Kiribati language

Kiribati language, Gilbertese or - in full in the Kiribati language itself - For taetae ni Kiribati is a language of the Austronesian language family, part of theOceanic branch and the nuclear Micronesian sub-branch. It is a language with the VOC order . "Kiribati" is the name of the language, "I-Kiribati" means "the people of Kiribati" in Kiribati.

Although about 105,000 people speak the language, only 98,000 people live in Kiribati, about 97.2% of the entire population. Other speakers live in Nui ( Tuvalu ), Rabi (Fiji ) and other islands to which they have been brought by the English (as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu ) or emigrated (mainly New Zealand and Hawaii ).

Unlike many languages ​​in the Pacific region is the Kiribati far from extinct and nearly all speakers use the language daily. Only 30% of the speakers are fully bilingual withEnglish as a second language, which means it Kiribati aid would still not be directly absorbed.

Fishermen, sailors, farmers and people in the koprabranche constitute the majority of the speakers of Kiribati.

There is a dialect Banabaans .

The Kiribati since 1840-50 written with the Latin alphabet when the missionary Hiram Bingham yr. the Bible for the first time would translate in Kiribati and a script needed for. The biggest problem in the translation were the words such as "mountain", a phenomenon that the people of Kiribati knew only from myths of Samoa . Bingham decided "hilly" to use, what people would understand better.

Catholic missionaries came later (around 1888 ) to the islands and translated the Bible independently of him, which caused some differences (Bingham wrote Jesus as"Iesu", while Catholics "Ietu" wrote). These differences are only reversed in the 20th century (the S was removed from the alphabet). The best dictionary of Kiribati was in1945 by the priest Ernest Sabatier Published: Dictionnaire Français-Gilbertin, 900 pp (published by the South Pacific Commission. 1971 ). ==Useful phrases [  edit ] ==
 * Hello - Mauri
 * Hello - [singular] Ko after mauri
 * Hello - [plural] Kam after mauri
 * How ya doing? - Ko uara?
 * How are you all? - Comb uara?
 * Thank you. - Ko rabwa
 * Bye - Ti, a bo (we shall see)