Latvian language

Latvian (latviešu valoda, pronounced [ˈlatviɛʃu ˈvaluɔda]), 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. 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 language, Latvian is most closely related to neighboring Lithuanian (as well as Old Prussian, an extinct Baltic language); however, Latvian has developed in different directions. In addition, there is some disagreement whether Standard Latgalian and Kursenieki, which are mutually intelligible with Latvian, should be considered varieties or separate languages.

Latvian first appeared in print 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 belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is classified as a part of the Baltic branch of the family. It is one of two living Baltic languages with an official status, the other being Lithuanian. The Latvian and Lithuanian languages have retained many features of the nominal morphology of Proto-Indo-European, though their phonology and verbal morphology show many innovations (in other words, forms that did not exist in Proto-Indo-European), with Latvian being considerably more innovative than Lithuanian. However, Latvian has mutual influences with the Livonian language.

According to some glottochronological speculations, the East Baltic languages split from West Baltic (or, perhaps, from the hypothetical proto-Baltic language) between 400 and 600 CE. The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after 800 CE. At a minimum, transitional dialects existed until the 14th century or 15th century, and perhaps as late as the 17th century.

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 oldest known examples of written Latvian are from a 1530 translation of a hymn made by Nikolaus Ramm [lv], a German pastor in Riga. The oldest preserved book in Latvian is a 1585 Catholic catechism of Petrus Canisius currently located at the Uppsala University Library in Sweden.

The first person to translate the Bible into Latvian was the German Lutheran 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 "The Book of High Wisdom of the World and Nature [lv]" (Augstas gudrības grāmata no pasaules un dabas; 1774), grammar books and Latvian–German and German–Latvian dictionaries.