Latvian
Language · official in 1 country
Latvian, latviešu valoda and once called Lettish in English, first reached print in 1544, when Sebastian Münster reproduced the Lord's Prayer in it in his Cosmographia universalis. It is an East Baltic language written in a Latin alphabet of 33 characters and has been the sole official language of Latvia since the Official Language Law of 1999.
The language on record
- Own name
- latviešu
- ISO 639-1
- LV
- ISO 639-3
- LAV
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Baltic
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Latvian is official
Latvia is the only country on record where Latvian is official, and it shares that status with no other language.
About Latvian
What Latvian grew out of
Latvian formed over several centuries from the speech of the Latgalians, who absorbed the Curonian, Semigallian and Selonian of neighbouring Baltic tribes. The consolidation began in the 13th century, after the Livonian Crusade, and Lithuanian and Latvian started to part after about 800 CE. Both kept much of the Proto-Indo-European noun system. Latvian innovated further in its sounds and its verb forms.
Why German pastors wrote it first
The oldest written Latvian is a hymn translated in 1530 by Nikolaus Ramm, a German in Riga, and the oldest surviving book is a Catholic catechism of 1585. Johann Ernst Glück translated the Bible, the New Testament in 1685 and the Old in 1691. Baltic Germans formed the upper class, and their spelling, built on German, did not match Latvian sounds; one early count found twelve ways of writing Š.
In 1908 Kārlis Mīlenbahs and Jānis Endzelīns drew up the modern alphabet, which slowly replaced the German-based one. The digraph uo went in 1914. The letters ō and ŗ left official use in 1946, and ch followed in 1957. Foreign names are respelled to fit Latvian sounds and take case endings, so the Scottish village of Tillicoultry becomes Tilikutrija.
How the state protects its language
Under Soviet rule the ethnic Latvian share of the population fell from 80% in 1935 to 52% in 1989, and most newcomers did not learn Latvian. The 2011 census found it spoken at home by 62% of residents. Parliament ended state-funded bilingual schooling for minorities in 2019. The Terminology Commission coins Latvian terms against English ones, and it proposed eira or eirs for the euro; the European Central Bank insisted on euro.
Standard Latgalian, spoken in the east, is sometimes treated as a variety of Latvian and sometimes as a language of its own.
Common questions
Questions about Latvian
Which law makes Latvian the state language?
The Official Language Law, adopted on 9 December 1999. The Latvian State Language Center, under the Ministry of Justice, monitors how it is observed.
Is Latgalian a dialect of Latvian?
Opinion is divided. Standard Latgalian is mutually intelligible with Latvian and rests on the High Latvian dialects of southern Latgale, but some treat it as a separate language. It writes y and ō, which standard Latvian does not.
Why do Latvians change foreign names?
Since the early 20th century Latvian has fitted foreign proper names to its own sound system and given them noun endings so they decline like any other noun, even when the original language already uses the Latin alphabet. Lecropt becomes Lekropta.