I-Kiribati

Gilbertese, officially te taetae ni Kiribati and also called te taetae n aomata, the language of the people, is an Austronesian language of the Micronesian branch of Oceanic, spoken across the coral atolls of the Gilbert Islands. It splits into northern and southern dialects.

Austronesian seafarers settled the atolls over a long span from around 3000 before Christ, and Samoan arrivals around 1300 added Polynesian words and clans; by the fifteenth century the northern islands lived under chiefs called uea while the south was run by councils of elders, the unimwaane.

European contact began when John Byron chanced on Nikunau in 1765, and Thomas Gilbert and John Marshall passed through in 1788, after whom Adam von Krusenstern named the archipelago the Gilbert Islands in 1820. Through the 1830s Gilbertese remained an entirely oral language.