Lithuanian surnames: why the endings change for wives and daughters

Every Lithuanian Saturday school class has the moment. A teacher calls the register, a child answers to Kazlauskaitė, and a newer family looks puzzled, because the same child's father signed the form as Kazlauskas and her mother as Kazlauskienė. Three spellings, one family, nobody has made a mistake.

I grew up with this as normal, and I still had to explain it many times to friends in Chicago, to my children's pediatrician and to more than one bank clerk. This piece sets out how Lithuanian surname endings work, why they change for women, what the newer neutral form is, and what tends to happen to all of it once a family settles abroad.

The basic idea: a surname that agrees with the person

Lithuanian is an inflected language. Nouns change their endings for gender, number and case, and surnames behave like nouns. A man's surname is grammatically masculine. A woman's surname is built from the same root with a feminine ending, and traditionally that feminine form also showed whether she was married.

So a surname is less a fixed label than a root with a set of possible endings. Once you can see the root, the family connection is obvious: Kazlausk- in Kazlauskas, Kazlauskaitė and Kazlauskienė.

Men's surnames: the common endings

Most Lithuanian men's surnames end in one of a handful of endings:

• -as, as in Kazlauskas, Paulauskas, Petrauskas
• -is, as in Gudelis or Martinaitis
• -ys, as in Kairys or Budrys
• -us and -ius, as in Vaitkus or Matulevičius

There are also smaller groups ending in -a (Juška) and in -ė, and many surnames carry a suffix before the ending, such as -aitis, -onis, -ėnas or -auskas. The -auskas and -evičius families are often Lithuanian versions of names that also exist in Polish, which matters a great deal when you search old records, as we will see.

Unmarried women: -aitė, -ytė, -utė, -iūtė

A daughter's surname traditionally takes a suffix that marks her as "of the family" and unmarried. Which suffix depends on the father's ending:

• -as becomes -aitė: Kazlauskas, Kazlauskaitė
• -is and -ys become -ytė: Gudelis, Gudelytė; Kairys, Kairytė
• -us becomes -utė: Vaitkus, Vaitkutė
• -ius becomes -iūtė: Matulevičius, Matulevičiūtė
• -a usually becomes -aitė: Juška, Juškaitė

These are the forms most diaspora children meet first, because they are the ones on the class register. In Lithuanian speech they also sound affectionate rather than formal. A teacher calling "Vaitkutė" is calling a girl, not a clerk calling a file.

Married women: -ienė

When a woman married and took her husband's surname, she traditionally took it with the ending -ienė, which attaches to the root after the masculine ending is dropped. Kazlauskas gives Kazlauskienė, Gudelis gives Gudelienė, Vaitkus gives Vaitkienė, and Matulevičius gives Matulevičienė. A rarer variant, -uvienė, appears with some -us surnames.

The -ienė ending is old and very common. Lists of the most frequent women's surnames in Lithuania are dominated by -ienė forms, which tells you how many women chose them.

A married woman can also keep her own maiden form, or combine her surname with her husband's in a double surname. Those choices are made at the civil registry when the marriage is registered.

The neutral form ending in -ė

The traditional system builds marital status into a woman's name, and for a long time some women asked for a form that did not. In June 2003 the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, which sets standards for the written language, adopted a resolution allowing women's surnames to be formed from the masculine surname with the ending -ė and no marital suffix.

The pattern is short and plain: Kazlauskas gives Kazlauskė, Vaitkus gives Vaitkė, Kairys gives Kairė, Matulevičius gives Matulevičė. The same form can be used whether a woman is married or not, and the Commission's rules allow it for girls as well as adult women.

You will still meet far more -ienė and -aitė forms than -ė forms, especially among older women and in diaspora families who learned the system before 2003. The neutral form is a legal and accepted option, not a replacement. There has also been public debate in Lithuania about whether women should be allowed surnames with other endings, such as -a; the rules on that may change, so check the current position with the civil registry if it matters to you.

A worked example: one illustrative family

Here is an invented family, the Vaitkus household, to show how the forms sit side by side. None of these are real people.

Say the mother was born a Gudelytė, daughter of a Gudelis. If she kept her name at marriage she stays Gudelytė. If she took a double surname, she might be Gudelytė-Vaitkienė. Her son is Vaitkus all his life. Her daughter is Vaitkutė, and if she marries a man called Kairys, she may become Kairienė, Kairė, keep Vaitkutė, or combine them.

The last column is where the diaspora reality starts, so it deserves its own section.

What happens to the endings abroad

Diacritics drop off

Most passport and ID systems in English-speaking countries do not print Lithuanian letters such as ė, ū, č or š. Vaitkutė becomes Vaitkute, Matulevičiūtė becomes Matuleviciute. The name is still recognisable, but the letters a Lithuanian reader uses to tell sounds apart are gone. Keep at least one document, such as a Lithuanian birth or marriage record, that shows the full spelling. It will save time later.

Many families stopped changing the endings

In the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia, a whole household usually shares one surname on its documents. For generations of emigrant families, that meant the masculine form for everyone. Grandmothers who were Vaitkienė at church and in the Lithuanian press were Mrs. Vaitkus on the mortgage and the census. Their daughters were Vaitkus at school.

Many families still use both: the traditional Lithuanian forms inside the community, and the single masculine form on official papers. In my own family, a great-aunt signed her letters home with her -ienė name and her American cheques with her husband's name, and nobody thought twice about it.

Anglicised and shortened surnames

Some families went further and changed the root itself. A long surname might be shortened (Kazlauskas to Kazlaus or Kaz), respelled to suit English pronunciation, translated, or exchanged for something unrelated. You may also find a Lithuanian family under a Polish form of the same name, such as Kozłowski for Kazlauskas, because that is how a priest, clerk or employer wrote it down.

It is often said that names were changed by officials at Ellis Island. Historians who work with the passenger records doubt it: the lists inspectors used were drawn up at the port of departure. Most changes happened later, by choice, at work, at school or at naturalisation. If a family story says otherwise, treat it as a story and look for the paper trail.

Names on Lithuanian documents

Going the other way, Lithuanian documents have traditionally written names in the Lithuanian alphabet. That raised problems for citizens married to foreigners and for children with a foreign parent, because letters such as w, q and x are not part of that alphabet.

The Law on the Writing of Names and Surnames in Documents, adopted by the Seimas in January 2022 and in force from 1 May 2022, allows the Latin letters q, w and x in the documents of Lithuanian citizens in certain cases, for example when a citizen takes a foreign spouse's surname, and for their children. It does not allow diacritics from other languages, so a German ä or a Polish ł is still written without the mark. The detailed rules are set by the government and by the civil registry, and they decide case by case.

For diaspora families this matters most when a child's birth is registered in Lithuania or when someone restores citizenship. The spelling of the name in the Lithuanian record, the ending a daughter receives, and how a foreign double surname is written all need a decision. If you are working through restoring citizenship by descent, ask the embassy how your names will appear before you send the documents, and keep the spelling identical across every form. This is general information, not legal advice; for your own case ask a Lithuanian embassy or a lawyer.

Searching old records with changing endings

The ending system is a gift to family historians once you know it is there. A woman's -aitė surname tells you her father's surname, and an -ienė surname tells you her husband's. When you search parish books and emigrant newspapers, try:

1. The root of the surname alone, followed by a wildcard if the database allows it (Vaitk*).
2. The masculine, -aitė/-ytė/-utė/-iūtė and -ienė forms one after another.
3. A Polish or Russian spelling of the same root, since many 19th century parish books were kept in Polish, Latin or Russian.
4. The spelling without diacritics, which is how most English-language indexes store names.

Death and marriage records abroad are the most likely place to find a woman's maiden form, and the obituary pages of the Lithuanian diaspora press often give both. There is more on where these records sit in our piece on tracing Lithuanian ancestors.

Choosing a form for your own child

Parents abroad sometimes ask which form to give a daughter. There is no single answer. Some families register the -aitė form in Lithuania and the masculine form at home, and accept that she will spend her life explaining it. Others choose the neutral -ė, which at least stays the same through marriage. Some decide the paperwork is not worth it and use one form everywhere.

What helps most is consistency. Decide which form goes on which document, write it down, and give your child the reasoning when she is old enough to ask. She will be asked by teachers, by Lithuanian relatives, and eventually by a border officer. Children who know why their name looks the way it does tend to enjoy the conversation. More on growing up with two languages is in our language circle.