Lithuanian grammar

Lithuanian grammar is the study of rules governing the use of the Lithuanian language. Lithuanian grammar retains many archaic features from Proto-Indo European that have been lost in other Indo-European languages, and is consequently very complex.

The following is a list of Lithuanian terms for properties and morphological categories, with their English translations or equivalents:

Lithuanian nouns are classified into one of two genders:

Lithuanian adjectives, numerals, pronouns and participles are classified into one of three genders:

Since no noun can have a neutral gender, it is used with subjects of neutral or undefined gender:

Ji (fem.) yra graži (fem.) – She is beautiful. Mokytojas (masc.) bus pasirengęs (masc.) – The teacher will be ready. Skaityti (undefined) buvo įdomu (neuter) – Reading was interesting.

The gender of a pronoun kas – 'who? what?', personal pronouns aš / mes – 'I' / 'we', tu / jūs – 'you (singular) / you (plural)' and a reflexive pronoun savęs is indefinite, it means any of the genders. The word kas uses masculine inflections, the other pronouns have their own specific paradigm. The nouns of the indefinite gender have feminine form inflections.

The masculine gender is also the indeterminate gender as in many other Indo-European languages. This means that for an entire mixed group of objects belonging to masculine and feminine genders, the masculine gender is used. The masculine as the indeterminate gender differs from the indefinite gender, which allows treatment of the word in two ways.

Note that there are many nouns that use masculine or feminine genders without any reason of biological gender, for instance, words that denote inanimate objects. The masculine or feminine usage of these words is stable (with few exceptions) and doesn't depend on the will of a speaker.

Lithuanian grammatical genders are similar to, for instance, Latin:

The Lithuanian language has two main numbers, singular and plural. It has also a dual, which is almost unused, except few words, that retain their dual forms (for example, du – two, abu – both), an indefinite number and super-plural words (dauginiai žodžiai in Lithuanian).

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