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| Hawaiian language Hawaiian (Olelo Hawaii) Spoken in: Hawaii: concentrated on Niihau and Hawaii, but speakers throughout the Hawaiian Islands and the U.S. mainland Region: Total speakers: ~1,000 native ~15,000 total Hawaiian is the ancestral language of the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, the Hawaiians, a Polynesian people. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the State of Hawaii. Hawaiian is a member of the Austronesian language family, most closely related to Polynesian languages like Marquesan, Tahitian, Samoan, Maori, and Rapanui (i.e., the language of Easter Island), as well as to other languages in the Pacific, like Fijian, and more distantly to Indonesian, Malagasy, and the indigenous languages of Taiwan and the Philippines. Use of the language Hawaiian is an endangered language. On six of the seven inhabited islands, Hawaiian was long ago displaced by English and is no longer used as the daily language of communication. The one exception is Niihau, where Hawaiian has never been displaced, has never been endangered, and is still used almost exclusively. This is because: Niihau has been privately owned for over 100 years visitation by outsiders has been only rarely allowed; the Caucasian owners/managers of the island have favored the Niihauans' continuation of their language; and, most of all, because the Niihau speakers themselves have naturally maintained their own native language, even though they sometimes use English as a second language for school. Native speakers of Niihau Hawaiian are able to use a manner of speaking among themselves which is significantly different from the Hawaiian of the other islands, so different that it is unintelligible to non-Niihau speakers of Hawaiian. For a variety of reasons starting around 1900, the number of native speakers of Hawaiian diminished from 37,000 to 1,000; half of these remaining are now in their seventies or eighties (see Ethnologue report below for citations). The most important cause for the decline of the Hawaiian language was its voluntary abandonment by the majority of its native speakers. They wanted their own children to speak English, as a way to promote their success in a rapidly changing modern environment, so they refrained from using Hawaiian with their own children. Even as early as 1885, before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, and before the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, while King Kalakaua was still on the throne, the Prospectus of the Kamehameha Schools announced that "instruction will be given only in English language" (see published opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Doe v. Kamehameha Schools, case no. 04-15044, page 8928, filed August 2nd 2005). Efforts to revive the language have increased in recent decades. Hawaiian language "immersion" schools are now open to children whose families want to retain (or introduce) Hawaiian language into the next generation. The local NPR station features a short segment titled "Hawaiian word of the day." Additionally, the Sunday editions of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, one of Honolulu's two major newspapers, feature a brief article called Kauakukalahale written entirely in Hawaiian by a student. When trying to learn Hawaiian as a second language, without a competent teacher and without native speakers of Hawaiian as models, English-speaking learners might mispronounce Hawaiian words by using English values for the letters. Also, learners might not be aware that one cannot simply replace the English words in an English sentence with Hawaiian words as a way to create a Hawaiian sentence. Hawaiian and English have important differences in the order of words in a phrase, and the order of phrases in a sentence. Even students of the immersion schools, where there are native speakers to imitate, are prone to produce ungrammatical expressions Hawaiian words are substituted directly into English syntactic patterns. Sam Warner, a major proponent of the immersion schools, has described some of the students' expressions as "bizarre" in his dissertation on the immersion program. There is also a certain tension between those who would revive a purist Hawaiian, as spoken in the early 19th century, and those who grew up speaking a colloquial Hawaiian shaped by more than one hundred years of contact with English and pidgin. Hawaiian Pidgin (more properly described as an English-Hawaiian creole language) is a local language, derived mostly fom English but with its own unique syntax and phonology. Its vocabulary comes from English, Hawaiian, and Asian languages. The latter are predominantly Japanese and Cantonese, introduced by immigrants hired to work at sugar and pineapple plantations; but Philippine languages have made contributions as well. Often overlooked but also important are the contributions of European languages other than English, especially Portuguese. Phonology Hawaiian is notable for having a small phoneme inventory (see Hawaiian alphabet, below), like many of its Polynesian cousins. Especially notable is the fact that it originally did not distinguish between /t/ and /k/; few languages do not make that distinction. A /t/ pronunciation of this phoneme was common at the Kaua?i (Taua?i) end of the island chain, and a /k/ pronunciation at the Big Island (island of Hawaii) end. The /k/ pronunciation won out over the /t/ pronunciation after Kamehameha the Great, who was from the island of Hawaii, conquered all the islands. However, the /t/ realization remains on Niihau. Consonants The consonant phonemes of Hawaiian are shown in the following table: Consonants Labial Alveolar Velar Glottal Stop p k ? Nasal m n Fricative h Approximant w Lateral approximant l The phoneme /w/ has two main allophones, [w] and [?] (a labiodental approximant). Their distribution is as follows (Elbert and Pukui 1979, 12–13; Pukui and Elbert 1986, xvii): After /i/ and /e/ usually [?] After /u/ and /o/ usually [w] After /a/ and initially, free variation between the two Vowels The vowel phonemes are shown in the following tables: Monophthongs Short Long Front Back Front Back Close i u i? u? Mid e o e? o? Open a a? Diphthongs Ending with /i/ Ending with /u/ Ending with /e/ Ending with /o/ Starting with /i/ iu Starting with /e/ ei eu Starting with /o/ oi ou Starting with /a/ ai au ae ao Syllable structure Hawaiian syllables may contain zero or one consonants in the onset; unlike many languages, Hawaiian syllables with no onset contrast with syllables beginning with the glottal stop: /alo/ "front, face" contrasts with /?alo/ "to dodge, evade". Codas and consonant clusters are prohibited. Orthography Hawaiian is written in a variety of the Latin alphabet, called ka piapa Hawaii in Hawaiian. Aa Ee Hh Ii Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Uu Ww ? /a/ /e/ /h/ /i/ /k/ /l/ /m/ /n/ /o/ /p/ /u/ /w/ /?/ All the letters have their IPA value, except for ?, called ?okina, which is the glottal stop. Vowel length is marked by a macron (called kahako) above the vowel, i.e. Aa Ee Ii Oo Uu. The macron does not represent stress, although under the rules for assigning stress in Hawaiian, a long vowel will always receive stress. The ?okina Main article: ?okina The ?okina is officially written as ? with the Unicode value ʻ (decimal ʻ), which although always having the correct appearance is not supported in some fonts/browsers, or alternatively written as an opening single quote ‘ with the Unicode value ‘ (decimal ‘), which appears either as a left-leaning quote or a quote with greater thickness at the bottom than at the top. For examples of use of the ?okina consider the word "Hawaii", or "O?ahu" (often simply "Hawaii" and "Oahu" outside Hawaiian English). The words are actually pronounced (using IPA): /ha.'?ai.?i/ and /o.'?a.hu/, with a glottal stop where the ?okina is written. See also The list of Hawaiian words and list of words of Hawaiian origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project Languages in the United States The ISO language code for Hawaiian is haw. Language codes ISLO 639-1: ISO 639-2: haw ISO/DIS 639-3: haw
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