Kiribati

The Republic of Kiribati is an island nation located in the central tropical Pacific Ocean. The country's 33 atolls are scattered over 3,500,000 km² near the equator. Its name is pronounced and is a Kiribati language rendering of "Gilberts", the English name for the main group of islands: the former Gilbert Islands.

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Main article: History of Kiribati

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Kiribati was inhabited by a single Micronesian ethnic group that spoke the same Oceanic language for 2,000 years before coming into contact with Europeans. The islands were named the Gilbert Islands in 1820 by a Russian admiral, Adam von Krusenstern, and French captain Louis Duperrey, after a British captain, Thomas Gilbert, who crossed the archipelago in 1788 ('Kiribati' is the islanders' pronunciation of plural 'Gilberts').

Island nation: An island nation is a country that is wholly confined to an island or islands. Forty-seven of the world's countries are island nations, including most of the smallest ones....

Pacific Ocean: :For other meanings of Pacific, see Pacific (disambiguation)....

Atoll: An atoll is a type of low, coral island found in tropical oceans and consisting of a coral-algal reef surrounding a central depression. The depression may be part of the emergent island, but more typically is a part of the sea (that is, a lagoon), or very rarely is an enclosed body of fresh, bracki...