The First Five Questions Latvians Will Ask You

Smalltalk in Latvia is short, and it is predictable. A taxi driver, a guesthouse owner, the person sharing your table at a crowded canteen: they will work through more or less the same five questions, in more or less the same order. Where are you from, how long are you staying, do you speak Latvian, how do you like it here, and somewhere in there, how are you. The vocabulary involved is tiny.

What catches people out is not the words. It is the volume. Latvian smalltalk runs quieter and flatter than the version you may have practised for Spanish or for Italian, and quieter than what you will hear from Russian speakers on the same street. A big smile and a long enthusiastic answer does not read as friendly. It reads as a performance, and the usual response is a short polite pause. Answer, keep it brief, hand the question back. That is the rhythm.

The second thing to settle before anything else is tu and jūs. Every question below exists in two forms. Jūs is for a stranger, for anyone older than you, for anyone working behind a counter, and for more than one person at once. Tu is for friends, family, children and, usually, for people your own age in a bar. Using tu with a bus driver will not start an argument. It will just sit there, slightly off, like calling a stranger by their first name before they offered it.

The default opening with a stranger is labdien, literally good day. It covers from mid morning to dusk and it is what you say walking into a shop, a post office, a pharmacy or a doctor's waiting room. Labrīt belongs to the early morning and labvakar to the dark. Latvians use labvakar earlier in winter than you might expect, because in December the dark starts in the middle of the afternoon.

Sveiki is the warmer hello, and the one most phrasebooks lead with. It is grammatically plural, which is exactly why it is useful: sveiks is for a man and sveika is for a woman, so if you reach for the singular you have to decide who you are looking at before you have opened your mouth. Sveiki avoids the choice. Čau is the informal one, borrowed from the Italian ciao, and like ciao it works at both ends of a conversation.

One warning about every respelling on this page. Latvian marks long vowels with a macron, and the long and short versions are different sounds that change meanings. English spelling has no way to show this. The stress is easier: it falls on the first syllable of almost every Latvian word, including borrowed ones, so you can stop guessing.

In English, how are you is a greeting wearing the costume of a question. In Latvian it is closer to an actual enquiry, which is why a stranger often will not ask it at all. The cashier says labdien and nothing more, and that is not coldness. If someone does ask, they are mildly interested in the answer.

The reply that keeps the exchange alive is two short pieces: a state, then the question back. Labi means good and is entirely sufficient. Normāli, meaning fine or nothing special, is extremely common between people who know each other, and it is not gloomy, whatever it looks like written down. Avoid piling on superlatives. A Latvian who says their week is excellent usually means something specific has happened.

Paldies is the thank you you will use fifty times a day. It is commonly explained as a worn down form of an old phrase meaning God help, which is a useful hook if the word will not stick.

Where are you from arrives early, usually as soon as your accent lands. The little word no, meaning from, is a good test of your ear: the letter o in native Latvian words is not a plain English o but a diphthong, closer to uo, so no sounds roughly like nwuo rather than like the English no.

Country names change shape after no, taking the genitive ending: Anglija becomes Anglijas, Amerika becomes Amerikas, Īrija becomes Īrijas. If you cannot remember the ending, say the country name on its own. It is understood and nobody is marking it.

Question three is how long you are here, and a bare number plus a time word is a complete answer. You do not need a full sentence, and a full sentence is actually the stiffer option.

Question four follows almost automatically once you have produced two correct Latvian sentences. Be honest about it and say so, because claiming more than you have leads straight into a sentence you cannot follow. The admission itself is the thing people respond to: Latvian has well under two million speakers and very few foreigners attempt it, so the fact that you are trying is the interesting part, not your accuracy.

The last of the five is how you like it here, and it is asked with genuine curiosity rather than as a prompt for compliments. Ļoti patīk, meaning I like it a lot, is enough. Adding one concrete detail is what turns an exchange into a conversation: the forest, the market, the sea at Jūrmala, the bread.

There is a trap in patīk. Latvian uses a separate verb for liking the taste of something, garšot, and using patīk about food is the kind of error that gets gently repeated back at you. If the subject is rupjmaize, the dark sour rye bread that turns up on every table, the verb you want is garšo.

The single most useful thing you can learn here is un jums, meaning and you. It costs two syllables and it converts an interrogation into an exchange. Latvians will not usually keep a conversation running for you out of politeness, so if you answer and stop, the conversation stops with you. That is not rudeness; it is a reading of silence as comfortable rather than awkward.

Do not use tu with someone serving you, someone older, or someone you have just been introduced to in a work context. Latvian keeps the distinction alive in ordinary daily speech, and the switch to tu is usually offered rather than assumed.

Do not translate your English warmth directly. Calling a stranger dear, laying on compliments, or answering how are you with a paragraph about your morning will not be read as charming. Watch how little people say back and match it. The friendliness is real, it arrives later, and it arrives quietly.

Do not assume the answers you have memorised for Lithuania or Estonia work here. The three Baltic states are routinely grouped together by outsiders and the languages are not interchangeable: Latvian and Lithuanian are related but mutually unintelligible, and Estonian is not related at all. Greeting someone in Riga with labas, which is Lithuanian, is a reliable way to make the point about homework undone.

Standard Latvian works across the whole country and nothing on this page is regionally restricted. What changes is what is spoken around it. In the southeast, in Latgale, there is Latgalian, written and spoken and legally recognised as a historic variety of Latvian, and a conversation overheard there may be nothing you can match to a textbook.

The larger practical point is Russian. Russian is widely spoken in Latvia, particularly in Riga and in Daugavpils, and many people are fluent in both languages. Which language a stranger opens in is not a neutral choice for everyone, and the question of language use is politically live here. The straightforward approach for a visitor is to start in Latvian, switch to English if it is offered, and let the other person choose from there.

Latvians frequently answer the phone with klausos, meaning I am listening. It is standard and it is not brusque, though it sounds abrupt written out. Jā, meaning yes, with a questioning rise, is the other common opening, and in a work context people often answer with their own surname.

In writing the register separates sharply. A message to a friend opens with čau and no punctuation to speak of. An email opens with sveicināti, the plural greeting form, or with cienījamā and cienījamais, the Latvian equivalent of Dear, which change ending depending on whether you are writing to a woman or a man. The polite Jūs is often capitalised mid sentence in a letter as a mark of respect, which is a small courtesy with no spoken equivalent.

Learn labdien, paldies and un jums first. Those three get you through a shop, a thank you and the moment where the conversation would otherwise die.

Add tikai mazliet for the moment someone asks whether you speak Latvian, and uz redzēšanos for the way out. Everything else on this page you will absorb by standing in a queue and listening to how short the real exchanges are.