Common Roots of the Latvian and Estonian Literary Languages

Estonian and Latvian are members of different language families. Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language, while Latvian belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages. The cultural and socio-political developments of Estonia and Latvia, however, have been remarkably similar since the Christianisation of the two peoples in the 13th century. The Estonian and Latvian cultures were both moulded to form part of Christian Europe by German-speaking mediators who worked hard from the 16th to 18th centuries in order to create the Estonian and Latvian literary languages by translating ecclesiastical texts. The authors assume that similarities in the cultural history must have left some similar traces in the structures of the two languages as well. This book represents a collection of papers on certain common developments in the Estonian and Latvian cultural history, which are obviously related to the formation of the two literary languages.