Lithuanian
The closest thing to the ancestor
The most conservative living Indo-European language, used by linguists to check what the reconstructed parent should look like.
- When linguists reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, Lithuanian is one of the languages they check the answer against, because it changed so little.
- It kept the dual number, for exactly two of something, well into the modern era.
- Seven cases, pitch accents, and a stress that moves around within the same word's forms.
- A Lithuanian word can still be recognisably close to its Sanskrit cousin thousands of years later.
- It was banned in print in Latin letters under Russian rule for forty years, and books were smuggled in by people whose job title translates as book carriers.
The most archaic living Indo-European language: linguists learn it to hear what Sanskrit's cousins sounded like. Still spoken at the supermarket. Vilnius is the EU's best-kept capital secret, and Lithuanians abroad light up like a flare when a foreigner tries their impossible language.
Where Lithuanian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Lithuanian vs Latvian → Lithuanian vs Russian → Lithuanian vs Polish →
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Lithuanian with.
The Lithuanian Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.