Selonian was a
language appertaining to the
Baltic languages group of the
Indo-European languages family. It was spoken by the
Eastern Baltic tribe of the
Selonians, who until the 15th century lived in
Selonia, a territory in South Eastern
Latvia and North Eastern
Lithuania.
During the 13th-15th centuries the Selonians lost their language after being assimilated by the
Latgalians and partly by the
Lithuanians.
It is considered that the Selonian language retained the proto-Baltic phonemes
*an,
*en,
*in,
*un like the
Lithuanian language, but like the
Latvian language the proto-Baltic
,
changed to
c,
dz, and the proto Baltic
*š,
*ž changed to
s,
z.
Traces of the Selonian language can still be found in the territories the Selonians inhabited, especially in the accent and phonetics of the so-called Selonian dialect of the
Latvian language.
There are some traces of the Selonian language in the North Eastern sub-dialects of the
Aukštaitian dialect of
Lithuanian language, mostly in the lexicon.