Latvian

München: Lincom Europa, 1998. — 60 p.The language being described in this sketch is that which is spoken and written in today's Latvia. It is not exactly the same as what in Latvia is called the "literary language", i.e. the (written) variety for which there are prescriptive rules'. I have tried to describe features of the spoken variety as well as of the written language and have therefore also included forms that are judged "non-literary", as long as they are frequently used by educated speakers. Furthermore, some of the example sentences also contain non-standard forms or individual deviations which 1 did not comment on.
The data presented here are taken mainly from a corpus composed of selected narratives from the Latvian National Oral History Collection The corpus consists of parts of the transcribed recordings of seven speakers with a total of 5,400 sentences. At the time of the interview, the youngest speaker was 63, the oldest 89 years old The transcription was made by members of the collection project and is (more or less) in standard orthography Reference to the corpus is made by the initials of the speaker followed by the sentence number in my corpus. The letter "i" following the number indicates an utterance made by the interviewer.