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1,800 Latvian Non-jews Say Yiddish is Mother Tongue

July 9, 1931
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The unsuspected existence of a fair number of non-Jews in Latvia who claim Yiddish as their mother tongue was re-revealed for the first time when the Latvian government made public a series of statistical tables giving figures on the race, religion and language of the population of the country.

According to one of these tables, one tenth of one percent of the 1,800,000 non-Jews consisting of Letts, Germans, Poles and Lithuanians gave Yiddish as their mother tongue. This means that there are some 1,800 non-Jews in Latvia who use Yiddish as their every day mode of expression. On the other hand 83 percent of the 96,000 Jews gave Yiddish as their mother tongue.

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