Baltic culture
| Baltic | |
|---|---|
| Ethnicity | Balts |
| Geographic distribution |
Northern Europe |
| Linguistic classification |
Indo-European
|
| Subdivisions |
|
| ISO 639-2 / 5 | |
| Linguasphere | 54= (phylozone) |
| Glottolog |
None east2280 (East Baltic) prus1238 (Prussian) |
The Baltic languages belong to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Baltic languages are spoken by the Balts, mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe.
Scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two groups: Western Baltic (containing only extinct languages), and Eastern Baltic (containing two living languages, Lithuanian and Latvian). The range of the Eastern 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, ranks as the most archaic of the Baltic languages.
Although morphologically related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another. As such they are not mutually intelligible, mainly due to a substantial number of false friends, and foreign words, borrowed from surrounding language families, which are used differently.
The Baltic languages are generally thought to form a single family with two branches, Eastern and Western. However, these two branches are sometimes classified as independent branches of Balto-Slavic.
(†—Extinct language)
The Baltic-speaking peoples likely encompassed an area in Eastern Europe much larger than their modern range: as in the case of the Celtic languages of Western Europe, they were reduced with invasions, exterminations and assimilations. Studies in comparative linguistics point to genetic relationship between the languages of the Baltic family and the following extinct languages:
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