Baltic languages

High school (ages 12+)
History & Culture

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/baltic-languages

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the geographic distribution?Primarily spoken in Lithuania and Latvia, with historical influence extending further east
2. What is the key living languages?Lithuanian and Latvian, with debated status for Latgalian and Samogitian
3. Why can Lithuanian and Latvian speakers not easily understand each other?Over many centuries, each language added its own words and sounds. These changes made the two languages very different, so people speaking one find it hard to follow the other.
4. Which old Baltic language is the best known today?Old Prussian is the best-documented old language. It kept many features that were common in the very early Baltic languages.

Proto-Indo-European: The hypothetical reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family.
Linguistic Conservatism: The retention of archaic linguistic features from an ancestral language.
Mutual Intelligibility: The ability of speakers of two different languages to understand each other without prior study.