The object has two variants in Estonian: partial object (in partitive, the functionally unmarked variant) and
total object (in genitive or nominative). We examine the variation in object case in Estonian texts from the 17th to the 20th
century, focusing on the 19th century and regarding this variation as an indicator in assessing the sociolinguistic variation of
Estonian in texts. The texts of Old Literary Estonian were written by German scholars for whom Estonian was a collective
interlanguage. In the 19th century the development of written Estonian came gradually into the hands of native speakers, who were
surrounded by a predominantly German-language cultural space. In the Estonian of Germans the total object was overused. The
19th-century texts written by native Estonians represent an amalgam of native language and earlier interlanguage, they show
fluctuations, and overuse of the partial object. By the turn of the 20th century, object case usage has stabilized.