Selonian language

Distribution of the Baltic tribes, c. 1200 CE (boundaries are approximate)

Selonian was a Baltic language spoken by the Eastern Baltic tribe of the Selonians, who until the 15th century lived in Selonia, a territory in southeastern Latvia and northeastern Lithuania.

History[]

During the 13th–15th centuries, the Selonians lost their language after being assimilated by the Lithuanians.^[1]

Traces of the Selonian language can still be found in the territories the Selonians inhabited, especially in the accent and phonetics of the so-called Selonian dialect of the Latvian language. There are some traces of the Selonian language in the northeastern sub-dialects of the Aukštaitian dialect of the Lithuanian language, mostly in the lexicon.

Classification[]

It is considered that the Selonian language retained the Proto-Baltic phonemes *an, *en, *in, *un like the Lithuanian language, but like the Latvian language the Proto-Baltic *kʲ, *ɡʲ changed to c, dz, and the Proto-Baltic *š, *ž changed to s, z.^[1]

References[]

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