Portal:Language/Language of the month/November 2006

Latvian (latviešu valoda), sometimes referred to as Lettish, is the official state language of the Republic of Latvia. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. Latvian is of the Eastern Baltic sub-group of the Baltic language group in the Indo-European language family. There are three dialects in Latvian: the Livonian dialect, Latgalian language and the Middle dialect. The language is of interest to linguists because it retains many archaic features of the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother language of Old Latin, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and Proto-Germanic. Find out more...