Evaluating native and non-native Latvian

Abstract

Since the end of WWII, Latvians have lived with asymmetrical bilingualism. To what extend has this situation affected the language? Young native speakers of Latvian were presented with short samples of Latvian as produced by native speakers and by ethnic Russians. The Latvian listeners were extremely good at identifying speech samples produced by Latvians vs. Russians. They judged the pronunciation of Latvians from all age groups as acceptable but were not generous in evaluating accented Latvian.