A Brief Summary of the Lithuanian Language

 


Lithuanian is a very unique language due to the completely different language structure it retains compared to its neighbors. Written in the Latin alphabet, Lithuanian is an Eastern Baltic language that is a descendant from the Balto-Slavic language family, which is ultimately a descendant of the Indo-European family.


Currently, there are about 3,000,0000 people who speak the language, with the majority living in Lithuania.

A Quick History of the Lithuanian People and Territory

If we take it back further (thousands of years ago), the Lithuanians can be generally described as a homogeneous group of people. They were a tribe of a larger group called the Balts. Fast forward to around 800-1000 A.D. and the Lithuanians, along with other Balts, were subject to Viking rulership and had to pay tribute to Denmark. Around a hundred years later the Lithuanians were invading other neighboring Balts and eventually became a dominant force by around the 12th century A.D.

Linguistic History of Lithuanian

There is no written evidence of the Lithuanian language prior to a Catechism published in 1547 by Martynas Mažvydas. This makes learning about the language quite difficult, but luckily we have some clues.


Researchers believe that Lithuanian and its cousin Latvian were once dialects of the same language. However, as Lithuanian became more dominant in the Baltic region, they slowly split into different languages.

The Language Itself

The Lithuanian language is quite unique, as it’s very different from most languages and even Latvian isn’t that similar to the language.


Because Lithuanian utilizes the case system, word order isn’t quite important. What is the case system? Simply put, you make modifications or inflections to the stem of a noun, adjective, or other linguistic elements to determine the role it plays in the sentence.


There are 8 cases in Lithuanian namely: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Locative, Voctive, and Illative. 


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