Lithuanian

Introduction

Lithuanian Map Lithuanian belongs to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in Lithuania by close to 3 million people of all ages in all public and personal domains. Besides Lithuania, it is also spoken in Latvia, Estonia, Church Poland, Canada, and the US. The worldwide population of Lithuanian speakers is estimated at around 3.1 million (Ethnologue). Its closest relative is Latvian, but the two languages are not mutually intelligible. Both evolved from a common ancestral Proto-Baltic (which itself is thought to have split from common Proto-Balto-Slavic). They started to split starting around 800 AD. It is thought that there was a long period when Lithuanian and Latvian were two dialects of one language until possibly as late as the 16th-17th centuries, when they finally emerged as distinct languages.

Both Lithuanian and Latvian have retained many features of Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, believed to have been spoken around 4,000 BC in Central Asia. Of the two languages, Lithuanian Balls Lithuanian is the more conservative, having retained more archaic grammatical forms that Latvian, especially in its Painting sound system and noun morphology. These features have been attested only in extinct Indo-European languages. For this reason, it has been closely studied by scholars of Indo-European linguistics.

Lithuanian has been the official language of Lithuania since 1918. Between 1940 and 1990, Lithuanian co-existed alongside Russian, the dominant language of the country at the time. When Lithuania gained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, a large number of publications in Lithuanian started to appear once again. Today, there is a thriving publishing industry as well as television and radio broadcasts in Lithuanian.

Dialects

Lithuanian is divided into two distinct dialect areas that do not have a high degree of mutual intelligibility: Aukštaitian (Highland Lithuanian) , and Samogitian (Lowland Lithuanian). Standard Lithuanian is based on Aukštaitian.

Structure

Sound System

Women Children Vowels
Lithuanian has five short vowels /i/, , /a/, /u/, /o/. The vowel /e:/ has no short counterpart. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning.

Click here for more details on Lithuanian vowels.

Consonants
Lithuanian has 23 consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that distinguish word meaning. Lithuanian Consonants
Stress
Lithuanian has a pitch accent system it is thought to have retained from Proto-Indo-European. The pitch of the vowel distinguishes the meaning of words. There are two pitches: a rising pitch (sometimes marked in writing by a circumflex accent), and a falling pitch (sometimes marked in writing by an acute accent). Stress can fall on any syllable in a word.

Click here to listen to some common phrases in Lithuanian.

Grammar

Church

City

tower

Lithuanian is a richly inflected language that has retained some of the characteristics of its ancestral Proto-Indo-European.

Nouns
Lithuanian nouns are marked for the following grammatical categories:

two genders (masculine and feminine);
three numbers (singular, dual, and plural);
five declensions;
seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, vocative);

Verbs
Lithuanian verbs have the following grammatical features:

three conjugations;
three persons (there are different forms in the 1st and 2nd persons in the singular and plural, and a common form in the 3rd person for both singular and plural);
three tenses (present, past, and future);
two aspects (imperfective and perfective);
four moods (indicative, subjunctive/conditional, imperative, infinitive);
participles (active and passive) which can be formed from all tenses;
several gerund forms.

Word order
The normal word order in Lithuanian sentences is Subject - Verb - Object. However, other word orders are possible since cases indicate the function of words in the sentence. Lithuanian has a switch-reference system, i.e., one set of of verb endings is used when the subjects of the main and subordinate clauses refer to the same person, and another set when they refer to different people.

Vocabulary

stamp

Village

Lithuanian is one of the most conservative modern Indo-European languages. It has even preserved some words that are identical or are very similar to their counterparts in Sanskrit , e.g.,

Lithuanian Sanskrit Words

Basic vocabulary is inherently Lithuanian and not borrowed from other languages. However, there are many words that were borrowed over time, e.g., stiklas "glass" from Russian steklo, muilas "soap" from Russian mylo, reklama "advertisement" from Russian reklama. Lithuanian has also borrowed a number of international words, e.g., telefonas, radijas, televizijas. Since independence in 1991, English has replaced Russian as the source of borrowed words.

Below are some basic words and phrases in Lithuanian.

Lithuanian Phrases

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Lithuanian.

Writing

Stone

Lithuanian Sign

Lithuanian was not written prior to the middle of the 16th century, and the level of literacy among Lithuanians was low throughout the 18th century. In addition, between 1864 and 1904, the printing and teaching of Lithuanian were banned, and the use of Cyrillic was mandated by the Czarist government of Russia. After the ban was lifted in 1904, there was a resurgence of Lithuanian literature. From 1918 to 1940, Lithuania was independent and literature flourished. After Lithuania became independent from Russia in 1991, literature once again began to flourish.

Click here to find out more about modern Lithuanian press.

Modern Lithuanian is written with a modified Roman alphabet consisting of 32 letters.

Lithuanian Alphabet

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Lithuanian.

1 Straipsnis
UHDR Lithuanian

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Click here to find out where Lithuanian is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Lithuanian.

Resources for the study of Lithuanian language and culture
Languages on the Web - Lithuanian
Yamada Language Center Lithuanian resources
BBC Country Profile - Lithuania
Wikipedia article on Lithuanian
UCLA Language Profile for Lithuanian
Ethnologue entry for Lithuanian
Lithuanian Language and Writing
Learn about other languages - Lithuanian
Library of Congress Portals to the World: Lithuania
Omniglot Lithuanian Alphabet