Antano Baranausko lietuvių bendrinės kalbos teorija: priėmimas Žemaičių kunigų seminarijoje
Antanas Baranauskas's model of standard Lithuanian: Acceptance in Samogitian theological seminary in Kaunas

Summary/Abstract: On December 31, 1870, Motiejus Valančius appointed Antanas Baranauskas to teach homiletics— the theory and practice of preaching in Lithuanian in The Samogitian Theological Seminary in Kaunas. During the first two years seminary students were being prepared for the homiletics course—they were taught the Lithuanian language and later studied the art of preaching. Seminary students came from various places of Kaunas province, so Baranauskas had to find a way to teach various-dialects-speaking seminarians the Lithuanian language. To that purpose, he created a unique model of standard written Lithuanian. This research was intended to uncover what contemporaries were thinking about Baranauskas’s standard language, in particular—how his immediate environment—The Samogitian Theological Seminary and Diocese Center—accepted or rejected Baranauskas’s standard language theory. According to Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, the seminarians disapproved Baranauskas’s standard language theory. But letters of some of them (of Marcijonas Jurgaitis and Juozapas Žebrys) prove that to at least a part of seminarians the model of Baranauskas’s standard language was not only the object of study, but also seemed very appropriate for everyday written communication.

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