Baltic

Baltic is the Indo-European speech group of the south-eastern Baltic shore, which with the Slavic languages forms the conservative Balto-Slavic branch. It divides into Western Baltic, including Old Prussian, and Eastern Baltic, represented by Lithuanian and Latvian. Baltic once reached from the Vistula to the Dnieper, until Slavic and Germanic expansion confined it to the coast.

The Roman historian Tacitus noted the Baltic Aesti as early as 98; the first written attestation is an Old Prussian epigram of about 1369. The Teutonic Knights conquered Prussia in the thirteenth century, and German settlement reduced Old Prussian to extinction by the early eighteenth century, hastened by the plague and famine of 1709 to 1711.

Lithuanian first appeared in print in Martynas Mažvydas's catechism of 1547 and Latvian in a catechism of 1585, leaving the two Eastern Baltic tongues as the living heirs.