Dzūkian dialect, known in academic works as Southern Aukštaitian dialect, is one of the three main sub-dialects of the Aukštaitian dialect

Aukštaitian dialect

Aukštaitian dialect is one of the dialects of the Lithuanian language, spoken in ethnographic regions of Aukštaitija, Dzūkija and Suvalkija. It became the basis for the standard Lithuanian language.-Classification:...

 of Lithuanian language

Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognized as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, closely related to Latvian, although they...

. Dzūkian dialect is spoken in Dzūkija

Dzukija

Dzūkija or Dainava is one of five ethnographic regions of Lithuania. Dzūkija is a cultural region defined by traditional lifestyles and dialects of the local Lithuanian population and has never been defined as a political or administrative unit...

, southern Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

. Its most distinctive feature is replacing t, d before i, į, y, ie and č, dž with c and dz (cik instead of tik – just, dzidumas instead of didumas – size, pync instead of pinti – to braid, sveciai instead of svečiai – guests). Since the region borders Slavic lands, the dialect has many Slavic loanword

Loanword

A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

s and barbarisms.