RIGA (Latvia), Jan 3: The single European currency will be called the ‘eiro’ in Latvia, the government in the new European Union member state voted on Tuesday, brushing off appeals from the European Central Bank to stick to the official ‘euro’ name.

“The ‘eu’ diphthong is alien to the Latvian language. We don’t have such a sound, so we will use ‘eiro’,” Education Minister Ina Druviete, a trained linguist, told a cabinet meeting at which ministers unanimously opted for the ‘ei’ word over the ‘eu’ one.

“This is not a monetary matter but language policy. We could, if need be, defend our rights at the European Court of Justice,” Druviete said. “We have many arguments for calling the currency the eiro.”

The finance ministry says it has been warned by the European Central Bank and other EU institutions to call the euro the euro.

But bowing to EU demands that the single currency be called the euro would have been seen as caving in to pressure from Brussels. It would also have set Latvians against the other members of the EU, which it joined in 2004, and the euro itself, which it plans to adopt in 2008, the finance ministry said.

Ministers also cited historical reasons for their decision.

During Soviet occupation, which lasted from the end of World War II to 1991, Moscow pushed a policy of Russification in Latvia.

Tens of thousands of Latvians were deported during the occupation and equal numbers of ethnic Russians shipped into the Baltic state by the authorities in Moscow, who also set up a Russian-language school system.

At the end of the Soviet occupation, Latvian, an Indo-European language with no ties to the Slavonic or Germanic families of languages, had nearly been overtaken by Russian as the primary language.—AFP