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).
Latvian Wikipedia
The Latvian Wikipedia is the third most read edition in Latvia, after the English Wikipedia and the Russian Wikipedia. It is also the seventh most read edition on the island of Guernsey, where there is an emerging Latvian diaspora of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 migrant workers. Despite Latvian having less than 2 million speakers, the edition enjoys a relatively high level of community participation, with 54 editors per million speakers, even though there is still no Wikimedia chapter in Latvia. At around *1000/ round 1 articles per speaker, the Latvian Wikipedia has an above-average number of articles per speaker. These figures were based on an estimate of 1.8 million speakers of Latvian. Its editing community currently consists of administrators (/*100 round 2% of all active users) and active contributors, of which on average between 12 and 20 are very active every month, and there are in total 62 users with over 1,000 edits (excluding bots). Around 90% of both views and edits originate from Latvia, where Wikipedia is the 14th most popular website.