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The
Latvian Language
- Alphabet, grammar, dialect map, comparative
texts, and a Latvian-English dictionary.
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Learning Latvian
- Introductory lessons with
sound support. The early lessons use graphics to represent the diacritical
marks, while later lessons require fonts to be installed.
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- The Latvian language is 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 one of two extant Baltic languages, a group of its own
within the family of Indo-European languages.
- It formed until 16th century on the basis of Latgalian
accumulating Curonian, Semigallian and Selic languages (all are Baltic
languages). Both Latvian and 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.
- Like most of the Indo-European languages, Latvian employs modified
Roman script including 33 letters. The alphabet lacks the letters q,
w, x, y, but contains the letters ā, č, ē, ģ, ī, ķ, ļ, ņ, , ū, . Ö
is only used in the Latgalic dialect, its use in the official Latvian
language has been cancelled in the 1940s. Every phoneme has its own
letter, so you can always guess how to pronounce a word when you read
it. The stress with some exceptions is on the first syllable.
- 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.
- The oldest known examples of written Latvian are from a 1585
catechism.
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