The
Baltic languages belong to the
Balto-Slavic branch of the
Indo-European language family, and are spoken by the
Balts. Baltic languages are spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the
Baltic Sea in
Northern Europe. Scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two groups:
Western Baltic (containing only extinct languages), and
Eastern Baltic (containing two living languages,
Lithuanian and
Latvian). The range of the Eastern Balts once reached to the Ural mountains. Although related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the
Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another and are not mutually intelligible. Old Prussian (a Western Baltic language which went extinct in the 18th century) ranks as the most archaic of the Baltic languages.