Samoan belongs to the Austronesian language family which is one of the largest linguistic families of the world. Samoan is spoken by approximately 200,000 people on the island of Western Samoa with another large community of speakers in nearby American Samoa. Both are situated in the Eastern Pacific, and there are smaller communities of speakers of Samoan in Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga and the USA.
Written Samoan uses Latin script which was introduced by Christian missionaries. The Samoan alphabet consists of a, e, i, o, u, f, g [ŋ], l, m, n, p, s, t, v. The letters k, h and r occur in loanwords, but are not included in the alphabet.
CLASSIFICATION = Austronesian languages (Oceanic), SCRIPT = Latin
