Native to Latvia and Lithuania ISO 639-3 sxl Glottolog None | Extinct 16th century Linguist list sxl | |
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Language family Indo-European
Balto-Slavic
Eastern Baltic
Selonian | ||
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 South Eastern Latvia and North Eastern Lithuania.
Contents
History
During the 13th-15th centuries the Selonians lost their language after being assimilated by the Latgalians and partly by the Lithuanians.
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 North Eastern sub-dialects of the Aukštaitian dialect of 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.