Home > Marshallese language

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 L M M̧ N N N̄ O O̧ O P R T U U W

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

Here is the Hail Mary in Marshallese Unicode. Compare with this scanned image to see how it should look with all the diacritics in place.

Io̧kwe eok Maria, kwo lon̄ kon

menin jouj;

Iroo ej pād ippam̧.

Kwo jeram̧m̧an iaan korā ran im

ejeram̧m̧an ineen lo̧jiom̧, Jesus.

O Maria kwojarar, jinen Anij,

kwon jar kon kem rijjerawiwi.

Kiio im ilo iien

amwoj 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

• Peace Corps Marshall Islands Marshallese Language Training Manual ( PDFPortable Document Format PDF is a file format developed by Adobe Systems for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. A PDF file can describ, 275 KB; instead of macrons uses trema on vowels and tilde on n, and underlines instead of cedillas)
• Everything2 page on Marshallese
• Ethnologue report on Marshallese
• Marshallese in the Rosetta ProjectThe Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 2100. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,00