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Latvian, also called Lettish, is a language spoken by 1.5 million people primarily by the Latvian population in Latvia, where it is the official language, and secondarily by the non-Latvian population in the same country.
Latvian is an inflective language with several analytical forms, three dialects, and German syntactical influence. There are two grammatical genders in Latvian. Each noun is declined in seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative.
History
Latvian emerged as a distinct language in the 16th century, having evolved from Latgalian and assimilating Curonian, Semigallian and Selonian on the way. All of these belong to the Baltic language group.
The oldest known examples of written Latvian are from a 1530 translation of a number of hymns made by Nicholas Ramm, a German pastor in Riga.
Classification
Latvian is one of two extant Baltic languages (the other being Lithuanian), a group of its own within the family of Indo-European languages. Latvian and, especially, Lithuanian are considered to be the most archaic of all the Indo-European languages spoken today. The closest ties they have are to the Slavic and Germanic language families.
Writing system
Historically, Latvian was written using a system based upon German phonetic principles. At the beginning of the 20th century, this was replaced by a more phonetically appropriate system, using a modified Roman script consisting of 33 letters.
The alphabet lacks the letters q, w, x, y, but uses letters modified by a number of diacritic marks: A macron over the vowels a, e, i, u, signifying a long vowel (ā, ē, ī, ū); a caron over c, s and z (č, š, ž); and a comma under or over some consonants signifying a "palatal" variant (ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, and historically also ŗ). Ö is only used in the Latgalic dialect; it has not been used in the official Latvian language since the 1940s.
The diphtongs (ai, au, ei, ia, iu, ui, ua) are written (ai, au, ei, ie, iu, ui, o).
Every phoneme has its own letter (with the exception of dz and dž, which are nevertheless uniquely identifiable, and the two sounds written as e), so that it is always guess how to pronounce a word when you read it. The stress, with a few exceptions, is on the first syllable.
Language and politics
Latvia is a country with long historic ties with Germany, Poland, Sweden and Russia. Both during tsarist times (when Latvia was a part of the Russian Empire) and during Soviet occupation in the latter half of the 20th century, many Russians immigrants settled in the country without learning Latvian. Today, Latvian is the mother tongue of only some 60% of the country's population (under 50% in capital Riga and the two other major cities, Daugavpils and Rezekne). As part of the independence process in the early 1990s, Latvia (like Estonia) introduced language laws to protect its national language from extinction. Recently, these laws have been toned down somewhat, in concord with European laws on minority languages: The Latvian government had to respect the speakers of Russian to join the European Union
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