Dalam sejarah, Bahasa Latvia sendiri ditulis dengan satu sistem berdasarkan prinsip fonetik Bahasa Jerman manakala loghat Latgalia ditulis dengan prinsip ortografi Bahasa Poland. Pada awal abad ke-20, ini digantikan dengan satu sistem yang lebih sesuai dari segi fonetik, menggunakan huruf Latin yang diubahsuai.

Ortografi piawai

Kini, huruf piawai Bahasa Latvia terdiri daripada 33 huruf:

Old orthography

The old orthography was based on that of German and did not represent the Latvian language phonemically. At the beginning it was used to write religious texts for German priests to help them in their work with Latvians. The first writings in Latvian were chaotic: there were as many as twelve variations of writing Š. In 1631 the German priest Georgs (Juris) Mancelis tried to systematize the writing. He wrote long vowels according to their position in the word — a short vowel followed by h for a radical vowel, a short vowel in the suffix and vowel with a diacritic mark in the ending indicating two different accents. Consonants were written following the example of German with multiple letters. The old orthography was used until the 20th century when it was slowly replaced by the modern orthography.

Latvian on computers

Lack of software support of diacritics has caused an unofficial style of orthography, often called translit, to emerge for use in situations when the user is unable to access Latvian diacritic marks in today's computerised media (e-mail, newsgroups, web user forums, chat, SMS etc.). It uses basic Modern Latin alphabet only, and letters that aren't used in standard orthography are usually omitted. In this style, diacritics are replaced by digraphs - a doubled letter indicates a long vowel; j indicates palatalisation of consonants, except for Š, Č and Ž that are indicated by using h. Sometimes the second letter, the one used instead of a diactric, is changed to one of two other diacritic letters (e.g. š is written as ss or sj, not sh), and since many people may find it difficult to use these unusual methods, they write without any indication of missing diacritic marks, or they use digraphing only if the diacritic mark in question would make a semantic difference.[1] Sometimes an apostrophe is used before or after the character that would properly need to be diacriticised. Also, digraph diacritics are often used and sometimes even mixed with diacritical letters of standard orthography. Although today there is software support available, diacritic-less writing is still widespread because of financial and social reasons.

Standard QWERTY keyboards are used for writing in Latvian; diacritics are entered by using dead key (usually ", occasionally ~). Some keyboard layouts use modifier key AltGr (most notable of such is windows 2000 and XP builtin layout (Latvian QWETRTY)). In the early 1990s, the Latvian ergonomic keyboard layout was developed. Although this layout may be available with language support software, it hasn't become popular because of a lack of keyboards with such layout.

For example, the Lord's Prayer in Latvian written in different styles: