Latvian language

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Latvian, also called Lettish, is a language 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 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 language formed until 16th century on the basis of Latgalian accumulating Curonian, Semigallian and Selonian languages (all are Baltic languages).

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.

Classification

Latvian is one of two extant Baltic languages, a group of its own within the family of Indo-European languages. Both Latvian and particularly 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.

Writing system

Historically, Latvian writing used a system using German phonetic rules. In the beginning of the 20th century, this system was replaced by a phonetically more appropriate system using a modified Roman script including 33 letters.

The alphabet lacks the letters q, w, x, y, but uses letters modified by a number of diacritic marks: A macron over the vowels a, e, i, u, signifying a long vowel (ā, ē, ī, ū); a caron over c, s and z (č, š, ž); and a comma under or over some consonants signifying a "palatal" variant (ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, and historically also ŗ). Ö is only used in the Latgalic dialect, its use in the official Latvian language has been cancelled in the 1940s.

The diphtongs (ai, au, ei, ia, iu, ui, ua) are written (ai, au, ei, ie, iu, ui, o).

Every phoneme has its own letter (with the exception of dz and dž, which however are uniquely identifiable, and the two sounds written as e), so you can always guess how to pronounce a word when you read it. The stress with some exceptions is on the first syllable.

Language and politics

Latvia is a country with long historic ties with Germany, Poland, 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 (under 50% in major cities). As part of the independence process in the early 1990s, Latvia (as well as Estonia) introduced language laws to protect the language from extinction.

See also

• List of Eastern Baltic languages

External links

• Latvian-English dictionary
• Latvian term dictionary
• Latvian Wikipedia
• The Latvian Alphabet
• Examples of Latvian words and phrases (with sound)
• Bilingual (Latvian and English) e-zine

bg:Латвийски език ca:Letó de:Lettische Sprache et:Läti keel es:Idioma letón eo:Latva lingvo fr:Letton it:Lingua lettone la:Lingua Latviana nl:Lets ja:ラトビア語 pl:Język łotewski ro:Limba letonă sv:Lettiska