Marshallese language - Definition and Overview

The Marshallese language (Marshallese: Kajin M̧ajeļ) or Ebon is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Marshall Islands.

Information on Marshallese is scant but it appears to have had a change of orthography in recent times. It is written in a form of the latin script with some very unusual diacritic combinations.

Here is the (current) alphabet:

A Ā B D E I J K L Ļ M M̧ N Ņ N̄ O O̧ Ō P R T U Ū W

A ā b d e I j k l ļ m m̧ n ņ n̄ o o̧ ō p r t u ū w

Here is the Hail Mary in Marshallese Unicode. Compare with this scanned image (http://www.udayton.edu/mary/images/marshall.jpg) to see how it should look with all the diacritics in place.

Io̧kwe eok Maria, kwo lōn̄ kōn

menin jouj;

Iroo ej pād ippam̧.

Kwo jeram̧m̧an iaan kōrā raņ im

ejeram̧m̧an ineen lo̧jiōm̧, Jesus.

O Maria kwojarar, jinen Anij,

kwōn jar kōn kem rijjerawiwi.

Kiiō im ilo iien

amwōj mej. Amen.

One Marshallese word is yokwe, which means both hello and good-bye. It also means love. (Compare Hawaiian aloha.) This word may also be written lakwe and io̧kwe.

External links

Wikipedia articles written in this language are located at the

Marshallese language Wikipedia

• Marshallese Phrasebook on the website for the Republic of Marshall Islands (http://www.rmiembassyus.org/tourism/phrasebook.html) lists the Marshallese word for the Marshallese language as kajin Majöl
• Peace Corps Marshall Islands Marshallese Language Training Manual (http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/~rscook/pdf/PCMLT-JejeinM.pdf) (PDF, 275 KB; instead of macrons uses trema on vowels and tilde on n, and underlines instead of cedillas)
• Everything2 page on Marshallese (http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=918957)
• Ethnologue report on Marshallese (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=MZM)
• Marshallese (http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/search/detailedlanguagerecord?ethnocode=MZM) in the Rosetta Project