Hawaiian (, ) is a critically endangered Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family, originating in and native to the Hawaiian Islands. It is the historic native language of the Hawai‘ian people. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the U.S. state of Hawaiʻi. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840.
In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii passed Act 57, an English-only law which subsequently banned Hawaiian language as the medium of instruction in publicly funded schools and promoted strict physical punishment for children caught speaking the Hawaiian language in schools. The Hawaiian language was not again allowed to be used as a medium of instruction in Hawaii's public schools until 1987, a span of 91 years. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually decreased during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. English essentially displaced Hawaiian on six of seven inhabited islands. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to less than 0.1% of the statewide population.
From around 1949 to the present day, there has been a gradual increase in attention to and promotion of the language. Public Hawaiian-language immersion preschools called Pūnana Leo were established in 1984; other immersion schools followed soon after that. Most of the first students to start in immersion preschool have since graduated from college, and many are fluent Hawaiian speakers. However, the language is still classified as critically endangered by UNESCO.
A creole language, Hawaiian Pidgin (also called Hawai‘i Creole English, or HCE), is more commonly spoken in Hawai‘i than Hawai‘ian.
Name The Hawaiian language takes its name from the largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, Hawaii ( in the Hawaiian language). The island name was first written in English in 1778 by British explorer James Cook and his crew members. They wrote it as "Owhyhee" or "Owhyee". It is written "Oh-Why-hee" on the first map of Sandwich Islands engraved by in 1781.French: Carte de l'OCÉAN PACIFIQUE au Nord de l'équateur, et des côtes qui le bornent des deux cotes: d'après les dernières découvertes faites par les Espagnols, les Russes et les Anglais jusqu'en 1780.German: Charte des STILLEN WELTMEERS nördlichen des Äequators und der Küsten, die es auf beiden Seiten einschränken: Nach den neuesten, von der Spanier, Russen und Engländer bis 1780.English (translation): Chart of the PACIFIC OCEAN north of the Equator and the Coasts that bound it on both sides: according to the latest discoveries made by the Spaniards, Russians and English up to 1780. Explorers Mortimer (1791) and Otto von Kotzebue (1821) used that spelling.
The initial "O" in the name "Oh-Why-hee" is a reflection of the fact that Hawaiian predicates unique identity by using a copula form, ʻo, immediately before a proper noun. Thus, in Hawaiian, the name of the island is expressed by saying , which means "[This] is Hawaiʻi." The Cook expedition also wrote "Otaheite" rather than "Tahiti". The spelling "why" in the name reflects the pronunciation of wh in 18th-century English (still used in parts of the English-speaking world). The spelling "hee" or "ee" represents the sounds or . Putting the parts together, O-why-(h)ee reflects , a reasonable approximation of the native pronunciation, .
American missionaries bound for Hawaiʻi used the phrases "Owhihe Language" and "Owhyhee language" in Boston prior to their departure in October 1819 and during their five-month voyage to Hawaii. They still used such phrases as late as March 1822. However, by July 1823, they had begun using the phrase "Hawaiian Language".
In Hawaiian, the language is called , since adjectives follow nouns.
Language family and origin Hawaiian is a Polynesian member of the Austronesian language family. It is closely related to other Polynesian languages, such as Samoan, Marquesan, Tahitian, Māori, Rapa Nui (the language of Easter Island) and Tongan.
According to Schütz (1994), the Marquesans colonized the archipelago in roughly 300 CE, followed by later waves of immigration from the Society Islands and Samoa-Tonga. Their languages, over time, became the Hawaiian language within the Hawaiian Islands. Kimura and Wilson (1983) also state: Linguists agree that Hawaiian is closely related to Eastern Polynesian, with a particularly strong link in the Southern Marquesas, and a secondary link in Tahiti, which may be explained by voyaging between the Hawaiian and Society Islands.
Mutual intelligibility Jack H. Ward (1962) conducted a study using basic words and short utterances to determine the level of comprehension between different Polynesian languages. The mutual intelligibility of Hawaiian was found to be 41.2% with Marquesan, 37.5% with Tahitian, 25.5% with Samoan and 6.4% with Tongan. Hawaiian newspapers recorded that Ernest Kaʻai and his Royal Hawaiians band conversed easily with Māori while they were on tour across New Zealand in 1911.
History
First European contact
In 1778, British explorer James Cook made Europe's initial, recorded first contact with Hawaiʻi, beginning a new phase in the development of Hawaiian. During the next forty years, the sounds of Spanish (1789), Russian (1804), French (1816), and German (1816) arrived in Hawaii via other explorers and businessmen. Hawaiian began to be written for the first time, largely restricted to isolated names and words, and word lists collected by explorers and travelers.
The early explorers and merchants who first brought European languages to the Hawaiian islands also took on a few native crew members who brought the Hawaiian language into new territory. Hawaiians took these nautical jobs because their traditional way of life changed due to plantations, and although there were not enough of these Hawaiian-speaking explorers to establish any viable speech communities abroad, they still had a noticeable presence. One of them, a boy in his teens known as Obookiah (), had a major impact on the future of the language. He sailed to New England, where he eventually became a student at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. He inspired New Englanders to support a Christian mission to Hawaii, and provided information on the Hawaiian language to the American missionaries there prior to their departure for Hawaii in 1819. Adelbert von Chamisso too might have consulted with a native speaker of Hawaiian in Berlin, Germany, before publishing his grammar of Hawaiian () in 1837. Lorrin Andrews wrote the first Hawaiian dictionary, called A Dictionary of the Hawaiian Language.
Folk tales Like all natural spoken languages, the Hawaiian language was originally an oral language. The native people of the Hawaiian language relayed religion, traditions, history, and views of their world through stories that were handed down from generation to generation. One form of storytelling most commonly associated with the Hawaiian islands is hula. Nathaniel B. Emerson notes that "It kept the communal imagination in living touch with the nation's legendary past".
The islanders' connection with their stories is argued to be one reason why Captain James Cook received a pleasant welcome. Marshall Sahlins has observed that Hawaiian folktales began bearing similar content to those of the Western world in the eighteenth century. He argues this was caused by the timing of Captain Cook's arrival, which was coincidentally when the indigenous Hawaiians were celebrating the Makahiki festival, which is the annual celebration of the harvest in honor of the god Lono. The celebration lasts for the entirety of the rainy season. It is a time of peace with much emphasis on amusements, food, games, and dancing. The islanders' story foretold of the god Lono's return at the time of the Makahiki festival.
Written Hawaiian
In 1820, Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in Hawaiʻi, and in a few years converted the chiefs to Congregational Protestantism, who in turn converted their subjects. To the missionaries, the thorough Christianization of the kingdom necessitated a complete translation of the Bible to Hawaiian, a previously unwritten language, and therefore the creation of a standard spelling that should be as easy to master as possible. The orthography created by the missionaries was so straightforward that literacy spread very quickly among the adult population; at the same time, the Mission set more and more schools for children.
In 1834, the first Hawaiian-language newspapers were published by missionaries working with locals. The missionaries also played a significant role in publishing a vocabulary (1836), grammar (1854), and dictionary (1865) of Hawaiian. The Hawaiian Bible was fully completed in 1839; by then, the Mission had such a wide-reaching school network that, when in 1840 it handed it over to the Hawaiian government, the Hawaiian Legislature mandated compulsory state-funded education for all children under 14 years of age, including girls, twelve years before any similar compulsory education law was enacted for the first time in any of the United States.Fernández Asensio (2019:14–15) King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840.
Literacy in Hawaiian was so widespread that in 1842 a law mandated that people born after 1819 had to be literate to be allowed to marry. In his Report to the Legislature for the year 1853 Richard Armstrong, the minister of Public Instruction, bragged that 75% of the adult population could read.Fernández Asensio (2019:15) Use of the language among the general population might have peaked around 1881. Even so, some people worried, as early as 1854, that the language was "soon destined to extinction."quoted in
When Hawaiian King David Kalākaua took a trip around the world, he brought his native language with him. When his wife, Queen Kapiʻolani, and his sister, Princess (later Queen) Liliʻuokalani, took a trip across North America and on to the British Isles, in 1887, Liliʻuokalani's composition "Aloha ʻOe" was already a famous song in the U.S. example 138, quoting McGuire
Suppression of Hawaiian The decline of the Hawaiian language was accelerated by the coup that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and dethroned the last Hawaiian queen. Thereafter, a law was instituted that required English as the main language of school instruction. The law cited is identified as Act 57, sec. 30 of the 1896 Laws of the Republic of Hawaii: