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Samoan (Gagana faʻa Sāmoa or Gagana Sāmoa, pronounced [ŋaˈŋana ˈsaːmʊa]) is a Polynesian language spoken by Samoans of the Samoan Islands.Administratively, the islands are split between the sovereign country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa.
Samoans or Samoan people (Samoan: tagata Sāmoa) are the Indigenous Polynesian people of the Samoan Islands, an archipelago in Polynesia, who speak the Samoan language.The group's home islands are politically and geographically divided between the Independent State of Samoa and American Samoa, an unincorporated territory of the United States of America.
Chromograph map of Samoa - George Cram 1896. The Samoan Islands were first settled some 3,500 years ago as part of the Austronesian expansion.Both Samoa's early history and its more recent history are strongly connected to the histories of Tonga and Fiji, nearby islands with which Samoa has long had genealogical links as well as shared cultural traditions.
The Indigenous Māori people form the largest Polynesian population, [9] followed by Samoans, Native Hawaiians, Tahitians, Tongans, and Cook Islands Māori. [ citation needed ] As of 2012 [update] , there were an estimated 2 million ethnic Polynesians (both full and part) worldwide.
It includes people who indicate their race as 'Native Hawaiian', 'Guamanian or Chamorro', 'Samoan', and 'Other Pacific Islander' or provide other detailed Pacific Islander responses. [ 57 ] According to the Office of Management and Budget , " Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander " refers to a person having origins in any of the original ...
The Lapita people discovered and settled the Samoan Islands around 3,500 years ago. They developed a Samoan language and Samoan cultural identity. Samoa is a unitary parliamentary democracy with 11 administrative divisions. It is a sovereign state and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
The contemporary classification of the Polynesian languages began with certain observations by Andrew Pawley in 1966 based on shared innovations in phonology, vocabulary and grammar showing that the East Polynesian languages were more closely related to Samoan than they were to Tongan, calling Tongan and its nearby relative Niuean "Tongic" and ...
The inhabitants have in common the Samoan language, a culture known as fa'a Samoa, and an indigenous form of governance called fa'amatai. [2] Samoans are one of the largest Polynesian populations in the world, and most are of exclusively Samoan ancestry. [3] The oldest known evidence of human activity in the Samoan Islands dates to around 1050 BCE.