Baltic languages

Languages of the group

Because its dialects are more archaic in their forms than those of the other living Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is of particular importance in the study of comparative Indo-European linguistics. The language had 2,760,000 speakers in Lithuania in the early 1980s and several thousand speakers in Belorussia and Poland, and until 1945 there were several thousand Lithuanians in East Prussia as well. More than 675,000 Lithuanians live abroad, mostly in the United States. Lithuanian is sharply divided into dialects whose differences are quite marked. The two major ones are Low (or Western) Lithuanian, with three subdialects, and High (or Eastern) Lithuanian, with four subdialects. The Low dialect is spoken by the Lowlanders, who live in the west and along the Baltic Sea; High Lithuanian is spoken by the Highlanders, who live in the eastern (and greater) part of Lithuania. Standard Lithuanian, formed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, is based on the southern subdialect of West High Lithuanian.

The language most closely related to Lithuanian is Latvian, spoken by 1,344,000 speakers in Latvia in the early 1980s and about 156,000 abroad, mostly in the United States. Latvian is divided into dialects, the major ones being the Central dialect, Livonian (also called Tahmian, or West Latvian), and High (or East) Latvian. Standard Latvian, established at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, is based on the Central dialect.

By the 16th century the Selonians, Semigallians, and Curonians (Kurs), who lived in areas of Latvia and Lithuania, had completely lost their national identities and were assimilated by the Latvians and the Lithuanians. They left no written records. Nor did the Yotvingians (or Suduvians), who lived in southwest Lithuania and farther to the south (in the territory of the present-day Poland). They became extinct around the 16th–17th century, being assimilated by the Lithuanians in the north and the Slavs in the south. Information on the extinct Baltic languages is extremely scarce (mostly place-names). Only Old Prussian, of all the extinct Baltic languages, left any written records, and they are quite poor. The Prussians lived in East Prussia (i.e., between the lower reaches of the Vistula and Neman [Lithuanian Nemunas] rivers on the Baltic coast). They became extinct (i.e., were assimilated by the Germans) at the beginning of the 18th century.

Linguistically, the Yotvingians were very closely related to the Prussians. They made up one ethnic Baltic group, commonly called the Western Balts, as opposed to the so-called Eastern Balts—the Lithuanians, Latvians, Selonians, Semigallians, and Curonians. The traditional terms Western Balts and Eastern Balts are inaccurate when used for all of the Balts—i.e., including the Balts for whose languages there are no records (the D-Balts). These Balts, who were assimilated by Slavs in the 7th–14th century, lived in the upper reaches of the Dnepr.

Historical survey

Proto-Baltic, the ancestral Baltic language from which the various known languages evolved, developed from the dialects of the northern area of Proto-Indo-European. These dialects also included the Slavic and Germanic protolanguages (and possibly also Tocharian). The quite close historic relationship of the Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages is shown by the fact that they alone of all the Indo-European languages have the sound m in the dative plural ending (e.g., Lithuanian vĭlká-m-s “wolf,” Common Slavic *vilko-m-ŭ, Gothic wulf-am). (An asterisk [*] indicates that the following sound or word is unattested and has been reconstructed as a hypothetical linguistic form.) This relationship is suggested not only by the morphology and word formation but also by the vocabulary—e.g., Lithuanian draũgas (Latvian dràugs) “friend,” Old Church Slavonic drugǔ, Gothic driugan “to fulfill military service”; Lithuanian vãškas (Latvian vasks) “wax,” Russian vosk, Old High German wahs. Probably the earlier close contact of the Balts and the Slavs with the Germanic tribes broke off around the 2nd millennium bc, when the Balts moved from the south (not, however, losing contact with the Slavs) and settled a large area of the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea and the upper reaches of the Dnepr.