Latvia
The share of ethnic Latvians had fallen from 77% (1,467,035) in 1935 to 52% (1,387,757) in 1989. In 2011, there were even fewer Latvians than in 1989, though their share of the population was larger – 1,285,136 (62.1% of the population).
The sole official language of Latvia is Latvian, which belongs to the Baltic language sub-group of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Another notable language of Latvia is the nearly extinct Livonian language of the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family, which enjoys protection by law; Latgalian – referred to as either a dialect or a distinct separate language of Latvian – is also formally protected by Latvian law but only as a historical variation of the Latvian language. Russian, which was widely spoken during the Soviet period, is still the most widely used minority language by far (in 2011, 34% spoke it at home, including people who were not ethnically Russian).
While it is now required that all school students learn Latvian, most schools also include English, Russian and German in their curricula. English and Russian are also widely accepted in Latvia, especially in business and tourism. there were 109 schools for minorities that use Russian as the language of instruction for 40% of subjects (the remaining 60% of subjects are taught in Latvian).
History of the Jews in Latvia
According to the population census taken in the Soviet Union in 1959, there were 36,592 Jews (17,096 men and 19,496 women; 1.75 percent of the total population) in the Latvian SSR. It may be assumed that about 10,000 of them were natives, including Jewish refugees who returned to their former residences from the interior of Russia, while the remainder came from other parts of the Soviet Union. About 48 percent of the Jews declared Yiddish as their mother tongue. The others mainly declared Russian as their language, while only a few hundred described themselves as Latvian-speaking. Of the total, 30,267 Jews (5/6) lived in Riga. The others lived in Daugavpils and other towns. According to private estimates, the Jews of Latvia in 1970 numbered about 50,000. The overwhelming majority of them lived in Riga, the capital, which became one of the leading centers of national agitation among the Jews of the Soviet Union. Underground religious and Zionist activity resulted in greater suspicion by authorities.