or Lettish language
East Baltic language spoken by some two million people in the Republic of Latvia and in diaspora communities, including about 85,000 speakers in North America.
Like Lithuanian, it is sparsely attested until the first printed books in Latvian appear in 158586. The essentials of the present orthography, which employs the Latin alphabet with a number of diacritics, were adopted in 1908. Literary Latvian is based on the dialect spoken in Riga, Latvia's capital, though in recent years there has been a resurgence of literature in High Latvian (Latgalian), the dialect of eastern Latvia. Relative to Lithuanian, Latvian has undergone a number of striking sound changes, though the grammatical structures of the two languages are similar.