Samoan language

Samoan is a Polynesian language spoken by Samoans of the Samoan Islands. Administratively, the islands are split between the sovereign country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa. It is an official language, alongside English, in both jurisdictions. It is widely spoken across the Pacific region, heavily so in New Zealand and in Australia and the United States. Among the Polynesian languages, Samoan is the most widely spoken by a number of native speakers.
Samoan is spoken by approximately 260,000 people in the archipelago and with many Samoans living in diaspora in a number of countries, the total number of speakers worldwide was estimated at 510,000 in 2015. It is the third-most widely spoken language in New Zealand, where 2.2% of the population, 101,900 people, were able to speak it as of 2018.
The language is notable for the phonological differences between formal and informal speech as well as a ceremonial form used in Samoan oratory.

Classification

Samoan is an analytic, isolating language and a member of the Austronesian family, and more specifically the Samoic branch of the Polynesian subphylum. It is closely related to other Polynesian languages with many shared cognate words such as aliʻi, ʻava, atua, tapu and numerals as well as in the name of gods in mythology.
Linguists differ somewhat on the way they classify Samoan in relation to the other Polynesian languages. The "traditional" classification, based on shared innovations in grammar and vocabulary, places Samoan with Tokelauan, the Polynesian outlier languages and the languages of Eastern Polynesia, which include Rapanui, Māori, Tahitian and Hawaiian. Nuclear Polynesian and Tongic are the major subdivisions of Polynesian under this analysis. A revision by Marck reinterpreted the relationships among Samoan and the outlier languages. In 2008 an analysis, of basic vocabulary only, from the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database is contradictory in that while in part it suggests that Tongan and Samoan form a subgroup, the old subgroups Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian are still included in the classification search of the database itself.

Geographic distribution

There are approximately 470,000 Samoan speakers worldwide, 50 percent of whom live in the Samoan Islands.
Thereafter, the greatest concentration is in New Zealand, where there were 101,937 Samoan speakers at the 2018 census, or 2.2% of the country's population. Samoan is the third-most spoken language in New Zealand after English and Māori.
According to the 2021 census in Australia conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Samoan language is spoken in the homes of 49,021 people.
US Census 2010 shows more than 180,000 Samoans reside in the United States, which is triple the number of people living in American Samoa, while slightly less than the estimated population of the island nation of Samoa – 193,000, as of July 2011.
Samoan Language Week is an annual celebration of the language in New Zealand supported by the government and various organisations including UNESCO. Samoan Language Week was started in Australia for the first time in 2010.

Phonology

The Samoan alphabet consists of 14 letters, with three more letters used in loan words. The is used for the glottal stop.

Aa, Āā

Ee, Ēē

Ii, Īī

Oo, Ōō

Uu, Ūū

‘

Vowels

Vowel length is phonemic in Samoan; all five vowels also have a long form denoted by the macron. For example, tama means child or boy, while tamā means father.

Monophthongs

Diphthongs are.
The combination of u followed by a vowel in some words creates the sound of the English w, a letter not part of the Samoan alphabet, as in uaua.
is reduced to in only a few words, such as mate or maliu 'dead', vave 'be quick'.

Consonants

In formal Samoan, used for example in news broadcasts or sermons, the consonants are used. In colloquial Samoan, however, merge as and is pronounced.
The glottal stop is phonemic in Samoan. Its presence or absence affects the meaning of words otherwise spelled the same, e.g. mai = from, originate from; maʻi = sickness, illness. The glottal stop is represented by the koma liliu, which is recognized by Samoan scholars and the wider community. The koma liliu is often replaced by an apostrophe in modern publications. Use of the apostrophe and macron diacritics in Samoan words was readopted by the Ministry of Education in 2012 after having been abandoned in the 1960s.
is pronounced as a flap following a back vowel and preceding an ; otherwise it is. is less sibilant than in English.
are found in loan words.

	Labial	Alveolar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal
Plosive
Fricative
Lateral
Rhotic

The consonants in parentheses are only present in words borrowed from English and colloquial Samoan.

Foreign words

Loanwords from English and other languages have been adapted to Samoan phonology:

/k/ is retained in some instances, and has become in rare instances.
/ɹ/ becomes in some instances, and in others.
/d/ becomes .
/ɡ/ becomes in some cases, while /tʃ/, /ʃ/ and /dʒ/ usually become .
/h/ is retained at the beginning of some proper names, but in some cases becomes an 's', and is omitted in others
/z/ becomes
/w/ becomes
/b/ becomes
Stress

Stress generally falls on the penultimate mora; that is, on the last syllable if that contains a long vowel or diphthong or on the second-last syllable otherwise.
Verbs formed from nouns ending in a, and meaning to abound in, have properly two aʻs, as puaa, pona, tagata, but are written with one.
In speaking of a place at some distance, the accent is placed on the last syllable; as ʻO loʻo i Safotu, he is at Safotu. The same thing is done in referring to a family; as Sa Muliaga, the family of Muliaga, the term Sa referring to a wide extended family of clan with a common ancestor. So most words ending in ga, not a sign of a noun, as tigā, puapuaga, pologa, faʻataga and aga. So also all words ending in a diphthong, as mamau, mafai, avai.
In speaking the voice is raised, and the emphasis falls on the last word in each sentence.
When a word combines with an affix, stress is shifted forward. For example: alófa, alofága, alofagía.
Reduplicated words have two accents. For example: pálapála, 'mud'; and ségiségi, 'twilight'. Compound words may have even three or four, according to the number of words and affixes of which the compound word is composed; as tofátumoánaíná, 'to be engulfed'.
The articles le and se are unaccented. When used to form a pronoun or participle, le and se are contractions for le e, se e, and so are accented; as ʻO le ona le meae, 'the owner', instead of O le e ona le meae. The sign of the nominative ʻoe, the prepositions o, a, i, e, and the euphonic particles i and te, are unaccented; as in ʻO maua, ma te o atu ia te oee.
Ina, the sign of the imperative, is accented on the ultima; ína, the sign of the subjunctive, on the penultima. The preposition iá is accented on the ultima, the pronoun ia on the penultima.

Phonotactics

Samoan syllable structure is V, where V may be long or a diphthong. A sequence VV may occur only in derived forms and compound words; within roots, only the initial syllable may be of the form V. Metathesis of consonants is frequent, such as manu for namu 'scent', lavaʻau for valaʻau 'to call', but vowels may not be mixed up in this way.
Every syllable ends in a vowel. No syllable consists of more than three sounds, one consonant and two vowels, the two vowels making a diphthong; as fai, mai, tau. Roots are sometimes monosyllabic, but mostly disyllabic or a word consisting of two syllables. Polysyllabic words are nearly all derived or compound words; as nofogatā from nofo 'sit, seat' and gatā, 'difficult of access'; taʻigaafi, from taʻi, 'to attend', and afi, 'fire; hearth; making to attend to the fire'; talafaʻasolopito, ' stories placed in order', faletalimalo, 'communal house for receiving guests'.

Grammar

Morphology

Personal pronouns

Like many Austronesian languages, Samoan has separate words for inclusive and exclusive we, and distinguishes singular, dual, and plural. The root for the inclusive pronoun may occur in the singular, in which case it indicates emotional involvement on the part of the speaker.
In formal speech, fuller forms of the roots mā-, tā-, and lā- are ‘imā-, ‘itā-, and ‘ilā-.

Articles

Articles in Samoan do not show the definiteness of the noun phrase as do those of English but rather specificity.

	singular	plural
specific	le	∅
non-specific	se	ni

The singular specific article le has frequently, erroneously, been referred to as a "definite" article, such as by Pratt, often with an additional vague explanation that it is sometimes used where English would require the indefinite article. As a specific, rather than a definite article, it is used for specific referents that the speaker has in mind, regardless of whether the listener is expected to know which specific referent is/are intended. A sentence such as ʻUa tu mai le vaʻa, could thus, depending on context, be translated into English as "A canoe appears", when the listener or reader is not expected to know which canoe, or "The canoe appears", if the listener or reader is expected to know which canoe, such as when the canoe has previously been mentioned.
The plural specific is marked by a null article: ʻO le tagata 'the person', ʻO tagata 'people'.
The non-specific singular article se is used when the speaker doesn't have a particular individual of a class in mind, such as in the sentence Ta mai se laʻau, 'Cut me a stick', whereby there is no specific stick intended. The plural non-specific article ni is the plural form and may be translated into English as 'some' or 'any', as in Ta mai ni laʻau, 'Cut me some sticks'.
In addition, Samoan possesses a series of diminutive articles.

	Singular	Plural
Specific diminutive-emotional	si	/
specific diminutive-partitive	sina	/
Specific diminutive	/	nāi / nai
Non-specific diminutive	/	ni nāi / ni nai