Prior to the 19th century, Estonian was spoken only by the rural serf populations, isolated geographically and socially stigmatized. Upward mobility was predicated on the acquisition of German and/or Russian and occurred rarely. Educational structures ensured a high literacy rate, however (40-70% could read by the end of the 18th century), in the two written dialect standards linked to the administrative centres Tallinn (first grammar: 1637) and Tartu (first grammar: 1648) – these grammars were compiled by Baltic Germans primarily for clerical purposes. Legislation under Russian Imperial rule improved the civic and economic status of the rural population over the 19th century; this, coupled with a process of urbanization, slowly raised the profile and broadened the currency of Estonian.

19th-century language interest initially emanated from the Baltic-German elite (within which a so-called “Estophile” trend emerged, which cultivated German-Estonian bonds as a self-positioning strategy vis-à-vis Russian rule); speakers of Estonian were objects of interest rather than active subjects in this process. Language improvement was advocated for educational and assimilationist purposes and as part of a benevolent, and ultimately conservative, paternalism towards the Estonian-speaking population.

Baltic-German language interest found a platform in Johann Heinrich Rosenplänter’s periodical Beiträge zur genauern Kenntniß der ehstnischen Sprache (“Contributions to a more precise understanding of the Estonian language”, 1813-32). It carried articles on language, folklore, manners and customs, literary texts, translations, and criticism. With its wide distribution, it made Estonian culture known abroad: Jacob Grimm translated six Estonian fairy-tales, published in the journal in 1817. Rosenplänter also compiled an Estonian bibliography and collected manuscripts in or about Estonian.

A central topic in the Beiträge was the question of standardization and the question of precedence for the Tallinn or Tartu variety. A pragmatic line of reasoning (advanced by Friedrich Gustav Arvelius, 1753–1806, Wilhelm Friedrich Steingrüber, 1761–1834, and Otto Wilhelm Masing, 1763–1832) wanted to ensure maximum usefulness by pedagogically adopting the template of “civilized” languages (Latin, Greek, German). A competing Romantic trend, influenced greatly by Herder (whose work was well known in the Baltics at the time) and represented by Rosenplänter stressed uniqueness and authenticity instead. Rosenplänter repeatedly emphasized the importance of dialects, archaic linguistic expressions, and language-typological relations; even so, his endorsement of the Tallinn variety was entirely pragmatic and argued from expedience. Conversely, Masing proposed his more rational Estonian variety on the basis of an extensive lexicographic amalgamation of the different dialects. The inclusion of marginal dialects was advocated by the likes of Johann Wilhelm Ludwig von Luce (1750–1842) for reasons of inclusiveness.

Rosenplänter’s Beiträge became a platform for linguistic investigations; the articles by Johann Friedrich Heller (1786–1849) on declination and by Arnold Friedrich Johann Knüpffer (1777–1843) on etymology were held in high regard by later linguists. Knüpffer also proposed that further grammar studies ought to be modelled after Finnish rather than Latin or German, which became the standard view some decades later. A practical proposal to resort to Finnish orthography instead of the current reliance on Latin and Low German patterns was made by an anonymous contributor thought to be Adolf Ivar Arvidsson (1791–1858). The journal also included grammar analyses from Kristjan Jaak Peterson (1801–1822), whose poems would gain posthumous fame. More freely speculative were disquisitions by Heinrich Georg von Jannau (1779–1868), making the case that contemporary Livonian was the closest living approximation of a proto-language antedating the branching off from proto-Finnish, and by Johann Leonhard von Parrot (1755–1836), who on the basis of diverse similarities argued that Estonian was related to the proto-Celtic language spoken by the Japhetan offspring of Noah. As linguistic models they gained no credit, but Jannau’s notion of a unified Estonian-Finnish past chimed with contemporary trends in history-writing and was cited by later revivalists.

In 1838 the Gelehrte Estnische Gesellschaft/Õpetatud Eesti Selts (Learned Estonian Society) was formed. It operated mostly in German, although from the beginning it included a core of native Estonian literati and continued to attract an increasing number of them. In 1838-50 Friedrich Robert Faehlmann presented a cycle of myths loosely based on Estonian folklore that was to crystallize into the Kalevipoeg, the Estonian national epic. Three of these myths (Vanemuise laul, “Song of Vanemuine”; Keelte keetmine, “The cooking of the languages”; and Loomine, “Creation”) present the Estonian language as a mythical language of God and of nature itself. Published in the Society’s proceedings of 1840-52, they reached Jacob Grimm, who highlighted Keelte keetmine in his 1851 lecture on the origins of language. After Faehlmann’s death, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) was appointed to finish the epic, which was finally serially published in 1857-61 in a bilingual Estonian-German edition. These early activities triggered a shift from a scholarly salvage paradigm to a national-revivalist one among the next generation of Estonian literati; this led to tensions between some Estonians and Baltic Germans in the 1860s.

Language became, indeed, a flashpoint in the articulation of an Estonian identity. In 1857 Johann Voldemar Jannsen (1819–1890) founded the first sustained Estonian-language newspaper: Perno Postimees ehk Näddalileht (“The Pärnu postman”). In this publication, Jannsen deliberately emphasized the Estonian ethnicity of his readers rather than their more common self-denomination as “country folk”. Estonian newspapers became a platform for the increasingly radical nationalist vindication of an Estonian ethnic identity, by Jakob Hurt (1839–1907) and Carl Robert Jakobson (1841–1882), some of whose writings ran afoul of government censorship. Jakobson’s political speeches in 1868 and 1870 formulated the notion of a new “Estonian dawn”. In 1871 Eesti Kirjameeste Selts (Society of Estonian Literati) was founded in order to systematically open up all cultural domains to Estonian, breaking the cultural monopoly of German wherever it still subsisted. The same spirit actuated the Alexander school movement for education taught in Estonian (1870-87). Alongside strictly nationalist ideas, competing ideologies advocated a multilingual Baltic unity (Harry Jannsen, 1851–1913). However, from the mid-1880s Alexander III’s policy of Russification put an end to such initiatives; even Dorpat/Tartu was given the Russian name Jur’jev.

Among the Estonian literati who conducted linguistic research were Peterson, Faehlmann, Kreutzwald, J.V. Jannsen, and others. The Finnish model for orthography and grammar description was most extensively developed by Eduard Ahrens (1803–1863) in his Grammatik der Ehstnischen Sprache Revalschen Dialektes (“Grammar of the Tallinn dialect of the Estonian language”), published in 1843 and supplemented for a second edition in 1853. Following endorsement by the Society of Estonian Literati in 1872, the new orthography was largely adopted. Influential work was also done by Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann (1805–1887), whose Estonian-German dictionary of 1869 was the most extensive lexicographic resource for some time and whose Estonian grammar of 1875 provided the first description of Estonian adhering to modern linguistic standards. The first grammar of Estonian in Estonian (1884) was that of Karl August Hermann (1851–1909).

Immediately after the reopening of Tartu University (1803), a lecturership in Estonian was established in order to teach the language to Baltic-German clergymen; the first incumbent (1837) was Dietrich Heinrich Jürgenson (1804–1841); the first Estonians to obtain doctoral degrees were Mihkel Veske (1843–1890), a comparative linguist of Finno-Ugric (Leipzig, 1872), Karl August Herrmann (Leipzig, 1880), and Jakob Hurt for his work on ne-suffixed nouns in Estonian (Helsinki, 1886). After Veske obtained a Tartu lecturership in 1874, he also lectured on Finno-Ugric studies and comparative-historical methods. Attempts to establish a professorship in Estonian remained fruitless, however; by the end of the century the University of Helsinki had become the foremost academic centre for linguistically interested Estonians.