Historical Dispute
The nature of the relationship of the Balto-Slavic languages has been the subject of much discussion from the very beginning of historical Indo-European linguistics as a scientific discipline. A few are more intent on explaining the similarities between the two groups not in terms of a genetic relationship, but by language contact and dialectal closeness in the Proto-Indo-European period.
Baltic and Slavic share more close phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and accentological similarities than do any other language groups within the Indo-European language family. The notable early Indo-Europeanist August Schleicher (1861) proposed a simple solution: From Proto-Indo-European descended Proto-Balto-Slavic, out of which Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic emerged. The Latvian linguist Jānis Endzelīns thought, however, that any similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages were a result of an intensive language contact, i.e., that they were not genetically related and that there was no common Proto-Balto-Slavic language. Antoine Meillet (1905, 1908, 1922, 1925, 1934), the distinguished French Indo-Europeanist, in reaction to a second simplified theory of Schleicher's, propounded a view according to which all similarities of Baltic and Slavic occurred accidentally, by independent parallel development, and that there was no Proto-Balto-Slavic language. In turn, the Polish linguist Rozwadowski suggests that the similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages are a result of not only genetic relationship, but also of later language contact. Thomas Olander corroborates the claim of genetic relationship in his research in the field of comparative Balto-Slavic accentology.
Even though some linguists still reject a genetic relationship, most scholars accept that Baltic and Slavic languages experienced a period of common development. Beekes (1995:22), for example, states expressly that "he Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group". Gray and Atkinson's (2003) application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a genetic relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages and dating the split of the family to about 1400 BCE. That this was found using a very different methodology than other studies lends some credence to the links between the two.
Read more about this topic: Balto-Slavic Languages
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