Latvian (Latvieu)
Latvian is the official language in the Republic of Latvia and covers the most important sociolinguistic functions in the multiethnic Latvian society. There are about 1,4 million Latvian native speakers in Latvia, with about 150 000 living abroad.
The linguistic competition has always been very hard for Latvian. The main languages in contact with it - German and Russian - are spoken by several tens or hundreds million of people, while their speakers have dominated over Latvians politically. Thus, the preservation of the Latvian language and culture could be called a wonder in itself.
The Latvian language belongs to the Baltic group of the Indo-European family of languages. Its closest and only living relative is Lithuanian (Latvian is a non-Slavic and a non-Germanic language). Latvian has inherited a lot from the Indo-European proto-dialects, and just like Lithuanian it has preserved a lot of archaic features in its sound system and grammar.
The first written texts in Latvian appeared more than 400 years ago, and since then the Latvian spelling has become one of the most perfect Latin script-based spelling systems in the world: Latvian graphemes correspond almost perfectly to the phonemes while observing the morphemic structure of the word. So-called phono-morphological principle is used in Latvian spelling up to now.
To find out more about Lithuanian, visit
http://www.latinst.lv
Latvian is the official language in the Republic of Latvia and covers the most important sociolinguistic functions in the multiethnic Latvian society. There are about 1,4 million Latvian native speakers in Latvia, with about 150 000 living abroad.
The linguistic competition has always been very hard for Latvian. The main languages in contact with it - German and Russian - are spoken by several tens or hundreds million of people, while their speakers have dominated over Latvians politically. Thus, the preservation of the Latvian language and culture could be called a wonder in itself.
The Latvian language belongs to the Baltic group of the Indo-European family of languages. Its closest and only living relative is Lithuanian (Latvian is a non-Slavic and a non-Germanic language). Latvian has inherited a lot from the Indo-European proto-dialects, and just like Lithuanian it has preserved a lot of archaic features in its sound system and grammar.
The first written texts in Latvian appeared more than 400 years ago, and since then the Latvian spelling has become one of the most perfect Latin script-based spelling systems in the world: Latvian graphemes correspond almost perfectly to the phonemes while observing the morphemic structure of the word. So-called phono-morphological principle is used in Latvian spelling up to now.
To find out more about Lithuanian, visit
http://www.latinst.lv