Latvian Language

Latvian is the official language of the country of Latvia in northeastern Europe. It is one of two surviving languages of the mostly extinct Baltic language family. Today, Latvian is spoken by more than two million people worldwide and is one of the official languages of the European Union.

History and Classification

Latvian is a member of the larger, nearly extinct family of Baltic languages. This family is itself part of the Indo-European language family, the ancient group of languages that formed the basis of all modern European languages. In the second and first millennia BCE, ancient peoples spread across the entire European continent, settling into their own regions and gradually developing their own dialects of the common European language. These dialects eventually became so different from one another that they formed their own new languages, the ancestors of the many European languages spoken today.

One of the large families of Indo-European languages that developed in ancient times in Eastern Europe was Balto-Slavic. This was the set of languages that eventually separated to form the categories of Slavic and Baltic languages. The Slavic languages arose mostly in eastern and central Europe and today include Russian, Ukrainian, and a variety of other languages. Baltic, meanwhile, developed in northeastern Europe and later diverged into two subcategories: Eastern Baltic and Western Baltic.

These two groups later separated into a variety of related languages, almost all of which are extinct today. The only remaining Western Baltic language is Lithuanian, while the last living Eastern Baltic language is Latvian. The Baltic peoples of roughly the first six hundred years CE spoke an early form of combined Lithuanian and Latvian. In the 600s CE, Latvian began disconnecting from Lithuanian as Eastern Baltic speakers moved north to settle into their own territory in modern-day Latvia on the Baltic Sea coast. By the 900s CE, the Latvians had fully separated from the Lithuanians in the south.

The development of Latvian from the 900s to the 1500s CE is today debated among linguists. Some claim that an early form of Latvian—perhaps still a kind of Latvian-Lithuanian that was progressing toward full Latvian—was being spoken throughout this period. Others assert that Latvian, in nearly the same form as it is spoken today, became totally its own language in the 1500s by combining elements from various related Baltic languages such as Curonian, Selonian, and Semigallan. It was by this formation process that these other Baltic languages became extinct in favor of one common Latvian language.

Latvian remained largely unchanged for the next four hundred years. In 1940, however, at the outset of World War II in Europe, the independent Republic of Latvia was invaded and overtaken by the Communist regime of the Soviet Union, which eventually occupied nearly all the nations of eastern and central Europe. The Soviet Union attempted to control these nations by stripping them of their national identities and forcing a distinctly Soviet character onto them.

In this era—1940 to 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved—the existence of the Latvian language, and of many other European languages, became seriously threatened by Soviet dominance. To establish its power more firmly throughout its collection of states, the Soviet Union began forcibly deporting citizens from their countries of origin and moving Soviets in to take their places. Russian was also made the co-official language in all Soviet nations.

In Latvia, all of these actions contributed to the dramatic decline in Latvian speakers over the country's fifty-year Soviet period. At the time of the Soviet invasion, 80 percent of Latvians could speak the Latvian language; by 1989, this number had decreased to 52 percent. After Latvia once again became an independent republic in 1990, the percentage of ethnic Latvian speakers began to increase. As a result of its many years of Soviet control, however, the Latvian language now includes many borrowed Russian words in its vocabulary.

Modern Latvian features three dialects: Livonian, Latgalian, and Middle. The standard, most common form of Latvian is based on the Middle dialect. Along with Lithuanian, Latvian is considered by scholars to be one of the oldest existing languages in the world, as it retains many features of the ancient Indo-European language from which all other Western languages arose.

Latvian, like most other European languages, is a fusional language, meaning that to indicate different grammatical functions, numerous suffixes and other word parts are added to the ends of words. To non-native Latvian speakers, this practice makes words appear long and complex, with no indication as to where the different word parts begin or end. The written Latvian language, based on the Latin alphabet, uses thirty-three characters, twenty-two of which are nearly exact copies of Latin letters.

Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage

In the twenty-first century, nearly 2.2 million people worldwide speak Latvian. The majority of these, about 2 million, are Latvian citizens, although only 1.4 million are native Latvian speakers. The other 600,000 in Latvia have learned Latvian as their second language. This is due to the Latvian national government's purposeful efforts to prevent the language from ever becoming extinct as it almost did during the Soviet era.

The primary part of this effort was the declaration, upon the restoration of Latvia's independence, of Latvian as the official language of the country. All government business is conducted in Latvian, and Latvian schools are well endowed with Latvian language programs to ensure the survival of the language in the country's younger population.

Outside of Latvia, about 150,000 additional people around the world speak Latvian. In 2004, Latvia joined the European Union—the political and economic partnership of nearly thirty European nations—after which time Latvian became one of the official languages of that organization.

Bibliography

Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Print.

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"Latvian Language." Effective Language Learning. Effective Language Learning. Web. 3 Aug. 2015. http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/latvian-language

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