Samoan literature imperialism, Language shift, and linguicide. Samoan literature Samoan literature can be divided into oral (pre-colonial and post-colonial) and written literatures, in the Samoan language and in English or English translation, and is from the Samoa Islands of independent Samoa and American Samoa, and Samoan writers in diaspora. Samoan as a written language emerged after 1830 when Tahitian and English missionaries from the London Missionary Society, working with Samoan chiefly orators, developed a Latin script based Samoan written language. Before this, there were "logologo" (tapa signs) and "tatau" (tattoo signs) but no phonetic written form. Pre-colonial and post-colonial Samoan oral literature
Tahitian language system and Tahitian was only a spoken language. In 1797, Protestant missionaries arrived in Tahiti on a British ship called "Duff", captained by James Wilson. Among the missionaries was Henry Nott (1774–1844) who learned the Tahitian language and worked with Pōmare II, a Tahitian king, to translate the English Bible into Tahitian. A system of five vowels and nine consonants was adopted for the Tahitian Bible, which would become the key text by which many Polynesians would learn to read and write. Tahitian features a very small number of phonemes: five vowels and nine consonants, not counting the lengthened vowels