There is a need for more Samoan language teachers in New Zealand, especially at the primary level. This became apparent during the Samoan language teachers conference, that was held in Palmerston North, New Zealand. The pre-school teachers called for the support of the language at Primary school level, given the fact that the language is already taught at pre-school, so as to ground children into the language. The language is not given much concentration in Primary schools. It was suggested that one of the best ways to address this issue was to avail training and resources to language teachers at both the pre-school and primary level.
Samoa is mainly spoken in American and Western Samoa. Speakers can also be found in Fiji, the USA, Hawaii, Tonga and Australia. The greatest concentration of speakers can be found in New Zealand. Samoan is the 3rd most popular language in New Zealand after English and Maori. There are about 370,000 people who speak this language worldwide. The American Samoans take pride in their language, even though the can speak English as their second language. There are different levels of language fluency. There are those people who speak the everyday Samoan language and there are good speakers who have good oratory and rhetoric skills, which can only be understood by speakers who have an excellent grasp of the language. The Samoan Language Week was an annual initiate that was started by the government in 2010.
Samoan has 14 letters of the alphabet, out of which 5 are vowels. The glottal stop is usually indicated by an apostrophe. Samoan words usually have a lot of vowels, due to one of their language rules, which states that consonants are not supposed to appear next to each other. The vowels have a long or short sound. Long vowels are denoted by a dash or a macron, which is placed at the top of the vowel. The consonant sounds are pronounced in the same way as English consonants, with the exception of the letter G. Just like other Indonesian languages, one object may have 2 names depending on the status of the person who the object belongs to.
