Hawaiian

Where it’s spoken

Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi) is the indigenous language of the Hawaiian Islands and an official language of the State of Hawaii (the only US state with an indigenous co-official language). After decades when its use in schools was forbidden, the 1978 Hawaiian Constitutional Convention recognized it; immersion schools (Pūnana Leo, Kula Kaiapuni) began in 1983. Speaker numbers have grown from about 1,500 in the 1970s to roughly 24,000 today.

What it sounds like

Hawaiian has the smallest known phonemic inventory of any major language — eight consonants and five vowels. The glottal stop (ʻokina) is a full consonant phoneme. The kahakō macron marks long vowels. The result is many short, vowel-rich words that flow into one another, giving Hawaiian its distinctive musicality.

How it’s written

Hawaiian uses the Latin alphabet of 13 letters: a, e, i, o, u, h, k, l, m, n, p, w, plus the ʻokina (glottal stop). The kahakō macron marks long vowels. Missionary linguists standardized the orthography in the 1820s.

History

The first Hawaiian-language newspapers appeared in 1834, and 19th-century Hawaii had one of the world’s highest literacy rates. The 1896 ban on Hawaiian in schools after US annexation contributed to near-extinction; the revitalization movement is one of the world’s most successful linguistic recoveries.