Balsių kiekybės sistemų sankirta ir raida

INTERSECTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE VOWEL QUANTITY SYSTEMSSummaryUnder the intersection of two dialectal systems – Southwest (A) and East (B) Lithuanian – the urban Lithuanian system C comes into being. In the latter, vowel length dephonologization is obvious and predicted because of the essential quantitative and qualitative differences existing in both A and B systems. The synchronic alternation there is considered as an indicative of diachronic change in progress.</p

Ilgųjų ir trumpųjų balsių priešpriešos nykimas miestiečių lietuvių kalboje

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF OPPOSITION BETWEEN LONG AND SHORT VOWELS IN URBAN LITHUANIANSummaryThe spoken Lithuanian in Vilnius was studied, special attention being paid to the contacts of languages and the mixture of dialects. Over 70 informants were examined and their speech was thoroughly investigated using a complex of methods and techniques. The existence of some sociolinguistic variances systematically appearing and their close connection with subjective evaluation have been established.It might be concluded from the data obtained that the main linguistic characteristics of Lithua­nian spoken in Vilnius are similar to those known in the Lithuanian dialects.</p

Language policy during the integration of Lithuania into the EU

Straipsnyje apžvelgiamos dabartinės Lietuvos kalbos politikos naujovės. Didesnis dėmesys skiriamas neseniai priimtiems teisiniams aktams šia tema, vertinamas numatytasis ir jau vykdomas kalbos politikos įgyvendinimas. Atskirai apsistojama ties su stojimu į Europos Sąjungą kilusiomis lietuviškos terminijos problemomis, svarstoma įvairių sričių specialistų pasirengimo visavertiškai vartoti norminę kalbą būklė, ieškoma jos gerinimo būdų.The legislation of the language policy in Lithuania is framing quite solidly and looks big even in the Europe context. It is to be regretted that it lacks for management, especially skills to manage the introducing of the language policy guides and means. In the context of today’s European Union challenges the purist character of the Lithuanian language planning could be evaluated differently. On the one hand, various new fashions in the field of the Lithuanian language usage are not taken incautiously, what guarantees its safety, purity and peculiarity. On the other hand, growing gulf between the principles of language codification and needs or interests of the society is troubling. This gap might challenge the lack of self-confidence of the mother tongue representatives, the standard language being that of benefit of the elite of society.Language contacts and language changing processes are frightening most of all. The Lithuanian society for a long time used to live in some kind feeling of the resistance to the Russian language constrain. That's why the Lithuanian language policy still is that of defensive one. Otherwise, the strengthening of democracy has set at liberty the population of Lithuania itself, people, especially the youth, does not want to accept those language norms, which are forced them down by linguists. The new possibility freely to cross the Lithuanian borders reciprocally emerges meet the requirements of learning foreign languages even giving therefore the spheres of the Lithuanian language for foreign ones, especially the English. That's why a lot of new language nurturance projects, techniques and methodology are needed. Some of them are discussed in this paper. The main aim of the Lithuanian language policy is to boost the prestige of the Lithuanian language, to modernize it and the means of teaching and correcting it

Tauragnų apylinkių gyventojų pavardės

This article analyses and compares surnames of residents of the Tauragnai area based on census data for Tauragnai for 1731 and 1792, County data for 1923 and Local Government Area data for 2000. Also used are lists of residents from 1554 and 1636 from the Linkmenai area, part of which now belongs to the Tauragnai Local Government Area. A comparison of the names shown on all these lists and in the LPŽ enables us to identify typical Tauragnai area surnames. As far back as 1554 there were people in the area with the surnames Bajarūnas, Budreika, Kirdeikis, Motiejūnas, Pošiūnas, Šapoka, Vaitiekėnas, Žadaika and others. In terms of origin, about half (130) of the 268 identified typical Tauragnai area surnames are of appellative origin; almost one third (84) are derived from Christian names, and a minority (17) are old Baltic names of the two-root type. More than half of the typical Tauragnai area surnames (153) have been shaped by Lithuanian linguistic resources. From a derivational (word structure) point of view, the most common are surnames without patronymic suffixes (152). Of those names that do have suffixes, one seventh (37) are Lithuanian patronymic suffixes (most frequently –ėnas and –ūnas). Almost one quarter of the surnames with suffixes (60) have non-Lithuanian patronymic suffixes (mostly –auskas). Nineteen non-Lithuanian surnames were on the list. The most frequent contemporary Tauragnai area surnames are Musteikis (50 families), Šinkūnas (49) (another 8 families have the very similar surname Šimkūnas), Grašys (42), Šuminas (31), Stundžia (30), Vaišnoras (27), Jackūnas (25) and Kučinskas (22). The most popular men’s forenames in 2000 were Jonas (84) and Antanas (57); and for women Ona (65) and Veronika (61)

Kaip įgyvendinsime kalbos politiką

The Seimas (Parliament) of the Republic of Lithuania has confirmed the National Language Policy Guidelines for 2003–2008 prepared by the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language (Valstybinė lietuvių kalbos komisija). The article presents some reflections on this topic. Lithuanian language policy has more than once been twofold: one version for the good of the country (even if temporarily under foreign occupation) and the people; another version – the official one – for the Government of the time. Evidence of such duality can be seen at the moment (concerning use of English and the European Union). There is also some duality in regard to linguistic élitism, as it appears that to some extent the 1936 goals of the Lithuanian Language Society (Lietuvių kalbos draugija) of creating an “ideal language” are still current, even though the situation has changed and a large portion of the community now masters Standard Lithuanian. The Guidelines set the goal of increasing the confidence and pride of language users in our language, because successful implementation of the Language Policy depends on the language’s prestige. The article talks about ways of implementing the Language Policy in our democratic society; about the public’s comprehension of the role of linguists under present conditions; about increasing the role of dialects, particularly regional dialects, in nurturing national consciousness; and about the relationship of Standard Lithuanian with regional language varieties (including dialects). The role of information technology in developing the national language is emphasised, as is the use of new methods for teaching our language and encouraging correct use of it. Also emphasised is the importance of data banks of terminology and other linguistic data in relation to publicising the latest information and actively involving the community in the work of cultivating our national language

Nature of borrowing in the languages of the world

Basing on the theory of language contacts, the paper overviews the tendencies of present borrowing of various languages, and presents the language policy regulating these processes. Concerning the direction and intensity of borrowing, language prestige is the determining factor. If the languages are equal in terms of prestige, mutual moderate borrowing takes place. If the community of one language gains social and political power, one language becomes substratum, and the other superstratum. Pidginisation – the simplification of the language system – is one of the drastic forms of language change. This phenomenon is mainly preconditioned by the appearance of many inserts from a foreign language. Lately the Japanese language has borrowed and modified many English words; the language thus degenerates, because the balance between the quantity of own and foreign words is lost. There is a common European tendency to directly cite English words without adapting them to the own language system. The present impact of the English language on many world languages is evidently superstratum, although the contacts often take place not between language communities. The Lithuanian language is also greatly affected by the English language. Borrowing is always socially motivated, and it is impossible to affect the nature of borrowing through a sole reminder that there are own language means, because in this case only the level of language system is operated without paying regard to the role of the language and its functions in society. The paper mentions the laws, resolutions and programmes effective in Lithuania which are related to loanwords; discusses the current Lithuanian language policy oriented to optimal yet rational avoidance of loanwords

La Politica lingüistica i la situacio sociolingüistica a Lituania

The book is aimed at discussing language policy and sociolinguistics in Lithuania. The study consistently analyses all the key aspects of development and existence of the state of Lithuania. At the start of the book, the author presents Lithuania, its historical situation and language peculiarities. Later the author discusses all Lithuanian ethnic minorities in detail: Poles, Byelorussians, Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Karaites, Germans and Jews. One of the key topics of the book is analysis of the diversity and dialects of the Lithuanian language. The book also tells about Lithuania's territory, demography and citizens. It also describes the peculiarities of language policy. The book ends with a description of the Lithuanian education system

Principles and tools of collecting dialect phonetics database

Before there were any qualitative sociolinguistic studies, most linguists believed it wasn’t really possible to observe language evolution in progress. However, in 1966 William Labov convincingly demonstrated that sociological variation in language can be considered to be observable language evolution in progress, i.e. qualitative analysis of the language characteristics of representatives of different age groups can demonstrate evolution in progress. This article presents a new method of studying the phonetics of Lithuanian dialects, designed to analyse phonetic variation in dialects and to record the ongoing processes, rather than a static snapshot of the dialect’s inventory of sounds. The questions of the phonetic survey are formulated having regard to morphological and phonologically (sometimes – phonetically) annotated sound positions. The questions are applicable to various dialects

Dabartinės rašomosios lietuvių kalbos dažninis žodynas ir jo bazė

There are few electronic databases for Lithuanian. The largest are the Frequency Dictionary of Modern Written Lithuanian, compiled by V. Žilinskienė and L. Grumadienė, and the Lithuanian Language Corpus of Kaunas University. The former is presented in detail here: the principles of its compilation and its possible uses are discussed, and the hitherto published work in statistical linguistics based on it is briefly characterised. The main problems in connection with the databases for modern Lithuanian are: (1) their insufficient differentiation (they reflect only the written, not the spoken language), (2) their not being optimally used, as the Lithuanian scholarly community lacks the preparation needed for working with such tools, and (3) the fact that the efforts of scholars compiling them receive too little public recognition and are not valued as original scholarly achievements