Latgalian

Latgalian is the East Baltic variety of Latgale, the Catholic south-east of Latvia, with a written tradition going back to the mid-eighteenth century and a codified orthography most recently revised in 2007. It differs from standard Latvian by a set of regular correspondences — Latvian ā and ē appear as uo and ā (māte → muote, tēvs → tāvs), Latvian /uo/ appears as ū (koks → kūks, roka → rūka), Latvian ie appears as ī (viens → vīns) and short a becomes o (galva → golva, labs → lobs) — and by a far heavier Polish, Belarusian and Russian loan layer than Latvian has. Its palatalisation is much more pervasive than Latvian's, and the sequence -ņs is realised as an affricate, giving guņs 'fire' [ˈɡunʲt͡sʲ] and suņs 'dog'. Latvian law does not recognise it as a language in its own right, which leaves it without schooling rights even though it has newspapers, publishing and a Wikipedia. The 2011 census recorded 164,500 daily users, about 8.8 percent of Latvia's population, but transmission to children is weak and the variety is generally classed as vulnerable.

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