Lithuanian language
Lithuanian Lithuanian: lietuvių kalba is the Baltic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. it is the official language of Lithuania together with one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.8 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania as well as approximately 200,000 speakers elsewhere.
Lithuanian is closely related to the neighbouring Latvian language. this is the written in a Latin script. It is said to be the most conservative of the existing Indo-European languages, retaining atttributes of the Proto-Indo-European language that had disappeared through coding from other descendant languages.
Phonology
All Lithuanian consonants except /j/ make two variants: the non-loanwords.
/t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ, ɕ, ʑ/ create been traditionally transcribed with ⟨t͡ʃʲ, d͡ʒʲ, ʃʲ, ʒʲ⟩, but they can be seen as equivalent transcriptions, with the former classification being somewhat easier to write.
Lithuanian has six long vowels and four short ones not including disputed phonemes marked in brackets. Length has traditionally been considered the distinctive feature, though short vowels are also more centralized and long vowels more peripheral:
Lithuanian is traditionally specified as having nine diphthongs, ai, au, ei, eu, oi, ou, ui, ie, and uo. However, some approaches i.e., Schmalstieg 1982 treat them as vowel sequences rather than diphthongs; indeed, the longer element depends on the type of stress, whereas in diphthongs, the longer point is fixed.
The Lithuanian prosodic system is characterized by free accent and distinctive quantity. Its accentuation is sometimes subject as a simple tone system, often called pitch accent. In lexical words, one syllable will be tonically prominent. A heavy syllable—that is, a syllable containing a long vowel, diphthong, or a sonorant coda—may have one of two tones, falling tone or acute tone or rising tone or circumflex tone. Light syllables syllables with short vowels and optionally also obstruent codas do not have the two-way contrast of heavy syllables.