In Estonia there are a number of dialects of the standard, some of which are fairly different from the standard (from what I’m told).
I don’t know the list of hand, I just remember the Seto language that is spoken by maybe a couple hundred people (or maybe it was a couple thousand, but I don’t think so). I saw a documentary on the Seto people called Küningas Üheks Päevaks (King For a Day).
There are only about 1 million Estonian speakers in Estonia, so minority languages are pretty small (except for Russian, which is spoken by at least several hundred thousand people in Estonia.)
I dunno about that “largely bilingually” part, especially if you’re talking about the older population. And if they do speak the other language, I believe it’s most likely to be on a just-barely-able-to-be-understood basis.
The Swedish spoken in Finland is not the same dialect as the Swedish spoken in Sweden.
Even within the Ostrobothnia area of Finland, there are many different sub-dialects of Swedish (again, especially among the older population). Go ten kilometers away from my dad’s hometown, for example, and they have a different word for “potato”.
How did I miss this thread? Sorry, I’ve been busy.
Anyway, a favorite spot of mine on the Net is the Perry-Castaneda map collection at the U. of Texas/Austin: one friend wanted us to make some really geeky T-shirts of the following CIA map of ethnolinguistic groups in the North Caucasus:
An even cooler map showing the overlap of minority ethnolinguistic groups groups in the southern FSU and surrounding Middle Eastern states (a bit dated what with recent population movements, but still cool):
Unfortunately, nobody has done a thorough job yet of studying the various Caucasian language groups; some of them only have a few hundred native speakers left at this point. But there are over 100 languages spoken in the Russian Federation alone.
And here’s another database of Russian Federation ethnicities/languages (click on each link for more details about dialects, numbers of speakers, population in each administrative subdivision of the Russian Federation, etc.):
