Latvian language
The Latvian language is 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 one of two Baltic
languages, a group of its own within the family of Indo-European
languages. It formed until 16th century on the basis of Latgalian accumulating
Curonian,
Semigallian and Selic languages (All belonging to Baltic languages). Both Latvian
and Lithuanian
languages are considered to be the most archaic of still-spoken Indo-European
languages. The closest ties they have are to Slavic
and Germanic families.
Like most of the Indo-European languages, Latvian employs modified Roman
script including 33 letters.
The alphabet lacks the letters q, w, x, y, but contains the letters ā, č,
ē, ģ, ī, ķ, ļ, ņ, š, ū, ž. Sometimes
ö is used. Every phoneme
has its own letter, so you can always guess how to pronounce a word when you read
it. The stress with some exceptions is on the first syllable.
There are two grammatical genders in Latvian. Each noun is declined in seven
cases: nominative,
genitive, dative,
accusative,
instrumental, locative,
and vocative.
Language and politics
Latvia is a country with long historic
ties with Germany, 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 have immigrated into the
country without learning Latvian. Today, Latvian is the mother
tongue of only some 60% of the country's population. As part of the independence
process in the early 1990s, Latvia (as well as Estonia)
introduced language laws to protect the language from extinction.
For more
information see Latvian Wikipedia.