LATVIAN LANGUAGE

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SOME FACTS

The Latvian language, sometimes also referred to as Lettish, is the official state language of the Republic of Latvia. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad.

The Latvian language belongs to the Eastern Baltic sub-group of the Baltic language group in the Indo-European language family, and it is neither Germanic, nor Slavic. Its closest and only living relative is the Lithuanian language. However, while related, the Latvian and Lithuanian vocabularies vary greatly from each other and are not mutually intelligible.

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.