Carolinian
Language · official in 2 countries and territories
Saipan Carolinian formed after about 1815, when Carolinians from the western atolls settled the abandoned island of Saipan and later waves of migration mixed their dialects. It is an Austronesian language of the Carolinian continuum, written in the Latin alphabet, and official in the Northern Mariana Islands alongside English and Chamorro.
The language on record
- Own name
- Refaluwasch
- ISO 639-3
- CAL
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Micronesian
- Official in
- 2 countries
Where Carolinian is official
The Northern Mariana Islands give Carolinian official status with English and Chamorro. The United States appears because its record takes in the languages of its territories; no federal law names Carolinian.
Official beside Carolinian
About Carolinian
Where the language came from
The Caroline Islands were first settled by Austronesians who came from Taiwan. Europeans reached them in 1652. Between 1795 and 1797 Don Luis de Torres, a Spanish official on Guam, studied the language and identified its dialect continuum. Drift voyages in the 1700s carried Carolinian speech to the Philippines and Guam.
Who brought it to Saipan
After Saipan was abandoned around 1815, Carolinians had the island largely to themselves. Between 1865 and 1868 the English entrepreneur H. G. Johnson moved about 1,500 more to plantations on Guam, Rota and Tinian, and the Tinian group later moved to Saipan. German ships brought hundreds of Mortlockese and other atoll dwellers after typhoons between 1905 and 1907, but they were settled apart and left little mark on the language. Most Carolinians live on Saipan today, and the small island of Agrigan is reported to be populated only by Carolinian speakers.
Its vocabulary overlaps 95% with Satawalese, 88% with Woleaian and Puluwatese and 78% with Chuukese.
How a committee settled the spelling
Speakers long spelled Carolinian by the rules of whichever language they knew: German, with umlauts and sch, or Chamorro, which lacks three of its vowels and its vowel length, or English. An orthography conference met from 26 July to 4 August 1976 and chose no single dialect as standard; it gave all three dialects one framework so that each could be spelled as spoken. The alphabet had 28 letters in 1977 and 33 from 2004.
The Catalogue of Endangered Languages lists Carolinian as threatened, and few children on Saipan now speak its traditional form with confidence.
Common questions
Questions about Carolinian
Is Carolinian an official language of the United States?
No federal law names it. It is official in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth, together with English and Chamorro, and the US record counts it for that reason.
Is Carolinian endangered?
The Catalogue of Endangered Languages lists it as threatened, though the data is scarce. English has shaped it heavily since the Second World War.
Which dialect does written Carolinian follow?
None in particular. The 1976 orthography conference agreed a spelling framework for all three dialects, and teachers let pupils spell the dialect they speak.