Dzūkian dialect ( lt, dzūkų tarmė), known in academic works as Southern Aukštaitian dialect ( lt, pietų aukštaičių patarmė), is one of the three main sub-dialects of the

Aukštaitian dialect Aukštaitian ( lt, Aukštaičių tarmė) is one of the dialects of the Lithuanian language, spoken in the ethnographic regions of Aukštaitija, Dzūkija and Suvalkija. It became the basis for the standard Lithuanian language. Classification ...

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 milli ...

. Dzūkian dialect is spoken in

Dzūkija Dzūkija or Dainava is one of five ethnographic regions of Lithuania. Dzūkija is a cultural region defined by traditional lifestyles and dialects of the local Lithuanian population (mostly rural farmers) and has never been defined as a politi ...

, southern Lithuania. Its most distinctive feature is replacing ''t'', ''d'' before ''i'', ''į'', ''y'', ''ie'' and ''č'', ''dž'' with ''c'' and ''dz'' () instead of ( – just, ( instead of – size, instead of – to braid, instead of – guests). Since the region borders Slavic lands, the dialect has many Slavic

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...

s and barbarisms.

References

* Lithuanian dialects {{Ie-lang-stub