Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official language of Lithuania, spoken by about 4 million native Lithuanians. The Lithuanian name for the language is Lietuvių kalba.

In older literature on Baltic languages, "Lithuanian" can sometimes refer to Baltic Languages in general.

History

The Lithuanian language still retains much of the original sound system and morphological peculiarities of the prototypal Indo-European language and therefore is fascinating for linguistic study. Some reconstructions have concluded that Lithuanian is the language most closely related to Proto-Indo-European. Separate Baltic language group exists perhaps since 10th century BC. However a way, in which the Baltic languages have developed from the Proto-Indo-European langage, is disputed, except the fact of having many archaic features by the Baltic languages.

The Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones (or, perhaps, from hypothetic proto-Baltic language) between 400 – 600s. The differentiation between Lithuanian and Latvian started after 800s with a period of being one language but different dialects, which perhaps lasted quite long. At least, transitive dialects existed till 14th – 15th or even 16th – 17th century. And after 13th – 14th centuries, the occupation of western part of Daugava basin (almost coinciding with the territory of modern Latvia) by German Sword Brethren had significant influence on separate development of Lithuanian and Latvian.

The first known written Lithuanian text dates from a hymnal translation in 1545. Printed books in Lithuanian language are known since 1547, but the level of literacy among Lithuanians was low in the 16th – 18th centuries and books were not easily available. Literacy in Lithuania strongly increased during the 19th century, despite victimization, made by Russian authorities (which reached its peak after suppression of January Uprising, in 1864 – 1904, when Russian officials forbade any public spoken usage of Lithuanian language and usage of Latin alphabet for written language).

Lithuanian has been official language in Lithuania since 1918 year. During Soviet period ( 1944 – 1990, see History of Lithuania), it was used in official affairs along with Russian language, which was official in the USSR and had priority over Lithuanian language.

Classification

Lithuanian is one of two (the other is Latvian) living Baltic languages, which is a separate branch of the Indo-European languages.

Geographic distribution

Lithuanian is spoken mainly in Lithuania. It is also spoken in Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Britain, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, and Uzbekistan.

2,955,200 in Lithuania (including 3,460 Tatar) or about 80% of the population (1998) speak Lithuanian. The population total speaking Lithuanian for all countries is 4,000,000 (1993 UBS).

Official status

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

Dialects

The Lithuanian language has two main dialects: Aukshtaitish (Aukštaičių, Highland Lithuanian) and Zhemaitish (Samogitian, Žemaičių/Žemaitių, Lowland Lithuanian). See maps at [1] (http://samogitia.mch.mii.lt/KALBA/girdstr.en.htm#Map).

Standard Lithuanian is based on Western Aukshtaitish. Intelligibility between Aukshtaitish and Zhemaitish is considered difficult by most Lithuanians.

Sounds

Vowels

Lithuanian has 12 written vowels. In addition to the standard Roman letters, the ogonek accent is used to indicate long vowels, and is a historical relic of a time when these vowels were nasalized (as ogonek vowels are in modern Polish).

Consonants

Lithuanian uses 20 consonant characters, drawn from the Roman alphabet. In addition, the digraph "Ch" represents a velar fricative (IPA [x]); the pronunciation of other digraphs can be deduced from their component elements.

Phonology

Consonants

All consonants (except /j/) have two forms: palatalized and non-palatalized.

(Adapted from http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_02.htm (http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_02.htm).)

Vowels

There are two possible ways to posit the Lithuanian vowel system. The traditional pattern has six long vowels and five short ones, with length as the distinctive feature:

(Adapted from http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_02.htm (http://www.lituanus.org/1982_1/82_1_02.htm).)

However, at least one researcher suggests that a tense vs. lax distinction may be the actual distinguishing feature, or at least equally important as length. Such a hypothesis yields the chart below, where 'long' and 'short' have been preserved to parallel the terminology used above.

(Adapted from http://www.lituanus.org/1972/72_1_05.htm (http://www.lituanus.org/1972/72_1_05.htm).)

Historical sound changes

Grammar

The main article is the Lithuanian grammar.

The Lithuanian language is a highly inflected language where relationship between parts of speech and their roles in a sentence are expressed by numerous flexions.

There are two grammatical genders in Lithuanian. It has a free and mobile stress. It has 5 noun and 3 adjective declensions and 3 verbal conjugations. All verbs have present, past, past iterative and future tenses of the indicative mood, conditional and imperative moods (both without distinction of tenses) and infinitive. These forms, except the infinitive, are conjugative, having 2 singular, 2 plural persons and the 3rd person form common both for plural and singular. Nouns and other declinable words are declined in seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, three types of locative, and vocative (nouns only).

The 1st scientific Compendium of Lithuanian language was published 1856/57 by August Schleicher, a professor at Prague University.

Vocabulary

Lexical borrowings in the language

Like with any other language, there is a category of people, known as language purists who strongly oppose foreign influence on their native language. This section presents their point of view.

The basic vocabulary of the Lithuanian language does not possess many loan words, which makes it quite "pure". (Clearly, this is not applicable to specialized, technical vocabularies, which are significantly internationalized in almost all languages.) There are some loan words that are called senieji skoliniai (old loans) which were borrowed from the closest neighbours a long time ago. Such words are stiklas, "glass" (<Slavic origin; cf. Russian "steklo"), muilas, "soap" (<Slavic origin; cf. Russian "mylo"), gatvė, "street" (<gatwo, Slavic; "paved road", esp. in wetlands), spinta (<die Spind, a generic term for storage furniture, such as cupboard, wardrobe, bookcase, etc.). These words are not likely to be changed because they got on in time. Other borrowed words are international words that can be found in many languages like telefonas, ciklas, schema etc. These words come from Latin or Ancient Greek and are not "dangerous" from the point of view of language purists (since those languages do not exist anymore). However, there are many words of forign origin that have Lithuanian counterparts, hence they should not be used. Such words used to come from Russian in the past but now that Lithuania has regained its independence in 1991, English is starting to have increasingly stronger influence over Lithuanian and many words have recently flooded the language (like dispenseris, hakeris or singlas) and they are not to be tolerated. These problems are being discussed at present but finding good Lithuanian counterparts for these words is a difficult job.

Writing system

Like many of the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian employs modified Roman script. It is comprised of 32 letters. Collation order presents one surprise: "Y" is moved to occur between I Ogonek (Į) and J.

Acute, grave, and macron/tilde accents can be used to mark stress and vowel length. However, these are generally not written, except in dictionaries and where needed for clarity. In addition, the following digraphs are used, but are treated as sequences of two letters for collation purposes. It should be noted that the "Ch" digraph represents a velar fricative, while the others are straightforward compositions of their component letters.

Examples

There is a Lithuanian language Wikipedia at lt.wikipedia.org

See also

• List of Eastern Baltic languages
• Martynas Mažvydas

External links

• Lithuanian linguistics (http://www.lituanus.org/IndexLanguage.htm)
• Ethnologue report for Lithuanian (http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=LIT)
• Pages and Forums on the Lithuanian History (http://www.istorija.net/)

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