Latgalic: Dialect or Language ?

Abstract This article provides insight into a question which continues to be debated, namely, whether to call the means of communication used by the Latvians of eastern Latvia, or Latgale, a language or a dialect. Different views on this question are discussed as well as the various terms the Latgale’s Latvians use to describe their speech. A classification of Latgalic subdialects according to their phonetic and morphological characteristics is also provided. The question of what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect is discussed in many places around the world. Linguists tend to define language as a standardised code, which has a spoken and written form, while defining a dialect as a spoken language variety lacking a standardised written form. The concepts dialect and language often have a political shade to them. Dialects can also be defined as different varieties of the same language, which have undergone unique development in different geographic locations or have ended up in dissimilar extralinguistic situations (for more on this see Hoekstra 2003; Haugen 1966; Rudzīte 1964:13). In this sense, the linguistic situation in Latvia’s eastern region of Latgale is unique. It has largely been determined by extralinguistic factors. For Latgalian this question is complicated by the historical circumstances of Latgale where a separate written tradition has existed for nearly 300 years, which only began to be standardised at the beginning of the 20th century, while its spoken form has not been similarly standardised even now.