Carolinian is an Austronesian language spoken in the
Northern Mariana IslandsThe Northern Mariana Islands, officially the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands , is a commonwealth in political union with the United States, occupying a strategic region of the western Pacific Ocean. It consists of 15 islands about three-quarters of the way from Hawaii to the Philippines...
, where it is an official language along with
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and
ChamorroChamorro is a Malayo-Polynesian language, spoken on the Mariana Islands by about 47,000 people Chamorro (Chamorro: Fino' Chamoru or simply Chamoru) is a Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language, spoken on the Mariana Islands (Guam, Rota, Tinian, and Saipan) by about 47,000 people Chamorro...
. Spoken mostly by the
Carolinian people, Carolinian is most closely related to
SatawaleseThe Trukic languages are a dialect continuum of Micronesian languages, conventionally divided into a dozen languages.-Components:The database seems to say that Sonsorol is the most divergent of the Trukese languages. However, the results are defective and it is not clear that they support a Trukese...
, Woleaian, and Puluwatese. Carolinian has 95%
lexical similarityIn linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words....
with Satawalese, 88% with Woleaian and Puluwatese; 81% with Mortlockese; 78% with Chuukese, 74% with Ulithian. A 1990 census estimated the number of speakers at about 3,000, currently 5,700. Carolinian is known as
Refaluwasch by native speakers. It has 31 characters in its
alphabetAn alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
.