<b>Marshallese Terms</b>

About

List of terms from Marshallese, the language spoken in the Micronesian nation Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Borrowed English words such as biteto (potato), or names of weekdays and months, tend to be more or less obvious, if not interesting because of the language's distinct Austronesian phonology and orthographies. Yes, orthographies - the old orthography, and the new. Depending upon who teaches the writing system and where and from whom they learned it, spellings may differ from island to island, or even by religious affiliation.

The words on this list are devoid of diacritical marks, so the spelling is but an approximation of a word's actual pronunciation. Marshallese syllables are of the form /CVC/ and the internal vowel always assimilates to both consonants in the syllable, based upon the palatalization, velarization and labialization of those consonants. Thus, a vowel phoneme will have differing realizations (allophones) depending upon the consonants at both ends of the syllable, with corresponding differences in orthography. Apparently, borrowed words that are Marshallese-ized may depart from the syllable constraint. Other seeming inconsistencies with the /CVC/ syllable construction may be a function of the orthographic representation of the words.

There are two main dialects of Marshallese: Rälik (western) and Ratak (eastern). Most of the words on this list are from the western dialect.

I don't speak Marshallese.