Latvian translations for your company

Latvian is the official language of the Republic of Latvia and is spoken by roughly two million people there. Like Lithuanian, Latvian belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages. As with Lithuanian, many of the ancient elements of the Indo-Germanic language have been preserved, although Latvian is younger than Lithuanian in terms of linguistic history.

Latvian, the established standard language of the first Latvian state from 1918, was suppressed by the Russian language during the time of the Soviet Union but, since independence in 1991, Latvian has been strongly promoted by the state as the national language. In addition to Russian, the vocabulary contains numerous German and Swedish loanwords and, in more recent times, an increasing number of Anglicisms. Since joining the European Union in 2004, words have also been created deliberately to fill gaps in the vocabulary.

Latvian is an inflectional language in which words are inflected to express word relationships in the sentence. Words are usually stressed in the first syllable; there is a falling, prolonged and broken intonation. There are three distinct dialect groups: Middle Latvian, which is the basis of the written language, as well as High Latvian and Tamish. Latvian is written using Latin letters. Its pronunciation is regulated by means of diacritical marks – special glyphs above or below the letters – which sometimes also change a word’s meaning. There is proof of the Latvian language in writing since the 16th century.