Arturs
Karins

K. Kariņš was born in 1964 to a Latvian exile family in the U.S. His father fled Latvia during WWII. Kariņš attended both American and Latvian schools, including Kalamazoo Latvian School and Beverīna Latvian Summer High School, before spending a year at Münster Latvian Gymnasium. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and literature at St. John’s College before earning a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, graduating summa cum laude.

He pursued a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Latvian phonetics and phonology. His dissertation focused on the intonation of Latvian syllables, for which he conducted field research in Latvia. In 1996, after marrying Anda, he moved to Riga. Kariņš worked as senior scientific coordinator at the Linguistic Data Consortium, developing language databases, and taught sociolinguistics at the University of Latvia.