Samogitians

Samogitians

žemaitē
Samogitians in the first half of the 19th century
Total population
c. 500,000 in Lithuania (estimated)
Regions with significant populations
Samogitia
Languages
Samogitian, Standard Lithuanian language
Religion
Catholicism
Related ethnic groups
Aukštaitians, Curonians

Samogitians (Samogitian: žemaitē, Lithuanian: žemaičiai, Latvian: žemaiši) are the inhabitants of Samogitia, an ethnographic region of Lithuania. Many speak the Samogitian language, which in Lithuania is mostly considered a dialect of the Lithuanian language together with the Aukštaitian dialect.^[1] The Samogitian language differs the most from the standard Lithuanian language.^[1]

Whether Samogitians are considered to be a distinct ethnic group or merely a subset of Lithuanians varies. However, 2,169 people declared their ethnicity as Samogitian during the Lithuanian census of 2011, of whom 53.9% live in Telšiai County.^[2] The political recognition and cultural understanding of the Samogitian ethnicity has, however, changed drastically throughout the last few centuries as 448,022 people declared themselves Samogitians, not Lithuanians, in the 1897 Russian Empire census.^[3]