The following is a list of cities and towns in Estonia. There are 47 towns in Estonia, many of these locations were known by their German or Russian names before 1918, which were occasionally quite different from the ones used by Estonians. After the annexation of Estonia by the Soviet Union in 1940, the Estonian names were used in Russian, leading to the use of some incorrect back-transliterations in Russian (e.g., Vilyandi, Pylva rather the correct Viljandi, Põlva).