Lithuanian language
| Lithuanian | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lietuvių kalba | ||||
| Native to | Lithuania, Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland, Uruguay, USA | |||
| Region | Europe | |||
| Native speakers | 2.96 million (Lithuania) 170,000 (Abroad) 3.13 million (Worldwide)[1] (date missing) |
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| Language family |
Indo-European
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| Dialects | ||||
| Writing system | Roman script | |||
| Official status | ||||
| Official language in |  Lithuania European Union |
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| Recognised minority language in |  Poland |
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| Regulated by | Commission of the Lithuanian Language | |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-1 | lt | |||
| ISO 639-2 | lit | |||
| ISO 639-3 | lit | |||
| Linguasphere | 54-AAA-a | |||
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The Lithuanian language is a Baltic language. It is from Lithuania, spoken in a few countries in Europe, as well as in the Americas and Australia.
Lithuanian and Latvian are the only remaining Baltic languages. Both languages have many things in common. Lithuanian, however, adopted fewer words and phrases from German and other languages. However, long ago Lithuanian was affected by the Slavic languages, so the main barbarisms were replaced with Lithuanian words only in 1920, by Lithuanian philologist Jonas Jablonskis and others.
There are two main dialects of Lithuanian. Samogitian is the dialect mostly used in West Lithuania, the other, widely used in the whole country is Aukštaitian (High-landers' dialect). The standard Lithuanian comes from West-Aukštaitian.
The first book written in Lithuanian is Katekizmas by Martynas Mažvydas. It was published in East Prussia in 1547.
