A bilingual history of Latvian larp

Agnese “Axa” Dzervite

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Latvia is at its heart a bilingual country, having retained a large number of inhabitants of Russian descent after the reign of the Soviet Union. Every Latvian attending school before the 1990s learned and used Russian as a second language, while the following generations have mostly renounced its use in the public sphere.

This has had a profound effect on all aspects of Latvian culture and has resulted in the formation of two distinct groups of people – those that speak predominantly Russian and those that speak Latvian.