Baltic Languages !!

8/2/2019 Baltic Languages !!

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Baltic languages !!

Made by : Stanislava K. Donina


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Baltic languages are spoken mainly inareas extending east and southeast ofthe Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. The

language group is usually divided into twosub-groups: Western Baltic andEastern Baltic.


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Western Baltic Containing only extinct languages like :

Galindian,Old Prussian,Sudovian andSkalvian.


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Eastern Baltic ontaining both extinct and the two living

languages in the group: Lithuanian(including both Standard Lithuanian

and Samogitian) and Latvian (includingboth literary Latvian and Latgalian). Therange of Eastern Balts reached to the Ural

mountains


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While related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian,and particularly the Old Prussianvocabularies differ substantially from one

another and are not mutually intelligible. .The now-extinct Old Prussian languagehas been considered the most archaic of

the Baltic languages.


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Geographic distribution

Speakers of modernBaltic languages aregenerally

concentrated withinthe borders ofLithuania and Latvia,and in emigrant

communities in theUSA,Canada,Australiaand states of theformer Soviet Union.


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Historically the languages were spokenover a larger area: West to the mouth ofthe Vistulia river in present-day Poland, at

least as far East as the Dniepr river inpresent-day Belarus, perhaps evento Moscow.


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Prehistory and history

Although the various Baltic tribes were mentioned byancient historians as early as 98 B.C., the firstattestation of a Baltic language was in about 1350, withthe creation of the Elbing Prussian Vocabulary, a German

to Prussian translation dictionary. It is also believed thatBaltic languages are among the most archaic of theremaining Indo-European languages, despite their lateattestation.


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Relationship with other Indo-

European languages

The Baltic languages are of particular interest tolinguists because they retain many archaicfeatures.Linguists have had a hard time

establishing the relationship of the Balticlanguages to other languages in the Indo-

European family.Language kinship is generallydetermined by the identification of linguistic

innovations that are held in common by twolanguages or groups.


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Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited ornonexistent written record, their existence being knownonly from the records of ancient historians and personalor place names. All of the languages in the Baltic group

(including the living ones) were first written downrelatively late in their probable existence as distinctlanguages. These two factors combined with others haveobscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a

number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family.


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The Baltic languages show the closestrelationship with the Slavic languages, and have,by most scholars, been reconstructed to a

common Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, during whichCommon Balto-Slavic lexical, phonological,morphological and accentological isoglosses are

thought to have developed.

Baltic Languages !!

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