The language of Lithuania. It is also spoken expatriates in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Lithuanian has two main dialect groups: Low Lithuanian (along the Baltic coast) and High Lithuanian, with further dialect subdivisions. It has retained archaic Indo-European forms although modern Standard Lithuanian (based on the West High Lithuanian dialect) did not develop fully until just before the first period of Lithuanian political independence (1918-40), when it became the country's official language. Especially since World War II, Russian has been a major influence on Lithuanian.
Lithuanian is highly inflected . In standard Lithuanian, nouns have seven cases (some dialects have eight or more). Gender is masculine and feminine, although some traces of the old neutral gender survive. Number is singular and plural; some dialects also have a dual number (for two items). The language is rich in the use of diphthongs and, like Latvian, in rising and falling intonations intonations. Lithuanian is written in the Latin alphabet, with additional markings.
| Name | Where spoken | Language Family | How many (000s) |
| Lithuanian | Lithuania | Indo-European (Balto-Slavic) | 2.5-3m |
Table source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, David Ctystal, Cambridge University Press
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