The Latvian Language in Computers and on the Internet

As Latvian uses many letters that are not on a standard keyboard, you have to modify the language settings on your Windows PC so that you would be able to write texts in Latvian with correct letters and your computer would understand them. There are various ways to solve this problem.

Tilde

Many Latvians install a program package called Tilde on their computers. It takes care of the language settings and also installs several Latvian-Another Language dictionaries as well as a tool to check your grammar when you type something in Latvian in MS Word. The downside is that this program is not free and often you don't need these other tools, you only need to be able to type Latvian characters.

Tilde solves the special character problem this way: in order to get, for example, 'š' on your screen, you have to press ' (the apostrophe) and then s. This way you can get all the special characters. It's rather convenient and many Latvians have gotten used to this system.

Without Tilde

If you can't get this program or don't want to use it, you can use Windows's built-in functionality. Right-click the Language bar (it should be next to the system clock in the right corner), choose Settings... and add the Latvian language. You can make it your default language if you want. If you don't make it default, you'll still see 'EN' in the language bar but you'll be able to switch to 'LV' with a left click of the mouse. If your language bar shows 'LV', you can type Latvian characters by pressing the right Alt key and holding it while pressing the letter you want. The downside of this method is that you have to press 3 keys at once to get capital letters (if you don't use Caps Lock) and that there's no easy way to access the right Alt key if you use all your fingers for typing. It may slow you down.

The third method is sort of a combination of the previous two. It's for people who don't have Tilde but who want to type using the Apostrophe key. If you're among those people, you have to install the keyboard layout (download it here, it's free), restart your computer and then add the Latvian language selecting the Apostrofs v0.2 keyboard.

Message Boards and Chats

40-60% of people in various forums and article comments and 90% people in chats don't use the special Latvian characters. In forums, it's mainly because it's easier not to write them and people are lazy. Many, especially teenagers, have gotten used to never typing Latvian characters although they have the necessary language settings on their computers. In chats, it's a different reason - some chat programms don't support Latvian characters or use different encodings and it is possible that a person won't be able to see the special characters correctly in a chat.

If they don't use the special characters, there are two most popular ways what to type instead of them. The first one is to type the same letter without the special mark. It's faster but sometimes the meaning of the word can be lost or be changed. The second way is to replace the special characters with the following letter combinations:

• ā -> aa
• ē -> ee
• ī -> ii
• ū -> uu
• š -> sh
• č -> ch
• ž -> zh
• ļ -> lj
• ņ -> nj
• ķ -> kj
• ģ -> gj

The second way is used more often because you don't lose any meaning that way.