Spoken Marshallese is designed to fill the need for a basic text in the language of the Marshall Islands. It will give students a fluency in the language and a feeling for its structure, enabling him or her to converse freely on a broad range of subjects without additional formal instruction. The Marshallese-English Dictionary, by Takaji Abo, Byron W. Bender, Alfred Capelle, and Tony DeBrum, would be useful as a supplement to this text.

This volume focuses on problems in the morphological and syntactic analysis of certain Asian and Pacific languages, bringing to bear alternative theories of grammar, including relational, categorial, and lexicase dependency grammar, and a whole-world approach to morphology.