The following is a list of the 47 cities and towns in Estonia. Before the Republic of Estonia became an independent nation in 1918, many of these locations were known in the rest of the world by their German names, which were occasionally quite different from the ones used in the Estonian. During the 1944–1991 Soviet occupation of Estonia, placenames were transliterated into Russian 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 in some English-language maps and texts during the second half of the 20th century.