Heritage languages are increasingly seen as a source of important insight in linguistics. Latvian has a long and under-researched history as a heritage language, with a heterogenous community of heritage speakers from two waves of migration in many countries including Sweden. A qualitative case study of a small written corpus identifies and analyses the key divergences in heritage Latvian in texts by nine preadolescent children that attend the complementary Latvian community school in Stockholm. Self-reported background information on language practices by study participants and their parents is used to estimate and compare their heritage language exposure level. This composite measure helps to evaluate the vulnerability of various areas of grammar to reduced language input. The observed language changes are analysed in the context of a recent study on Latvian language change in second-generation post-war immigrants to Sweden, earlier findings of contact-induced change in heritage Latvian in the USA as well as common features identified in other heritage languages. Changes attested in texts by several study participants and in previous studies are likely to point to common features of heritage Latvian. Recognition of their language as a heritage variety of Latvian can facilitate language maintenance efforts in the language community. / Arvsspråken ses alltmer som en källa till viktiga insikter inom språkvetenskap. Lettiskan har en lång och underutforskad historia som arvsspråk, med en heterogen gemenskap av kulturarvstalare från två migrationsvågor i många länder, inklusive Sverige. En kvalitativ fallstudie av en liten skriftlig korpus identifierar och analyserar de viktigaste avvikelserna i lettiska som arvsspråk i texter av nio barn i förpubertal ålder vilka alla går i den lettiska lördagsskolan i Stockholm. Självrapporterad bakgrundsinformation om språkbruk av studiedeltagarna och deras föräldrar används för att uppskatta och jämföra deras kontaktnivå med arvsspråket. Denna sammansatta indikator används för att utvärdera hur stor påverkan den minskade kontakten med språket har på olika grammatiska funktioner. De observerade språkförändringarna analyseras mot bakgrund av en nyligen genomförd studie om språkförändringar i lettiskan hos andra generationens efterkrigsinvandrare i Sverige, med en tidigare studie i USA om kontaktinducerade arvsspråksförändringar samt med gemensamma drag som identifierats i andra arvsspråk. Förändringar som observerats i flera av studiedeltagarnas texter och i tidigare studier pekar sannolikt på gemensamma drag i det lettiska arvsspråket. Om arvsspråket erkänns som en variant av lettiskan skulle det underlätta möjligheterna att underhålla språket i diasporans gemenskaper. / Etniskā mantojuma valodām lingvistikā tiek pievērsta arvien lielāka uzmanība. Latviešu valodai kā mantojuma valodai ir gara un maz pētīta vēsture. Saistībā ar vairākiem migrācijas viļņiem latviešu valoda ir mantojuma valoda daudzās pasaules valstīs, tai skaitā arī Zviedrijā. Šis pētījums veikts ar kvalitatīvu gadījuma analīzes metodi, izmantojot maza apjoma rakstveida teksta korpusu. Deviņu Stokholmas latviešu papildskolas audzēkņu rakstu darbos konstatētas un tālāk analizētas tipiskākās izmaiņas mantojuma latviešu valodā. Pētījuma dalībnieku un to vecāku sniegtās ziņas par valodu lietojumu izmantotas, lai novērtētu un salīdzinātu katra dalībnieka mantojuma valodas saskarsmes līmeni. Šis saliktais rādītājs palīdz novērtēt, cik lielu ietekmi uz dažādiem latviešu gramatikas moduļiem atstāj samazināta saskarsme ar latviešu valodu. Novērotās valodas izmaiņas tiek salīdzinātas ar rezultātiem nesenā pētījumā, kas analizē latviešu valodas izmaiņas otrās paaudzes pēckara imigrācijā Zviedrijā, kā arī ar senāku ASV latviešu valodas pētījumu un vispārējām etniskā mantojuma valodai raksturīgām pazīmēm. Izmaiņas, kas novērotas vairāku pētījuma dalībnieku darbos un iepriekšējos pētījumos, iespējams, norāda uz kopīgām iezīmēm, kas raksturīgas latviešu valodai kā mantojuma valodai. Izpratne par etniskā mantojuma valodu kā vienu no latviešu valodas paveidiem var palīdzēt uzturēt latviešu valodu diasporas valodas kopienās.

This work deals with Latvian Song Festivals as an important phenomenon in Latvian history which started in Latvia in 1873. Their basis lays in choir singing developed in Latvia on a massive scale in 2nd half of 19th century. The festivals probably continued old tradition of singing - so-called teicamās dziesmas which had a similar structure as modern choirs. The development of choir singing is connected with Herrnhuterian schools and pedagogical colleges. The personality playing an important role in this process was a chief pedagogue in Valmiera Jānis Cimze whose collection Dziesmu rota launched a discussion about the future of Latvian culture from the point of view of national identity. Although the structure of Latvian Song Festivals was taken over from the Baltic Germans the idea of national identity has been involved since the beginning. Forming of Latvian national identity was in its beginnings influenced by J. G. Herder's philosophy and his idea of Volkslied and Volksgeist and it is closely connected with Latvian folk songs. It corresponds with Latvian self-determination as the nation of singers. In four historic periods defined by socio-political changes on Latvian territory these ideas together with a strong national element is found exactly in Latvian Song Festivals. The festivals become a...

Tyrimo „Lietuvos ir Latvijos profesinio orientavimo sistemos 1990 – 2012“ tikslas yra atlikti Lietuvos ir Latvijos profesinio orientavimo sistemų, paslaugų teikėjų (institucijų, kurios yra atsakingos už profesinio orientavimo paslaugų teikimą, kokybę, plėtotę) lyginamąją analizę. Tyrimo ataskaitą sudaro 4 skyriai. Pirmame skyriuje analizuojama ir lyginama abiejų šalių profesinio orientavimo sistemų raida nuo 1990 m. iki 2012 m. Antrame skyriuje analizuojamos ir lyginamos profesinio informavimo struktūros t.y., už profesinį orientavimą atsakingos institucijos. Trečiame skyriuje analizuojamos ir lyginamos Lietuvos ir Latvijos profesinio informavimo internetinės duomenų bazės. Ketvirtame skyriuje lyginami Lietuvos ir Latvijos profesinį orientavimą reglamentuojantys teisiniai dokumentai.Tyrimas grindžiamas prielaida, kad Lietuvos ir Latvijos profesinio orientavimo sistemos plėtojamos skirtingai, nepaisant to, kad yra kaimyninės šalys ir jas sieja istoriniai bei politiniai įvykiai. Atlikus tyrimą nustatyta, kad Lietuvos ir Latvijos profesinio orientavimo sistemos yra plėtojamos skirtingai, nes: priimami skirtingo pobūdžio įstatymai, orientuojamasi į skirtingas profesinio orientavimo sistemos dalis ir t.t. Nors rasta ir labai daug panašumų: Europos Sąjungos fondų vykdyti tokie pat arba panašūs projektai, sutampa, kai kurių už profesinį orientavimą atsakingų institucijų veiklą ir t.t. Tačiau negalima patvirtinti, kad Lietuvos profesinio orientavimo sistema yra labiau išvystyta negu... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The aim of the research “Lithuanian and Latvian Systems of Professional Orientation in 1990-2012” is to perform a comparative analysis between the Lithuanian and Latvian vocational guidance systems and the service providers (institutions, responsible for vocational guidance service providing, their quality and development). The research report consists of 4 chapters. In the first one, there are analysed and compared the development of vocational guidance systems from 1900 till 2012 in both countries. In the second chapter, there are analysed and compared professional information structures, i. e. institutions, responsible for vocational guidance. In the third chapter, there are analysed and compared internet data bases of the Lithuanian and Latvian professional information. In the last chapter of the report, the legal documents regulating the Lithuanian and Latvian vocational guidance are compared. The research is grounded on the assumption that despite the Lithuanian and Latvian common historical and political events, the vocational guidance systems are developed differently in both countries. The research showed that the Lithuanian and Latvian vocational guidance systems are developed differently, because: the legislation is drafted of different character, it is oriented to different vocational guidance systems parts, etc. Even though there were certain similarities found: same projects, developed by the European Union funds, activity of some institutions, responsible for... [to full text]

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1991. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 277-291).

Agriculture is a climate sensitive sector whether it changes moderately and slowly or radicallyand rapidly. Many studies that focus on the vulnerability of agriculture, use climate scenariosand crop models to assess the potential impacts. This study seeks to identify (1) farmers‘awareness and perceptions of climate variability and change; (2) the types of adjustments theyhave made in their farming practices in response to these changes (farm responses, adaptivestrategies); and (3) other external factors (government policies, social, technological andeconomic conditions) that have significant impact on the farming activities.The results indicate that climate change and variability already have and will have mostlynegative impacts on agriculture. Prolonged dry spells and heat in the summer, less summerrain combined with higher temperatures, more heavy rainfall, more forest or grass fires andextreme weather: drought, flood, storms have been identified as highest climatic burdens toagriculture. An advanced start of the growing season is the the only truly positive change forthe majority of farmers. Apart from that several non-climatic factors were identified assignificant, among them political: high level of bureaucracy, lack of public trust in socialinstitutions, political instability; economical: incentives, for example tax exemption orreduction, access to subsidies and funds, economic growth and development, long-lastingeconomic recession; technological and infrastructural: access to advanced technologies,infrastructure and settlement development and poor road and railroad system; and social:population migration within Europa, ageing of population and population decrease. Thesesocio-economic factors play significant roles in overcoming the risks and building adaptivecapacity. This study shows that a variety of strategies and methods have been applied toreduce the vulnerability. Most often it is a farm level managerial decision, like, adjustedtiming of farm operations, changed crop variety and types, reduced number of livestock,improved technological base or increased income by off farm jobs.Finally we can conclude that even though individual farms have capacity to reducevulnerability, one must not underestimate the role of government and industry to decrease thedamages, take advantage of opportunities or cope with consequences. Farmer decision tomake changes in farming activities is rarely based on one risk alone.

This thesis investigates the system of compounding attested in the earliest written Latvian texts of the 16th and 17th centuries. The philological analysis presented in this work is the first systematic attempt to extensively treat compounds in Old Latvian. The purpose of this thesis is to thoroughly describe the system of compounding of the earliest period of written Latvian. One of the main aims of the analysis provided in this work is to determine whether the Old Latvian compounds were distinguished in terms of their meaning and form. This is why another important aim of this study is to discern the most characteristic formal properties of each category of compounds in Old Latvian. This study also addresses the morphological variation of the components of compounds and seeks to explain why one finds different tendencies of compounding in the texts of this period.    Firstly, it is shown in this thesis that compounds in Old Latvian were clearly distinguished in terms of their meaning. The main semantic types of Old Latvian compounds, which were analyzed in this study, are the determinative compounds, the possessive compounds, the verbal governing compounds, and the copulative compounds. Secondly, it is argued that the aforementioned types of compounds were clearly differentiated in terms of the formal properties of their components. A large number of possessive compounds and verbal governing compounds had the compositional suffix -is (m.)/-e (f.). By contrast, only a handful of determinative compounds had this suffix. In view of the distribution of the suffix found in the Old Latvian compounds, it is suggested that the suffix was originally restricted to adjectival compounds. Furthermore, the different types of compounds in Old Latvian were also distinguished in terms of the first component. In the majority of cases, both the possessive compounds and the verbal governing compounds were coined without linking elements, while the determinative compounds had linking elements to a larger extent. Thirdly, it is proposed in this thesis that a part of linking elements used in the determinative compounds in Old Latvian originated from the original stem vowels of the first components. Thus, it is argued that stem compounds were still attested in the Old Latvian texts, although this Baltic model of coining compounds is no longer visible in Modern Latvian. Lastly, it is suggested that the tendencies of compounding found in the texts under discussion represent dialectal differences. Another contribution of this study is that the Old Latvian compounds are not treated in isolation, but analyzed in drawing parallels with compounds in the other Baltic languages, Lithuanian in particular. Hence, by analyzing common features and similarities between the compounding systems, the Old Latvian compounds are positioned within the context of the Baltic system of compounding.

Title: Comparative aspects of Latvian and Czech lexicons: Materials for assembling a Latvian-Czech dictionary Autor: Mgr. Michal Škrabal Department: Institute of the Czech National Corpus Supervisor: prof. PhDr. František Čermák, DrSc. The primary aim of this work is to classify the Latvian lexicon, or better its relevant segment, into individual groups, definable semantically, grammatically, syntagmatically, pragmatically, and so on, and to attempt to find for these classifications an ideal method of lexicographical adaptation and apply it to an emerging Latvian-Czech dictionary (the very first manual of its type). To this end, modern instruments were utilized which, in the recent past, have radically altered the methodology of lexicographical work: on the one hand, the linguistic corpora, which nowadays represent authentic, linguistic usage and, on the other hand, the specialized lexicographic software TshwaneLex, in which a lexical database of Latvian is constructed and from which the dictionary itself will be subsequently constructed. Because of the limited size of the Latvian corpus it was not possible to completely eliminate traditional sources, and the author of the work was forced to consolidate traditional and modern lexicographical methods. His primary source however remained the corpus...

The struggle of training adequate MT models using data-hungry NMT frameworks for low-resource language pairs has created a need to alleviate the scarcity of sufficiently large parallel corpora. Different transfer learning methods have been introduced as possible solutions to this problem, where a new model for a target task is initialized using parameters learned from some other high-resource task. Many of these methods are claimed to increase the translation quality of NMT systems in some low-resource environments, however, they are often proven to do so using different parent and child language pairs, a variation in data size, NMT frameworks, and training hyperparameters, which makes comparing them impossible. In this thesis project, three such transfer learning methods are put head-to-head in a controlled environment where the target task is to translate from the under-resourced Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian to English. In this controlled environment, the same parent language pairs, data sizes, data domains, transformer framework, and training parameters are used to ensure fair comparisons between the three transfer learning methods. The experiments involve training and testing models using all different combinations of transfer learning methods, parent language pairs, and either in-domain or out-domain data for an extensive study where different strengths and weaknesses are observed. The results display that Multi-Round Transfer Learning improves the overall translation quality the most but, at the same time, requires the longest training time by far. The Parameter freezing method provides a marginally lower overall improvement of translation quality but requires only half the training time, while Trivial Transfer learning improves quality the least. Both Polish and Russian work well as parents for the Baltic languages, while web-crawled data improves out-domain translations the most. The results suggest that all transfer learning methods are effective in a simulated low-resource environment, however, none of them can compete with simply having a larger target language pair data set, due to none of them overcoming the strong higher-resource baseline.

This thesis is about a remarkable experience lived through by Latvian émigrés in the mid-1950s. They were the targets of a Soviet repatriation campaign, operated by the KGB, which not only envisioned their repatriation to the Soviet Latvian homeland, but also anticipated the destruction of their émigré society as they knew it. The purpose of this thesis is to portray and analyze this repatriation campaign and the émigré Latvian reactions to it. By looking at the activities of the Committee For Return to the Motherland in East Berlin, the contents of the Latvian language repatriation newspaper Par atgriešanos Dzimtenē (For Return to the Motherland), and the reactions to the campaign in contemporary émigré press, this study shows how highly developed strategies and tactics were implemented in order to elicit certain behaviors from émigrés, and how émigrés advanced their own counter-strategies to offset the effects of the campaign. More specifically, this study examines the standardized narratives in Par atgriešanos Dzimtenē that were meant for émigré self-identification and emulation. This thesis proposes that the repatriation campaign was a highly complex Soviet propaganda effort. The publicly announced goal of repatriation included several parallel goals, aims, and purposes and encompassed many types of activities. Above all, deception was used to cover the actions undertaken against émigrés and to mislead host country governments and agencies. This thesis concludes that notwithstanding the Soviet superiority in organization and resources, a small, unprotected, and internally divided community could withstand the concerted efforts of Soviet propaganda if the group’s sense of mission was sufficiently strong and firm. / Denna avhandling behandlar de lettiska flyktingarna från andra världskriget och deras erfarenheter av ofrivilliga kontakter med Sovjetlettland vid mitten av 1950-talet, då flyktingarna blev måltavla för en sovjetisk repatrieringskampanj. Målet för denna kampanj var repatriering, dvs att få flyktingarna att återvända till hemlandet, det av Sovjet ockuperade Lettland. Ett annat mål var att splittra flyktingarnas sammanhållning. Avhandlingen beskriver och analyserar den sovjetiska repatrieringskampanjen och de lettiska flyktingarnas reaktioner. Studien bygger på källmaterial från kampanjverkamheten Committee For Return to the Motherland, som hade sin bas i Östberlin, samt från artiklar i den lettiskspråkiga tidskriften Par atgriešanos Dzimtenē (For Return to the Motherland) som riktade sig till de lettiska flyktingarna. Flyktingarnas reaktioner studeras genom en rad lettiska tidningar som utgavs i Väst. Min avhandling visar hur väl utvecklade strategier användes i syfte att framkalla önskade reaktioner från flyktingarna, samt vilka motåtgärder flyktingar själva utvecklade mot repatrieringskampanjen. Mer specifikt analyseras standardberättelser i Par atgriešanos Dzimtenē som var avsedda för flyktingarnas självidentifiering och igenkännande. Avhandlingen pekar på att den sovjetiska repatrieringskampanjen var en mycket komplex propagandaverksamhet. Utöver det offentligt tillkännagivna kampanjmålet fanns flera parallella målsättningar och avsikter som omfattade en stor mängd skiftande aktiviteter. En strategi som användes aktivt var vilseledning, bl a för att dölja verksamheter riktade mot flyktingarna, och för att förvilla statsledningar och myndigheter i de nationer där flyktingarna vistades. Avhandlingens slutsats är att trots den sovjetiska överlägsenheten i organisation och resurser kunde en liten oförsvarad och inom sig splittrad lettisk gemenskap motstå de samordnade ansträngningar från den sovjetiska propagandan.

<p>Civil society activism in traditional non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is seen as one of the cornerstones of a vibrant participatory liberal democracy in most Western democratic states. Whereas this issue has been explored from a variety of perspectives in a Western context, only limited research has been carried out in a post-Soviet context. This study presents unique survey data on civil society core activism in post-Soviet Latvia addressing the following two main questions: What are the characteristics and factors that influence a person to become a core activist in a civil society organization? How does the post-Soviet Latvian context influence civil society core activism?</p><p>Two nationwide surveys were carried out among core activists in all sorts of NGOs and for a comparative purpose among the population at large, from which non-activists have been extracted. Through cross-tabulations based on the three comparative dimensions: a) activists in general vs. non-activists, b) fields of interest and c) position in organization, this study indicates that many of the factors proven to be important when explaining civil society core activism in Western contexts also have explanatory power in post-Soviet Latvia. Important factors are an individual’s educational level, empathic ability and level of civic literacy, as well as the presence of activist role models and positive support for the decision to become involved in civil society activism. Citizenship and gender are other important factors, but unlike Western countries women dominate the civil society sector in Latvia. Two new factors are also suggested and tested, showing that the perception that one has the ability to organize activity and prior leadership experience from a communist organization are important for Latvian core activists.</p><p>Binary logistic regression analysis is further used to test the significance of each of the independent variables alone and in combination with each other, introducing different types of core activists based on gender, motives for activism, intensity of political, charity and recreational activity, as well as the positions they have in their organizations.</p>