Gagana faʻa Sāmoa

Gagana faʻa Sāmoa is notable for having two registers – formal and colloquial – this is not reflected in the orthography; the formal register is the correct way to write.

faʻamamafa: these are more used in Aotearoa and Hawaiʻi than in Sāmoa, having been historically excluded by their Department of Education. usage is divided along diasporic lines. there is certain ambiguity in not using faʻamamafa. this problem extends to koma liliu. as-of 2025, usage of faʻamamafa and koma liliu are taught in Sāmoan schools.

the apostrophe [u+0027] is often used in place of the turned comma [u+02bb] out of convenience. use of the apostrophe also aligns with te Taura Whiri. this is simple enough as apostrophes form no punctuative rôle in Gagana faʻa Sāmoa.

older Gagana faʻa Sāmoa texts, particularly those of Pratt, also make use of the breve diacritic (◌̆ [u+0306]) on vowels to indicate brevity of length.

use of diacritics, despite being in use, remain inconsistent in older texts, instead utilising context to determine meaning.

derived from 6-dot English Braille.

there is a special reduplication sign which indicates that a word is reduplicated thus saving space. e.g., tumutumu (summit) is rendered ⠞⠥⠍⠥⠙ rather than ⠞⠥⠍⠥⠞⠥⠍⠥.

the prefix equivalent to a macron is ⠰ [u+2830]. the prefix marking capitalisation is ⠠ [u+2820].

the English Braille apostrophe character ⠈ [u+2808] is used for the glottal stop.

can’t find any abbreviations specific to this braille.

other notes

before the inclusion of the macron into unicode in 1993, macrons were encoded as a diaeresis, they may appear visually as a macron or not depending on the font used.

the ‘k’ used in loanwords is also used once (hapax legomenon but not really) in the exclamation and ‘puke!’ compound ‘pukētā!’.

data

precomposed characters are used in this section when available.

alphabetised (as per Tusiʻupu Sāmoa):
A Ā a ā E Ē e ē F f G g H h I Ī i ī K k L l M m N n O Ō o ō P p R r S s T t U Ū u ū V v
remarks: the koma liliu is ignored in sorting. alphabetisation is generally case insensitive because capital letters occur extremely infrequently to be relevant. faʻamamafa only count against the same column: e.g., fofoga precedes fofogā which is followed by fofogapogia. if working with breves in a historical text, the same is true: breves follow both the normal form and the macroned form, i.e., a ā ă.

regex:
vowels: (?'smo_vowels'A|Ā|a|ā|E|Ē|e|ē|I|Ī|i|ī|O|Ō|o|ō|U|Ŭ|u|ū)
consonants: (?'smo_consonants'F|f|G|g|H|h|K|k|L|l|M|m|N|n|P|p|R|r|S|s|T|t|V|v|ʻ)