| Baltic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Northern Europe |
| Linguistic classification: | Indo-European
|
| Subdivisions: |
Western Baltic
Eastern Baltic
|
| ISO 639-2 and 639-5: | bat |
The Baltic languages are a group of related languages that, in the opinion of some scholars, form a separate branch of the Indo-European language family, while most scholars maintain that it belongs to a Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European.[1][2] Baltic languages are spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. The language group is usually 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). The range of Eastern Balts reached to the Ural mountains.[3][4][5] While related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another and are not mutually intelligible. The now-extinct Old Prussian language has been considered the most archaic of the Baltic languages.[6]
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(†—Extinct language)
Speakers of modern Baltic languages [7] are generally concentrated within the borders of Lithuania and Latvia, and in emigrant communities in the United States, Canada, Australia and states of the former Soviet Union. 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.
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, most 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.
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.[8]
Linguists have had a hard time establishing the relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family.[9] 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.[10]
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 the closest relationship with the Slavic languages, and have, by most scholars, been reconstructed to a common Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, during which Common Balto-Slavic lexical, phonological, morphological and accentological isoglosses are thought to have developed.[11][12]
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