Балто-славянские языки: история и современное состояние

Balto Slavic languages of the Indo European language family

The Baltic languages are a branch of the Indo European language family spoken natively or as a second language by a population of about 6.5–7.0 million people mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Europe. Together with the Slavic languages, they form the Balto Slavic branch of the Indo European family. Scholars usually regard them as a single subgroup divided into two branches: West Baltic (containing only extinct languages) and East Baltic (containing at least two living languages, Lithuanian, Latvian, and by some counts including Latgalian and Samogitian as separate languages rather than dialects of those two). The range of the East 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, had possibly conserved the greatest number of properties from Proto Baltic. Although related, Lithuanian, Latvian, and particularly Old Prussian have lexicons that differ substantially from one another and so the languages are not mutually intelligible. Relatively low mutual interaction for neighbouring languages historically led to gradual erosion of mutual intelligibility, and development of their respective linguistic innovations that did not exist in shared Proto Baltic. The substantial number of false friends and various uses and sources of loanwords from their surrounding languages are considered to be the major reasons for poor mutual intelligibility today.

Within Indo European, the Baltic languages are generally classified as forming a single family with two branches: Eastern and Western Baltic. But these two branches are sometimes classified as independent branches of Balto Slavic itself. +Baltic languages by number of native speakersEast Baltic Latvian c. 1.5 million Latgalian 150,000–200,000 Lithuanian c. 4 million Samogitian 500,000 Selonian Extinct since 16th century Semigallian Extinct since 16th century Old Curonian Extinct since 16th centuryWest Baltic Western Galindian Extinct since 14th century Old Prussian Extinct since early 18th century Skalvian Extinct since 16th century Sudovian Extinct since 17th centuryDnieper Baltic Eastern Galindian Extinct since 14th centuryItalics indicate disputed classification. indicates languages sometimes considered to be dialects. indicates extinct languages.

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 Baltic Aesti tribe was mentioned by ancient historians such as Tacitus as early as 98 CE, the first attestation of a Baltic language was 1369, in a Basel epigram of two lines written in Old Prussian. Lithuanian was first attested in a printed book, which is a Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas published in 1547. Latvian appeared in a printed Catechism in 1585. One reason for the late attestation is that the Baltic peoples resisted Christianization longer than any other Europeans, which delayed the introduction of writing and isolated their languages from outside influence. With the establishment of a German state in Prussia, and the mass influx of Germanic (and to a lesser degree Slavic speaking) settlers, the Prussians began to be assimilated, and by the end of the 17th century, the Prussian language had become extinct. After the Partitions of Poland, most of the Baltic lands were under the rule of the Russian Empire, where the native languages or alphabets were sometimes prohibited from being written down or used publicly in a Russification effort (see Lithuanian press ban for the ban in force from 1864 to 1904).

Speakers of modern Baltic languages are generally concentrated within the borders of Lithuania and Latvia, and in emigrant communities in the United States, Canada, Australia and the countries within the former borders of the Soviet Union. Historically the languages were spoken over a larger area: west to the mouth of the Vistula river in present day Poland, at least as far east as the Dniepr river in present day Belarus, perhaps even to Moscow, and perhaps as far south as Kyiv. Key evidence of Baltic language presence in these regions is found in hydronyms (names of bodies of water) that are characteristically Baltic. The use of hydronyms is generally accepted to determine the extent of a culture's influence, but not the date of such influence. The eventual expansion of the use of Slavic languages in the south and east, and Germanic languages in the west, reduced the geographic distribution of Baltic languages to a fraction of the area that they formerly covered. The Russian geneticist Oleg Balanovsky speculated that there is a predominance of the assimilated pre Slavic substrate in the genetics of East and West Slavic populations, according to him the common genetic structure which contrasts East Slavs and Balts from other populations may suggest that the pre Slavic substrate of the East Slavs consists most significantly of Baltic speakers, which predated the Slavs in the cultures of the Eurasian steppe according to archaeological references he cites.

Though Estonia is geopolitically included among the Baltic states due to its location, Estonian is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family and is not related to the Baltic languages, which are Indo European. The Mordvinic languages, spoken mainly along western tributaries of the Volga, show several dozen loanwords from one or more Baltic languages. These may have been mediated by contacts with the Eastern Balts along the river Oka. In regards to the same geographical location, Asko Parpola, in a 2013 article, suggested that the Baltic presence in this area, dated to c. 200–600 CE, is due to an "elite superstratum". However, linguist Petri Kallio argued that the Volga Oka is a secondary Baltic speaking area, expanding from East Baltic, due to a large number of Baltic loanwords in Finnic and Saami. Finnish scholars also indicate that Latvian had extensive contacts with Livonian, and, to a lesser extent, to Estonian and South Estonian. Therefore, this contact accounts for the number of Finnic hydronyms in Lithuania and Latvia that increase in a northwards direction. Parpola, in the same article, supposed the existence of a Baltic substratum for Finnic, in Estonia and coastal Finland. In the same vein, Kallio argues for the existence of a lost "North Baltic language" that would account for loanwords during the evolution of the Finnic branch.