Marshallese
Language · official in 1 country
Kajin Ṃajeḷ, also called Ebon, is spoken on the 34 atolls of the Marshall Islands in two mutually intelligible dialects, Rālik in the western chain and Ratak in the eastern. A Micronesian language of the Austronesian family, it is written in a Latin alphabet of 24 letters and is the official language of the Marshall Islands.
The language on record
- Own name
- Kajin Ṃajōḷ
- ISO 639-1
- MH
- ISO 639-3
- MAH
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Micronesian
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Marshallese is official
The Marshall Islands is the only state where Marshallese is official, and the record gives it no partner there.
Official beside Marshallese
About Marshallese
Which languages Marshallese is close to
Marshallese belongs to the Micronesian group of Eastern Oceanic. Its relatives include Gilbertese, Nauruan, Pohnpeian, Mokilese, Chuukese, Refaluwasch and Kosraean, and it shares 50% of its vocabulary with Gilbertese, Mokilese and Pohnpeian. It is more distant from Yapese and further still from Palauan and Chamorro, which are not Oceanic languages at all.
How the two island chains split a word
The dialects differ mostly in vocabulary, but they also treat stems that start with a double consonant in different ways. Rālik puts a vowel in front, and Ratak puts one between the consonants, so kkure, "play", becomes ikkure in the west and kukure in the east.
Why there are two spellings
Missionaries introduced the old orthography, which is inconsistent in how it shows sounds but still appears in newspapers and on signs. The new one, used in the Marshallese-English dictionary by Abo and others, is spreading through schools and among younger speakers. It adds cedillas to four letters, ḷ, ṃ, ṇ and ọ, which the old spelling wrote plain. Spelling follows pronunciation, so vowel backness is written even though it does not change meaning.
The linguist Byron W. Bender designed a third, morphophonemic system for dictionaries in 1968. Typing the language is still awkward: as of 2019 Unicode had no precomposed forms for m̧, n̄ or o̧, and most fonts draw ļ and ņ with the comma of Latvian instead of a cedilla.
Who speaks it
Nearly all of the country's people do: 43,900 speakers were counted in 1979 and about 59,000 in 2020. Communities in Nauru, Kiribati and the United States speak it too.
Common questions
Questions about Marshallese
What do the Marshallese call their language?
Kajin Ṃajeḷ, also spelled Kajin Majōl. English sometimes calls it Ebon.
Do the Ratak and Rālik dialects understand each other?
Yes. They differ mainly in vocabulary and in how they break up double consonants at the start of a word, and speakers of each follow the other.
Why is Marshallese hard to type?
Several of its letters carry a cedilla or macron that Unicode does not supply as a single character, so they have to be built from combining marks. Many fonts misplace them, and the online dictionary uses dots under the letters instead.
How many letters are in the Marshallese alphabet?
Twenty-four, in the alphabet promoted by the government of the Marshall Islands.