Selonian was an Eastern Baltic language, which was 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. 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 Latvian ( ), also known as Lettish, is an Eastern Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken in the Baltic region. It is the language of Latvians and the official language of Latvia as well ...

. There are some traces of the Selonian language in the northeastern sub-dialects of the Aukštaitian dialect of the

Lithuanian language Lithuanian ( ) is an Eastern Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the official language of Lithuania and one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.8 mill ...

, mostly in the lexicon.

Classification

It is considered that the Selonian language retained the Proto-Baltic phonemes *an, *en, *in, *un like the

, but like the

the Proto-Baltic , changed to c, dz, and the Proto-Baltic *š, *ž changed to s, z.

References

East Baltic languages Medieval languages Extinct Baltic languages Extinct languages of Europe Languages of Lithuania Languages of Latvia {{Ie-lang-stub