Having never seen any Latvian TV show or movie, or heard an appreciable
amount of spoken Latvian, my interest was piqued by _Padomju džinsi_
(Soviet Jeans), a recent Latvian TV show, possibly available on a
streaming platform near you.

Riga, Soviet Latvia, 1979. Three young people: Renārs (Kārlis
Arnolds Avots), a tailor with black market connections; Tiina (Aamu
Milonoff), a Finnish theater director; and Māris (Igors Šelegovskis),
a KGB officer. They are drawn into a cat-and-mouse game between
an underground factory that produces knock-off Levi's jeans and the
KGB operation to find the source of the subversive pants. The show
is a dramedy that lays bare the utter corruption of the Soviet
system.

It turns out that the "Latvian" dialogue actually flips back and
forth between Latvian and Russian. Since I know neither language,
simply distinguishing the two is already an effort for me. (Akanye
helps.) I assume there are a lot of sociolinguistic details that
I'm missing. The Finnish character doesn't speak the local languages
either and communicates in English, which is the third major language
of this multilingual TV show. Interestingly, some of the older
generation Latvian characters occasionally try to fall back to
German.

I'd recommend the show on its own, although I personally never
experienced the Soviet Block, apart from a short trip to Moscow in
1989 as part of the entourage of a diplomatic mission--and what a
depressing experience that was.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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On 2025-03-22, Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> wrote:

I'd recommend the show on its own, although I personally never
experienced the Soviet Block, apart from a short trip to Moscow in
1989 as part of the entourage of a diplomatic mission--and what a
depressing experience that was.

Oh, and a school trip to Prague, ČSSR, in the same time frame.
Somewhat less depressing, although the locals' desperation to
exchange money at black market rates, any time, any place, has
stayed with me. Language-wise, you could muddle through with German,
less so with English. I think some students who had studied Russian
as second foreign language also tried that language--against advice
to the contrary--but I think they were merely ignored and nobody
was beaten up for it.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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On 2025-03-22, Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> wrote:

It turns out that the "Latvian" dialogue actually flips back and
forth between Latvian and Russian. Since I know neither language,
simply distinguishing the two is already an effort for me. (Akanye
helps.)

Actually, I think it isn't so much akanye specifically as that
Russian generally reduces unstressed vowels. Latvian not so much.
And now that I look at Wikipedia's "Latvian phonology" page, I see
that Latvian distinguishes vowel quantity even in unstressed
syllables.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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On 23/03/2025 12:41 p.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2025-03-22, Christian Weisgerber <[email protected]> wrote:

It turns out that the "Latvian" dialogue actually flips back and
forth between Latvian and Russian. Since I know neither language,
simply distinguishing the two is already an effort for me. (Akanye
helps.)

Actually, I think it isn't so much akanye specifically as that
Russian generally reduces unstressed vowels. Latvian not so much.
And now that I look at Wikipedia's "Latvian phonology" page, I see
that Latvian distinguishes vowel quantity even in unstressed
syllables.

This reminded me of the first time I had a chance to hear Latvian spoken
(some distinguished Latvian being interviewed on TV, with subtitles).
Knowing some Russian, and a very little Finnish, my impression was that
it sounded like Russian spoken with a Finnish accent. Which, on
reflection, makes some linguistic sense. And your point about vowel
reduction was probably an important part of that impression.

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