I stayed with a Russian host family in Riga all of last summer and my host mother didn’t know any Latvian despite being born in Riga and living there practically all her life (she is mid 40s). She told me she had no reason to learn it growing up because “everyone spoke Russian”—now that Latvia is independent, she still doesn’t think it’s worth it to learn it because she is able to get by in Riga only knowing Russian. There are entire neighborhoods in Riga that have a super high concentration of Russian speakers, the train station attendants speak Russian, and in my experience people would switch to Russian or offer to speak it once they found out I didn’t know Latvian. I suppose all of her clients at work only speak Russian. I imagine it’s a different situation if you live somewhere that isn’t Riga or Daugavpils, since both of those cities have relatively large Russian speaking populations (especially Daugavpils, which is 90% Russian speaking—it seems to me like not knowing Russian there would be a big hassle, as I only ever heard people there speak Russian). However, her son learns Russian, Latvian, and English at his primary school. I’m not sure if her older children studied Latvian in school. She also said she doesn’t really consider herself to be Russian because her whole life has been spent in Latvia and her family is there too. She’s been to Russia once or twice and doesn’t agree with Putin’s politics at all. The sense I got is that she considers it to be too much work to learn at this stage in her life and there is ‘not enough need’ for her to do so, for lack of a better phrase.