- By the Imperial census of 1897. In bold are languages spoken by more people than the state language.
| Language | Number | percentage (%) | males | females |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latvian | 507 511 | 75.29 | 240 672 | 266 839 |
| German | 51 017 | 7.56 | 23 372 | 27 645 |
| Yiddish | 37 689 | 5.59 | 18 137 | 19 552 |
| Russian | 25 630 | 3.8 | 16 319 | 9 311 |
| Polish | 19 688 | 2.92 | 9 985 | 9 703 |
| Lithuanian | 16 531 | 2.45 | 8 833 | 7 698 |
| Belarusian | 12 283 | 1.82 | 6 356 | 5 927 |
| Romani | 1 202 | 0.17 | 581 | 621 |
| Persons that didn't name their native language |
5 | >0.01 | 4 | 1 |
| Other | 2 478 | 0.36 | 1 993 | 485 |
| Total | 674 034 | 100 | 326 252 | 347 782 |
Read more about this topic: Courland Governorate
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)