks' or abbreviations 'tel' and 'faks'. International formatting uses TELEPHONE SIGN, 'telephone' and 'telefax' or 'tel' and 'fax'.

For international numbers both +country_code tel_number and 00 country_code  tel_number are acceptable, e.g. a sample Latvian telephone number may be presented as 00 371  xxxx xxxx or +371  xxxx xxxx.

Note: If the grouping is done by three digits, care should be taken in spelling the last last group by three digits. If it is preceded by digit 0 or starts with digit 1, it may sound ambiguously, e.g. 23123 can be mistaken for 20 323 and vice versa.

Clause 25: Mail addresses

See => Clause 16 for how to write personal names.

The street number is placed after the street name. If the house has several apartments the apartment number is added to the street number using a hyphen.

The postal code is placed before the city name. The CEPT country prefix (EE) should be placed in front of the postal code for international mail. Prefix and postal code are separated by hyphen.

Postal codes are defined in "Eesti Vabariigi sihtnumbrite teatmik", obtainable at all postal offices, and may be found also in telephone directory books.

An example of an international mail address is:

   Standardiamet / Estonian Standards Board
   Aru tn 10
   EE-10317 Tallinn
   Eesti

   Jaan Võike
   Roosikrantsi 6-208
   10119 Tallinn

According to CEPT recommendations, one should either use the French name of the country ("Estonie"), or the name in the local language "Eesti".

Clause 26: Identification of persons and organizations

In Estonia, persons are identified by a unique personal identity number ("isikukood"). This number incorporates the date of birth and the sex. The structure of the Estonian personal identity number is: GYYMMDDoooC

where G is both sex (odd=male; even=female) and century (3 and 4 for 1900--1999), DD=day, MM=month, YY=year, ooo=running number and C=checksum.

Clause 27: Electronic mail addresses

The Estonian X.400 email country code is EE, that is the ISO 3166 alpha-2 code.

The Estonian Internet top domain is .EE (ISO 3166 alpha-2 code). Most Internet domain addresses have an organization name as the second level name. The generic second level domain names indicating the economic sector (government, commercial, academic/educational, private) are being implemented but are not widespread.

Clause 28: Payment account numbers

Bank account numbers in Estonia contain only digits. They start with a 2-digit branch identification code followed by the numeric bank account number. Bank account numbers have 4 to 16 digits. The last digit is used to verify the number using 7-3-1 method.

Clause 29: Keyboard layout

The Estonian keyboard has the layout of the alphabetic keys (first is lowercase, second is uppercase, third is alternate graphic). The latest standard EVS 8:2000 added the Euro sign (Level3 + e).

        (1)~ 1!  2"@ 3#£ 4¤$ 5%  6&  7/{ 8([ 9)] 0=} +?\ ?`
               Q   W   E(e)   R   T   Y   U   I   O   P  Ü   Õ§
                A   S   D   F   G   H   J   K   L   Ö   Ä^  '*½
             <>| Z   X   C   V   B   N   M   ,;  .:  -_

(1) - non-spacing caron
(e) - Euro sign
Acute <’>, grave <`>, caron <(1)> and tilde <~> are dead keys.

Clause 30: Man-machine dialogue

Localizing a software product should reach a level where all menus, names of icons, commands, information messages, help texts, manuals etc. are translated and adjusted to the cultural conventions.

Programmers and screen layout designers must bear in mind that Estonian translation of an English text will normally be longer.

Estonian traditionally uses all personal and place names that are based on the latin alphabet in their original form. A program or user interface must not limit the input or the use of data to only one or a few code pages.

As different separators are used in numeric and monetary values, any data-entry system must accept only the correct separator or change it on the fly. Layout systems that have no previous knowledge of the type of data must accept both comma and full stop as legal separators eg in decimal tabulation.

Any program that directly manipulates data types defined in this standard (esp. text-processing applications) must leave a possibility for the user to change all the rules the program uses to process data (e.g. rules of capitalization, hyphenation, converting quotes etc), not just turn off a rule that produces incorrect result for Estonian.

Clause 31: Paper formats

ISO 216 paper sizes are used in Estonia. A4 is the most common paper size and it is desirable that all localized software and hardware should support this by default.

Clause 32: Typographical conventions

In Estonia the Didot point measure is used in typography, which is 7% larger than the point used in English and American typography.

Letter spacing is a separate typographical element to emphasize a word or expression like bold, italic and underline. Therefore, to avoid confusion when justifying text at both margins, extra space should be inserted between words, not between letters within a word.

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