Estonian and Latvian are members of different language families. Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language, while Latvian belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages. The cultural and socio-political developments of Estonia and Latvia, however, have been remarkably similar since the Christianisation of the two peoples in the 13th century. The Estonian and Latvian cultures were both moulded to form part of Christian Europe by German-speaking mediators who worked hard from the 16th to 18th centuries in order to create the Estonian and Latvian literary languages by translating...