French linguist Antoine Meillet once said that: “Anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant.” As a language, Lithuanian is one of the most archaic Indo-European languages, still retaining features found in Ancient Greek and even Sanskrit.
Aside from an unwillingness to change, the Lithuanian language is also extremely resilient. In the last 150 years, it was banned for 40 years (1864-1904) from being taught, published, or using the Latin script following an uprising, and later, under 40+ years of Soviet rule following World War 2, it was relegated to being a secondary language behind Russian.
The oldest known work written in Lithuanian is a translation of the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, and Nicene Creed written in the first decades of the 1500s using the Latin script and the Southern Aukštaitian dialect, meaning that, previous to this, Lithuanian had been a spoken language for at least 700 years.
Though the Lithuanian alphabet uses the Latin script, it is supplemented with diacritics, such as accent marks, giving it a total of 32 letters, instead of the typical 26.
As with most modern languages, there is a tendency for loanwords from larger, more widely used languages, such as English, Russian, German, etc., to appear in Lithuanian, usually when referring to foreign cultural items or technology. In order to keep the language, well, more “Lithuanian,” the government has enacted a language policy to develop local equivalents to foreign words; however, this policy has yet to be successful.
Lithuanian has 2 distinct dialects – Aukštaitian, (Highland Lithuanian) and Žemaičių/Žemaitiu (Samogitian, Lowland Lithuanian) – each of which have 3 sub-dialects. 6 total dialects may not sound too difficult, but the Lowland Lithuanian pulls heavily from the extinct Curonian language, which contains more elements from Latvian, so, even in a smaller country, there are a number of ways to say the same thing, depending on location.
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