Particularities of the Lithuanian
It is estimated that today Lithuanian is spoken by 4 million people, of whom scarcely 3 million live in Lithuania proper. Lithuanian along with Latvian forms the linguistical group of the remaining Baltic tongues that are based directly upon the common European linguistic roots of the Indo-Germanic languages. Up to the 17th century there were still 10 other such known languages, all of which are extinct today. The written language in its present form was only developed in the first half of the 20th century. Prior to this, Lithuanian was the language of the peasants; Polish was spoken in the cities. Since May 2004 Lithuanian is one of the official languages of the European Union.
Typical of the Lithuanian is the system in which foreign loan words and even proper names are transliterated pursuant to the "Lithuanian" pronunciation (e.g. "Džordžas Bušas" for "George Bush" or "Haris Poteris" for "Harry Potter"). Lithuanian endings are also suffixed to foreign words (e.g. "ananasas", "vunderkindas"). This addition to the ending is purely grammatical in nature and is indispensable to the Lithuanian language, which does not have any articles, for comprehensibility's sake. Lithuanian is a tonal language, i.e. different intonation can be relevant to meaning. As a result of this, the different intonation is frequently expressed by an accent.
