There are about 1,4 million Latvian native speakers in Latvia; about 150 000 abroad. Latvian can even be considered the big language – there are only about 250 languages spoken by more than one million speakers in the world, Latvian among them. However, the language competition situation was always very hard for Latvian. The main languages in contact – German and Russian – are spoken by several tens or hundreds million of people and have status of international languages, and their speakers had dominated over Latvians politically. The maintenance of the Latvian language and culture could be called a wonder in itself.