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Lithuan­ian is one of two liv­ing Baltic lan­guages, along with Lat­vian, and they con­sti­tute the east­ern branch of Baltic lan­guages family. An ear­lier Baltic lan­guage, Old Pruss­ian, was ex­tinct by the 18th cen­tury; the other West­ern Baltic lan­guages, Curon­ian and Su­dov­ian, be­came ex­tinct ear­lier. Some the­o­ries, such as that of J...

Lithuan­ian is spo­ken mainly in Lithua­nia. It is also spo­ken by eth­nic Lithua­ni­ans liv­ing in today's Be­larus, Latvia, Poland, and the Kalin­ingrad Oblast of Rus­sia, as well as by siz­able em­i­grant com­mu­ni­ties in Ar­gentina, Aus­tralia, Brazil, Canada, Den­mark, Es­to­nia, France, Ger­many, Ice­land, Ire­land, Nor­way, Rus­sia, Swe­den...

Lithuan­ian uses the Latin script sup­ple­mented with di­a­crit­ics. It has 32 let­ters. In the col­la­tion order, y fol­lows im­me­di­ately after į (called i nosinė), be­cause both y and į rep­re­sent the same long vowel [iː]: In ad­di­tion, the fol­low­ing di­graphs are used, but are treated as se­quences of two let­ters for col­la­tion pur­poses...

Consonants

All Lithuan­ian con­so­nants ex­cept /j/ have two vari­ants: the non-palatal­ized one rep­re­sented by the IPA sym­bols in the chart, and the palatal­ized one (i.e. /b/ – /bʲ/, /d/ – /dʲ/, /ɡ/ – /ɡʲ/, and so on). The con­so­nants /f/, /x/, /ɣ/ and their palatal­ized vari­ants are only found in loan­words. /t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ, ɕ, ʑ/ have been tra­di­tion­ally tran­scribed with ⟨t͡ʃʲ, d͡ʒʲ, ʃʲ, ʒʲ⟩, but they can be seen as equiv­a­lent tran­scrip­tions, with the for­mer set being some­what eas­ier to write.

Vowels

Lithuan­ian has six long vow­els and four short ones (not in­clud­ing dis­puted phonemes marked in brack­ets). Length has tra­di­tion­ally been con­sid­ered the dis­tinc­tive fea­ture, though short vow­els are also more cen­tral­ized and long vow­els more pe­riph­eral: 1. /e, ɔ/ are restricted to loanwords. Many speakers merge the former with /ɛ/.

Diphthongs

Lithuan­ian is tra­di­tion­ally de­scribed as hav­ing nine diph­thongs, ai,au,ei,eu,oi,ou,ui,ie, anduo.How­ever, some ap­proaches (i.e., Schmal­stieg 1982) treat them as vowel se­quences rather than diph­thongs; in­deed, the longer com­po­nent de­pends on the type of stress, whereas in diph­thongs, the longer seg­ment is fixed.

Lithuan­ian is a highly in­flected lan­guage. In Lithuan­ian, there are two gram­mat­i­cal gen­ders for nouns (mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine) and three gen­ders for ad­jec­tives, pro­nouns, nu­mer­als and par­tici­ples (mas­cu­line, fem­i­nine and neuter). Every at­tribute must agree with the gen­der and num­ber of the noun. The neuter forms of other ...

Indo-European vocabulary

Lithuan­ian re­tains cog­nates to many words found in clas­si­cal lan­guages, such as San­skrit and Latin. These words are de­scended from Proto-Indo-Eu­ro­pean. A few ex­am­ples are the fol­low­ing: 1. Lith. and Skt. sūnus(son) 2. Lith. and Skt. avis and Lat. ovis(sheep) 3. Lith. dūmas and Skt. dhūmas and Lat. fumus(fumes, smoke) 4. Lith. antras and Skt. antaras(second, the other) 5. Lith. vilkas and Skt. vṛkas(wolf) 6. Lith. ratas and Lat. rota (wheel) and Skt. rathas(carriage). 7. Lith. se...

Loanwords

In a 1934 book en­ti­tled Die Ger­man­is­men des Litauis­chen. Teil I: Die deutschen Lehnwörter im Litauischen, K. Alminauskis found 2,770 loan­words, of which about 130 were of un­cer­tain ori­gin. The ma­jor­ity of the loan­words were found to have been de­rived from the Pol­ish, Be­laru­sian, and Ger­man lan­guages, with some ev­i­dence that these lan­guages all ac­quired the words from con­tacts and trade with Prus­sia dur­ing the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithua­nia. Loan­words com­prise...

The lan­guage of the ear­li­est Lithuan­ian writ­ings, in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, is known as Old Lithuanianand dif­fers in some sig­nif­i­cant re­spects from the Lithuan­ian of today. Be­sides the spe­cific dif­fer­ences given below, nouns, verbs, and ad­jec­tives still had sep­a­rate end­ings for the dual num­ber. The dual per­sists today i...