Lithuanian Translations

POZENA’s professional Lithuanian translations

• Lietuvių kalba is an Eastern Baltic language, which originated in the 6th and 7th centuries AD. In the 9th century Lithuanian and Latvian started to exhibit differences, which at present are so large that the two languages are not mutually intelligible. The oldest account of Lithuanian, a handwritten prayer in the book Tractatus sacerdotalis, dates from the early 16th century. Throughout its history, Lithuanian managed to resist Slavic influences. These days, it is regulated by the Commission of the Lithuanian Language, which protects the language from the influx of borrowings (especially from English), by promoting native neologisms.
• In terms of morphology and phonology, Lithuanian is, besides Latvian, one of the most archaic living Indo-European languages. It has retained many features of the proto-Indo-European language. Modern Lithuanian displays moderate dialectal variation. Its regional dialects are classified as belonging to one of the two major dialectal groups: Highland Lithuanian (Aukštaitian) or Lowland Lithuanian (Žemaičių/Žemaitiu).
• Lithuanian is one of the EU’s official languages.

• Lithuanian is a highly inflectional language. There are seven cases, two numbers and two genders (only masculine and feminine). The language has a very rich verbal morphology with various forms and structures to express the categories of tense, mood and aspect. Lithuanian features the present tense, the past tense, the past iterative tense, the future tense, two conditional moods (I and II) as well as compound tenses with participles (Lithuanian has 13 participles).
• An interesting feature of Lithuanian lexis is a wide range of diminutive suffixes. For example, the meaning of the English little brother can be expressed by one-suffix forms (brol-el-is, brol-iuk-as, brol-ut-is, brol-yt-is, brol-už-is) and multiple suffixes (brol-ėl-iuk-as, brol-už-ėl-is, brol-už-yt-is).
• Female family names indicate whether a woman is married or not (this rule does not apply to male last names). Unmarried women’s names end in the aitė, –ytė, -iūtė and -utė suffixes. The surnames of married women have the suffix –ienė. However, the feminist movement in Lithuania argues strongly in favor of masculine gender family names for both married and unmarried women.
• As a result of language protection policies, Slavic loanwords now constitute only 1.5% of Lithuanian vocabulary (most of them originate from Russian). The turn of the millennium saw a number of English words being adopted by Lithuanian, e.g. monitorius (Eng. computer monitor) or kompiuteris (Eng. computer).