Hawaiian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Hawaiian, known to its speakers as ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, is a Polynesian language that came within a generation of disappearing entirely. In 2001, native speakers accounted for less than 0.1% of Hawaii's statewide population. A single law passed in 1896 had made English the sole medium of instruction in schools, and children who dared speak Hawaiian on the playground were sometimes physically punished. How does a language survive nearly a century of official suppression? And what does it take to bring it back? Those are the questions that run through the story of Hawaiian.

• 2. Ancient Roots, Distant Cousins

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  According to Schütz (1994), the first settlers reached the Hawaiian archipelago from the Marquesas in roughly 300 CE, followed by later waves from the Society Islands and the Samoa-Tonga region. The languages those voyagers carried evolved over centuries into what became Hawaiian. The relationship to its relatives is still audible today. Jack H. Ward measured mutual intelligibility between Polynesian languages in 1962 and found that Hawaiian and Marquesan speakers could understand about 41.2% of each other's basic words and short phrases. Comprehension with Tahitian ran to 37.5%, with Samoan to 25.5%, and with Tongan to just 6.4%. A remarkable real-world test came in 1911, when Ernest Kaʻai and his Royal Hawaiians band toured New Zealand and found they could converse easily with Māori speakers. Hawaiian is also closely related to Rapa Nui, the language of Easter Island, a fact that speaks to the extraordinary navigational range of its ancestors. Kimura and Wilson (1983) note that linguists place Hawaiian's strongest link in the Southern Marquesas, with a secondary connection to Tahiti, likely reflecting voyaging between the Hawaiian and Society Islands long after initial settlement.

• 3. What James Cook Heard

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  James Cook made Europe's first recorded contact with Hawaiʻi in 1778, and the name his crew wrote down tells a small linguistic story of its own. Cook's sailors spelled the island's name as "Owhyhee" or "Owhyee", and a map engraved in 1781 shows it as "Oh-Why-hee". The opening "O" reflects the Hawaiian copula form ʻo, which precedes proper nouns; saying ʻO Hawaiʻi means roughly "This is Hawaiʻi." The letters "why" captured how 18th-century English pronounced the sound wh, while "hee" rendered the sounds hi or i. Together, O-why-(h)ee is a reasonable phonetic approximation of the native ʔo həwɐiʔi. American missionaries still used the phrase "Owhyhee language" in Boston as late as March 1822, when they were already en route to the islands. By July 1823, they had settled on "Hawaiian Language." A teenage boy named Obookiah, who had sailed to New England and enrolled at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, had already given those missionaries their first detailed information about the language before they departed in 1819. His influence on the course of Hawaiian's written history was far larger than his brief life suggested.

• 4. The Making of a Written Language

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  Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1820, and within six years they had built a working writing system for a language that had previously existed only as sound. On the 7th of January 1822 they produced the first thing ever printed in Hawaii: the Hawaiian alphabet. That original alphabet included consonants B, D, R, T, and V alongside the letters still used today, plus F, G, S, Y, and Z for foreign words. In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate letters that represented the same sounds, so that each symbol stood for exactly one phoneme. The result was a remarkably learnable system. Literacy spread so quickly that by 1842 a Hawaiian law required people born after 1819 to be literate before they could legally marry. Richard Armstrong, the minister of Public Instruction, reported to the legislature in 1853 that 75% of the adult population could read. The Hawaiian Legislature had already mandated compulsory state-funded education for all children under 14, including girls, in 1840 when the Mission handed its school network over to the Hawaiian government. That mandate came twelve years before any comparable compulsory education law was enacted in any of the United States. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840, and the Hawaiian Bible was completed in 1839. The first Hawaiian-language newspapers appeared in 1834. Even as the language flourished in print, at least one observer worried as early as 1854 that Hawaiian was "soon destined to extinction."

• 5. Suppression and Near-Silence

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  Act 57, section 30 of the 1896 Laws of the Republic of Hawaii established English as the sole medium of instruction in all public and private schools. The law followed the coup that had overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy and dethroned the last Hawaiian queen. While the text of Act 57 did not make Hawaiian illegal in other settings, those pushing for English-only schooling took it as licence to stamp out the native language at the earliest ages. Children who spoke Hawaiian at school, including on the playground, were disciplined. Mary Kawena Pukui, who would later co-author the Hawaiian-English Dictionary, began being punished for speaking Hawaiian starting in 1900; the penalties included being rapped on the forehead, being given only bread and water at lunch, and being denied home visits on holidays. In 1937, Winona Beamer was expelled from Kamehameha Schools for chanting Hawaiian. The Kamehameha Schools had been founded in 1887, nine years before Act 57, when Hawaiian was still spoken in the home; once the law passed, individuals at those institutions enforced the ban on their own initiative. Demographic change compounded official pressure. Whereas pure Hawaiian students made up 56% of school enrollment in 1890, their share fell to 32% by 1900 and to 16.9% by 1910. Over the same period, the number of students of mixed White-Hawaiian parentage grew from 1,573 to 3,718. In households where English carried prestige and Hawaiian did not, English became the family language. The only community that held out was on Niʻihau, the isolated island off the southwest coast of Kauaʻi, where Hawaiian has remained the language of daily life and English is still treated as a foreign tongue.

• 6. Revival and the Long Road Back

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  In 1949, the legislature of the Territory of Hawaii commissioned Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Hoyt Elbert to produce a new Hawaiian dictionary. The work they completed in 1957 introduced what has since become an era of gradually growing attention to the language. The Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970s brought a broader cultural revival. In 1983, the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, meaning "language nest," was formed; it opened its first center in 1984 as a privately funded preschool program inviting native Hawaiian elders to speak with children in Hawaiian every day. Hawaiian was not permitted as a medium of instruction in public schools until 1987, a span of 91 years after Act 57 had banned it. Over 80% of graduates from the Hawaiian-medium laboratory schools have gone on to college, with some attending Ivy League institutions. The Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo is the only college in the United States that offers a master's and doctoral degree in an Indigenous language. Its programs are collectively known as the "Hilo model" and have been imitated by the Cherokee immersion program and several other Indigenous language revitalization efforts. By the time of the US 2011 census, the number of native speakers had risen to 2,000, out of 24,000 total fluent speakers, though a 2016 state government estimate found only 18,000 residents claimed to speak Hawaiian at home. UNESCO still classifies the language as critically endangered.

• 7. The Niʻihau Question and Living Debate

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  Niʻihau presents a paradox at the heart of Hawaiian revitalization. On that island, native speakers of Hawaiian and speakers of "University Hawaiian" educated through the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo have developed friction over which version of the language is authentic. The university's Hawaiian Language Lexicon Committee, known as the Kōmike Huaʻōlelo Hou, coins new words for concepts the language historically lacked, such as terms for "computer" and "cell phone." Niʻihau speakers often do not adopt these coined terms, preferring to generate new vocabulary organically or to Hawaiianize existing English words. Scholars have noted that "the dialect of Niʻihau is the most aberrant and the one most in need of study" and that variations in Hawaiian dialects have not been systematically examined. The broader debate over "University Hawaiian" versus varieties spoken by elders has real stakes. Some Native Hawaiian children reportedly feel scared or ashamed to speak Hawaiian at home when the variety they hear there differs sharply from the standardized form taught in school. Language attitudes of this kind are one of the factors UNESCO uses when assessing endangerment, meaning the authenticity debate could directly affect the language's prospects for survival.