Most Latvian speakers reside in Latvia, where Latvian is the official language. The others live abroad, most notably in the United States, Germany, Australia, Canada, and Britain. These Latvian communities abroad were largely established in the 1940s, when many Latvians were deported or fled during the war. More recently, Latvian has been declared one of the official languages of the European Union.
The Latvian language uses a variation of the Latin alphabet, the same alphabet used by English, so most of the Latvian letters will look familiar to English speakers. The Latvian alphabet is made up of 33 characters, including some identical letters with diacritic marks to differentiate between their sounds. Note that the letters
Q,
W,
X, and
Y do not exist in Latvian, even in foreign words.
Latvian pronunciation is phonetic. All letters are pronounced, and most letters (with the exception of a few vowels) correspond to only one sound. Many letters are pronounced similarly to English. Vowels may be either long or short; long vowels have a line over them. There are also five diphthongs, or vowel combinations:
ai,
ei,
ui,
au, and
ie. The digraphs
dz and
dž are treated as one letter, though they are not really part of the Latvian alphabet.
Stress is generally placed on the first syllable of a Latvian word. The sentence pitch is slightly descending. There is a light stress at the beginning of the sentence and a heavier one at the end.
During the Soviet occupation, between 1940 and 1991, Russian influence on the Latvian language grew increasingly prevalent. Some feared that Russian would prevail as the national language, causing Latvian to die out. Since independence in 1991, however, several laws have been passed to reverse this trend and to reinstate Latvian as the primary language spoken within Latvia. Today, Latvian is alive and well.
The considerable Russian influence on the language can be seen, however, especially in the number of Russian loanwords. More recently, English words relating to commerce and technology have also been adopted to some extent.
Nouns in the Latvian language are either masculine or feminine. Generally, masculine nouns end with consonants and feminine nouns end with vowels. However, in the plural, feminine nouns end with the letter
s, while masculine nouns end with the letter
i. Latvian nouns decline for case, meaning they change form to indicate their role in a sentence. Latvian adjectives also decline for case, gender, and number to match the nouns they modify. There are no definite or indefinite articles in Latvian.
All Latvian verbs end in
-t. With the exception of three irregular verbs, conjugations for all Latvian verbs fall into three conjugation groups. Verbs are conjugated to show tense and person.
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