Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first recorded word in the Lithuanian language, Ba, was shouted by a raider into a Livonian church in 1207. This single interjection stands as the earliest known written evidence of the language.
Martynas Mažvydas printed the first book in Königsberg on the 8th of January 1547. The Catechism marked the beginning of written history for the people and established the foundation for future literary works.
Russian became the de facto official language while Lithuanian usage declined through Russification policies between 1940 and 1990. Radio broadcasts were between 61 and 74 percent in Russian until the Supreme Soviet restored Lithuanian as the official language on the 18th of November 1988.
Jonas Jablonskis established the south-western Aukštaitian dialect as the basis for standardized Lithuanian in the twentieth century. He earned the nickname father of standardized Lithuanian for his efforts to unify regional variants into a single written form.
The language features twelve noun declensions and five adjective forms with complex case systems. It retains archaic verbal morphology including synthetic future tenses formed with -s suffixes and uses pitch accents to distinguish meaning.