[3] The majority of Latvian DHI (deaf and hearing impaired) children live in boarding schools instead of with their families.
[3] The country has two specialist schools for DHI children that offer elementary education over a period of 10 or 12 years, one of which uses LSL and signed Latvian in instruction, while the other uses spoken language.
[citation needed] Mahoney (2017) conducted the first-known 100-word Swadesh–Woodward list comparison of Latvian Sign Language and Estonian Sign Language (EVK), concluding that a possible relationship between them – as descending from VLFS, perhaps via ÖGS and/or RSL, as Wittmann (1991) and Bickford (2005) proposed – was 'still uncertain as it is unclear how sign languages disseminated in Eastern European countries during the Soviet Union, but aside from superficial impressions that the core lexicons are similar, signs with shared parameters displaying small variation in handshape while retaining 4 selected fingers suggests that these languages share a parent'.
She added that '[a]t present there is no reason to assume that Estonian and Latvian sign language have a mother-daughter relationship'.
[5] Power et al. (2020) conducted a large-scale data study into the evolution and contemporary character of 76 of manual alphabets (MAs) of sign languages, concluding that Latvian Sign Language's manual alphabet showed characteristics that were both typical of a postulated 'Russian Group' (including Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Estonian Sign Language) as well as a postulated 'Polish Group' (including Polish and Lithuanian Sign Language), and was therefore placed in between.