Livonian people
|
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
| Latvia (Livonian Coast) | |
 Latvia
|
250 (2011) |
 Russia
|
64 (2002) |
 Estonia
|
23 (2011) |
| Languages | |
| Latvian, Livonian | |
| Religion | |
| Lutheranism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| other Finnic peoples | |
The Livonians or Livs (livonian: līvlizt) are the indigenous inhabitants of Northern Latvia and Southwestern Estonia. They spoke the Uralic Livonian language, a language which was closely related to Estonian and Finnish. The last person to have learned Livonian as a mother tongue, Grizelda Kristiņa, died in 2013. As of 2010, there were approximately 30 people who had learned it as a second language.
Historical, social and economic factors, together with an ethnically dispersed population, have resulted in the decline of the Livonian population, with only a small group surviving in the 21st century. In 2011, there were 250 people who claimed Livonian ethnicity in Latvia.
The exact date of the Uralic migration to the region has been disputed. Linguistic estimations place the arrival of ancestors of modern Livonians on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea around the Gulf of Riga as early as 1800 B.C., while a recent study of Y-chromosome haplogroups suggests an earlier arrival, 5,000 years ago, and that subsequent interactions and merging with Balts and Finnic tribes led to linguistic conversion of some neighboring groups of Uralic origin, such as the Estonians and Indo-European Balts (Latgallians and Lithuanians).
Historically, the Livonians lived in two separate areas of Latvia, one group in Livonia and another on the northern coast of Courland. The latter were referred as Curonians, together with the Balts living there. The Livonians referred to themselves as rāndalist ("coast dwellers") and supported themselves mainly by fishing, but also by agriculture and animal husbandry. Since they controlled an important trade route, the Daugava River (Livonian: Väina), their culture was highly developed through trade with the Gotlanders, Russians and Finns, and, from the end of the first millennium AD onwards, with the Germans, Swedes and Danes.
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