The three small countries lie on the Baltic Sea, but so do many others: Poland, Finland and Sweden, to name a few. So geography can’t be the entire reason for lumping the three nations together and excluding their neighbors with the term. There are reasons to view the countries as similar to one another: The three countries are all small in both territory and population, they all became independent around the same time at the end of WWI, and they were all absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940 to spend 50 years as Union republics. But the similarities run deeper than 20th century history. One common factor, for two of the three, is language.
Latvians and Lithuanians speak related languages in the Baltic group of the Indo-European family. (English, French and Russian, for example, are also Indo-European, but they are each in separate groups.) The word for “god,” for instance, is “dievas” in Lithuanian and “dievs” in Latvian—and “deus” in Latin. Originally Lithuanian and Latvian had been the same language, dialects of which were spoken by the various tribes in the region. Around the 8th century A.D., however, the languages began to split, and today the two are no longer mutually intelligible. Lithuanian, in fact, is considered to be one of the oldest surviving Indo-European languages, and more closely related to the ancient Indian language Sanskrit than any other language spoken today. Today, Latvia and Lithuania are the only two “Baltic” countries in the world.
There used to be a third Baltic people, however. Although it ceased to exist in the Middle Ages and early modern period, its name lasted into the 20th century: Prussia. The Prussians (sometimes called the Old Prussians) lived to the west of the Lithuanians and spoke what linguists classify as a West Baltic language (Latvian and Lithuanian are both East Baltic languages). But the Germans were a very powerful force in the entire Baltic region, and they gradually wiped out or assimilated the Prussian people. The Balts’ old territory continued to be called by its old name until after WWII, when the name—associated with German militarism—ceased to be used, and the German territory of East Prussia was divided between Poland and the USSR.
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