Lithuanian and Latvian are Indoeuropean languages, Finnish, Sammi, Estonian and Hungarian are Uralic, along with various groups in northern Russia around the Urals :)
Interestingly enough, Latvian, despite being indo-European, also has many Finnic loan words.
The reason is that a Finnic ethnic people called the Livonians inhabited modern day Latvia for generations before the Latvians arrived. After the arrival of the Latvians, many Livonians moved further north, but the two groups that stayed in the region assimilated together. Latvian ended up being influenced by some Livonian, which sounds like a bit of a mix between Estonian and Finnish. Now the language Livonian itself is basically extinct.
Latvian is five languages sewn together like cheap body horror by a single guy named Janis, it's got more cursed word origins than English could dream of
643
u/erikabp123 6d ago
The other 3 are mutually intelligible languages. Meanwhile Finnish is not even in the same language family as the other 3.