Lithuanian translations for your company

Lithuanian is the official language of the Republic of Lithuania; it is spoken by almost three million people there. There are also Lithuanian speakers in Poland, Belarus, Latvia and Russia. The total number of speakers is four million.

Like Latvian, Lithuanian belongs to the Baltic languages of the Indo-Germanic language family. Prehistorically, Lithuanian was close to Slavic and is also related to the Indian languages of the Indo-European language family. It has preserved numerous ancient elements that are important for the study of Indo-European languages. There are two major dialect groups – Lowland Lithuanian in the northwest and Highland Lithuanian in the south, southeast and east. The written language developed from the southwestern Highland Lithuanian; there is proof of written Lithuanian since the beginning of the 16th century.

Lithuanian is an inflectional language – that is, word relationships in a sentence are expressed by inflection of the words. The grammatical structure is complex with seven cases, two genders and – at least in literature – three number classifications (singular, plural and dual); the verbs have numerous participles. Many double sounds (diphthongs) and its rising and falling intonation are characteristic of the Lithuanian language, and the same is true of Latvian. Besides the inherited vocabulary, there are also borrowings from the Slavic and Germanic languages. Anglicisms are discouraged and foreign designations are converted into Lithuanian. Lithuanian is written in Latin letters with special characters that reflect pronunciation and emphasis (diacritical marks).