Jānis speaking Latvian

This video was recorded by Teddy Nee in Taiwan. Latvian is a Baltic language, part of the broader Indo-European language family, and is related to Lithuanian and Old Prussian. About 1.7 million people speak Latvian, with more than half using it as their primary language at home. During the Soviet occupation (1940–1991), the policy of Russification greatly affected the user of the Latvian language; since 2004, the state mandates Latvian as the language of instruction in public secondary schools for at least 60% of class work (previously, a broad system of education in Russian existed).