Carolinian is an Austronesian language spoken in the Northern Mariana Islands

Northern Mariana Islands

The 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 English

English language

English 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 Chamorro

Chamorro language

Chamorro 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 Satawalese

Trukic languages

The 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 similarity

Lexical similarity

In 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 alphabet

Alphabet

An 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...

.