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The Baltic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively or as a second language by a population of about 6.5–7.0 million people "Lietuviai Pasaulyje" (PDF) (in Lithuanian). Lietuvos statistikos departamentas. Retrieved 5 May 2015.Latvian at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Standard Latvian language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Latgalian language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required) mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Europe. Together with the Slavic languages, they form the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European family.
Scholars usually regard them as a single Subgrouping divided into two branches: West Baltic (containing only ) and East Baltic (containing at least two Modern language, Lithuanian, Latvian language, and by some counts including Latgalian and Samogitian as separate languages rather than dialects of those two). In addition, the existence of the Dnieper-Oka language is hypothesized, with the extinct Golyad language being the only known member. The range of the East Baltic linguistic influence once possibly reached as far as the Ural Mountains, but this hypothesis has been questioned.
Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, had possibly conserved the greatest number of properties from Proto-Baltic.
Although related, Lithuanian, Latvian, and particularly Old Prussian have lexicons that differ substantially from one another and so the languages are not mutually intelligible. Relatively low mutual interaction for neighbouring languages historically led to gradual erosion of mutual intelligibility, and development of their respective linguistic innovations that did not exist in shared Proto-Baltic. The substantial number of and various uses and sources of loanwords from their surrounding languages are considered to be the major reasons for poor mutual intelligibility today.
| +Baltic languages by number of native speakers |
| Valsts valoda |
| 150,000–200,000 |
| 500,000 |
| Extinct since 16th century |
| Extinct since 16th century |
| Extinct since 16th century |
| Extinct since 14th century |
| Extinct since early 18th century Revived in the 21st century 2 native speakers |
| Extinct since the 1st millennium BC |
| Extinct since 16th century |
| Extinct since 17th century |
| Extinct since 12th century |
Although the Baltic Aesti tribe was mentioned by ancient historians such as Tacitus as early as 98 CE, the first attestation of a Baltic language was 1369, in a Basel epigram of two lines written in Old Prussian. Lithuanian was first attested in a printed book, which is a Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas published in 1547. Latvian appeared in a printed Catechism in 1585.
One reason for the late attestation is that the Baltic peoples resisted Christianization longer than any other Europeans, which delayed the introduction of writing and isolated their languages from outside influence.
With the establishment of a German state in Prussia, and the mass influx of Germanic (and to a lesser degree Slavic-speaking) settlers, the Prussians began to be assimilated, and by the end of the 17th century, the Prussian language had become extinct.
After the Partitions of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, most of the Baltic lands were under the rule of the Russian Empire, where the native languages or alphabets were sometimes prohibited from being written down or used publicly in a Russification effort (see Lithuanian press ban for the ban in force from 1864 to 1904).
Historically the languages were spoken over a larger area: west to the mouth of the Vistula river in present-day Poland, at least as far east as the Dniepr river in present-day Belarus, perhaps even to Moscow, and perhaps as far south as Kyiv. Key evidence of Baltic language presence in these regions is found in (names of bodies of water) that are characteristically Baltic.Blažek, Vaclav. " Baltic horizon in Eastern Bohemian hydronymy?". In: Tiltai. Priedas. 2003, Nr. 14, p. 14. .
:"The study of hydronyms has shown that the Proto-Baltic area was about six times larger than the ethnic territory of the present-day Balts ..." The use of hydronyms is generally accepted to determine the extent of a culture's influence, but not the date of such influence.The eventual expansion of the use of Slavic languages in the south and east, and Germanic languages in the west, reduced the geographic distribution of Baltic languages to a fraction of the area that they formerly covered.
The Russian geneticist Oleg Balanovsky speculated that there is a predominance of the assimilated pre-Slavic substrate in the genetics of East and West Slavic populations, according to him the common genetic structure which contrasts East Slavs and Balts from other populations may suggest that the pre-Slavic substrate of the East Slavs consists most significantly of Baltic-speakers, which predated the Slavs in the cultures of the Eurasian steppe according to archaeological references he cites.
The Mordvinic languages, spoken mainly along western tributaries of the Volga, show several dozen loanwords from one or more Baltic languages. These may have been mediated by contacts with the Eastern Balts along the river Oka River. In regards to the same geographical location, Asko Parpola, in a 2013 article, suggested that the Baltic presence in this area, dated to –600 CE, is due to an "elite superstratum".Parpola, A. (2013). " Formation of the Indo-European and Uralic (Finno-Ugric) language families in the light of archaeology". In: Grünthal, R. & Kallio, P. (Eds.). A linguistic map of prehistoric northern Europe. Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 2013. p. 150. However, linguist argued that the Volga-Oka is a secondary Baltic-speaking area, expanding from East Baltic, due to a large number of Baltic loanwords in Finnic and Saami languages.Kallio, Petri. " The Language Contact Situation in Prehistoric Northeastern Europe". In: Robert Mailhammer, Theo Vennemann gen. Nierfeld, and Birgit Anette Olsen (eds.). The Linguistic Roots of Europe: Origin and Development of European Languages. Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European 6. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015. p. 79.
Finnish scholars also indicate that Latvian had extensive contacts with Livonian,
and, to a lesser extent, to Estonian and South Estonian. Therefore, this contact accounts for the number of Finnic hydronyms in Lithuania and Latvia that increase in a northwards direction.Parpola, in the same article, supposed the existence of a Baltic substratum for Finnic, in Estonia and coastal Finland.Parpola, A. (2013). " Formation of the Indo-European and Uralic (Finno-Ugric) language families in the light of archaeology". In: Grünthal, R. & Kallio, P. (Eds.). A linguistic map of prehistoric northern Europe. Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 2013. p. 133. In the same vein, Kallio argues for the existence of a lost "North Baltic language" that would account for loanwords during the evolution of the Finnic branch.
The Baltic languages show a close relationship with the Slavic languages, and are grouped with them in a Balto-Slavic family by most scholars. This family is considered to have developed from a common ancestor, Proto-Balto-Slavic. Later on, several lexical, phonological and morphological dialectisms developed, separating the various Balto-Slavic languages from each other.
Although it is generally agreed that the Slavic languages developed from a single more-or-less unified dialect (Proto-Slavic) that split off from common Balto-Slavic, there is more disagreement about the relationship between the Baltic languages.The traditional view is that the Balto-Slavic languages split into two branches, Baltic and Slavic, with each branch developing as a single common language (Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic) for some time afterwards. Proto-Baltic is then thought to have split into East Baltic and West Baltic branches. However, more recent scholarship has suggested that there was no unified Proto-Baltic stage, but that Proto-Balto-Slavic split directly into three groups: Slavic, East Baltic and West Baltic. Under this view, the Baltic family is paraphyletic, and consists of all Balto-Slavic languages that are not Slavic. In the 1960s Vladimir Toporov and Vyacheslav Ivanov made the following conclusions about the relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages:
Бирнбаум Х. О двух направлениях в языковом развитии // Вопросы языкознания, 1985, No. 2, стр. 36These scholars' theses do not contradict the close relationship between Baltic and Slavic languages and, from a historical perspective, specify the Baltic-Slavic languages' evolution – the terms 'Baltic' and 'Slavic' are relevant only from the point of view of the present time, meaning diachronic changes, and the oldest stage of the language development could be called both Baltic and Slavic; this concept does not contradict the traditional thesis that the Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic languages coexisted for a long time after their formation – between the 2nd millennium BC and circa the 5th century BC – the Proto-Slavic language was a continuum of the Proto-Baltic dialects, more rather, the Proto-Slavic language should have been localized in the peripheral circle of Proto-Baltic dialects.
Finally, a minority of scholars argue that Baltic descended directly from Proto-Indo-European, without an intermediate common Balto-Slavic stage. They argue that the many similarities and shared innovations between Baltic and Slavic are caused by several millennia of contact between the groups, rather than a shared heritage.
The Bulgarian linguist Ivan Duridanov, who improved the most extensive list of toponyms, in his first publication claimed that Thracian is genetically linked to the Baltic languages and in the next one he made the following classification:
"The Thracian language formed a close group with the Baltic, the Dacian and the "Pelasgian" languages. More distant were its relations with the other Indo-European languages, and especially with Greek, the Italic and Celtic languages, which exhibit only isolated phonetic similarities with Thracian; the Tokharian and the Hittite were also distant. "Of about 200 reconstructed Thracian words by Duridanov most cognates (138) appear in the Baltic languages, mostly in Lithuanian, followed by Germanic (61), Indo-Aryan (41), Greek (36), Bulgarian (23), Latin (10) and Albanian (8). The cognates of the reconstructed Dacian words in his publication are found mostly in the Baltic languages, followed by Albanian. Parallels have enabled linguists, using the techniques of comparative linguistics, to decipher the meanings of several Dacian and Thracian placenames with, they claim, a high degree of probability. Of 74 Dacian placenames attested in primary sources and considered by Duridanov, a total of 62 have Baltic cognates, most of which were rated "certain" by Duridanov. For a big number of 300 Thracian geographic names most parallels were found between Thracian and Baltic geographic names in the study of Duridanov. According to him the most important impression make the geographic cognates of Baltic and Thracian
"the similarity of these parallels stretching frequently on the main element and the suffix simultaneously, which makes a strong impression".
Romanian linguist Sorin Paliga, analysing and criticizing Harvey Mayer's study, did admit "great likeness" between Thracian, the substrate of Romanian, and "some Baltic forms".Paliga, Sorin. " Tracii şi dacii erau nişte „baltoizi”?" Were. In: Romanoslavica XLVIII, nr. 3 (2012): 149–150.
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