Lithuanian
lietuvių kalba
Spoken in	Lithuania
Region	Europe
Native speakers	3.2 million  (2010)
Language family	Indo-European Baltic Eastern Baltic Lithuanian
Dialects	Samogitian, Aukštaitian
Writing system	Latin (Lithuanian alphabet)
Official status
Official language in	Lithuania  European Union
Recognised minority language in	Poland
Regulated by	Commission of the Lithuanian Language
Language codes
ISO 639-1	lt
ISO 639-2	lit
ISO 639-3	lit
Linguasphere	54-AAA-a
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Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba) is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.9 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 300,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they are not mutually intelligible. It is written in a Latin alphabet. The Lithuanian language is believed to be the most conservative living Indo-European language, retaining many features of Proto-Indo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages.^[1]

History[link]

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Area of the Lithuanian language in the 16th century

The oldest surviving manuscript in Lithuanian (around 1503), rewritten from 15th century original text

A map of European languages (1741) with the first verse of the Lord's Prayer in Lithuanian

Anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant.

—Antoine Meillet

Lithuanian still retains many of the original features of the nominal morphology found in some ancient Indo-European languages like Sanskrit and Latin, 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 conservative living Indo-European language.^[1][2]

Lithuanian and other Baltic languages passed through a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, from which Baltic languages retain numerous exclusive and non-exclusive lexical, morphological, phonological and accentual isoglosses in common with the Slavic languages, which represent their closest living Indo-European relatives. Moreover, with Lithuanian being so archaic in phonology, Slavic words can often be deduced from Lithuanian by regular sound laws.

According to some glottochronological speculations^{[citation needed]} the Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones between AD 400 and AD 600. The Greek geographer Ptolemy had already written of two Baltic tribe/nations by name, the Galindai and Soudinoi (Γαλίνδαι, Σουδινοί) in the 2nd Century A.D. The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after AD 800; 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 translation dating from about 1503–1525 of the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Nicene Creed written in the Southern Aukštaitijan dialect. 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. However, the most archaic features are found in the South Aukštaitija dialect, such as: -tau, -tai usage instead of -čiau, -tum; in instead of į; and the endings -on, -un instead of -ą, -ų. 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[link]

Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages, along with Latvian. An earlier Baltic language, Old Prussian, was extinct by the 19th century; the other Western Baltic languages, Curonian and Sudovian, went extinct earlier. Some theories, such as Jānis Endzelīns' considered that the Baltic languages form their own distinct branch of the family of Indo-European languages, but the most widely accepted opinion is the one that suggests the union of Baltic and Slavic languages into a distinct sub-family of Balto-Slavic languages amongst the Indo-European family of languages. Such opinion was first represented by the likes of August Schleicher, and to a certain extent, Antoine Meillet. Endzelīns thought that the similarity between Baltic and Slavic was explainable through language contact; Schleicher, Meillet and others on the other hand, gave arguments for a genetic kinship of the two families. An attempt to reconcile the opposed stances was made by Jan Michał Rozwadowski. He proposed that the two language groups were indeed a unity after the division of Indo-European, but also suggested that after the two had divided into separate entities (Baltic and Slavic), they had posterior contact. The genetic kinship view is augmented with the fact that Proto-Balto-Slavic is easily reconstructible with important proofs in historic prosody. The alleged (or certain, as certain as historic linguistics can be) contact similarities are seen in such phenomena as the existence of definite adjectives, which exist in both Baltic and Slavic and nowhere else in the Indo-European family (languages such as Albanian and the Scandinavian languages developed definite adjectives only in more recent times), that are not reconstructible for Proto-Balto-Slavic, meaning they are most likely to have had to have developed through language contact.

Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov believed in the unity of Balto-Slavic, but not in the unity of Baltic. In the 1960s they proposed a new division, that into East-Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian), West-Baltic (Old Prussian) and Slavic. Ivanov-Toporov theory is gaining more and more weight in the community of scholars of comparative-historic grammar of Indo-European languages, and seems to be replacing the previous two stances in most P-I-E textbooks.^{[citation needed]}

Geographic distribution[link]

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 by sizable emigrant communities in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and Spain.

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 3 200 000.

Official status[link]

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

Dialects[link]

Dialects of Lithuanian.^[3] Samogitian subdialects are yellow, red, and brown; Aukštaitian subdialects are green, blue, and purple.

The Lithuanian language has two dialects (tarmės): Aukštaičių (Aukštaitian, Highland Lithuanian), Žemaičių/Žemaitiu (Samogitian, Lowland Lithuanian). 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 (Soduviečiai), Dainavian and East (the South and East dialects are also known as Dzūkian dialects due to their frequent use of dz for standard dž). Each subdialect is divided into smaller units – speeches (šnektos).

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

Orthography[link]

Lithuanian uses the Latin script supplemented with diacritics. It has 32 letters. In the collation order, y follows immediately after į (called i nosinė), because both y and į represent the same long vowel [iː]:

In addition, the following digraphs are used, but are treated as sequences of two letters for collation purposes. The digraph ch represents a single sound, the velar fricative [x], while dz and dž are pronounced like straightforward combinations of their component letters (sounds):

Dz dz [dz] (dzė), Dž dž [dʒ] (džė), Ch ch [x] (cha).

The Lithuanian writing system is largely phonemic, i.e., one letter usually corresponds to a single phoneme (sound). There are a few exceptions: for example, the letter i represents either the vowel [ɪ], as in the English sit, or is silent and merely indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized. The latter is largely the case when i occurs after a consonant and is followed by a vowel, except in some borrowed words (e.g., the first consonant in lūpa, "lip", is slightly different from the palatalized first consonant in liūtas, "lion", but both consonants are then followed by the same vowel, the long [uː], there is no [ɪ] in liūtas).

A macron (on u), an ogonek (on a, e, i, and u), and y (in place of i) can all be used to mark vowel length in Modern Standard Lithuanian. Acute, grave, and tilde diacritics are used to indicate pitch accents. However, these pitch accents are generally not written, except in dictionaries, grammars, and where needed for clarity, such as to differentiate homonyms and dialectal use.

Vowels[link]

Lithuanian has 12 letters representing vowels. To indicate long vowels, the nosinė diacritic ("little-nose diacritic"; caudata, "tailed", in Latin) is added under the letters ą [aː], į [iː], and ų [uː] in many instances, which is a historical relic of a time when these vowels were nasalized, and at an even earlier time constituted diphthongs with a [n]-component (now occurring only in South Aukštaitijan dialects).^{[clarification needed]} In other instances, the long vowel [iː] is represented by y, and the long vowel [uː] is represented by ū.

Because the letter y [iː] represents the same sound as the letter į [iː], which is a long version of the short sound represented by i [ɪ], the letter y is placed immediately after į in the Lithuanian alphabet.

Consonants[link]

Lithuanian has 20 letters representing consonants. In addition, the digraph ch represents the voiceless velar fricative [x]; the pronunciation of the other two digraphs, dz and dž, can be deduced from their components.

Phonology[link]

Consonants[link]

Each consonant listed above except /j/ has two allophones: the non-palatalized one represented by the IPA symbols in the chart, and the palatalized one (i.e., /b/ – /bʲ/, /d/ – /dʲ/, /ɡ/ – /ɡʲ/, and so on). The consonants /f/, /x/, /ɣ/ and their palatalized allophones are only found in international loanwords. Consonants preceding the vowels /i/, /iː/, /ɛ/, /æ/ and /eː/ are always moderately palatalized (a feature Lithuanian has in common with the Polish, Belarusian and Russian languages but which is not present in the more closely related Latvian).

Plosives commonly have no audible release before other plosives.

(Adapted from Lituanus^[4] with changes according to Encyclopedia of the Lithuanian Language.^[5])

Vowels[link]

Lithuanian has six long vowels and five short ones. Length has traditionally been considered the distinctive feature, though short vowels are also more centralized and long vowels more peripheral:

Lithuanian is traditionally described as having eight diphthongs, ai au ei eu oi ui ie uo. However, some approaches (i.e. Schmalstieg 1982) treat them as vowel sequences rather than diphthongs; indeed, the longer component depends on the type of stress, whereas in diphthongs the longer segment is fixed.

When not stressed, as in ai /ai/, it is the second element of the sequence which is longer, [æ̠iˑ]. This is also the case with the stress written with a tilde, aĩ /aˈi/. However, with the "acute" stress, it is the first element which is longer, in addition to the falling pitch: ái /ˈai/, [ɐ̂ˑi]. The full set is as follows:

Pitch accent[link]

Lithuanian prosodic system is characterized by free accent and distinctive quantity. Its accentuation is sometimes described as a simple tone system, often called pitch accent.^[6] In lexical words, one syllable will be tonically prominent. A heavy syllable—that is, a syllable containing a long vowel, diphthong, or a sonorant coda—may have one of two tones, falling tone (or acute tone) or rising tone (or circumflex tone). Light syllables (syllables with short vowels and optionally also obstruent codas), do not have the two-way contrast of heavy syllables.

Common Lithuanian lexicographical practice uses three diacritic marks to indicate word accent, i.e. the tone and quantity of the accented syllable. They are used in the following way:

• The first (or the only) segment of a heavy syllable with a falling tone is indicated with an acute accent mark (e.g. á, ár), unless the first element is i or u followed by a tautosyllabic resonant, in which case it is marked with a grave accent mark (e.g. ìr, ùr).
• The second (or the only) segment of a heavy syllable with a rising tone are indicate with a circumflex accent (e.g. ã, ar̃)
• Short accented syllables are indicated with a grave accent mark (e.g. ì, ù).

As said, Lithuanian has a free accent which means that its position and type is not phonologically predictable and has to be learned by heart. This is the state of affairs inherited from Proto-Balto-Slavic and, to a lesser extent, from Proto-Indo-European; Lithuanian circumflex and acute syllables directly reflect Proto-Balto-Slavic acute and circumflex tone opposition.

In a word-final position the tonal distinction in heavy syllables is almost neutralized, with a few minimal pairs remaining such as šáuk "shoot!" vs. šaũk "shout!". In other syllables the two-way contrast can be illustrated with pairs such as: kóšė "porridge" vs. kõšė "it soured"; áušti "to cool" vs. aũšti "to dawn"; drímba "lout" vs. drĩmba "it falls"; káltas "chissel" vs. kãltas "guilty", týrė "(he/she) explored" vs. tỹrė "mush".

kóšė is perceived as having a falling pitch (/kôːʃæ/ or /kóòʃæ/), and indeed acoustic measurement strongly supports this. However, while kõšė is perceived as having a rising pitch ([kǒːʃæ] or [kòóʃæ]), this is not supported acoustically; measurements do not find a consistent tone associated with such syllables that distinguish them from unaccented heavy syllables. The distinguishing feature appears to be a negative one, that they do not have a falling tone.^[6]

If diphthongs (and truly long vowels) are treated as sequences of vowels, then a single stress mark is sufficient for transcription: áušta /ˈauʃta/ = [ˈâˑʊʃtɐ] "it cools" vs. aũšta /aˈuʃta/ = [ɐˈuˑʃtɐ] "it dawns"; kóšė /ˈkooʃe/ = [ˈkôːʃæ] "porridge" vs. kõšė /koˈoʃe/ = [koˈoˑʃæ] "it soured".

Lithuanian accentual system inherited another very important aspect from Proto-Balto-Slavic period, and that is the accentual mobility. Accents can alternate throughout the inflection of word by both the syllable position and type. Parallels can be drawn with some modern Slavic languages, namely Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. Accentual mobility is prominent in nominal stems, while verbal stems mostly demonstrate phonologically predictable patterns.

Lithuanian nominal stems are commonly divided into four accentual classes, usually referred to by their numbers:

• Accent paradigm 1: Fixed (columnar) accent on a non-desinential syllable. If the accent is on a pre-desinential syllable, it carries the acute tone.
• Accent paradigm 2: Alternation of accent on a short or circumflex pre-desinential syllable with desinential accentuation.
• Accent paradigm 3: Alternation of accent on a non-desinential syllable with desinential accentuation. If the accent is on a pre-desinential syllable, it caries the acute tone.
• Accent paradigm 4: Alternation of accent on short or circumflex pre-desinential syllable with desinential accentuation.