Spoken in: Lithuania, surrounding areas, and many other countries.

Total speakers: 4 million.

Language family: Indo-European, Baltic, Eastern Baltic, Lithuanian.

Official status
Official language in: Lithuania, European Union, Puńsk Commune in Poland.

Regulated by: Commission of the Lithuanian Language.

Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba) is the official state language of the Republic of Lithuania, spoken by about 4 million native speakers.


History

- Antoine Meillet
Lithuanian still retains many of the original features of the nominal morphology found in the common ancestors of the Indo-European languages, and has therefore been the focus of much study in the area of Indo-European linguistics. Studies in the field of comparative linguistics have shown it to be the most archaic among the living Indo-European languages.

There have been attempts to suggest the existence of a Balto-Slavic language group after the splitting of the Proto-Indo-European language, with the Slavic and Baltic branches then dividing after a prolonged "period of common language and life" (Szemerényi, 1957). However, other linguists (Meillet, Klimas, Zinkevičius) oppose this view, providing arguments against the common Balto-Slavic proto-language, and explaining similarities by a historical period, or several periods, of close contacts. While the possession of many archaic features is undeniable, the exact manner by which the Baltic languages have developed from the Proto-Indo-European language is not clear.

According to some glottochronological speculations the Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones between 400 AD and 600 AD. The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after 800 AD; for a long period they could be considered dialects of a single language. At a minimum, transitional dialects existed until the 14th or 15th century, and perhaps as late as the 17th century. Also, the 13th- and 14th-century occupation of the western part of the Daugava basin (closely coinciding with the territory of modern Latvia) by the German Sword Brethren had a significant influence on the languages' independent development.

The earliest surviving written Lithuanian text is a hymnal translation dating from about 1503-1525. Printed books existed after 1547, but the level of literacy among Lithuanians was low through the 18th century and books were not commonly available. In 1864, following the January Uprising, Mikhail Muravyov, the Russian Governor General of Lithuania, banned the language in education and publishing, and barred use of the Latin alphabet altogether, although books printed in Lithuanian continued to be printed across the border in East Prussia and in the United States. Brought into the country by book smugglers despite the threat of stiff prison sentences, they helped fuel a growing nationalist sentiment that finally led to the lifting of the ban in 1904.

Jonas Jablonskis (1860-1930) made significant contributions to the formation of the standard Lithuanian language. The conventions of written Lithuanian had been evolving during the 19th century, but Jablonskis, in the introduction to his Lietuviškos kalbos gramatika, was the first to formulate and expound the essential principles that were so indispensable to its later development. His proposal for Standard Lithuanian was based on his native Western Aukštaitijan dialect with some features of the eastern Prussian Lithuanians' dialect spoken in Lithuania Minor. These dialects had preserved archaic phonetics mostly intact due to the influence of the neighbouring Old Prussian language, while the other dialects had experienced different phonetic shifts. Lithuanian has been the official language of Lithuania since 1918. During the Soviet occupation (see History of Lithuania), it was used in official discourse along with Russian which, as the official language of the USSR, took precedence over Lithuanian.


Classification

Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages, along with Latvian. An earlier Old Prussian Baltic language was extinct by the 19th century; the other Western Baltic languages, Curonian and Sudovian, went extinct earlier. The Baltic languages form their own distinct branch of the Indo-European languages.


Geographic distribution

Lithuanian is spoken mainly in Lithuania. It is also spoken by ethnic Lithuanians living in today's Belarus, Latvia, Poland, and the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, as well as by emigrant communities in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Russia proper, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay.

2,955,200 people in Lithuania (including 3,460 Tatars), or about 80% of the 1998 population, are native Lithuanian speakers; most Lithuanian inhabitants of other nationalities also speak Lithuanian to some extent. The total worldwide Lithuanian-speaking population is about 4,000,000 (1993 UBS).


Official status

Lithuanian is the state language of Lithuania and an official language of the European Union.


Dialects

The Lithuanian language has two dialects (tarmės): Aukštaičių (Aukstaitian, Highland Lithuanian), Žemaičių/Žemaitiu (Samogitian, Lowland Lithuanian), See maps at . There are significant differences between standard Lithuanian and Samogitian. The modern Samogitian dialect formed in the 13th-16th centuries under the influence of the Curonian language. Lithuanian dialects are closely connected with ethnographical regions of Lithuania

Dialects are divided into subdialects (patarmės). Both dialects have 3 subdialects. Samogitian is divided into West, North and South; Aukštaitian into West (Suvalkiečiai), South (Dzūkai) and East. Each subdialect is divided into smaller units - speeches (šnektos).

The standard Lithuanian is derived mostly from Western Aukštaitian dialects, including the Eastern dialect of Lithuania Minor. Influence of other dialects is more significant in vocabulary of the standard Lithuanian.


Lithuanian grammar

The Lithuanian language is a highly inflected language in which the relationships between parts of speech and their roles in a sentence are expressed by numerous flexions.

There are two grammatical genders in Lithuanian - feminine and masculine. There is no neuter gender per se, but there are some forms which are derived from the historical neuter gender, notably attributive adjectives. Lithuanian has a free, mobile stress, and is also characterized by pitch accent.

It has five noun and three adjective declensions and three verbal conjugations. All verbs have present, past, past iterative and future tenses of the indicative mood, subjunctive (or conditional) and imperative moods (both without distinction of tenses) and infinitive. These forms, except the infinitive, are conjugative, having two singular, two plural persons and the third person form common both for plural and singular. Lithuanian has the richest participle system of all Indo-European languages, having participles derived from all tenses with distinct active and passive forms, and several gerund forms. Nouns and other declinable words are declined in seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. In older Lithuanian texts three additional varieties of the locative case are found: illative, adessive and allative. The most common are the illative, which still is used, mostly in spoken language, and the allative, which survives in the standard language in some idiomatic usages. The adessive is nearly extinct.

In practical terms, these declensions render word order less important than in more isolating languages such as English. A Lithuanian speaker may word the English phrase "a car is coming" as either "atvažiuoja automobilis" or "automobilis atvažiuoja".

The first prescriptive grammar book of Lithuanian was commissioned by the Duke of Prussia, Frederick William, for use in the Lithuanian-speaking parishes of East-Prussia. It was written in Latin and German by Daniel Klein and published in Königsberg in 1653/1654. The first scientific Compendium of Lithuanian language was published in German in 1856/57 by August Schleicher, a professor at Prague University. In it he describes Prussian-Lithuanian which later is to become the "skeleton" (Buga) of modern Lithuanian.

Today there are two definitive books on Lithuanian grammar: one in English, the "Introduction to Modern Lithuanian" (called "Beginner's Lithuanian" in its newer editions) by Leonardas Dambriūnas, Antanas Klimas and William R. Schmalstieg, and another in Russian, Vytautas Ambrazas' "Ãðàììàòèêà Ëèòîâñêîãî ÿçûêà" ("The Grammar of the Lithuanian Language"). Another recent book on Lithuanian grammar is the second edition of "Review of Modern Lithuanian Grammar" by Edmund Remys, published by Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Chicago, 2003.


Vocabulary

The Grand Dictionary of the Lithuanian language, consisting of 20 tomes containing more than half a million headwords. Lithuanian is considered one of the more conservative modern Indo-European languages, and certain Lithuanian words are very similar to their Sanskrit counterparts. The Lithuanian and Sanskrit words sūnus (son) and avis (sheep) are exactly the same, and many other word pairs differ only slightly, such as dūmas for smoke (dhumas in Sanskrit), antras for second (antaras in Sanskrit), and vilkas for wolf (vrkas in Sanskrit). However, Lithuanian verbal morphology shows many innovations.

Lithuanian has some vocabulary items descended from the proto-language which are also found in Latin. Examples include the following words (the first word is Latin, the second is the Lithuanian cognate): rota — ratas (wheel), senex — senis (an old man), vir — vyras (a man), anguis — angis (a snake in Latin, a species of snakes in Lithuanian), linum — linas (flax, compare with English 'linen'), aro — ariu (I plow), iungo — jungiu (I join), duo — du (two), tres — trys (three), septem — septyni (seven), gentes — gentys (tribes), mensis — mėnesis (month), dentes — dantys (teeth), noctes — naktys (nights), sedemus — sėdime (we sit) and so on. This even extends to grammar, where for example Latin noun declensions ending in -um often correspond to Lithuanian -ų. Many of the words from this list share similarities with other Indo-European languages, including English. But, despite frequent similarities in vocabulary, Lithuanian has many differences from Latin, and consequently from the Romance languages as well. Notably, structural differences almost exclude the possibility of any hypothesis that one of the languages is a descendant of the other.

On the other hand, the numerous lexical and grammatical similarities between Baltic and Slavic languages suggest an affinity between these two language groups. However, there exist a number of Baltic (particularly Lithuanian) words, notably those that are similar to Sanskrit or Latin, which lack counterparts in Slavic languages. This fact was puzzling to many linguists prior to the middle of the 19th century, but was later influential in the re-creation of the Proto Indo-European language. In any event, the history of the earlier relations between Baltic and Slavic languages and a more exact genesis of the affinity between the two groups remains in dispute.


Loan words

In a 1934 book entitled Die Germanismen des Litauischen. Teil I: Die deutschen Lehnwörter im Litauischen, K. Alminauskis found 2,770 loan words, of which about 130 were of uncertain origin. The majority of the loan words were found to have been derived from the Polish, Belarussian, and German languages, with some evidence that these languages all acquired the words from contacts and trade with Prussia during the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Loan words comprised about 20% of the vocabulary used in the first book printed in the Lithuanian language in 1547, Martynas Mažvydas's Catechism. The majority of loan words in the 20th century arrived from the Russian language. Towards the end of the 20th century a number of English language words and expressions were introduced.

The Lithuanian government has an established language policy, which encourages the development of equivalent vocabulary to replace loan words.