Žemaičių savarankiškos raidos pradžia

Anotacija

THE BEGINNING OF THE DIVERGENT EVOLUTION OF THE ŽEMAITIAN DIALECT

Summary

Proceeding with presumptions and conclusions expressed earlier [Girdenis, 1971; 1992a], an attempt is made to show that the Žemaitian (especially North Žemaitian) dia­lect has preserved a number of word-ending phenomena, the stratification and relative chronology of which approximates the linguistic dating of dialectal divergence to archaeologic dating (cf. Tautavičius, 1981).

Žemaitians (or so-called Samogitians) with respect to their language started drifting away from the future Aukštaitians (High Lithuanians) not later than in the VIIth centu­ry (ca. 700 A.D.), i.e. at the time when the Common East Baltic was splitting into separa­te tribal languages. One of those languages was Žemaitian, and it turned into a dialect of the Lithuanian much later - by the processes of linguistics convergence which began and was going on under the conditions of the consolidated Lithuanian state.