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Latvian (, ), also known as Lettish, is an East Baltic language belonging to the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in the Baltic region, and is the language of the Latvians. It is the official language of Latvia as well as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 1.5 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and 100,000 abroad. Altogether, 2 million, or 80% of the population of Latvia, spoke Latvian in the 2000s, before the total number of inhabitants of Latvia slipped to 1.8 million in 2022. Of those, around 1.16 million or 62% of Latvia's population used it as their primary language at home, though excluding the Latgale and Riga regions it is spoken as a native language in villages and towns by over 90% of the population.
As a Baltic languages, Latvian is most closely related to neighboring Lithuanian (as well as Old Prussian, an extinct Baltic language); however, Latvian has developed in different directions. (2025). 9789027230577, John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN 9789027230577 In addition, there is some disagreement whether Standard Latgalian and Kursenieki, which are mutually intelligible with Latvian, should be considered varieties or separate languages. However, in Latvian linguistics, such hypotheses have been rejected as non-scientific.
Latvian first appeared in Printing press in the mid-16th century with the reproduction of the Lord's Prayer in Latvian in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis (1544), in Latin script.
Latvian as a distinct language emerged over several centuries from the language spoken by the ancient Latgalians assimilating the languages of other neighboring Baltic tribes—Curonian, Semigallian, and Selonian—which resulted in these languages gradually losing their most distinct characteristics. This process of consolidation started in the 13th century after the Livonian Crusade and forced christianization, which formed a unified political, economic, and religious space in Medieval Livonia.
The first person to translate the Bible into Latvian was the German Lutheranism pastor Johann Ernst Glück (The New Testament in 1685 and The Old Testament in 1691). The Lutheran pastor Gotthard Friedrich Stender was a founder of Latvian secular literature. He wrote the first illustrated Latvian alphabet book (1787), the first encyclopedia "" (Augstas gudrības grāmata no pasaules un dabas; 1774), grammar books and Latvian–German and German–Latvian dictionaries.
According to the 1897 Imperial Russian Census, there were 505,994 (75.1%) speakers of Latvian in the Governorate of Courland and 563,829 (43.4%) speakers of Latvian in the Governorate of Livonia, making Latvian-speakers the largest linguistic group in each of the governorates.
After the Soviet occupation of Latvia, the policy of Russification greatly affected the Latvian language. At the same time, the use of Latvian among the Latvians in Russia had already dwindled after the so-called 1937–1938 Latvian Operation of the NKVD, during which at least 16,573 ethnic Latvians and Latvian nationals were executed. In the 1941 June deportation and the 1949 Operation Priboi, tens of thousands of Latvians and other ethnicities were deported from Latvia. Massive immigration from the Russian SFSR, Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and other republics of the Soviet Union followed, primarily as a result of Stalin's plan to integrate Latvia and the other Baltic republics into the Soviet Union through colonization. As a result, the proportion of the ethnic Latvian population within the total population was reduced from 80% in 1935 to 52% in 1989. In Soviet Latvia, most of the immigrants who settled in the country did not learn Latvian. According to the 2011 census Latvian was the language spoken at home by 62% of the country's population.
After the re-establishment of independence in 1991, a new policy of language education was introduced. The primary declared goal was the integration of all inhabitants into the environment of the official state language while protecting the languages of Latvia's ethnic minorities.
Government-funded bilingual education was available in primary schools for ethnic minorities until 2019 when Parliament decided on educating only in Latvian. Minority schools are available for Russian language, Yiddish language, Polish language, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Estonian and Romany language languages. Latvian is taught as a second language in the initial stages too, as is officially declared, to encourage proficiency in that language, aiming at avoiding alienation from the Latvian-speaking linguistic majority and for the sake of facilitating academic and professional achievements. Since the mid-1990s, the government may pay a student's tuition in public universities only provided that the instruction is in Latvian. Since 2004, the state mandates Latvian as the language of instruction in public secondary schools (Form 10–12) for at least 60% of class work (previously, a broad system of education in Russian existed).
The Official Language Law was adopted on 9 December 1999. Several regulatory acts associated with this law have been adopted. Observance of the law is monitored by the Latvian State Language Center run by the Ministry of Justice.
There are several contests held annually to promote the correct use of Latvian. One of them is "Word of the year" (Gada vārds) organized by the Riga Latvian Society since 2003. It features categories such as the "Best word", "Worst word", "Best saying" and "Word salad". In 2018 the word zibmaksājums (instant payment) won the category of "Best word" and influenceris (influencer) won the category of "Worst word". The word pair of straumēt (stream) and straumēšana (streaming) were named the best words of 2017, while transporti as an unnecessary plural of the name for transport was chosen as the worst word of 2017.
The increased adoption of Latvian by minorities was brought about by its status as the country's only official language and other changes in the society after the fall of the Soviet Union that mostly shifted linguistic focus away from Russian language. As an example, in 2007, universities and colleges for the first time received applications from prospective students who had a bilingual secondary education in schools for minorities. Fluency in Latvian is expected in a variety of professions and careers.
| Capital letters (also called uppercase or capital letters) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ē | K | P | Ž | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lower case (also called lowercase or small letters) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ē | ķ | r | ž | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The modern standard Latvian alphabet uses 22 unmodified letters of the Latin alphabet (all except , which are usually replaced by , , , and respectively in loanwords and even in foreign names, though they may appear in certain specialized terms such as status quo; "W" can be found in older texts, "Y" can be found in the Latgalian language/dialect). It adds a further eleven characters by modification. The vowel letters , , and can take a macron to show length, unmodified letters being short; these letters are not differentiated while sorting (e.g. in dictionaries). The letters , and are pronounced , and respectively, while when marked with a caron, , they are pronounced , and respectively. The letters , written with a comma placed underneath (or above them for lowercase g), which indicate palatalized versions of representing the sounds , , and . Latvian orthography also contains nine digraphs, which are written . Non-standard varieties of Latvian add extra letters to this standard set.
Latvian spelling has almost one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. Every phoneme corresponds to a letter so that the reader can almost always pronounce words by putting the letters together. There are only two exceptions to this consistency in the orthography: the letters represent two different sounds: and . The second mismatch is that letter indicates both the short and long , and the diphthong . These three sounds are written as , and in Standard Latgalian, and some Latvians campaign for the adoption of this system in standard Latvian. However, Latvian grammarians argue that and are found only in loanwords, with the sound being the only native Latvian phoneme. The digraph was discarded in 1914, and the letters and have not been used in the official Latvian language since 1946. Likewise, the digraph was discarded in 1957, although , , and are still used in some varieties and by many Latvians living beyond the borders of Latvia. The letter is used only in Standard Latgalian, where it represents , a sound not present in other dialects.
Nowadays standard QWERTY or the US keyboards are used for writing in Latvian; diacritics are entered by using a dead key (usually ', occasionally ~). Some keyboard layouts use the modifier key AltGr key (most notably the Windows 2000 and XP built-in layout (Latvian QWERTY), it is also default modifier in X11R6, thus a default in most Linux distributions).
In the 1990s, lack of software support of diacritics caused an unofficial style of orthography, often called Transliteration, to emerge for use in situations when the user is unable to access Latvian diacritic marks (e-mail, newsgroups, web user forums, chat, SMS etc.). It uses the basic Modern Latin alphabet only, and letters that are not used in standard orthography are usually omitted. In this style, diacritics are replaced by digraphs – a doubled letter indicates a long vowel (as in Finnish and Estonian); a following j indicates palatalisation of consonants, i.e., a cedilla; and the postalveolars Š, Č and Ž are written with h replacing the caron, as in English. Sometimes the second letter, the one used instead of a diacritic, is changed to one of two other diacritic letters (e.g. š is written as ss or sj, not sh), and since many people may find it difficult to use these unusual methods, they write without any indication of missing diacritic marks, or they use digraphing only if the diacritic mark in question would make a semantic difference. Sometimes an apostrophe is used before or after the character that would properly need to be diacriticised. Also, digraph diacritics are often used and sometimes even mixed with diacritical letters of standard orthography. Although today there is software support available, diacritic-less writing is still sometimes used for financial and social reasons. As š and ž are part of the Windows-1252 coding, it is possible to input those two letters using a numerical keypad. Latvian language code for cmd and .bat files - Windows-1257
| Muuſze Thews exkan tho Debbes | Muhſu Tehvs debbeſîs | Mūsu tēvs debesīs | Muusu teevs debesiis |
| Sweetyttz thope totws waerdtcz | Swehtits lai top taws wahrds | Svētīts lai top tavs vārds | Sveetiits lai top tavs vaards |
| Enaka mums touwe walſtibe | Lai nahk tawa walſtiba | Lai nāk tava valstība | Lai naak tava valstiiba |
| Tows praetcz noteſe | Taws prahts lai noteek | Tavs prāts lai notiek | Tavs praats lai notiek |
| ka exkan Debbes tha arridtczan wuerſſon ſemmes | kà debbeſîs tà arirdſan zemes wirsû | Kā debesīs, tā arī virs zemes | Kaa debesiis taa arii virs zemes |
| Muſze beniſke mayſe bobe mums ſdjoben | Muhsu deeniſchtu maizi dod mums ſchodeen | Mūsu dienišķo maizi dod mums šodien | Muusu dienishkjo maizi dod mums shodien |
| Vnbe pammet mums muſſe parrabe | Un pametti mums muhſu parradus later | Un piedod mums mūsu parādus | Un piedod mums muusu paraadus |
| ka mehs pammettam muſſims parabenekims | kà arri mehs pamettam ſaweem parrahdneekeem | Kā arī mēs piedodam saviem parādniekiem | Kaa arii mees piedodam saviem paraadniekiem |
| Vnbe nhe wedde mums exkan kaerbenaſchenne | Un ne eeweddi muhs eekſch kahrdinaſchanas | Un neieved mūs kārdināšanā | Un neieved muus kaardinaashanaa |
| Seth atpeſthmums no to loune | bet atpeſti muhs no ta launa later | Bet atpestī mūs no ļauna | Bet atpestii muus no ljauna |
| Aefto thouwa gir ta walſtibe | Jo tew peederr ta walſtiba | Jo tev pieder valstība | Jo tev pieder valstiiba |
| Vnbe tas ſpeez vnb tas Goobtcz tur muſſige. | Un tas ſpehks un tas gods muhſchigi later. | Spēks un gods mūžīgi. | Speeks un gods muuzhiigi. |
| Amen. | Amen. | Āmen. | Aamen. |
| +Latvian consonants ! !Labial consonant !Dental consonant/Alveolar !Post-alveolar/Palatal !Velar consonant |
Consonants in consonant sequences assimilate to the voicing of the subsequent consonant, e.g. a pgabals or la bs . Latvian does not feature final-obstruent devoicing.
Consonants can be long (written as double consonants) mamma , or short. Plosives and fricatives occurring between two short vowels are lengthened: upe . Same with 'zs' that is pronounced as , šs and žs as .
| + Latvian vowels ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" Front vowel ! colspan="2" | Central vowel ! colspan="2" | Back vowel | |
, and the diphthongs involving it other than , are confined to loanwords.
Latvian also has 10 , four of which are only found in loanwords (), although some diphthongs are mostly limited to proper names and interjections.
Loanwords from other Baltic language include ķermenis (body) from Old Prussian, as well as veikals (store) and paģiras (hangover) from Lithuanian.
In addition, Latvian has many loanwords from Russian, such as "telefon" (telephone, derived from Russian "телефон") and "kompjūters" (computer, derived from Russian компьютер).
The first grammar of the Latvian language is a short “Manual on the Latvian language” () by , published in 1644 in Riga.
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