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The 'Marshallese language' (Marshallese: '' or '' ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Marshall Islands.

Contents

Sounds

Consonants

Vowels

Syllable and phonotactics

Stress

Orthography

Grammar

Spelling

Text examples

Modern orthography

Older orthography

External links

Bibliography

Further reading

Sounds

Consonants

Marshallese has 22 consonants (five of which are written with digraphs), plus a supplementary velar central approximant consonant (often not written in the current orthography):

Primary		Bilabial		Dental			Palatal	Velar
Secondary		palatalized	velarized	palatalized	velarized	labialized		velarized	labialized
Nasal
Stop (occlusive)
Rhotic (fricative)
Approximant	lateral
	central							or

★ Marshallese has a number of consonants with contrasting secondary articulations:

★
★ palatalized consonants

★
★ velarized consonants

★
★ labialized-velarized consonants
(Note that central approximants in the table above actually have a single articulation.)

★ The velarized bilabial stop is phonetically voiced.

Vowels

Marshallese has four vowel phonemes each with several allophones:

Marshallese vowel			Simple realisations			Main orthographies
height		phoneme	unrounded		rounded	unrounded		rounded
			front	back		front	back
High	(close)
Upper Mid	(near-close)			(long)		(or )		(or )
Lower Mid	(open-mid)			(short)			̧ (or )	(or )
Low	(open)							(or )

Marshallese vowels are not specified along the front-back and rounded-unrounded dimensions, but on the height and ATR dimensions (see the IPA classification of vowels in the table on the right). This means that a given vowel phoneme will have several different phonetic realizations.
For example, the high vowel phoneme may alternately be pronounced as , , , , , , , , , depending on the context:

★ Specifically, vowels next to palatized consonants become front unrounded (, , , ),

★ vowels next to velarized consonants become back unrounded (, , , ),

★ and vowels next to labialized consonants become back rounded (, , , ).

★ When between two consonants of different types (e.g., a velarized consonant and a labialized consonant), the vowels become diphthongs, beginning with the surface form found next to the preceding consonant, and ending with the surface form found next to the following consonant (e.g., in the case of a vowel between a velarized and labialized consonant, the diphthongs would be , , , :

Consonants secondary articulations	palatalized	velarized	labialized	palatalized- velarized	velarized- palatalized	velarized- labialized	labialized- velarized	palatalized- labialized	labialized- palatalized
Vowel realisation	front unrounded	back unrounded	back rounded	front and back unrounded		back rounded and unrounded		complex
Phoneme	simple vowel allophones			diphthong allophones
(close)
(near-close)
(open-mid)
(open)

Syllable and phonotactics

Stress

Orthography

Marshallese underwent a change of orthography in recent times. However, most people still use the old orthography. It is written in a form of the Latin alphabet with unusual diacritic combinations. There are different alphabetic systems in use by Marshallese speakers depending on religious affiliation, due to many schools being run by church groups. Each teacher uses his/her preferred method of teaching language. As a result, children who attend Catholic schools tend to use the same spellings because the teachers are trained by a small group of Maryknoll Sisters. Students in public schools vary their spelling from island to island, based upon what their teachers learned about language and spelling.
Here is the (current) alphabet (note that letters with a macron are usually represented with a tilde in printed texts, eg, ō becomes õ):

Base letter		Phonology		Letter with cedilla		Phonology		Letter with macron		Phonology
								(or )	(or )
(or )	(or )
				(or )	(or )
				(or )	(or )
				(or )	(or )			(or or )	(or or )
		(long)		̧ (or )	̧ (or )	(short)		(or )	(or )
								(or )	(or )

Sometimes, the unusual combinations of letters with combining macrons are replaced by vowels with diaeresis and by (or by an letter), and the combining cedilla is replaced by , or underlined letters (or letters with combining macron below).
Finally, the velar approximant may be seen written as h/H or (adding one more letter to the alphabet). And some orthographies make distinctions between allophones of the same palatal central approximant phoneme, i.e. between j/J and y/Y (adding another letter to the alphabet).

Grammar

One Marshallese word is '', which means both hello and good-bye. It also means love. (Compare Hawaiian ''.) This word may also be written '' and ''.

Spelling

Marshallese spelling is highly variable. Not only are there multiple orthographies in common use, but spelling is inconsistent within an orthography. For example, '' (no or not) is sometimes spelled '' and '' is sometimes spelled ''.

Text examples

Modern orthography

Here is the Hail Mary in Marshallese Unicode. Compare with this scanned image to see how it should look with all the diacritics in place.

Older orthography

Here is the Lord's Prayer as given in the 1982 Marshallese Bible, which uses the older orthography (most commonly used today).
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:

External links

★ Marshallese Phrasebook on the website for the Republic of Marshall Islands lists the Marshallese word for the Marshallese language as

★ Peace Corps Marshall Islands ''Marshallese Language Training Manual'' (PDF, 275 KB; instead of macrons uses trema on vowels and tilde on ''n'', and underlines instead of cedillas)

★ Everything2 page on Marshallese

★ Ethnologue report on Marshallese

★ Marshallese in the Rosetta Project

★ Marshallese Spelling Reforms article in the blog, "Far Outliers"

★ A Brief Introduction to Marshallese Phonology, a paper by Heather Willson

Bibliography

★ Bender, Byron W. (1968). Marshallese phonology. ''Oceanic Linguistics'', ''7'', 16-35.

★ Bender, Byron W. (1969). ''Spoken Marshallese: an intensive language course with grammatical notes and glossary''. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0870220705

★ Bender, Byron W. (1969). Vowel dissimilation in Marshallese. In ''Working papers in linguistics'' (No. 11, pp. 88-96). University of Hawaii.

★ Bender, Byron W. (1973). Parallelisms in the morphophonemics of several Micronesian languages. ''Oceanic Linguistics'', ''12'', 455-477.

★ Choi, John D. (1992). Phonetic underspecification and target interpolation: An acoustic study of Marshallese vowel allophony. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics (No. 82).

★ Hale, Mark. (2007) Chapter 5 of ''Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method''. Blackwell

★ Hale, Mark. (2000). Marshallese phonology, the phonetics-phonology interface and historical linguistics. ''The Linguistic Review'', ''17'', 241-257.

Further reading

★ Pagotto, L. (1987). ''Verb subcategorization and verb derivation in Marshallese: a lexicase analysis''.