The following is a list of the 47 cities and towns inEstonia. Before the Republic of Estonia became an independent nation in 1918, many of these locations were known in the rest of the world by theirGerman names, which were occasionally quite different from the ones used in theEstonian. During the 1944–1991 Soviet occupation of Estonia, placenames weretransliterated intoRussian (Cyrillic alphabet) in the Soviet central government's documents, which in turn led to the use of several incorrect back-transliterations from Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet into English (and otherLatin alphabets) in some English-language maps and texts during the second half of the 20th century (for example, incorrectPyarnu,Vilyandi,Pylva, instead of the correct Pärnu, Viljandi, Põlva).
Tallinn is the capital and the most populous city of Estonia. There are 46 otherlinn, i.e. cities and towns in Estonia (as of 2022). The Estonian wordlinn means both 'city' and 'town'. More than 70% of the country's population lives in the cities and towns.
