Hawaiian language

• 1. The Name That Wasn't

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  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.

• 2. The Missionaries' Alphabet

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  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.

• 3. The Punishment of Children

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  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.

• 4. The Language Nest Revival

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  In 1949, the legislature of the Territory of Hawaii commissioned Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Hoyt Elbert to write a new dictionary, which they published in 1957, introducing an era of gradual increase in attention to the language. The true turning point came in 1983 with the formation of 0Aha Pūnana Leo, meaning language nest, which opened its first center in 1984. This privately funded preschool program invited native Hawaiian elders to speak to children in Hawaiian every day, creating a model for intergenerational transmission. Most of the first students to start in these immersion preschools have since graduated from college, and many are fluent Hawaiian speakers. By 2011, the number of native speakers had risen to 2,000 out of 24,000 total fluent speakers, though the language remains critically endangered. The 0Aha Pūnana Leo's Hawaiian language preschools in Hilo have received international recognition, and the local National Public Radio station features a segment titled Hawaiian word of the day. The Sunday editions of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the largest newspaper in Hawaii, feature a brief article called Kauakukalahale written entirely in Hawaiian by teachers, students, and community members.

• 5. The Island of Silence

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  On the isolated island of Ni0ihau, located off the southwest coast of Kauai, Hawaiian is still spoken as the language of daily life, specifically a local dialect known as the Ni0ihau dialect. This dialect is considered the most aberrant and the one most in need of study, with variations that have not been systematically researched. Friction has developed between those on Ni0ihau who speak Hawaiian as a first language and those who speak it as a second language, particularly those educated by the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawai0i at Hilo. The university sponsors a Hawaiian Language Lexicon Committee that coins words for concepts like computer and cell phone, but these words are generally not incorporated into the Ni0ihau dialect, which often coins its own words organically. While Hawaiian has been largely displaced by English on six of the seven permanently inhabited islands, Ni0ihau remains a stronghold where native speakers have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively. The isolation of the island has preserved a unique linguistic heritage that stands in stark contrast to the standardized University Hawaiian taught in schools elsewhere.

• 6. The Squid and the Sentence

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  Hawaiian immersion schools teach content that adheres to state standards while stressing Hawaiian culture and values through a unique metaphorical system called pepeke, meaning squid. This metaphor features the body of a squid with three essential parts: the po0o, or head, representing the predicate; the 0awe, or tentacles, representing the object; and the piko, where the head and tentacles meet, representing the subject. This structure allows students to understand sentence formation by visualizing the relationship between the parts of speech. The Hawaiian medium education system is a combination of charter, public, and private schools, with over 80% of graduates from these laboratory schools attending college, including Ivy-League institutions. The Ka Haka 0Ula O Ke0elik0olani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo is the only college in the United States to offer a master's and doctorate's degree in an Indigenous language. Programs offered at this college are known collectively as the Hilo model and have been imitated by the Cherokee immersion program and several other Indigenous revitalization programs.

• 7. The Words of the Sea

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  Hawaiian possesses thousands of words for elements of the natural world, demonstrating the profound importance of the environment to Hawaiian culture. The Hawaiian Electronic Library documents thousands of names for different types of wind, rain, parts of the sea, peaks of mountains, and sky formations. For example, Ho0omalumalu means sheltering cloud, while Ho0oweliweli means threatening cloud. This semantic richness extends to the phonology of the language, which has five short and five long vowels, plus diphthongs. The language is known for having very few consonant phonemes, with eight total, and exhibits allophonic variation that is quite unusual among the world's languages. The variation between t and k, for instance, is likely a product of the small number of consonants in Hawaiian and the recent shift of historical t to modern k after historical k had shifted to t. This phonological complexity is matched by the grammatical structure, which is an analytic language with verb-subject-object word order and no use of inflection for verbs.

• 8. The Authenticity Debate

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  A marked difference exists between the varieties of Hawaiian spoken by most native Hawaiian elders and the Hawaiian Language taught in education, sometimes regarded as University Hawaiian or College Hawaiian. University Hawaiian is often so different from the language spoken by elders that Native Hawaiian children may feel scared or ashamed to speak Hawaiian at home, limiting the language's domains to academia. Language varieties spoken by elders often include Pidgin Hawaiian, Hawaiian Pidgin, Hawaiian-infused English, or another variety that is much different from the standardized University Hawaiian documented by colonists in the 19th century. This divide has created debate over which variety should be considered real or authentic, as neither is free from foreign interference. Hawaiian cultural beliefs of divine intervention as the driving force of language formation expedites distrust in what might be seen as the mechanical nature of colonial linguistic paradigms. The authenticity debate has major implications for revitalization efforts, as language attitudes and trends in existing language domains are both UNESCO factors in assessing a language's level of endangerment. Despite these challenges, the language continues to evolve, with online platforms like Duolingo and Memrise offering new ways to learn, and the Sunday editions of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser featuring articles written entirely in Hawaiian.