Baltic Languages - Relationship With Other Indo-European Languages

Relationship With Other Indo-European Languages

The Baltic languages are of particular interest to linguists because they retain many archaic features, which are believed to have been present in the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language.

Linguists have had a hard time establishing the precise relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family. Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited or nonexistent written record, their existence being known only from the records of ancient historians and personal or place names. All of the languages in the Baltic group (including the living ones) were first written down relatively late in their probable existence as distinct languages. These two factors combined with others have obscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family. They show the closest relationship with the Slavic languages, and have, by most scholars, been reconstructed to a common Proto-Balto-Slavic stage, during which Common Balto-Slavic lexical, phonological, morphological and accentological isoglosses are thought to have developed. There is a minority of scholars who argue that Baltic forms a separate branch of Indo-European, or that it is not a genetic node in either Indo-European family or Balto-Slavic, but that Eastern and Western Baltic are separate branches of Balto-Slavic.