The Balto-Slavic language group is a hypothetical language group consisting of the Baltic and Slavic language subgroups of the Indo-European family. Baltic and Slavic share many close similarities, both lexical and morphosyntactic, not found in the rest of Indo-European; many linguists, following the lead of such notable Indo-Europeanists as Oswald Szemerenyi , take these to indicate that the two groups separated from a common ancestor, Proto-Balto-Slavic, only well after the breakup of Indo-European. Other linguists - themselves following such notable Indo-Europeanists as Antoine Meillet - regard these similarities as arising entirely from intensive contact between the two branches well after they had separately split directly from proto-Indo-European (satem branch.) The former view is traditionally the more widely held of the two.
The question is complicated by the facts that:
- Baltic and Slavic speakers are in close geographical, political and cultural contact, which naturally leads to lexical similarities; that is, each has borrowed words and meanings from the other. Differentiating between borrowings and common inheritance requires a careful study of sound shifts, and in some cases the information can be insufficient to resolve the question.
- Baltic and Slavic languages were not written down until 15th and 9th centuries A.D.; thus, the historical record tracing the development of the languages is limited.
- Both the Baltic and the Slavic languages are very archaic; indeed, Lithuanian is commonly described as being more similar to proto-Indo-European than any other living language. Baltic and Slavic languages both belong to the Satem sub-group of the Indo-European languages.
Simas Karaliūnas (1968) argues that Baltic went through an initial period in which it was strongly influenced by Germanic languages (3rd millennium BC), and later (beginning around 2000 BC) interacted extensively with Slavic, resulting in convergent developments.
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