submitted by @sudiev​

gwendolynlerman:

Languages of Europe

Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba)

Basic facts

• Number of native speakers: 3.5-4 million
• Official language: Lithuania, European Union (EU)
• Minority language: Poland, United States
• Language of diaspora: Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay
• Alphabet:Latin, 32 letters
• Grammatical cases: 7
• Linguistic typology: inflectional, pro-drop, SVO
• Language family: Indo-European, Balto-Slavic
• Number of dialects: 2
• Longest word: nebeprisikiškia­kopūsteliaudavome (we haven’t been gathering enough wood sorrels) - 35 letters

History

• 10th century BCE - Baltic languages formed a separate branch from other Indo-European languages
• 400-600 CE - Eastern Baltic languages split from the Western Baltic ones
• >800 - difference between Lithuanian and Latvian started to appear
• 13th-14th century - Lithuanian and Latvian continued to develop separately
• 1503 - eraliest surviving written text in Lithuanian
• 1864 - Lithuanian was banned
• 1918 - Lithuanian became the official language of Lithuania

Lithuanian is one of the two surviving Eastern Baltic languages of the Indo-European family. It is the most archaic of all living Indo-European languages and the closest to the Proto-Indo-European language.

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a ą b c č d e ę ė f g h i į y j k l m n o p r s š t u ų ū v z ž.

The letters ą, į, ų once were used to denote nasal vowels. There are no nasal vowels in modern literary Lithuanian, but the letters remained to denote long sounds.

Grammar

Lithuanian has retained a very old vocabulary. Nevertheless, the growing influence of English is obvious.

It has lots of diminutive-endearing suffixes, therefore there are plenty of expressive, endearing word forms.

Lithuanian has two numbers (singular and plural), two genders (masculine and feminine), seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative), and five declensions for nouns and three declensions for adjectives.

There are four tenses (past, past iterative, present, future) and three conjugations.

Anadjectivecan have up to 147 forms: 2 genders x 6 cases x 2 numbers x 2 forms x 3 degrees of comparison + 3 forms with no gender.

Pronominal forms of adjectives are a special feature of Lithuanian. They denote that the feature is particular and at the same time emphasize this feature.

Dialects

The Lithuanian language has two dialects: Aukštaitian/High Lithuanian(aukštaičių)and Samogitian/Lowland Lithuanian (žemaičių). Dialects are differentiated by their phonetic and morphological features.

Both dialects have three subdialects. Samogitian is divided into Western, Northern and Southern, and Aukštaitian into Western, Southern and Eastern.

Standard Lithuanianisderived mostly from Western Aukštaitiandialects.