| Also Known As: Ebon,Marshallese
Description:
The Marshallese language (Marshallese: Kajin M̧ajeļ or Kajin Majõl ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Marshall Islands. There are two major dialects: Rälik (western) and Ratak (eastern).
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):
Marshallese has four vowel phonemes each with several allophones:
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 /ɨ/ may alternately be pronounced as [i], [ɯ], [u], [i͡ɯ], [i͡u], [ɯ͡i], [ɯ͡u], [u͡i], [u͡ɯ], depending on the context:
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..... full article at Wikipedia |