Modern Interpretation
The Balto-Slavic languages are most often divided into Baltic and Slavic branches. However, another division was proposed in the 1960s by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov: that the Balto-Slavic proto-language split from the start into West Baltic, East Baltic and Proto-Slavic. Thus Ivanov and Toporov questioned not only Balto-Slavic unity, but also Baltic unity. In their framework, Proto-Slavic is a peripheral and innovative Balto-Slavic dialect which suddenly expanded, due to a conjunction of historical circumstances, and effectively erased all the other Balto-Slavic dialects, except in the marginal areas where Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian developed. This model is supported by glottochronologic studies by V.V.Kromer although both of the most recent computer-generated family trees have a Baltic node parallel to the Slavic node. Onomastic evidence shows that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Slavic.
Read more about this topic: Balto-Slavic Languages
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