Hawaiian language

Hawaiian, a Polynesian language within the Austronesian family, is native to the Hawaiian Islands and is the ancestral tongue of the Hawaiian people. It holds official status in the U.S. state of Hawaiʻi alongside English. King Kamehameha III oversaw the creation of the first Hawaiian-language constitutions in 1839 and 1840. A major blow came in 1896, when the Republic of Hawaii enacted Act 57, an English-only law that banned Hawaiian as the language of instruction in public schools and authorized harsh physical punishment for students caught speaking it.

Hawaiian was not permitted again as a medium of instruction in public schools until 1987, after 91 years. From the 1830s through the 1950s, the number of native speakers steadily declined, with English largely replacing Hawaiian on six of the seven inhabited islands. By 2001, native speakers made up less than 0.1% of the state’s population. Since around 1949, interest in and support for the language have gradually grown.

Public Hawaiian-language immersion preschools, called Pūnana Leo, opened in 1984, followed by other immersion schools. Many of the first immersion preschoolers have since graduated from college and are fluent speakers, though UNESCO still classifies the language as critically endangered. More widely spoken in Hawaiʻi than Hawaiian itself is Hawaiian Pidgin (also known as Hawaii Creole English, or HCE), which uses local abbreviations, slang, and loanwords from various Asian languages spoken in the islands, not just Hawaiian.

The language’s name comes from the largest island in the archipelago, Hawaiʻi. British explorer James Cook and his crew first wrote the island’s name in English in 1778 as “Owhyhee” or “Owhyee.” A 1781 map engraved by an unknown cartographer rendered it “Oh-Why-hee,” and explorers Mortimer (1791) and Otto von Kotzebue (1821) used that spelling. The initial “O” reflects Hawaiian’s use of the copula form ʻo before proper nouns, so the island’s name is expressed as “ʻO Hawaiʻi,” meaning “[This] is Hawaiʻi.”

Cook’s expedition similarly wrote “Otaheite” for Tahiti. The “why” spelling mirrors the 18th-century English pronunciation of “wh” (still heard in some regions), while “hee” or “ee” represents the sounds [hi] or [i]. Together, “O-why-(h)ee” approximates the native pronunciation. American missionaries bound for Hawaiʻi used phrases like “Owhihe Language” and “Owhyhee language” in Boston before departing in October 1819 and during their five-month voyage, continuing as late as March 1822.

By July 1823, they had switched to “Hawaiian Language.” In Hawaiian, the language is called ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, since adjectives follow nouns.

Hawaiian belongs to the Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family, closely related to Samoan, Marquesan, Tahitian, Māori, Rapa Nui, and Tongan. According to Schütz (1994), the Marquesans colonized the archipelago around 300 CE, with later waves from the Society Islands and Samoa-Tonga. Over time, their languages evolved into Hawaiian. Kimura and Wilson (1983) note that linguists agree Hawaiian is closely tied to Eastern Polynesian, especially the Southern Marquesas, with a secondary link to Tahiti, possibly due to voyaging between Hawaiʻi and the Society Islands.

Jack H. Ward (1962) tested mutual intelligibility using basic words and short utterances, finding Hawaiian 41.2% intelligible with Marquesan, 37.5% with Tahitian, 25.5% with Samoan, and 6.4% with Tongan. Hawaiian newspapers reported that Ernest Kaʻai and his Royal Hawaiians band conversed easily with Māori during their 1911 tour of New Zealand.

European contact began in 1778 with James Cook, starting a new phase for the language. Over the next forty years, Spanish (1789), Russian (1804), French (1816), and German (1816) arrived via explorers and businessmen. Hawaiian was first written down, mostly in isolated names, words, and word lists collected by travelers. Early explorers and merchants also took on native Hawaiian crew members, who brought the language abroad. Though too few to establish lasting speech communities elsewhere, these Hawaiians had a noticeable presence. One, a teenager named Obookiah, sailed to New England and studied at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. He inspired New Englanders to support a Christian mission to Hawaiʻi and provided American missionaries with information on the Hawaiian language before they departed in 1819.