After Great Prince Mindaugas and his descendants in the 13-14th centuries unified lands of Lithuanians, Curonians, Semigalians, the united form of the language started shaping. Today the language is officially spoken in Lithuania, and also by minorities in Poland. Acute, circumflex and gravis intonations act for long and short vowels of Lithuanian, and moreover the stress is absolutely free in the word. There is a number of diphthongs which share the peculiarities of the stress. The system of consonants demonstrates variety of affricates.
Adjectives can be pronominal - their declension is extremely hard to memorize.
The wide range of participles and verbal adverbs is also in use. A great lot of common features in phonetics, morphology and lexicon generated the theory of the common Balto-Slavic language which could exist in East Europe before it split into separate dialects. Lithuanian also has a number of definite cognates in Thracian and other ancient Balkan languages, mostly in lexicon. Close Contacts Slavic is obviously the closest relative of the Baltic tongues. Among other families, Finnish languages definitely influenced morphology and lexicon of Lithuanian.