Issues in Applied Linguistics

Samoans establish new communities and identities through different linguistic strategies in the urban context ofLos Angeles. I isolated two kinds of strategies, the "minimal grasp" and the "tag particle" in both Samoan and Samoan-English, and traced the distribution of their use in everyday encounters between adults and children. Different models for socializing appropriate behavior—the Samoan way (fa^aSdmoa) and the American way (fa^apalagi)—co-exist within the same speech community. I argue that by comparing the different social organizations of language use, we may uncover how certain forms may be used to simultaneously maintain and transform cultural practices within a syncretic social space.