or Lettish language
East
Like Lithuanian, it is sparsely attested until the first printed books in Latvian appear in 1585–86. The essentials of the present orthography, which employs the {{link=Latin alphabet">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.