Latvian language

Latvian
Latvian
latviešu valoda
Native to	Latvia, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, USA, Venezuela, Finland
Region	Europe
Native speakers	native 1.39 million (Latvia); 150,000 (Abroad); 1.54 million (Worldwide) ; second language: 500,000 (date missing)
Language family	Indo-European Baltic Eastern Latvian; ; ;
Writing system	Roman script
Official status
Official language in	Latvia, European Union
Regulated by	Latvian State Language Center
Language codes
ISO 639-1	lv
ISO 639-2	lav
ISO 639-3	lav

Latvian (Latvian: latviešu valoda), also called Lettish or Lettisch, is the official state language of Latvia.^[2] It is estimated that it has 1.75 million native speakers in Latvia.^[3]

The Latvian alphabet has 33 letters. The letters are based on the Latin alphabet.^[4] Along with the Lithuanian language, Latvian is the only living Baltic language.^[5]

Latvian Language Media

Distribution of the Baltic tribes, c. 1200 (boundaries are approximate).
In 1649^[source?] settlement of the Latvian speaking Kursenieki spanned from Memel (Klaipėda) to Danzig (Gdańsk).
Dictionary of the Polish-Latin-Latvian languages by Georgs Elgers, published in Vilnius, Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1683
A young man speaking in Latvian
Geographical distribution of the dialects in Latvia. Varieties of the Livonic dialect (Lībiskais dialekts) are in blue, the Central dialect (Vidus dialekts) in green, the High Latvian dialect (Augšzemnieku dialekts) in yellow.
The first geolinguistic map of the Latvian language (1891)
Latvian Lutheran hymnbook in old orthography.
The rarely used Latvian ergonomic keyboard layout
Recording of the first article of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Latvian.