Lithuanialanguage

Lithuanian is a Baltic language spoken primarily in Lithuania, where it is the official state language. It belongs to the Indo‑European language family and forms a branch with Latvian, although Lithuanian preserves many archaic features that have disappeared from most other Indo‑European languages.

The language is written with the Latin alphabet, adapted with diacritics such as ą, č, ę, ė, į, ų, ū, and š, to represent vowels and consonants that are phonemically distinct. Orthographic conventions were standardized in the early 20th century and further refined after the country’s independence in 1990.

Lithuanian grammar is highly inflectional. Nouns decline for case, number, and gender, with seven grammatical cases including nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. Verbs conjugate for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number, and the language includes a rich system of participles and infinitives. Word order is generally subject‑verb‑object, but is flexible due to the heavy inflectional system.

Its phonology features a relatively large vowel inventory and consonant clusters. Stress is typically fixed on the first syllable of a word. Lithuanian preserves vowel gradation (ablaut) and has retained the voiced and voiceless pairings of certain consonants.

There are two main dialect groups: Western (standard), based on the Kaunas and Samogitian subdialects, and Eastern, which includes the Šiauliai vernacular. The standard language largely derives from the Western group.

According to the 2021 census, approximately 1.1 million people in Lithuania use Lithuanian as their native language, and it is spoken by diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The language is recognized by UNESCO as a Protected language, and it participates in international language preservation efforts.