The “Elbing Vocabulary,” a short German-Prussian glossary written between 1300 and 1400, provides one of the few written documentations of Prussian, the West Baltic language sometimes called Old Prussian.
The most conservative of all Baltic languages, the Prussian of the Elbing vocabulary contains more archaisms than Lithuanian and differs significantly from both Lithuanian and Lettish, or Latvian.
Spoken by the inhabitants of the area that later became East Prussia (now northeastern Poland and the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia) prior to the German colonization of the area which began in the thirteenth century, it will become extinct in the seventeenth century.
A few experimental communities involved in reviving a reconstructed form of the language exist today in Lithuania, Poland, and other countries.