Samoan for Samoa

Posted: Monday Jul 29, 2024

Starting from scratch to create a dictionary for a language – and a culture

Finally, Samoa has a dictionary created by its people, for its people – in their language.

The new monolingual dictionary has been 20 years in the making, and brings some consistency to the written language, where there’s always been confusion.

“Traditionally, we’re an oral culture, where a lot of our customs and practices, our stories, our protocols are all passed on through oral nature, such as our storytelling times in the evenings,” Auckland University Samoan language lecturer Lemoa Henry Fesulua’i tells The Detail.

“Then the written aspect and the literacy aspect slowly came in when missionaries started to come in and then when they started to develop the Bible as text, all of that as well started to develop Samoan literacy and Samoan writing.”

Samoan dictionaries have always been bilingual, using English and Samoan. But in 2014, the government established the Samoan Language Commission to create a monolingual dictionary. This was mainly due to inconsistencies in the use of diacritical marks – like glottal stops or macrons.

Discussions had already been happening for about a decade before the official announcement.

Fa’atili Iosua Esera was the New Zealand representative on the commission and was intimately involved in creating the dictionary.

“The way the committee was constructed, there were representatives from each of the denominations… there were representatives from [each of the Samoan] islands,” he says.

“There were people with very deep knowledge in terms of the language and the culture and how the language is actually used in certain cultural contexts and cultural activities… it could be funerals, it could be opening of a church… just making sure that all the words for the whole Samoan world are actually in the dictionary,” he says.

“That was funnelled through a committee, basically under the guidance and also further research by the National University of Samoa. That’s where the work was actually put together.”

Lemoa says Samoans are trying to “decolonise our thinking”.

“The imperial thinking is that the Samoan language is inferior to the Western language or European and English language. By the Samoans and by the government creating these texts and creating these initiatives and coming up with resources like this, [it] really starts to uplift the value of the language and starts to validate to Samoans the importance of Samoan language.”

Listen here: newsroom.co.nz/2024/07/20/samoan-for-samoa