Baltic languages
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Date: 2021-12-08

Baltic languages, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=4213 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Indo-European_languages
#Baltic_languages
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 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.
Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, has possibly retained the most number of properties from Proto-Baltic.
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.
Within Indo-European, the Baltic languages are generally classified as forming a single family with two branches: Eastern and Western Baltic.
However, these two branches are sometimes classified as independent branches of Balto-Slavic itself.
Balto-Slavic languages （† – extinct language） Distribution of the Baltic tribes c.
1200 AD just before the coming of the Teutonic Order.
Baltic territory extended far inland.
It is believed that the Baltic languages are among the most conservative of the currently remaining Indo-European languages, despite their late attestation.
Although the various Baltic tribes were mentioned by ancient historians as early as 98 CE, the first attestation of a Baltic language was c.
1369, i...