In 1778, British explorer James Cook did not hear the word Hawaii when he first made contact with the islands, but rather Owhyhee. This spelling, appearing on the first map of the Sandwich Islands engraved in 1781, was a phonetic approximation of the native pronunciation by 18th-century English speakers who pronounced the letter combination why as a sound similar to a modern w. The initial O was not part of the name itself but a reflection of the Hawaiian copula 0, which predicates unique identity before a proper noun. When Cook and his crew wrote Owhyhee, they were essentially transcribing the phrase 0 Hawai'i, meaning This is Hawaii. This linguistic misunderstanding persisted for decades, with explorers like Mortimer in 1791 and Otto von Kotzebue in 1821 continuing to use the spelling. It was not until July 1823 that American missionaries, who had arrived in October 1819, finally began using the phrase Hawaiian Language, replacing the earlier Owhihe Language. The name of the language itself, 0lelo Hawai'i, follows the grammatical rule where adjectives follow nouns, placing the descriptor after the noun it modifies.
The Missionaries' Alphabet
When Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in 1820, they faced a language with no written form, relying solely on oral tradition and petroglyph symbols. Their solution was to create a writing system that was so straightforward that literacy spread rapidly among the adult population. The alphabet they developed, known as ka pīāpā Hawaii, was the first thing they ever printed in Hawaii on the 7th of January 1822. Initially, this alphabet included letters like B, D, R, T, and V, along with F, G, S, Y, and Z for spelling foreign words. However, by 1826, the developers voted to eliminate redundant letters to achieve a one-symbol-one-phoneme system. They dropped B in favor of P, R and D in favor of L, T in favor of K, and V in favor of W. This decision optimized the ease of teaching and learning, allowing the Hawaiian Bible to be fully completed by 1839. The missionaries also introduced the use of the 0kina, a symbol representing the glottal stop, which was formerly known as 0u0ina. While early missionaries used an apostrophe to distinguish words like ko0u from kou, it was not until 1864 that William DeWitt Alexander published a grammar clarifying the glottal stop as a true consonant. The modern 0kina symbol, now preferred in revitalization efforts, was once called a reversed apostrophe or inverse comma.The Punishment of Children
The decline of the Hawaiian language was accelerated by Act 57, passed by the Republic of Hawaii in 1896, which established English as the medium of instruction for all government-recognized schools. While the law did not make speaking Hawaiian illegal in private contexts, its implementation in schools led to severe physical punishment for children caught speaking their native tongue. Mary Kawena Pukui, who would later co-author the Hawaiian-English Dictionary, was punished for speaking Hawaiian by being rapped on the forehead, allowed to eat only bread and water for lunch, and denied home visits on holidays. In 1937, Winona Beamer was expelled from Kamehameha Schools for chanting Hawaiian. The law specifically provided for teaching languages in addition to English, reducing Hawaiian to the status of an extra language subject to approval. This systemic suppression, combined with the growing influx of foreign laborers, caused native Hawaiian students to drop from 56% of school enrollment in 1890 to just 16.9% by 1910. The law effectively banned Hawaiian from public schools for 91 years, until 1987, when it was once again allowed as a medium of instruction.