Alphabet and Pronunciation

Latvian is a phonetic language, it means that every letter represents a single sound, no matter which letter follows it (although there are exceptions). But before you proceed to learn the Latvian alphabet, make sure that your browser's character encoding is set to Baltic, otherwise you may see weird symbols instead of the intended letters.

Here's the alphabet:

You can listen to all the sounds here.

Although the pronunciation is pretty simple and straightforward, there are a couple of catches, namely, e, ē and o.

The pronunciation of 'o'

The letter o can be pronounced in 3 ways:

• a short, distinct o like in German or Spanish. The closest English sound is probably o in 'fog'
• the same sound from above, only longer. It could have the letter ō but for some reason there's no such letter in Latvian
• a diphthong 'ua', somewhat like 'wa' in 'watch' and 'wallet', only the accent is on the 'w', not the 'a'

And the best thing is - you can quickly learn in which cases to use what pronunciation, you just have to follow a few simple rules:

• If the word is of Latvian origin, the 'o' is likely to be a diphthong, for example: skola, ota, otrdiena, brokastis, godīgs, ceļot, domāt, karote, zilonis, logs (Note: to find out what the Latvian words mean, use the online dictionary)
• If the 'o' is a part of a verb's ending (in any tense, present, past or future), it is always a diphthong
• If the word is of a foreign origin, the 'o' will be either short or long. If the 'o' is towards the end of the word, it's more likely to be long, otherwise - short. Short is more common so you can use that if you're not sure, or use something in between short and long. Either way, everyone will understand you. Here are some examples (for learning purposes, the long 'o' is denoted with an 'ō' although that's not a real letter):
  glōbuss, globalizācija, antropolōgs, sōda, hokejs, sinoptiķis, programmētājs, ofiss, psiholōgs, boja, objekts, odekolōns, šoks

The pronunciation of 'e' and 'ē'

There are two ways to pronounce the 'e' in Latvian: either like 'e' in 'get' or like 'a' in 'apple'. The same goes for 'ē', only it's longer. The first pronunciation is more common and therefore is called the 'normal' one; the second is called 'the broad e'. It's important that you always pronounce the 'e' correctly and there are rules to guide you but they're not as easy to memorize as the 'o' rules. It is especially important to pronounce the 'e' correctly in verbs because the whole meaning of the sentence may depend on it.

Here are the rules:

• If the word is of a foreign origin, the 'e' will be normal: prezentācija, dezinfekcija, tāfele, velosipēds, demokrātija, investēt
• If the 'e' is in the prefix or the ending of a word, it is pronounced normally: nedarbs, bezmiegs, nemeklēt, nelaimīgs, stāvēt, mīlēt, māte, karote
• If the 'e' is followed by one of these letters (in the same or the next syllable), it is pronounced normally: i, ī, e (normal), ē (normal), j, ķ, ģ, ļ, ņ, š, ž, č. Examples: vējš, deja, celis, derīgs, zemene, nēģis, mežs, ceļš
• If the 'e' is followed by one of these letters (in the same or the next syllable), it is pronounced broadly: a, ā, u, ū, e (broad), ē (broad). Examples: deva, senāts, vecums, medūza, vedekla, pelēks
• The above rules don't apply to all forms of verbs. In many cases, two forms of the verb are written alike but pronounced differently, for example: tu nes (you're bringing, normal e), viņš nes (he's bringing, broad e), es nesu (I'm bringing, broad e), es nesu (I was bringing, normal e). The usual rule is that if the verb is in a past or future form or it's in present second person singular, the 'e' is normal. In other present forms, the 'e' is broad, except when some of the above rules apply, e.g., the 'e' is followed by a 'j'
• If the word is short and no other rule applies to it, the 'e' is usually pronounced broadly, e.g., vecs, tēvs, dēls, sens . But other short words, like sen, vēl, bet, tāpēc are pronounced with the normal 'e', so you can't always depend on rules

Diphthongs

Here are the most common diphthongs ('e' is always normal) in Latvian: ai, ei, au, ie and o. The accent always falls on the first vowel of the diphthong. You probably won't have any trouble pronouncing the first three diphthongs but ie often causes trouble for not native Latvian speakers. It's pronounced somewhere in the middle of ie and ia and i is by far the strongest vowel in the diphthong.

Here are some examples: laiks, gaidīt, beigas, augusts, raudāt, diena, rieksts, cietums, latviete, pieci, skola

Other notes about pronunciation

In Latvian, you generally have to pronounce every letter in a word, you can't omit the last 'e' or 's' like in English or French. What you can do is - turn a voiced consonant into an unvoiced consonant and the other way around to make the pronunciation of words easier. It means that if two consonants are next to each other and the second one is unvoiced, you change the first one to unvoiced, too. For example, grozs sounds like gross, pats sounds like pac, kāds - kāc, mežs - mešš, vads - vac, atbraukt - adbraukt, labs - laps, sākdams - sāgdams. But please note that this pronunciation is not mandatory, people just use it because it's easier. You don't have to learn it by heart, you can just as well try to pronounce every single consonant in a word.

For similar reasons, if letters 'v' or 'j' are in the same syllable with a short vowel and followed by a consonant, they are pronounced as 'u' or 'i', respectively. For example: tavs - taus, tev - teu, zvejnieks - zveinieks. And here are a few cases where letter 't' has disappeared at all: piektdiena - piegdiena, sestdiena - sezdiena, svētdiena - svēdiena, but these are just exceptions.