Latgalian language
Latgalian is spoken in Latgale, the eastern part of Latvia. It is debated whether it is a separate language or a distinct dialect of Latvian. Nevertheless, its standardized form is recognized and protected as a "historical variety of the Latvian language" "(vēsturisks latviešu valodas paveids)" by Latvian law. The 2011 Latvian census established that 8.8% of Latvia's inhabitants, or 164,500 people, speak Latgalian daily. 97,600 of them live in Latgale, 29,400 in Riga and 14,400 in the Riga region.
Latvian language
Government-funded bilingual education is available in primary schools for ethnic minorities. These include Russian, Yiddish, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Estonian and Roma schools. Latvian is taught as a second language in the initial stages too, as is officially declared, in order to encourage proficiency in that language, aiming at avoiding alienation from the Latvian-speaking linguistic majority and for the sake of facilitating academic and professional achievements. Since the mid-1990s, the government may pay a student's tuition in public universities only provided that the instruction is in Latvian. Since 2004, the state mandates Latvian as the language of instruction in public secondary schools (Form 10–12) for at least 60% of class work (previously, a broad system of education in Russian existed).