Old Samoan songs and stories made available online

Transcript

A lack of new Samoan language resources in New Zealand has prompted a team to make available online old recordings of traditional Samoan songs and stories.

Victoria University of Wellington's Language Learning Centre embarked on a mission to digitise a number of high quality Maori and Samoan casette tapes from the 1980s and 90s.  

The Rays of Sound project includes recordings of Samoan music composed over a 100 year period, and stories about making palusami and the gathering of the palolo.

The Language Learning Centre's senior administrator, Balint Koller, says they wanted to put the audio online so they can remain available for people to listen to in the future.

BALINT KOLLER: What we've noticed in the last few years is that there are not many new Samoan resources coming out from commercial publishers that are of a similar nature. There are some children stories but not a lot of audio that we have been able to identify. We thought why not give these older resources a new lease on life and that's the motivation behind it. So we thought these resources might be useful for Samoan early childhood educators who may be struggling to find resources these days, audio especially. The whole idea of favouring audio is that language is mostly spoken and we'd like to support that or spread the spoken word, the oral language, if possible.

LEILANI MOMOISEA: Can you tell me a bit about what these recordings are? Are they childrens stories, are they songs?

BK: Some are children's stories, some are songs, some are more stories of an educational nature. Sort of realistic stories involving children, what they do in the home and how they cook a traditional Samoan dish, like the one about palusami. We thought they were really nice stories, and really high quality recordings, that were kind of dying on the cassette tapes, if you like.

LM: You feel like if children can listen to these recordings, this will help them with their learning the language?

BK: Absoloutely. That's what we do at the language learning centre, we're trying to expose people to as much audio, as much spoken language as we can because that's where real language takes place. The written word is important but there's sometimes all too much emphasis on written and printed and not enough on spoken, and we just wanted to promote the sounds of the language, and a space online that accommodates the sounds of that language and keeps it alive.

LM: There's also a collection of Samoan music composed over a period of 100 years, that must be amazing for people to have access to that.

BK: Yes, we think so. The nice thing about this is that these things all existed, and they were just kind of withering away on cassette tapes and I think our contribution was that we didn't want to let that happen, because they were too valuable.