Why is the Hawaiian language considered critically endangered?
UNESCO classifies Hawaiian as critically endangered because native speakers fell to less than 0.1% of Hawaii's statewide population by 2001. Decades of suppression following the 1896 Act 57, which banned Hawaiian as a medium of instruction in schools, reduced the number of fluent speakers drastically. As of the US 2011 census, only about 2,000 native speakers remained, with 24,000 total fluent speakers out of a statewide population of over a million.
What was Act 57 and how did it affect the Hawaiian language?
Act 57, passed in 1896 by the Republic of Hawaii, established English as the sole medium of instruction in all public and private schools. It effectively banned Hawaiian as a teaching language for 91 years, until 1987. Children who spoke Hawaiian at school were disciplined, sometimes physically, and the law contributed to the near-extinction of the language.
When did the Hawaiian language revitalization movement begin?
A gradual increase in attention to Hawaiian began around 1949, when the legislature commissioned Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Hoyt Elbert to write a new dictionary, completed in 1957. The broader cultural revival accelerated during the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s. The ʻAha Pūnana Leo formed in 1983 and opened the first Hawaiian-language immersion preschool in 1984.
Who created the Hawaiian alphabet and when was it first printed?
American Protestant missionaries developed the modern Hawaiian alphabet between 1820 and 1826. The first printing in Hawaii appeared on the 7th of January 1822. In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate redundant letters so that each symbol represented exactly one phoneme, producing the simplified alphabet still in use.
What is the ʻokina in Hawaiian and what does it represent?
The ʻokina is the Hawaiian name for the symbol representing the glottal stop, a consonant formed by briefly closing the glottis. As Elbert and Pukui's Hawaiian Grammar describes it, the sound resembles the hiatus in the English word "oh-oh." Missionaries used an apostrophe for the sound as early as 1823, but the ʻokina was not standardized as a letter of the alphabet until later revitalization efforts.
Where in Hawaii is Hawaiian still spoken as a first language?
Niʻihau is the only place in the world where Hawaiian is the first language and English is treated as a foreign language. The island, located off the southwest coast of Kauaʻi, has remained isolated, and its residents have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively. Its dialect is considered the most distinct variety of Hawaiian and has not been extensively studied.