Why do people speak different languages?
There are many theories as to why we speak so many different languages – for instance, the well-known story about the Tower of Babel. There is also the “exclamation theory,” which points to the moment when people stood upright and started walking on two legs. Parallel developments were taking place as the brain and a special “language gene” developed (each of us has one – even you). At this moment, exclamations became a way for human social animals to express feelings, emotions, and attitude. Over time these simple sounds developed and were associated with particular meanings, and so language evolved.
Is the Latvian language unique?
Every language is unique, of course! The grammar and vocabulary of each language contain the historical experiences of the people who speak it. Latvian (together with Lithuanian) is the closest living language to the oldest known proto-language, Indo-European, which was spoken over 5,000 years ago.
On the origins of Latvian
Our neighbors the Lithuanians speak the language that is most similar to ours. Latvian and Lithuanian are the only living Baltic languages, spoken by millions of people every day. Some aspects of our language develop and some drop away, as they do for any living dynamic language. In Latvian you will find words borrowed from Slavic, Finno-Ugric, and Germanic languages, like Russian, Finnish, German, and Swedish. And, naturally, the zeitgeist also plays its part – these days many loan words from English are appearing in our vocabularies.