Early European visitors, including Commodore John Byron, whose ships happened on Nikunau in 1765, had named some of the islands the Kingsmill or Kings Mill Islands or for the Northern group les îles Mulgrave in French[2] but in 1820 they were renamed, in French, les îles Gilbert by Admiral Adam Johann von Krusenstern, after Captain Thomas Gilbert, who, along with Captain John Marshall, had passed through some of these islands in 1788.

The first ever vocabulary list of Gilbertese was published by the French Revue coloniale (1847) by an auxiliary surgeon on corvette Le Rhin in 1845.

However, it was not until Hiram Bingham II took up missionary work on Abaiang in the 1860s that the language began to take on the written form known now.

Bingham was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, a dictionary (1908, posthumous) and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands.

Alphonse Colomb, a French priest in Tahiti wrote in 1888, Vocabulaire arorai (îles Gilbert) précédé de notes grammaticales d'après un manuscrit du P. Latium Levêque et le travail de Hale sur la langue Tarawa / par le P. A.

C.. Father Levêque named the Gilbertese Arorai (from Arorae) when Horatio Hale called them Tarawa.

This work was also based on the first known description of Gilbertese in English, published in 1846, in the volume Ethnology and Philology of the U.S.

The first complete and comprehensive description of this language was published in Dictionnaire gilbertin–français of Father Ernest Sabatier (981 pp, 1952–1954), a Catholic priest.

The Gilbertese, Tongan, Tahitian, Māori, Western Fijian and Tolai (Gazelle Peninsula) languages each have over 100,000 speakers.

The islands of Butaritari and Makin also have their own dialect that differs from the standard Kiribati in some vocabulary and pronunciation.

Quantity is distinctive for vowels and plain nasal consonants but not for the remaining sounds so that ana /ana/ (third person singular article) contrasts with aana /aːna/ (transl.

Since the independence of Kiribati in 1979, long vowels and consonants are represented by doubling the character, as in Dutch and Finnish.

Bingham and the first Roman Catholic missionaries (1888) did not indicate in their script the vowel length by doubling the character.

For example, the word maneaba should be written mwaneaba or even mwaaneaba and the atoll of Makin, Mwaakin.

One difficulty in translating the Bible was references to words such as "mountain", a geographical phenomenon unknown to the people of the islands of Kiribati at the time, heard only in the myths from Samoa.

[clarification needed] Catholic missionaries arrived at the islands in 1888 and translated the Bible independently of Bingham, which led to differences (Bingham wrote Jesus as "Iesu", but the Catholics wrote "Ietu") that would be resolved only in the 20th century.

In 1954, Father Ernest Sabatier published the larger and more accurate Kiribati to French dictionary (translated into English by Sister Olivia): Dictionnaire gilbertin–français, 981 pages (edited by South Pacific Commission in 1971).

The dictionary is available at the French National Library Rare Language Department and at the headquarters of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC), Issoudun.

These include names of people and places, words for cardinal directions, and other specific nouns.

Sex or gender can be marked by adding mmwaane (male) or aiine (female) to the noun.

Agent nouns can be created with the particle tia (singular) or taan(i) (plural).

Adjectives can also be formed from nouns by reduplication with the meaning of "abundant in", e.g., karau ("rain"), kakarau ("rainy").

A limited set of nouns, typically referring to unique entities, dispense with te.

While te marks singular nouns, the language possesses a plural article taian.

The Gilbertese language employs a system of demonstratives to indicate the spatial proximity of the referent to the speaker.

Expressing “better than” requires the preposition nakon (“than”) along with a construction that compares the noun-like qualities derived from the adjectives: Eakibootauanaakoitarim.E aki bootau an aakoi tar im.You are not as kind as your brother.

Protestants (1860) and Roman Catholics (1888) had to find or create some words that were not in use in the Gilbert Islands, like mountain (te maunga, borrowing it from Hawaiian mauna or Samoan maunga), and like serpents, but also to find a good translation for God (te Atua).