| 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 [i], [ɯ], [u], [i͡ɯ], [i͡u], [ɯ͡i], [ɯ͡u], [u͡i], [u͡ɯ], depending on the context:
Marshallese syllable structure is such that all syllables begin and end with a consonant, with a vowel at the syllable's nucleus.
In all cases, the vowel of each syllable assimilates to the consonants at both its sides.
These multiple vowel articulations are a product of the different consonant phonemes that neighbor them on..... full article at Wikipedia |
