Last Updated: 2020-07-02
SLIGHTLY COMPROMISED: suspect marking of vowel length and glottal stops
Background
Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Central-Eastern / Eastern Malayo-Polynesian / Oceanic / Central-Eastern Oceanic / Remote Oceanic / Central Pacific / East Fijian-Polynesian / Polynesian / Nuclear / Samoic-Outlier / Samoan
- Samoan is spoken throughout the Samoan Islands.
- The formal style is represented below.
Phonology
Consonants
- /k/, /h/, and /ɹ/ appear in loanwords (Zuraw, Yu, and Orfitelli 2014, 277).
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Place of Articulation
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Manner of Articulation
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Labial
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Alveolar
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Velar
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Glottal
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Stops
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p
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t
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ʔ
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Affricates
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Fricatives
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f v
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s
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Nasals
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m
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n
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ŋ
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Approximants
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l
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Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.
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Vowels
- Vowel length is phonemic (Kernan 1974, 107). Long vowels are marked with a macron (¯).
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Front
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Central
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Back
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High
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i
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u
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Mid
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e
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o
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Low
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a
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Alphabet
- Alderete and Bradshaw (2012) state that macrons and apostrophes (marking long vowels and glottal stops respectively) aren’t generally used in orthography (p. 9). However, the Crúbadán corpus appears to use the conventions quite frequently. Because of this unexpected outcome (where the observation is not in line with the documentation), the marking of vowel length and glottal stops is somewhat suspect. Therefore, I have decided to classify the language as compromised.
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Grapheme
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Phoneme
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a
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/a/
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e
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/e/
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f
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/f/
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g
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/ŋ/
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i
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/i/
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l
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/l/
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m
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/m/
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n
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/n/
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o
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/o/
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p
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/p/
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s
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/s/
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t
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/t/
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u
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/u/
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v
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/v/
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‘
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/ʔ/
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Lenition Rules
- In fast speech, voiceless stops (including /k/), are voiced intervocalically (Alderete and Bradshaw 2012, 3).
- Glottal stops are often deleted intervocalically in fast speech (ibid.).
- /f/ may debuccalize to /h/ (ibid.).
Misc. Rules
- In the colloquial style (Kernan 1974, 108):
- /t/ is realized as [k]
- /n/ is realized as [ŋ]
- /t/ tends to become [ts] preceding /i/ (Alderete and Bradshaw 2012, 3).
- /k/ may palatalize in the environment of /i/ or /e/ (ibid.).
- In fast speech, /s/ may become [ts] or [ʃ] (ibid.).
- Short vowels may be deleted word-finally (Alderete and Bradshaw 2012, 6).
References
Alderete, John, and Mark Bradshaw. 2012. “Samoan Grammar Synopsis.”
Kernan, Keith T. 1974. “The Acquisition of Formal and Colloquial Styles of Speech by Samoan Children.” Anthropoligical Linguistics.
Zuraw, Kie, Kristine M. Yu, and Robyn Orfitelli. 2014. “The Word-Level Prosody of Samoan.” Phonology 31 (2). Cambridge University Press (CUP): 271–327. doi:10.1017/s095267571400013x.