Here's a short story:

Estonian (eesti keel [ˈeːsti ˈkeːl] ( listen)) is the official language of Estonia, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various migrant communities. It belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. 

One distinctive feature that has caused a great amount of interest among linguists is what is traditionally seen as three degrees of phonemic length: short, long, and "overlong", such that /sɑdɑ/, /sɑˑdɑ/ and /sɑːdɑ/ are distinct. In actuality, the distinction is not purely in the phonemic length, and the underlying phonological mechanism is still disputed.[citation needed] 

Estonian belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic languages, along with Finnish, Karelian, and other nearby languages. The Uralic languages do not belong to the Indo-European languages. Estonian is distantly related to Hungarian and to the Sami languages. 

Estonian has been influenced by Swedish, German (initially Middle Low German, which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League and spoken natively in the territories of what is today known as Estonia by a sizeable burgher community of Baltic Germans, later Estonian was also influenced by standard German), and Russian, though it is not related to them genetically. (End of story)

Provide your best guess for the following question. Give ONLY the guess, no other words or explanation.

For example:

Guess: <most likely guess, as short as possible; not a complete sentence, just the guess!>

Here are a few examples of questions and answers:

Question: Approximately how many people speak the language in focus?
Guess: Around 1.1 million people.

Now answer the following question in the same format.

Question: What language branch does it belong to?

The Finnic branch.