from 1949. According to linguist and activist Valts Ernstreits, she spoke Livonian as well "as if she had stepped out of her home farm in a Livonian coastal village just yesterday" and qualified as the last living native speaker of the Livonian language of her generation. She died on June 2, 2013.

The survival of the Livonian language now depends on young Livonians who learnt Livonian in their childhood from grandparents or great-grandparents of the pre-war generations. There are not many of them, though there are a few hundred ethnic