User:PK2/Baltic languages
Balto-Slavic languages of the Indo-European language family / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
Baltic | |
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Ethnicity | Balts |
Geographic distribution | Northern Europe |
Linguistic classification | Indo-European
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Subdivisions |
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ISO 639-2 / 5 | bat |
Linguasphere | 54= (phylozone) |
Glottolog | None east2280 (Eastern Baltic) prus1238 (Old Prussian) |
Distribution of the Baltic tribes c. 1200 AD just before the coming of the Teutonic Order. Baltic territory extended far inland. |
Scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two branches: Western Baltic (containing only extinct languages) and Eastern Baltic (containing at least two living languages, Lithuanian, Latvian, and by some counts including Latgalian and Samogitian as separate languages). The range of the Eastern Baltic linguistic influence once possibly reached as far as the Ural Mountains, but this hypothesis has been questioned.[1][2][3]
Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, has possibly retained the most number of properties from Proto-Baltic.[4]
Although related, the Lithuanian, Latvian and, particularly, Old Prussian lexicons differ substantially from one another, and as such they are/were not mutually intelligible. Lack of intelligibility is mainly due to a substantial number of false friends, and different uses and sources of borrowings from their surrounding languages.