ABSTRACT
This chapter examines to what extent Estonians and non-Estonians are included in the legal terms ‘citizens’ and ‘former owners’, and to what extent Estonians and non-Estonians are represented in the statistics based on language usage and personal names. An important methodological problem is to confine the significance and the number of Estonians and Russians to the different types of legal acts and statistical accountings. The population can be divided with certain fairness into two large groups, that is, Estonians who are Estonian citizens, and persons without Estonian citizenship who are non-Estonians. Non-Estonians are mainly concentrated in the capital Tallinn where they constitute slightly more than half of the population, and in the ‘Russian’ cities of north-east Estonia. The Estonians have Estonian names, the Russians have Russian names etc., and the Estonians can be distinguished from the other nationalities by their names.
