[2] Woleai has a writing system of its own, a syllabary based on the Latin alphabet.
More specifically most of the speakers are found in Yap State in Micronesia where Woleaian is considered an official language.
Most Woleaian speakers are classified as Pacific Islanders and Micronesian (People-In-Country Profile).
Aside from Woleaian, many speakers in Yap and other nearby places speak other languages, like Yapese, Satawalese, Ulithian, English, Chuukese, Kosraean, Pingelapese, Pohnpeian, Mwoakilloan, and some Asian and Polynesian Languages.
They also enjoy using canoes to get around instead of motorboats, and simple things like beautiful beaches and going fishing.
13 years later when the census was taken in 2000 there was an increase of speakers and about 5,000 people were speaking or knew the language.
In the orthography of Sohn (1975),[5] along with a few approximations in the IPA, the inventory is, Note that both sh and r become ch when long, and that l becomes nn.
Progressive action is shown in Woleaian through reduplication of initial parts of verbs.
[6] They use both whole stem and partial reduplications “as initial or medial consonant doubling and initial or final reduplication,”[5] An example of this is the word fiyefiy, which means to squeeze and comes from the word fiya, which means squeeze it.
Two books in particular are helpful in learning about the Woleaian language: the Woleaian Reference Grammar book by Ho-Min Sohn, and a Woleaian-English Dictionary by Ho-Min Sohn and Anthony Tawerilmang.
These two books contain much information about the Woleaian language, such as the sentence structures, types of reduplication, vocabulary, etc.
One by Tsz-him Tsui from the University of Hawaii at Manoa describes the Woleaian vocabulary and phonemes.
A paper by Robert Kennedy from the University of Arizona is about Woleaian reduplication.
There is intergenerational transmission involved in Woleaian because of its language status on the EGIDS.