1. General Methodology
  2. Ethnic Minorities In Central and Eastern Europe
  3. Minority condition in Latvia

Minority condition in Latvia

Flag of Latvia

Capital: Riga

Population: 1.88 million

Russian Minority: 25.2%

GDP: $39.85 billion USD

Russian speakers

Russian speakers are the biggest ethnic group in Latvia, comprising 25.2% of the population. The ethnic minority and the dominant majority are differentiated by language, religion, residence, and schooling. The former are Russian speakers, practice Eastern Orthodoxy or self identify as Old Believers. They are urban dwellers residing primarily in the capital city of Riga and the second largest city of Daugavpils. Russian-speaking children tend to attend preschools and schools with Russian language of instruction.

Pressing Issues

Russian speakers in Latvia are most affected by education and citizenship policies. Both policies delineate ethnic boundaries between the dominant and ethnic minorities. Latvian is the only official language, and it is the dominant language in public and private schools. At the same time, Russian-language education has become severely limited since state independence. Exclusionary citizenship adopted in the early 1990s excluded most Russian speakers from the political community. Presently, over 70% of Russian speakers in Latvia have citizenship.

Language

According to the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, Russian is the mother tongue of 36% of the population of Latvia. Russian is the mother tongue of 53.5% of the population of the capital city Riga. The share of native Russian speakers is the highest in Latgale region (55.5%), followed by Zemgale (23.8%) and Pieriga (22.4%).

Population of Latvia by mother tongue
  2000 2017
Latvian 58.2% 60.8%
Russian 37.5% 36%
Other 4.3% 3.2%

Source: Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, 2019.

About 45% of people aged 50 and over speak Russian at home. These rate are lower for second generation Russian speakers. Russian is used at home by 30% of those aged 15 to 24.

Language use by age
This image shows the reduced share of population of Russian speakers in younger age groups as compared to older age groups.

Source: Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, 2019. 

Education

Russian-language education in Latvia has been on the decline in Latvia. The graph presents the number of students enrolled in schools according to language of instruction between 1998 and 2018:

Students by language of instruction
The graph shows that although student enrollments in schools with Estonian or Latvian languages of instruction have been slowly increasing since 2010, there is a steady decline in enrollments in Russian or other languages.

Citizenship

Number of persons having been granted Latvian citizenship since state independence:

Year Number
1995 984
1996 3,016
1997 2,992
1998 4,439
1999 12,427
2000 14,900
2001 10,637
2002 9,844
2003 10,049
2004 16,064
2005 19,169
2006 16,439
2007 6,826
2008 3,004
2009 2,080
2010 2,336
2011 2,467
2012 2,213
2013 1,732
2014 939
2015 971
2016 987
2017 915
2018 930
2019 808
2020 725
Total 147,893