Her parents are Livonian language revival activists Jānis Mednis and Renāte Medne.

The Estonian newspaper Eesti Päevaleht erroneously announced that Viktors Bertholds, who died on 28 February 2009, was the last native speaker who started Latvian-language school as a monolingual.

[11] Some other Livonians had argued, however, that there were some native speakers left,[12] including Viktors Bertholds' cousin, Grizelda Kristiņa, who died in 2013.

[1] An article published by the Foundation for Endangered Languages in 2007 stated that there were only 182 registered Livonians and a mere six native speakers.

[21] According to estimates of the Liv Culture Center in 2010, only 40 people spoke Livonian in everyday life.

[24][25] The first book in Livonian was the Gospel of Matthew, published in 1863 in London in both the eastern and western Courland dialects.

[28] The second book in Livonian was the same Gospel of Matthew, published in 1880 in St. Petersburg, with an orthography based on Latvian and German.

[30] After WWII, books in Livonian were no longer published,[31] as Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union.

The whole area of the Livonian Coast became a restricted border zone under tight Soviet supervision.

Coastal fishing was gradually eliminated in the smaller villages and concentrated in the larger population centres of Kolka, Roja, and Ventspils.

[33][34] To date, the only Livonian media outlet is the trilingual (English-Latvian-Livonian) Livones.lv (livones.net) operated by the Liv Culture Center.

[39] As reported in the Estonian newspaper Eesti Päevaleht,[40] Viktors Bertholds was born in 1921 and probably belonged to the last generation of children who started their (Latvian-medium) primary school as Livonian monolinguals; only a few years later it was noted that Livonian parents had begun to speak Latvian with their children.

During World War II, Bertholds, unlike most Livonian men, managed to avoid being mobilized in the armies of either occupation force by hiding in the woods.

One such younger generation Livonian speaker is Julgī Stalte [lv; et], who performs with the Livonian-Estonian world music group Tuļļi Lum.

[48][49] In January 2023, the first of 171 approved road signs in Latvia with Latvian and Livonian text were placed on the border of Talsi Municipality.

Voiced obstruents are subject to being either devoiced or half-voiced in the word-final position, or before another unvoiced consonants (kuolmõz /ˈku̯olməs ~ ˈku̯olməz̥/ "third").

Livonian has for centuries been thoroughly influenced by Latvian in terms of grammar, phonology and word derivation etc.

Many inhabitants of the islands of Western Estonia worked in the summer in Kurzeme Livonian villages.

[62] The Livonian language once spoken on about a third of modern-day Latvian territory,[63] died in the 21st century with the death of the last native speaker Grizelda Kristiņa on 2 June 2013.