The
Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the
Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the
Baltic Sea in
Northern Europe. The language group is sometimes divided into two sub-groups:
Western Baltic, containing only extinct languages, and
Eastern Baltic, containing both extinct and the two living languages in the group:
Lithuanian (including both Standard Lithuanian and
Samogitian) and
Latvian (including both literary Latvian and
Latgalian). While related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the
Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from each other and are not mutually intelligible. The now-extinct Old Prussian language has been considered the most archaic of the Baltic languages.
Branches
Western Baltic languages †
Eastern Baltic languages
- Latvian (~2 - 2.5 million speakers (~1.39 million native speakers, 0.5 - 1million ethnic Russian speakers, 0.15 million others)
- *Latgalian (150 thousand speakers; usually considered a dialect of Latvian)
- *Samogitian (~0.5 million speakers; usually considered a dialect of Lithuanian)
- *New Curonian (nearly extinct; status as Eastern / Western Baltic is disputed)
(†
—Extinct language) Geographic distribution
Distribution of the Baltic languages in the Baltic (simplified).
Speakers of modern Baltic languages are generally concentrated within the borders of
Lithuania and
Latvia, and in emigrant communities in the
United States,
Canada,
Australia and former
Soviet states. Historically the languages were spoken over a larger area: West to the mouth of the
Vistula river in present-day
Poland, at least as far East as the
Dniepr river in present-day
Belarus, perhaps even to
Moscow, perhaps as far south as
Kiev. Key evidence of Baltic language presence in these regions is found in
hydronyms (names of bodies of water) in the regions that are characteristically Baltic. Use of hydronyms is generally accepted to determine the extent of these cultures' influence, but
not the date of such influence. Historical expansion of the usage of
Slavic languages in the South and East, and
Germanic languages in the West reduced the geographic distribution of Baltic languages to a fraction of the area which they had formerly covered.
Prehistory and history
Although the various Baltic tribes were mentioned by ancient historians as early as 98 B.C., the first attestation of a Baltic language was in about 1350, with the creation of the
Elbing Prussian Vocabulary, a German to Prussian translation dictionary. It is also believed that Baltic languages are among the most archaic of the remaining Indo-European languages, despite their late attestation. Lithuanian was first attested in a hymnal translation in 1545; the first printed book in Lithuanian, a
Catechism by
Martynas Mažvydas was published in 1547 in
Königsberg, Prussia (now
Kaliningrad, Russia). Latvian appeared in a hymnal in 1530 and in a printed Catechism in 1585. One reason for the late attestation is that the Baltic peoples resisted
Christianization longer than any other Europeans, which delayed the introduction of writing and isolated their languages from outside influence.
With the establishment of a
German state in Prussia, and the eradication or flight of much of the Baltic Prussian population in the 13th century, the remaining Prussians began to be assimilated, and by the end of the 17th century, the Prussian language had become extinct.
During the years of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1795), official documents were written in
Polish,
Ruthenian and
Latin, with Lithuanian being mostly an oral language, with small quantities of written documents.
After the
Partitions of Poland, much of the Baltic lands were under the rule of the
Russian Empire, where the native languages were sometimes prohibited from being written down, or used publicly.
Relationship with other Indo-European languages
The Baltic languages are of particular interest to linguists because they retain many archaic features, which are believed to have been present in the early stages of the
Proto-Indo-European language.
Linguists disagree regarding the relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family. Such relationships are discerned primarily by the
comparative method, which seeks to reconstruct the
chronology of the languages' divergence from each other in
phonology and
lexicon. Language kinship is generally determined by the identification of linguistic innovations that are held in common by two languages or groups.
Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited or nonexistent written record, their existence being known only from the records of ancient historians and personal or place names; all of the languages in the Baltic group (including the living ones) were first written down relatively late in their probable existence as distinct languages. These two factors combined with others have obscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family.
The Baltic languages show closest relationship with the Slavic languages, and are commonly reconstructed to have passed through common
Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, during which numerous Common Balto-Slavic lexical, phonological, morphological and accentological isoglosses developed. Comparative Balto-Slavic
accentology is one of the most active branches of
Indo-European studies nowadays, with numerous mysteries still waiting to be solved. Even the commonly accepted facts - such as
Winter's law, identical reflexes of Proto-Indo-European syllabic sonorants or development of Balto-Slavic mobile paradigms - have many intricate problems in their formulations.
Most linguists agree however that Baltic languages do not represent a genetic node in Indo-European family. There are virtually no non-trivial isoglosses that connect Baltic languages with respect to Proto-Indo-European and leave Slavic languages aside; West and East Baltic languages seem to differ from each other as much as each of them differs from
Proto-Slavic, and all major isoglosses that differ Slavic from Baltic that are usually mentioned are either Proto-Indo-European archaisms preserved in Baltic or later innovations in Slavic that occurred during Common Slavic period, and not some "Common Baltic" innovations. Thus, there was most likely no "Proto-Baltic" stage, and Baltic languages would thus represent an archaic remnant of former Balto-Slavic dialect continuum, the last Proto-Indo-European branch to finally split around 1500-1000 BCE.
See also
