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How closely related are Finnish and Estonian?

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distribution of the Uralic languages — Uralic languages Distribution of the Uralic languages.

Finnish and Estonian are closely related languages within the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric family. Their relationship is quite intimate; they differ in much the same manner as greatly diverse dialects of the same language.12

Both languages share a common ancestry and belong to the Uralic language family. Because of this proximity, they share many structural features, such as the use of suffixes to mark grammatical categories. Additionally, the northernmost dialects of Estonian share many features with the southwestern dialects of Finnish. While they are distinct languages, their linguistic connection is significantly closer than that of more distant Finno-Ugric relatives, such as Finnish and Hungarian, whose relationship is comparable to that between English and Russian.123