Gilbertese

Who first wrote Gilbertese down

The language was unwritten until the 1860s. A French naval surgeon published the first word list in 1847, taken from a castaway from Kuria picked up near Tabiteuea, and Horatio Hale printed the first English description in 1846. The written form in use today began with Hiram Bingham II, a Protestant missionary on Abaiang, who translated the Bible and compiled a dictionary published after his death in 1908. Father Ernest Sabatier's Dictionnaire gilbertin-français of 1952 to 1954, 981 pages long, was the first full description.

Why Protestant and Catholic spellings differ

Neither Bingham nor the Catholic missionaries who arrived in 1888 marked long sounds, and the two spellings have disagreed since 1895. Since independence in 1979, long vowels and consonants are written double, as in Finnish. The old spellings also missed the a that follows the velarised b and m, so maneaba should be mwaneaba, and the atoll of Makin is properly Mwaakin. Length changes meaning: ana is a third-person article, aana its underside, and anna dry land.

How nouns are marked

Gilbertese puts the verb first, then the object, then the subject. The article te turns any verb or adjective into a noun: nako, to go, becomes te nako, the going. Some nouns show the plural by lengthening the first vowel, so te boki, a book, becomes booki. Sibling words depend on the speaker's sex: tariu is a sibling of the same sex, maneu one of the other.

Where else the language is spoken

Relocation after the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme and later emigration spread the language. Fiji had about 6,600 speakers in 2019 and the Solomon Islands 6,800 in 2012, and New Zealand's 2018 census counted 2,196. In 2020 Finlayson Park School in Auckland opened the first Gilbertese language unit in New Zealand. The two main dialects, Northern and Southern, differ mostly in pronunciation; Butaritari and Makin have their own.