Samoan pronunciation guide

The following pronunciation guide makes me feel a little bit like I’m copying Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. But when I read that book, I really appreciated having the pronunciation guide so I didn’t feel uncertain about characters’ names. Even if I was mispronouncing them in my mind, I didn’t feel like I was mispronouncing them. I am going to try to keep all the use of Sāmoan words to a reasonable balance so that the reader doesn’t feel overwhelmed. If I err, it will probably
be on the side of using too much Sāmoan in the first draft. Hopefully if the readers feel able to pronounce the words, and I make it clear enough what each represents, then the story will continue to be interesting.

Here's the guide:

First of all, vowels are important. Since learning Sāmoan and subsequently studying some Spanish I’ve noticed that American English speakers tend to turn about half of vowel sounds into the ǝ schwa sound “uh” even if a technically correct pronunciation of a word doesn’t involve the schwa sound. This is fine for English because most English ears listen more closely to the consonant sounds. The Sāmoan language is opposite. Vowel sounds are generally what differentiate most words from each other. Some consonants can even be interchanged. If you know how to pronounce Spanish vowels, then you’re most of the way ready to pronounce any Sāmoan word. A is pronounced “ah” as in father although even in Sāmoan it can tend toward a schwa sound “uh” at the end of a dipthong (a dipthong means two vowels slurred together) such as fea, fia, foa, or fua. E is pronounced as an “eh” or “ay” sound as in hey. I is pronounced “ee” as in peek. O is pronounced “oh” as in tote. U is pronounced “oo” as in flute. Put any two vowels together and you get a dipthong. Generally you can just sound out each
vowel sound in the dipthong slurred together a little bit and that’s correct. The dipthongs ai and ae can be approximated with the sound “eye” as in a person’s eyes. The dipthongs au and ao can be approximated by “ow” as in the word cow. The dipthongs oe and oi can be approximated by “oy” as in the word toy. Again other dipthongs mostly just sound like each vowel sound stuck
together and slurred a little bit: ui sounds like “oo” slurred with “ee”,eo sounds like “eh“ slurred with “oh”, and so on. Consonants are mostly similar to English consonants. The most notable exception is G, which sounds like the “ng” sound in the English words bringer, or singing. So a word like pālagi sounds like “Pah- lah-ngi” agaga sounds like ah-ngah-ngah”, galuega sounds like “ngah-loo-eh-ngah”. If you have problems with this, I suggest just using an English N which is what analogous Hawaiian words use instead of the Sāmoan G. So the Sāmoan lagi is similar to the Hawaiian lani. Close enough for this story. F, L, M, N, S, and V are close enough to the English consonants. You can also use the English pronunciations for K, P, and T but they’re not exactly the same. English K, P, and T are heavily aspirated. Aspirated means it has breath or a puff of air behind it. English speakers generally put a lot of breath behind consonants K, P, and T, but Samoans don’t. Samoan consonants K, P and T generally trend slightly toward their un-aspirated counterparts: English G, B, and D respectively. Like I mentioned before, some consonants are interchangeable. T and K are mostly interchangeable, G and N are interchangeable in casual speech, and R is usually turned into L. In my story there will be some interchanging of T and K, but not of the other letters. There is one more consonant sound represented by an apostrophe ‘ called a glottal stop. Depending on where you‘re from you may notice that you don’t actually make a T sound when you say the word button or the word mountain. Most people replace the T’s with glottal stops without even knowing it! Button becomes buh’uhn and mountain becomes some
kind of monstrosity approaching a sound like “moun’uhn”. When you say uh-oh, there’s generally a glottal stop there between the “uh” and the “oh”. It’s a sharp break in the vocalization. A Sāmoan word like pea sounds like “pay-uh” with the “ay” and “uh” sounds kind of slurred together. But put a glottal stop in between the vowels and it becomes another word, pe’a
or “pay’uh”. There is a distinct break in between the “ay” sound and the “uh” sound.
There’s one last thing I need to mention. Unless otherwise indicated by a macron or horizontal bar over a vowel, the second to last syllable in a Sāmoan word is the syllable to be the most
accented. So the word savali, meaning to walk is pronounced “sah-VAH-lee”. The first syllable sah almost trends toward a schwa sound. The second syllable, using capitals for accent, has a very clear aw sound and is held a little bit longer for accent. But if I put the accent over the first syllable, written sāvali, the first syllable is very clear, and held a little longer. “SAW-vah-lee” changes the meaning of the word to the noun message. So you may have noticed the macron over the word Sāmoa. Most people I know pronounce this with the first syllable as a schwa sound “suh-moh- uh”. While I’m fine with people using this pronunciation, I always take flak from people when I pronounce it correctly, like I’m just pronouncing it that way to be pretentious or something. I only pronounce it that way because I have a better ear for vowels now and “suh-moh-uh” sounds really bad to me now. Imagine you were going to the hardware store and I want a tool to cut wood with. Suppose I asked you to buy a “suh” at the hardware store and bring it back to me. You’d probably think I had an aneurism or something. You would only know what I was talking about through the context of the entire sentence. The word is clearly “saw” and
no other substitute works as well. Again the point of this guide is that the reader feels more comfortable with the Sāmoan words in this story. I hope this guide accomplishes that in some measure. If you feel comfortable with a pronunciation you made up yourself then more power to you for it. I hope you enjoy my story, and I hope the Sāmoan doesn’t come across as pretentious or
otherwise lame.