The Lithuanian language and the kindred Latvian belong to the Baltic group of Indo-European languages. Out of all the living Indo-European languages, Lithuanian has best retained its ancient system of phonetics and most of its morphological features. Since the 19th century, when the similarity between Lithuanian and Sanskrit was discovered, Lithuanians take a particular pride in their mother tongue as the oldest living Indo-European language. To this day, to some people their understanding of their ethnicity is based on their linguistic identity. Lithuanians proudly quote the French linguist Antoine Meillet, who said that anyone who wanted to hear old Indo-European should go and listen to a Lithuanian farmer. One can safely say that Lithuanian is a language that cannot be understood by a speaker of any other language who has not learnt it. More than that, even users of the main dialects: aukštaičių (highland) and žemaičių (lowland or Samogitian) can hardly understand each other unless they communicate in Standard Lithuanian. Linguists divide the main dialects into numerous sub-dialects, forms of speech, etc, which have endured up till now. This is a unique phenomenon in all Europe.
In the Renaissance times the Lithuanian language was not derived from the Indo-Europeans, which were even not known at that time. There were completely different theories on the origins of the language. One of them was an Italian origin theory. Lithuanians noticed that many words in Lithuanian and Latin were similar. Venclovas Mikalojaitis (Michalo Lituanus, Mykolas Lietuvis) made a list of 74 words with roots from Latin: lot. dentes – lit. dantys, deus – dievas, nasus – nosis. It is not necessary to master both languages to recognize the Latin resembling words. The Latin similar words led Lithuanians to suspect that the Lithuanian language is a distorted dialect of the Latin language. Such an inference seemed to be very ‘honourable’ for Catholic Lithuania, because Latin was the sacred language par excellence.
Indo-European origin. In XIXth century with the rise of the Indo-Europeistics all the previous theories concerned with the origin of Lithuanians were dismissed. The conclusion was drawn that languages spoken by the Indo-Europeans in the Old continent split into different languages. It came to light that Lithuanians did not distort a dialect of the Latin language. However, Lithuanian, Italian and Latin are cognate languages, but this affinity is rather far off.
The written Lithuanian language evolved relatively late in comparison with some of its neighbours. The first piece of the written Lithuanian is Catechismus (1547) by Martynas Mažvydas. Postilė (1599) by Mikalojus Daukša, the trilingual Polish-Latin-Lithuanian dictionary (around 1620) by Konstantinas Sirvydas, and the grammar of the Lithuanian language by Danielius Kleinas (1653) had a great impact on the standardisation of the language. A masterpiece of Lithuanian literature, a poem in hexameter ‘Metai’ (The Year), written by Kristijonas Donelaitis between 1758 and 1765, was an encyclopaedia of the peasant’s life. For his merits to the written Lithuanian language, Donelaitis is compared to Dante or Shakespeare and their influence on the written Italian and English.
Lithuania is the only country that has built monuments to book distributors. After the uprising of 1863, the Russian tsarist authorities prohibited using Latin characters in publishing Lithuanian texts. The prohibition lasted for several decades. Lithuanians categorically rejected the idea of writing in Cyrillic, as proposed by the authorities. The resistance to the ban on Lithuanian schools and publishing was highly organised and effective. Manuscripts were taken secretly to East Prussia, from where the printed books were smuggled back over the border to Lithuania. The Russian authorities tried to suppress the distribution of books that they considered illegal, book distributors were shot, and several thousand, mostly peasants, were exiled to Siberia. The linguistic and cultural resistance was so strong that during the ban on the printed Lithuanian language the foundations for standard Lithuanian were laid. In 2004 Lithuania marked the 100th anniversary of re-introduction of Lithuanian language into public and cultural life.
At the beginning of the 20th century the present alphabet was introduced. The standardisation of the language was influenced by the studies of the famous Lithuanian linguists Jonas Jablonskis and Kazimieras Būga. The Lithuanian Language Institute, having accumulated
a 4.5-million-word file, published a definitive 20-volume ‘Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language’.
The Lithuanian Constitution stipulates that ‘the Lithuanian language is the official language of the Republic of Lithuania’. Consequently, Lithuanian language is used in all walks of life. There is a Commission of the Lithuanian language which observes the usage of the Lithuanian language. This commission has the power to punish with a pecuniary punishment people for the incorrect usage of the Lithuanian language in public. The right of persons belonging to national minorities to use their national language is also respected in Lithuania and it is concerned with the retention of Russian, Polish, Belarusian and other languages of national minorities, whose members have been traditionally settled in Lithuania. Lithuanian is the language studied as a foreign language in Italy, United States, Germany, Poland, Czech, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, France, Slovakia, Brazil, Australia, the UK, and Canada and in many other countries.
