Selonian language

Selonian
Selian
Native to	Selonia
Region	Latvia and Lithuania
Ethnicity	Selonians
Extinct	16th century
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic East Baltic Selonian
Language codes
ISO 639-3	sxl
Linguist List	sxl
Glottolog	None
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Distribution of the Baltic tribes, c. 1200 CE (boundaries are approximate)

Selonian was an East Baltic language, which was spoken by the East Baltic tribe of the Selonians, who until the 15th century lived in Selonia, a territory in southeastern Latvia and northeastern Lithuania. The language persisted until the 16th century. ^[1]

History

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.^{[ citation needed ]}

Classification

It is considered that the Selonian language retained the Proto-Baltic sonorant diphthongs *an, *en, *in, unlike 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. ^[2]

References

1. Trask, R. L. (2019-08-08). Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press. p. 303. ISBN   978-1-4744-7331-6.
2. Babaev, Cyril. "Selonian (Selian) language". tied.verbix.com. Retrieved 2017-06-28.