Lithuanian

Primary language family: Indo-European

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Endonymic glossonyms: lietuvių kalba
Exonymic glossonyms: Lithuanian, Литовский язык (Litovskiy yazyk), Litauisch, litauiska, Litouws, Lituanien, Lituano

Approximate number of native speakers = 3,000,000

The modern flag of Lithuania

The best conserved descendant of Proto-Indo-European

There are only two living Baltic languages: Lithuanian and Latvian. They are closely related, but not mutually intelligible. Latvian is the official language of Latvia, which lies north of Lithuania.
The closest living languages to the Baltic languages are the Slavic languages (e.g. Polish, Russian, Bulgarian). The Baltic and Slavic languages are part of the Indo-European language family.
There are about 3 million native speakers.
It is the official language of Lithuania and a minority language of Poland.
There are two main dialects: Samogitian (Žemaitiu kalba) and Aukštaitian (Aukštaičių tarmė). Some researchers consider Samogitian to be a separate language from Lithuanian.
It can have an SOV (subject-object-verb) or an SVO word order.
Estonia and Finland are north of Latvia, but they do not speak Baltic languages. Finnish and Estonian are Finnic languages, which are part of the Uralic language family. They are not closely related to any Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, or Italic languages.

An archaic language

Many researchers believe that Lithuanian is the best conserved Indo-European language. This means that it has not changed so much throughout history. It has many similarities to other ancient Indo-European, such as Sanskrit (a classical Indian language) and Latin (a classical European language). Unlike these languages, Lithuanian is still a living language and spoken by millions of people.

One factor which may have caused this stability was the strong resistance to Christianity in the lands to the East and South of the Baltic sea. During the Northern Crusades, Germanic Catholic Christians attempted to force baptism on the Baltic, Finnic and West Slavic pagans around the Baltic sea.

The German Livonian Brothers of the Sword were crushed by the Samogitians (East Lithuania) in battle in 1236. The Livonian order merged with the Teutonic order and they continued to order crusades against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The country officially converted in 1386, but the people remained pagan. In 1410 the Lithuanians and Poles, helped by the Tatars, Moldovans and the Czechs, defeated the Teutonic order in the Battle of Grunwald (Žalgiris).

Eventually writing was accepted in the region, and the Latin alphabet was adopted. The earliest known manuscript in Lithuanian is dated around 1503. It is a Christian prayer, containing the name "ÿeſus chriſtus" (Jēzus Christus). (4) The long history of isolation and resistance to external influences (particularly religious texts) could have helped to stabilise the language.

Comparison to Proto-Indo-European

When studying the modern Indo-European languages, researchers were able to demonstrate how they have changed over time (for example, the Germanic sound shifts). By reversing those changes, they could demonstrate that these languages were once the same in every way. They were able to trace them back to a common ancestor language: Proto-Indo-European (P.I.E.). It is well described that Lithuanian has changed relatively little in its long history. Consequently, it is widely believed that modern Lithuanian is the closest living language to P.I.E.

Firstly, the phonology of Lithuanian is well conserved. It contains phonological features which are only seen in ancient Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit. When comparing the predicted phonology of P.I.E. to the various stages of Lithuanian, you can see this stability quite clearly. Put simply: it is likely to be the language which sounds the most similar to P.I.E. in the modern world.

Vowel changes (5)

Consonant changes (5)

Secondly, the morphology is well conserved. In the table below you can see a word in several ancient languages and modern lithuanian. You can see that there are many similarities!

From Proto-Indo-European *h₃dónts (“tooth”):

Grammatical cases of the word for "tooth" in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Lithuanian. The cases are: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, instrumental, vocative. Singular and plural. (6)

This table also demonstrates that Lithuanian is a richly inflected language. Sanskrit and Lithuanian have a maintained a large number of grammatical cases from P.I.E.

In highly inflected languages, there are many forms of each word. A single form of one word can convey a lot of information, but the speaker and listener need to know every form of the word. These forms are often very subtly different. For example, "dantìs" is nominative but "dantimì" is instrumental. The first word means "tooth" (it is the subject of the sentence), but the second word means "with tooth being used as an instrument". It's the difference between saying "my dog ate the food" and "it ate the food by using my dog". This makes it a very difficult language to learn, but it allows for very efficient and specific expression.

By comparison, modern English is weakly inflected. This means that one word can remain unchanged every time it is used (e.g. tooth), but the meaning must be described by the combination of words in the sentence (in the tooth, with the tooth, for the tooth).

Example phrases in Lithuanian

Hi! = labas
Kaip sekasi? = How are you
Ačiū, gerai. = Thanks, fine.
O tau? = And you?
Sudie = Goodbye!

Bibliography

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this article.

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Lithuanian

An archaic language

Comparison to Proto-Indo-European

Example phrases in Lithuanian

Bibliography

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