Lithuanian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Lithuanian is a language that has fascinated scholars for centuries, not because it is widely spoken, but because of what it preserves. Linguists consider it the most conservative of all living Indo-European languages, retaining features of the ancient Proto-Indo-European tongue that have vanished from virtually every other descendant. The earliest Lithuanian texts date only to around 1500 AD, yet the grammar and phonology of the language mirror structures found in Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, two of the most ancient written languages humanity possesses. How does a language spoken by roughly 2.8 million people in a small Baltic nation hold the keys to reconstructing a lost ancestor spoken thousands of years ago? And how did it survive bans, occupations, and centuries of pressure to abandon it entirely? The answers reach from the Bronze Age forests east of the Baltic Sea all the way to clandestine schoolrooms in the 19th century, where children memorized prayers in a language their government had outlawed.

• 2. A Living Fossil

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  Sanskrit scholars in the 19th century were the first to notice something remarkable. Lithuanian words for everyday things, like vilkas for wolf, sūnus for son, and ugnis for fire, correspond almost exactly to their Sanskrit counterparts vṛka, sūnu, and agni. The philologist Isaac Taylor wrote in his 1892 book The Origin of the Aryans that the Lithuanians seemed to have the best claim to represent the primitive Aryan race, because their language had undergone fewer phonetic changes and grammatical losses than any other. August Schleicher, a professor at Charles University in Prague who published the first scientific compendium of Lithuanian in 1856-57, went further. He asserted that Lithuanian could compete with Greek and Old Latin in the perfection of its forms. These were not idle compliments; they were observations about the language's structural integrity.

  Proto-Balto-Slavic branched off directly from Proto-Indo-European, then split into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic. The Baltic branch preserved features that Slavic, Germanic, Romance, and other families have long since shed. The Baltic hydronyms, meaning river and lake names of Baltic origin, stretch from the Vistula River in the west all the way to the east of Moscow, and from the Baltic Sea down to south of Kyiv. This vast territory of Baltic-origin place names tells researchers where Baltic speakers once lived, long before any written record confirmed their presence. Among the features Lithuanian preserves are a pitch accent system similar to ancient Greek and Sanskrit, seven noun cases in everyday use with additional archaic cases still surviving in spoken and idiomatic language, and what linguists describe as the richest participle system of all Indo-European languages.

• 3. The First Words

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  The first recorded Lithuanian word appeared not in a learned manuscript but in a military chronicle. On the 24th of December 1207, an entry in the chronicle of Henry of Latvia recorded the interjection Ba, a sound uttered by a Lithuanian raider after he found no loot to pillage in a Livonian church. It is a striking debut for a language that scholars would later call the closest living relative of the proto-language from which all Indo-European tongues descend. By the time that entry was written, Lithuanian had been a spoken language for well over a millennium.

  The earliest surviving written Lithuanian text is a translation, dated to roughly 1503-1525, of the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Nicene Creed, composed in the Southern Aukštaitian dialect. But the language's written history accelerated decisively on the 8th of January 1547, when Martynas Mažvydas printed the first Lithuanian book, a Catechism. Mažvydas' work was produced in Lithuania Minor, the Lithuanian-speaking territory under Prussian rule, where authorities had supported Lithuanian-language education in parishes and peasant schools since 1530-1560. For two centuries, the Duchy of Prussia took no major obstructive measures against this teaching. In that same Catechism, about 20% of the vocabulary came from loanwords, many derived from Polish, Belarusian, and German, reflecting the crossroads character of the region. Loanwords from those same languages made their way into Lithuanian through trade and contact with Prussia during the era of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

• 4. Royal Courts and Contested Tongues

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  Lithuanian was not merely a peasant tongue. Jogaila, the Lithuanian ruler who became King of Poland, was an ethnic Lithuanian by male-line descent who knew and spoke Lithuanian with his cousin Vytautas the Great. When Jogaila arrived in Samogitia during its Christianization, none of the clergy who accompanied him could communicate with the native population, so Jogaila himself instructed the Samogitians in Catholicism, speaking to them in their dialect of Lithuanian. Vytautas the Great confirmed the linguistic unity of Lithuanian and Samogitian in a letter dated the 11th of March 1420 to Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor.

  At the court of Sigismund II Augustus, the last Grand Duke of Lithuania prior to the Union of Lublin, both Polish and Lithuanian were spoken equally widely. In 1552, Sigismund II Augustus ordered that announcements from the Magistrate of Vilnius be issued in Lithuanian, Polish, and Ruthenian simultaneously, with the Magistrate of Kaunas under the same requirement. In 1501, a priest of the Vilnius Cathedral named Erazm Ciołek explained to the Pope that Lithuanians preserve their language and ensure respect to it, describing the situation with the Latin phrase Linguam propriam observant. Yet Latin and Ruthenian dominated written and chancellery use in the Grand Duchy, and by the late 17th and 18th centuries, Ruthenian had been replaced by Polish as the administrative language. When Mikalojus Daukša published his Postil in 1599, he wrote frankly that while few nobles lacked knowledge of Polish, the majority of ordinary people either did not understand Polish or had only a poor knowledge of it.

• 5. Plague, Bans, and Book Smugglers

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  The Great Northern War plague outbreak of 1700-1721 did not spare any corner of Lithuanian-speaking territory. It killed 49% of the residents of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, claiming up to half the population of Samogitia, and 53% of the residents of Lithuania Minor. More than 90% of those who died in Lithuania Minor were Prussian Lithuanians. The demographic catastrophe reshaped the language map. Lithuanian-speaker numbers in Lithuania Minor, excluding the Klaipėda Region, fell from around 139,000 in the 19th century to about 8,000 by 1925, as Germanisation and colonization filled the vacuum left by the plague.

  In 1864, following the January Uprising, Mikhail Muravyov, the Russian Governor General of Lithuania, banned publication of Lithuanian texts in the Latin alphabet. Schools were forbidden to teach Lithuanian. Even personal conversations between pupils in Lithuanian were prohibited. Books continued to be printed across the border in East Prussia and in the United States, then smuggled into the country by book carriers known as knygnešiai. These individuals risked long prison sentences to bring Lithuanian-language material home. The ban lasted until 1904. During its height, the Russian Empire Census of 1897 found that 53.5% of Lithuanians aged ten and older were literate, against a Russian Empire average of only 24-27.7%. Lithuanian children in the Russian Empire were taught mainly by their parents or in clandestine schools run by informal teachers called daractors. Only 6.9% attended Russian state schools, reflecting broad resistance to Russification. By 1939, following the restoration of Lithuanian statehood in 1918 and the improvements to education that followed, the literacy rate had climbed to 92% of the population.

• 6. Standardizing the Language

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  Jonas Jablonskis, who lived from 1860 to 1930, is known as the father of standardized Lithuanian. The conventions of written Lithuanian had been evolving across the 19th century, but Jablonskis was the first to formally set down the essential principles in the introduction to his Lietuviškos kalbos gramatika. He drew the standard primarily from his native Western Aukštaitian dialect, supplemented with features of the Eastern Prussian Lithuanian dialect of Lithuania Minor. Both of those dialects had kept archaic phonetics largely intact because of the influence of neighboring Old Prussian.

  The standardization effort had an earlier rival. In the 19th century, some scholars proposed basing standard Lithuanian on the Samogitian dialect instead, but the project collapsed because every advocate offered a different subdialect and no consensus emerged. The modern alphabet also has a deliberate political dimension. During the Lithuanian National Revival in the 19th century, the Polish-origin letters sz and cz were replaced with š and č borrowed from Czech orthography. One stated reason was that the Czech letters were shorter; another, equally important, was that they helped distinguish Lithuanian writing from Polish. The letters š and č appeared first in publications aimed at educated readers, such as the newspapers Varpas and Tėvynės sargas, while less educated readers continued seeing sz and cz until after 1906. The letter ž was also adopted from Czech, and the letter ū was the latest addition, contributed by Jablonskis himself.

• 7. Soviet Pressure and Restoration

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  The Soviet occupation of 1940, German occupation in 1941, and Soviet re-occupation in 1944 reduced independent Lithuania to a Soviet Socialist Republic. Authorities introduced Lithuanian-Russian bilingualism. In 1948, around 80% of the 22,000 Communist Party members in the Lithuanian SSR were Russians. By 1970, between 61% and 74% of radio and television broadcasts were in Russian. Lithuanian speakers passively resisted the shift; they continued to use their own language in daily life even as Russian took precedence in institutions.

  On the 18th of November 1988, the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR restored Lithuanian as the official language, driven by the popular pro-independence movement Sąjūdis. Less than two years later, on the 11th of March 1990, the Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania was passed. The Constitution of 1992, adopted during a Lithuanian constitutional referendum, recognized Lithuanian as the sole official language of the state. Today, approximately 2,955,200 people in Lithuania, around 86% of the 2015 population, are native speakers of Lithuanian. The language is also an official language of the European Union. A 1934 study found that loanwords then constituted a substantial part of the Lithuanian lexicon, with Polish, Belarusian, and German being the main sources. After decades of language preservation policy, Slavic loanwords now make up only 1.5% of standard Lithuanian vocabulary, and German loanwords only 0.5%, a testament to how thoroughly the standardization effort reshaped the language's lexical composition.