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The Sāmoan or Samoan language is the traditional language of Samoa and American Samoa and is an official language in both political bodies. It is a member of the Austronesian family, and more specifically the Samoic branch of the Polynesian subphylum. There are 370,337 Samoan-speakers worldwide, nearly half of them in the Samoan Islands. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ... The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages used by some 351 million speakers. ... The Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian languages are a branch of the Austronesian family that are thought to have dispersed from a possible homeland in Sulawesi. ... The family of Central Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages is a subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian languages. ... The family of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages is a subgroup of the Central Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages. ... The Oceanic languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, containing approximately 450 languages. ... The family of Central-Eastern Oceanic languages is a subgroup of the Oceanic languages. ... The family of Central Pacific languages is a subgroup of the Remote Oceanic languages. ... The family of East Fijian-Polynesian languages is a subgroup of the Central Pacific languages. ... The Samoic languages are one of the primary classes of Polynesian languages, encompassing the Polynesian languages of Samoa, Tuvalu, American Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, as well as a number of languages, spoken in parts of Tonga, the Cook Islands, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ... The Samoic languages are one of the primary classes of Polynesian languages, encompassing the Polynesian languages of Samoa, Tuvalu, American Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, as well as a number of languages, spoken in parts of Tonga, the Cook Islands, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and... The Polynesian languages are a group of related languages spoken in the region known as Polynesia. ...

Grammar

Pronouns

Like many Austronesian languages, Samoan has separate words for inclusive we 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. Inclusive we is a pronoun that indicates the speaker, the addressee, and perhaps other people, as opposed to the exclusive we that excludes the addressee. ... Exclusive we is a pronoun that indicates the speaker and perhaps other people, but excludes the addressee, as opposed to the inclusive we that includes the addressee. ... In linguistics, grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. ... Dual forms exist in some languages in addition to singular and plural forms of nouns and pronouns; the latin term is dualis. ... Look up Plural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Plural is a grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the referent in the real world. ...

Samoan personal pronouns

In formal speech, fuller forms of the roots mā-, tā-, and lā- are ’imā-, ’itā-, and ’ilā-. Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ...

References

• Payne, Thomas E. 1997. Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58224-5.

External links

Samoan language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Ethnologue main Samoan page
• Samoan - English Dictionary
• Samoan Dictionary - An online Samoan dictionary. Samoan to English, English to Samoan.
• Common words reference