Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba)
Number of native speakers: 3.5-4 million
Official language: Lithuania, European Union (EU)
Minority language: Poland, United States
Language of diaspora: Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay
Alphabet: Latin, 32 letters
Linguistic typology: inflectional, pro-drop, SVO
Language family: Indo-European, Balto-Slavic
Longest word: nebeprisikiškiakopūsteliaudavome (we haven’t been gathering enough wood sorrels) - 35 letters
10th century BCE - Baltic languages formed a separate branch from other Indo-European languages
400-600 CE - Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones
>800 - difference between Lithuanian and Latvian started to appear
13th-14th century - Lithuanian and Latvian continued to develop separately
1503 - eraliest surviving written text in Lithuanian
1864 - Lithuanian was banned
1918 - Lithuanian became the official language of Lithuania
Lithuanian is one of the two surviving Eastern Baltic languages of the Indo-European family. It is the most archaic of all living Indo-European languages and the closest to the Proto-Indo-European language.
Writing system and pronunciation
These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a ą b c č d e ę ė f g h i į y j k l m n o p r s š t u ų ū v z ž.
The letters ą, į, ų once were used to denote nasal vowels. There are no nasal vowels in modern literary Lithuanian, but the letters remained to denote long sounds.
Lithuanian has retained a very old vocabulary. Nevertheless, the growing influence of English is obvious.
It has lots of diminutive-endearing suffixes, therefore there are plenty of expressive, endearing word forms.
Lithuanian has two numbers (singular and plural), two genders (masculine and feminine), seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative), and five declensions for nouns and three declensions for adjectives.
There are four tenses (past, past iterative, present, future) and three conjugations.
An adjective can have up to 147 forms: 2 genders x 6 cases x 2 numbers x 2 forms x 3 degrees of comparison + 3 forms with no gender.
Pronominal forms of adjectives are a special feature of Lithuanian. They denote that the feature is particular and at the same time emphasize this feature.
The Lithuanian language has two dialects: Aukštaitian/High Lithuanian (aukštaičių) and Samogitian/Lowland Lithuanian (žemaičių). Dialects are differentiated by their phonetic and morphological features.
Both dialects have three subdialects. Samogitian is divided into Western, Northern and Southern, and Aukštaitian into Western, Southern and Eastern.
Standard Lithuanian is derived mostly from Western Aukštaitian dialects.
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