Laipni lūdzam!

under construction

Latvia is the second-biggest of the three Baltic countries in terms of population and land area and also is one of the most consistently high-ranking nations in (various) sports, having one of the most Olympic medals in comparison to their total population size. (34 total medals as of 2025 with ~18.9 medals per million people with a population of 1,8 million)

Geography

Following clockwise, Latvia borders Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania. The country is mostly flat with some rolling hills with around 50% of its total land area being forested.

Language

The Latvian language, as most European languages, come from the Indo-European language family. As many other languages from the Indo-European languages, Latvian has 7 grammatical cases like nominative, dative, etc. Every noun also has its own (grammatical) gender, no articles and verb conjugations for number, person mood and tense. For example, the suffix 'iet' means 'to go', so aiziet = to leave and pāriet = to cross

Words are pronounced how they're written, which for some English speakers may be confusing considering Latvian uses diacritical marks to help guide pronounciation (ā, ē, ī, ū, š, č, ž, ļ, ņ) and has no silent letters.

Context

Latvian is, together with Lithuanian, one of the only surviving Baltic languages together with Lithuanian. Other now-extinct languages spoken by Baltic tribes like Old Prussian fell into obscurity as their people assimilated into larger languages/cultures. One of the main things that allowed Latvian (and Lithuanian) to survive is difference in leadership. While the Germans in Prussia effectively wiped out the use of Old Prussian combined with plagues, wars and lack of opportunity, Latvian peasants under the Livonian Order and later Sweden, Russia and Poland kept their culture.