Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian
Language combinations for translations involving Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian:
Eisenmann Übersetzungsteam provides technical translations by native speakers of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian for all subject areas: economics, law, technology, medicine, advertising, IT etc.
All texts are translated by experienced specialist translators of Bulgarian into their mother tongues, as per the native speaker principle.
The only Baltic languages still spoken today are Latvian and Lithuanian; Estonian belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family. Due to the relatively similar development of the Baltic countries in the last 65 years, beginning with belonging to the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1990 and finally with entry into the European Union on 1st May 2004, the linguistic backgrounds of these languages have been very similar over this time period.
Latvian
Latvian belongs to the Eastern Baltic languages of the Indo-European language family, and along with Lithuanian and a small minority language is the only actively spoken Baltic language. Today, there are 1.4 million speakers of Latvian in Latvia, amounting to two thirds of the population. Russian, on the other hand, is spoken by roughly 80% of the population because Latvia was part of the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1990, and Russian was therefore the dominant language in the country for the past few decades.
Latvian originated from Latgallian; a regional dialect in the core region of Latgale in the south east of Latvia on the border with Lithuania and Belarus, and still displays similarities to Lithuanian.
Latvian borrows words from German, Swedish and Russian, as well as increasingly from English.
Since the country’s ascension into the European Union, the significance of Latvian has grown and demand for translations from Latvian into German has risen.
Lithuanian
Like Latvian, Lithuanian belongs to the Eastern Baltic languages of the Indo-European language family, but is spoken by more people. There are roughly 3 million native speakers in Lithuania and more than 1 million speakers of Lithuanian living in ethnic groups in Russia, Poland and Belarus.
Lithuanian is split into Highland Lithuanian (Aukštaitija) and Lowland Lithuanian (Samogitian).
Latvian and Lithuanian are two closely related languages which have been separate since the 8th Century. Unlike with Latvian, Lithuania has a language commission for the preservation of language purity; one reason why Lithuanian contains far fewer borrowed words than Latvian. Lithuanian has also grown in significance after entering the European Union.
Estonian
Although Estonia belongs to the Baltic States, Estonian is not a Baltic language, belonging instead to the Finno-Ugric family alongside Finnish and Hungarian. Whereas Estonian displays only a few similarities to Hungarian, a native speaker of Estonian would find it easy to understand Finnish due to the two languages’ many shared similarities.
In Estonia there are three major dialect groups: the southern, northern and the northeastern coast dialect groups. In total, Estonian is spoken by around one million people. Estonia was also part of the Soviet Union until 1990, causing Estonian to be of secondary importance for a long time in its own country. Since gaining independence in 1991, this is no longer the case; currently over 90% of Estonians speak their official language.
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Updated November 2022
