 Although the spoken and written Estonian and Finnish languages are closely related Finno-Ugric languages and there are some notable and probable Finnish Sign Language influences on EVK, there seems to have been 'no considerable historical language contact between EVK and Finnish Sign Language' (Hollman 2016).In the unlikely event that EVK originally derived from Finnish Sign Language, it would belong to the Swedish Sign Language family.Mahoney (2017) conducted the first-known 100-word Swadesh–Woodward list comparison of EVK and Latvian Sign Language, concluding that a possible relationship between them – as descending from VLFS, perhaps via ÖGS and/or RSL, as Wittmann (1991) and Bickford (2005) proposed – was 'still uncertain as it is unclear how sign languages disseminated in Eastern European countries during the Soviet Union, but aside from superficial impressions that the core lexicons are similar, signs with shared parameters displaying small variation in handshape while retaining 4 selected fingers suggests that these languages share a parent'.