Lithuanian Language Facts

Lithuanian is spoken by 3 million people (98 percent of the population in the Republic of Lithuania. Outside of Lithuania, it is widely spoken in Poland (70,000 speakers). It is one of two currently spoken Baltic languages, the other being Latvian. Approximately 3.5 million people speak Lithuanian as their first language. Lithuanian is perhaps the oldest of all the modern Indo-European languages. It has retained many old grammatical forms that only have been attested in other long extinct Indo-European languages. It has been said that the speech of a Lithuanian peasant is the closest thing existing today to the speech of the original Indo-Europeans. Lithuanian also bears certain remarkable similarities to Sanskrit, the progenitor of the modern Indic languages. Lithuanian uses a modified form of the Roman script. Diacritics are used to symbolize an important aspect of Lithuanian speech, namely "accent." Prior to adopting the Roman alphabet, there was limited use of the Cyrillic between 1864 and 1905.