The Samoan vowel shift: A phenomenon in phonetics and phonological awareness

Abstract

This paper is a response to a phenomenon in the area of Samoan phonology, or to be exact, the vowels' pronunciation. It involves a shift in the utterance of vowels in the past thirty years or so. And it comes to this. A gradual blurring in the articulation of the vowel sound has been noted. It appears that the glottal stop had rubbed off on the vowel for reasons that are linguistic, sociological and even pedagogical. This 'emerging reality' is yet to be addressed in literature even though evidence of its first appearance can be traced back to the early eighties. Time moves on and there hasn't been a question raised for reasons not quite clear to the writers, hence the purpose of this response. In this writing we hope to raise the issue, as we believe it is crucial to any type of research that delves into both Samoan phonetics and phonology, and the extent of both in language and learning application.