On March 01 2015 22:33 FuzzyJAM wrote: Estonian is utterly different from either. It's not even Indo-European but a Uralic language, along with Finnish and Hungarian. However, I assume most educated Estonians know a decent amount of Russian given the history, though I don't know.
Many older people will, but for the young ones I believe the way it works is they can choose it in school but don't have to (so many don't). They have a very large Russian minority that speaks it though, obviously.
Yeah Estonian is very different, but as of 3 years ago when I visited Kazakhstan, all the youth still speak Russian fluently (better than I do), so I think it safe to assume that former soviet countries still widespread-ly speak Russian. I know Puppey is very comfortable speaking Russian though~ Since a really close friend of mine is Finnish, I know even educated people in Finland know Finnish, Swedish, English, and Russian (russian would be learned last on that list though)