Daina (Latvia)

A daina or tautas dziesma is a traditional form of music or poetry from Latvia. Lithuanian dainas share common traits with them, but have been more influenced by European folk song traditions. Latvian dainas often feature drone vocal styles and pre-Christian themes and legends, and can be accompanied by musical instruments such as the Baltic psalteries (kokles). Dainas tend to be very short (usually four-liners) and are usually in a trochaic or a dactylic metre.

The trochaic metre is the most popular, with around 95% of dainas being in it. Characteristic of this metre is that an unstressed syllable follows a stressed syllable, two syllables forming one foot. Two feet form a dipody and after every dipody there is a caesura, which cannot be in the middle of a word. The dainas traditionally are written down so that every line contains two dipodies. If a caesura is followed by three syllables, the last syllable – i.e. the one at the end of the line – is long; if four syllables follow it is short. A syllable is considered short if it contains a short vowel or a short vowel and s; all other syllables are considered long. This results in a rather limited vocabulary as a dipody can consist of either one four-syllable word, two two-syllable words, one one-syllable and one three-syllable word or two one-syllable and one two-syllable words. Exceptions are mostly found in Eastern Latvian dialects, which allow words to start one syllable before or after where the caesura normally would be, thus allowing five-syllable combinations. This inconsistency is usually found only in one or two lines, most often in the second or fourth. The notion of short and long syllables at the end of lines is retained. However, the syllable after a lost caesura is often unstressed as it is in everyday speech.

A sound may be added or removed to increase vocabulary there or elsewhere. The addition of sounds is explained with structural changes in the language itself (loss of vowels in word endings). The sound added at the end of a word is usually I, in some rare cases also A, U or E (the last of these mostly in some regions of Courland). Occasionally contractions occur and I replaces a diminutive ending in I – i.e. the ending is retained, but separated from the rest of the word by a caesura. This can perhaps be explained by diminutives being so popular in dainas that people didn't find it appropriate to replace one with the same word without it, which would be a syllable shorter. Sometimes a diminutive is added to increase the number of syllables even when the meaning of the word is the opposite of what is usually expressed with the diminutive. Similarly, the need to match the metric might cause disagreement in tenses.

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