Background

Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Central-Eastern / Eastern Malayo-Polynesian / Oceanic / Central-Eastern Oceanic / Remote Oceanic / Micronesian / Micronesian Proper / Ikiribati

Also referred to as Gilbertese, Kiribati is spoken on the Solomon Islands, located just east of Papua New Guinea.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Bilabial	Alveolar	Velar
Stops	p pˠ	t	k
Fricatives	βˠ
Nasals	m mː mˠ	n nː	ŋ ŋː
Flaps		ɾ
Note: Phonemes that share a cell match in voicing. Those transcribed with /ˠ/ are velarized and those transcribed with /ː/ are phonemically long.

Vowels

Vowel length is contrastive, where long vowels are represented orthographically by doubling the vowel (Blevins and Harrison 1999, 206).

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme
a	/a/
b	/p/
e	/e/
i	/i/
k	/k/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
r	/ɾ/
t	/t/
u	/u/
w	/βˠ/
Multigraph
bw	/pˠ/
mm	/mː/
mw	/mˠ/
nn	/nː/
ng	/ŋ/
ngng	/ŋː/

Misc. Rules

/t/ spirantizes to [s] when followed by /i/ in all dialects (Blevins and Harrison 1999, 206).

References

Blevins, Juliette, and Sheldon P Harrison. 1999. “Trimoraic Feet in Gilbertese.” Oceanic Linguistics 38 (2). University of Hawai’i Press: 203–30.

Kiribati