The Lithuanian language belongs, together with Latvian, to the East-Baltic group of the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages. Most of the words absorbed by Lithuanian come from the Slavic languages.
Lithuanian is the official language in Lithuania. There are Lithuanian minorities in the north-western part of Belorussia, in Ukraine and in the north-eastern part of Poland. Until 1945, Lithuanian was also spoken in the northern part of East-Prussia (now Kaliningrad Oblast, which is part of Russia).
Hello - labas
The structure of Lithuanian is remarkably archaic, and therefore it is considered to be the most conservative still-living Indo-European language. Some grammatical forms and accents known from Sanskrite and from the Indo-European basic language, which have been lost by all the other Indo-European languages, can still be found in Lithuanian.
The Lithuanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and has a number of extra diacritical signs, such as: Ą, č, ę, į, š, ų, ū, ž.
Lithuanians in Poland (20.000 Speaker)
Lithuanians in Estonia (2.200 Speaker)
Lithuanians in Latvia (31.000 Speaker)
Lithuanians in Ukraine (11.000 Speaker)
Lithuanians in Russia (70.000 Speaker)
Lithuanians in Belarus (7.600 Speaker)
Lithuania (3.000.000 Speaker)