Samogitian Dialect - Writing System

Writing System

The first use of a unique writing system for Samogitian was in the interwar period, however it was neglected during the Soviet period, so only elderly people knew how to write in Samogitian at the time Lithuania regained independence. The Samogitian Cultural Society renewed the system to make it more usable.

The writing system uses similar letters to standard Lithuanian, but with the following differences:

• There are no nasal vowels (letters with ogoneks: ą, ę, į, ų).
• There are three additional long vowels, written with macrons above (as in Latvian): ā, ē, ō.
• Long i in Samogitian is written with a macron above: ī (unlike standard Lithuanian where it is y).
• The long vowel ė is written as o with tilde above (õ). In fact it is written like ė with macron: Ė̄ and ė̄.
• There are two additional diphthongs in Samogitian that are written as digraphs: ou and ėi. (The component letters are part of the standard Lithuanian alphabet.)

As previously it was difficult to add these new characters to typesets, some older Samogitian texts use double letters instead of macrons to indicate long vowels, for example aa for ā and ee for ē; now the Samogitian Cultural Society discourages these conventions and recommends using the letters with macrons above instead. The use of double letters is accepted in cases where computer fonts do not have Samogitian letters; in such cases y is used instead of Samogitian ī, the same as in standard Lithuanian, while other long letters are written as double letters. The apostrophe might be used to denote palatalization in some cases; in others i is used for this, as in standard Lithuanian.

A Samogitian computer keyboard layout has been created.

Samogitian alphabet: