It has preserved many features of the extinct Curonian language, such as specific phonological traits and vocabulary.

Efforts are being made to preserve the language, including local initiatives and cultural societies.

During the 5th century, Proto-Samogitians migrated from the lowlands of central Lithuania, near Kaunas, into the Dubysa and Jūra basins, as well as into the Samogitian Upland.

In the 13th century, Žemaitija became a part of the Baltic confederation called Lietuva (Lithuania), which was formed by Mindaugas.

From the 13th century onwards, Samogitians settled within the former Curonian lands, and intermarried with the population over the next three hundred years.

[citation needed] The earliest writings in the Samogitian language appeared in the 19th century.

The earliest writings in Samogitian language appeared in the 16th century (Catechism of Martynas Mažvydas has been written mostly in south Samogtian dialect), more in 18th century (starting with "Ziwatas Pona Yr Diewa Musu Jezusa Christusa" written in 1759 in north Samogitian dialect).

The Samogitian language is highly inflected like standard Lithuanian, in which the relationships between parts of speech and their roles in a sentence are expressed by numerous flexions.

Relics of historical neuter are almost fully extinct while in standard Lithuanian some isolated forms remain.

Samogitian stress is mobile but often retracted at the end of words, and is also characterised by pitch accent.

Samogitian differs from Standard Lithuanian in phonetics, lexicon, syntax and morphology.

Samogitian preserved a lot of relics of athematic conjugation which did not survive in standard Lithuanian.

The intonation in the future tense third person is the same as in the infinitive, in standard Lithuanian it shifts.

The neuter of adjectives has been pushed out by adverbs (except for šėlt 'warm', šalt 'cold', karšt 'hot') in Samogitian.

Samogitian also has many words and figures of speech that are altogether different from typically Lithuanian ones, e.g., kiuocis – basket (Lith.

There is no new literature in Samogitian either, as authors prefer standard Lithuanian for its accessibility to a larger audience.

[citation needed] 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 writing system uses similar letters to standard Lithuanian, but with the following differences: 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.