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( Old Prussian language)
Prussian is an extinct Baltic language, once spoken by the inhabitants of the area that later became East Prussia (now north-eastern Poland and the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia) prior to the German colonization of the area which began in the 13th century. In Old Prussian itself, the language was called “Prusiskan” (Prussian) or “Prusiskai Bila” (the Prussian language). A few experimental communities involved in reviving a reconstructed form of the language now exist in Lithuania, Poland, and other countries. The Æsti, mentioned by Tacitus in his Germania, may have been a people who spoke Old Prussian. However, Tacitus describes them as being just like the Suebi (a group of Germanic peoples) but with a more Britannic-like (Celtic) language. Old Prussian was closely related to the other extinct Western Baltic languages, Curonian and Sudovian. It is more distantly related to the surviving Eastern Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian, and to the Slavic languages. Compare the Prussian word zeme[1], the Latvian zeme, the Lithuanian žeme (as well as the Russian ????? (zeml'á) and the Polish ziemia), meaning "earth" (soil). In addition to the German colonists, groups of people from Poland[2][3], Lithuania, France[citation needed], Scotland[4], England[5] and Austria[citation needed] found refuge in Prussia during the Protestant Reformation and thereafter. Such immigration caused a slow decline in the use of Old Prussian, as the Prussians adopted the languages of the others, particularly German, the language of the German government of Prussia. Old Prussian probably ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the 18th century. The regional dialect of Low German spoken in Prussia, Low Prussian, preserved a number of Prussian words, such as kurp, from the Old Prussian kurpi, for shoe (in contrast to the standard German Schuh).
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Old Prussian language Subcategories
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