"Nors esame pasaulyje tik trys milionai," the song erroneously goes, but despite making up a statistically insignificant population of the world, speakers and writers of Lithuanian have managed to collaborate to move Vikipedija up to 30th on the list of Wikipedias by article count. There's almost 17,000 articles there, waiting to get checked out.

And though I don't use Vikipedija much (I stick to the English, except on matters of Lithuanian history, where I read both articles and compare), it's kind of cool that it's so big.

But, as I learned today, there's competition: Vikipedėjė, the žemaičių Vikipedija. It only has 11 articles for now, but watch out! 

As diaspora members, we've bought into the linguistic nationalism of the Lithuanian state, so our exposure to Samogitian/Žemaitish is rather limited. "Pempel, pempel" is probably the extent of my own famliarity with the dialect/language, and if you compare it to Vikipedėjė, I'm not sure it even counts. But, still, I thought I'd mention the Vikipedėjė for those of you who are interested in seeing something self-consciously žemaitish.

Also, the English article about Samogitian includes a brief audio clip of a woman speaking the dialect, which is also worth checking out. Remember, if there's no mutual intelligibility, it's not a dialect (or something).