Balto-Slavic languages of the Indo-European language family
Not to be confused with Baltic Finnic languages or Balti language.
Baltic
Ethnicity
Balts
Geographic distribution
Northern Europe, historically also Eastern Europe and Central Europe
Linguistic classification
Indo-European
Balto-Slavic
Baltic
Proto-language
Proto-Baltic
Subdivisions
West Baltic †
East Baltic
Dnieper Baltic †
ISO 639-2 / 5
bat
Linguasphere
54= (phylozone)
Glottolog
None east2280(East Baltic) prus1238(Old Prussian)
Countries where an East Baltic language is the national language
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[1][2] 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 subgroup divided into two branches: West Baltic (containing only extinct languages) and East Baltic (containing at least two living languages, Lithuanian, Latvian, and by some counts including Latgalian and Samogitian as separate languages rather than dialects of those two). The range of the East Baltic linguistic influence once possibly reached as far as the Ural Mountains, but this hypothesis has been questioned.[3][4][5]
Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, had possibly conserved the greatest number of properties from Proto-Baltic.[6]
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 false friends and various uses and sources of loanwords from their surrounding languages are considered to be the major reasons for poor mutual intelligibility today.
^"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)
^Gimbutas, Marija (1963). The Balts. Ancient peoples and places 33. London: Thames and Hudson. Retrieved 3 December 2011.
^Mallory, J. P., ed. (1997). "Fatyanovo-Balanovo Culture". Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Fitzroy Dearborn.
^Anthony, David W. (2007). [The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press.
^Ringe, D.; Warnow, T.; Taylor, A. (2002). "Indo-European and computational cladistics". Transactions of the Philosophical Society. 100: 59–129. doi:10.1111/1467-968X.00091.
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