Baltic languages

The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. The language group is sometimes 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 and Latvian. While related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from each other and are not mutually intelligible. The now extinct Old Prussian language has been considered the most archaic of the Baltic languages.

Relationship with other Indo-European languages

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.

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Linguists disagree regarding the relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family. 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.

Related Topics:
Comparative method - Chronology - Phonology - Lexicon

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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.

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While some linguists believe that the Baltic languages diverged from Proto-Indo-European separately from other language groups, others feel that the Baltic languages share a common ancestor tongue with either the Slavic languages or the Germanic languages, and should be classified as Balto-Slavic or Balto-Germanic respectively.

Related Topics:
Slavic languages - Germanic languages

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Close relationships have also been posited between the Baltic languages and geographically-distant Indo-European languages and groups such as Albanian, Dacian, and Thracian.

Related Topics:
Albanian - Dacian - Thracian

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More recently, it has been suggested that the Baltic language group is itself an inappropriate grouping and that the West Baltic and East Baltic groups have differing lineages that converged later in their existences.

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