valoda

Days keep getting shorter, pants keep getting longer, and Germany has celebrated reunification, so it must be Fall. And as always around this time of year, I have fallen gravely ill with a deadly disease that only affects men, i.e. the cold. It may have to do with all the traveling I had been doing - there is some correlation between me flying and me feeling like crap for a week after. And so while I have this tiny little gremlin drilling holes in my brain (or at least that's how it feels) and can't really ... do ... what's the word ... oh yeah, thinking, why don't I share with you some of my language-related travel experiences. 

Contrary to my usual habits and common sense, I headed north, with the main goal of seeing Riga. I had never been to any Baltic country, nor had I had any significant exposure to Latvian, so I was very much looking forward to being around it. My goal was two-fold: first, to get some impression of how present Latvian is in the everyday landscape of the city. That one I accomplished by simply walking around, looking around and taking pictures of just about everything that had some writing on it.

These include this glorious pair of signs to which prohibit entry to all but those with a permit issued by the administration of the Seimas (Latvian parliament) and permit parking only to those who have such a permit.

Having thus acquainted myself with the basics of the Latvian language, I have reached the following conclusion: Latvian is essentially Common Slavic as spoken by Finns. I mean, c'mon:  

• lexical items like dien 'day', strielniks 'rifleman', es esmu 'I am', es neesmu 'I am not', dzīvot 'to live', strādat 'to work' (IYKYK), cilvēks 'person'
• all the morphology like angliski, -ju for 1SG, -am for 1PL, DAT.PL -ām/-iem 
• function words like the preposition bez in bez cūkuru 'without sugar', kā 'what', the subordinator ja 'if' in the second image

This brings me to my second goal on this - and let's face it, any - trip, to check out some bookstores and buy language-related books. Normally the first thing I would be looking for is a grammar, but I already have the excellent 2021 reference grammar by Kalnača and Lokmane - free PDF! - and consult the online grammar reference. And I decided to do some research first and check out the catalogues of two bookstores with physical stores in Riga - Globuss and Valters un Rapa. This is a crucial aspect of the entire endeavor because I may have used the plural of "book" a few lines above, but with the way my apartment looks, I can afford to bring home only one.

Even though the first catalogue did not have a section on linguistics, I hit the jackpot when after looking for something else in the category Vēsture 'History', I found Valodu jauda no ģimenes līdz sabiedrībai by Sanita Martena published in 2025. I bought it in the store on Vaļņu iela and brought it with me to the beach in Jūrmala.

This book, the full title of which translates to "The power of language: From family to society. Latvia's people, identities, languages", consists of five chapters on various aspects of Latvian, its use and language policy. The chapters are as follows:

1. "Valodas ģimenē: no emocijām līdz racionāliem apsvērumiem" = Language in the family: From emotional to rational considerations
2. "Valodas pirmsskolā: būt kopā, spēlēties un mācīties" = Language in primary school: being together, playing, and learning
3. "Latviešu valoda skolā: mācīšana un mācīšanās, attieksme un valodas lietojums" = Latvian language in school: learning and teaching, attitudes and language use
4. "Valodas un to vērtība Latvijā: individuãlais un sociālais aspekts" = Language and its value in Latvia: individual and social aspekts (phew, that was easy)
5. "Latviešu valoda un citas valodas diasporā: ģimenē, kopienā, izglitībã" = Latvian language and other languages in diaspora: in the family, in the community, in education

Aside from all the wonderful examples of my favorite grammatical feature of Latvian, the preposition-less locative (which in the singular is basically a long vowel, e.g. Latvijā < Latvija, ģimenē < ģimene 'family), the list shows that the books contains exactly what I was hoping for. This includes answers to questions such as "How is Latvian doing" and "What's up with Latgalian?" The entire book is essentially the answer to the former question and it will take me some time to digest it all. The specific discussion of the subject in chapter 4.1 seems to rely a bit too much on Ethnologue data which classifies Latvian as "Institutional"/"Stable" which, you know, fine. Martena adds a few excerpts from interviews with school children and teachers about language attitudes, but more local information would not hurt.

As for what be up with Latgalian, here Martena also relies on Ethnologue and so classifies Latgalian (ltg) as a variety of the Latvian macrolanguage (lav), on par with standard Latvian (lvs) (p. 198, ch. 4.1). The book, thankfully, contains a lot more than that, especially in ch. 4.2. And for example we learn that a survey of language competencies in Latgalian conducted in 2009 found this (p. 203):

Skill	Perfectly	Well	Medium	Poorly
I understand	58.20%	21.20%	14.20%	6.40%
I speak	49.60%	20%	17.00%	13.40%
I can read	32.90%	25.70%	19.30%	22.10%
I can write	19.60%	16.30%	21.50%	42.60%

And that according to the official statistics, while in 2022, Latgalian was spoken by some 8% of population in all of Latvia (down from 9.1% in 2011) and by some 37.1% of population in Latgale (up from 36.2% in 2011), the outlook for the viability of Latgalian is somewhat less optimistic when considering various age groups in Latgale only:

The most interesting bits I encountered in this context include Martena's discussion of linguistic landscape in Latvia. The term Martena uses is lingvistiskā ainava and it showcases one aspect of the book I very much appreciate: the use of native terminology. It's not that Martena does not use the common English ones - alas, such is the state of the world - but whenever she introduces a term, she immediately provides the Latvian one (to what extent they are neologisms, I sadly cannot tell) and then use them consistently.

The overview of Latvian linguistic landscape involves not only Latvian and Latgalian in official use (signs, public buildings, etc.), but also the presence of other languages, such as English and Russian, on protest signs (especially those connected with Russia's imperialist aggression) and in graffiti. During one of my evening walks in Riga, I paid special attention to graffiti and to my surprise, found mostly English and Russian (much of it very poetic, in the suka-blyad way). The single example of graffiti in Latvian I found was most likely left some confused missionary.

In short, I am very happy with my one - the tiny pocket dictionary I also got at Globuss does not count - book purchase in Riga. The pickings were somewhat slimmer at Valters un rapa, but if I ever decide to get serious about Latvian, I know where to get a graded reader, a manual of orthography and usage oh and maybe this one titled "Latvian in stability and change". And now I'm regretting not getting this brand new book which discusses not only Jānis Endzelīns' grammar of Latvian, but also the history of the study of Latvian. But then again, choices had to be made, because my journey through the north had one more stop, on which later.

And while I did not shock the natives with my command of their language, I did talk to some of them and learned about some language related things. The most interesting one is the non-word braliukas which Latvians and Lithuanians use to affectionately refer to each other. The word does not exist in either language which - at least according to this reddit post - can be traced to an incident during Eurovision 2007.