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The Hawaiian language is an Austronesian language that takes its name from that of the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the State of Hawaii. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitutions in 1839 and 1840. For various reasons, the number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually dropped (except on Niihau) during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. Hawaiian was essentially displaced by English on six of the seven inhabited islands. As of 2000 A.D., native speakers of Hawaiian amount to under 0.1% of the statewide population. Nevertheless, the language is not endangered because it can continue indefinitely on Ni{{okina}}ihau (Niihau, the smallest inhabited island, privately owned for over 100 years, residence of about 200 native speakers). From about 1949 to the present, there has been a gradual increase in attention to, and promotion of, the language. Public Hawaiian-language immersion schools were started in 1987. A type of "local English" spoken in Hawaii is technically called "Hawaiian Creole English", abbreviated "HCE". It developed from pidgin English and is often called simply "pidgin" (or Hawaiian Pidgin). It should not be mistaken for the Hawaiian language. The ISO language code for Hawaiian is haw. Wiki (as in Wiki-pedia) is from a Hawaiian word meaning "quick".
Name The Hawaiian language is so named from the name of the largest island, Hawaii (Hawaii in Hawaiian language), in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed, originally from a Polynesian language of the South Pacific, most likely Marquesan or Tahitian. 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". Explorers Mortimer (1791) and Kotzebue (1821) also used that spelling (Schütz 1994:44, 459). The initial "O" in the name is a reflection of the fact that unique identity is predicated in Hawaiian by using a copula form, o, immediately before a proper noun (Carter 1996:144, 174). Thus, in Hawaiian, the name of the island is expressed by saying O Hawaii, which means "This is Hawaii" (Carter 1996:187–188). Note that the Cook expedition also wrote "Otaheite" rather than "Tahiti" (Schütz 1994:41). The spelling "why" in the name reflects the pronunciation of wh in 18th-century English. Why was pronounced . The spelling "hee" or "ee" in the name represents the sounds , , or (Schütz 1994:61–65). Putting the parts together, O-why-hee reflects , a reasonable approximation of the native pronunciation, . American missionaries bound for Hawaii 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 (Schütz 1994:304, 475). They still used such phrases as late as February 1822 (Schütz 1994:108–109). However, by July 1823, they used the phrase "Hawaiian Language" (Schütz 1994:306). In Hawaiian, ōlelo Hawaii means "Hawaiian language". (The adjective follows the noun (Carter 1996:3 Figure 1).) Family and origin
Methods of proving Hawaiians family relationships The genetic history of the Hawaiian language (and race or ethnic group) is demonstrated primarily through the application of (1) lexicostatistics, and (2) the comparative method (Lyovin 1997:1–12; Schütz 1994:322–338). Lexicostatistics is a way of quantifying an approximate evaluation of the degree to which any given languages are genetically related to one another (Lyovin 1997:8; Schütz 1994:331). It is mainly based on determining the number of cognates (genetically shared words) that the languages have in a fixed set of vocabulary items which are nearly universal among all languages (Lyovin 1997:8). The so-called "basic vocabulary" (or "Swadesh list") amounts to about 200 words (Schütz 1994:332–333), having meanings such as "eye", "hair", "blood", "water", and "and" (Lyovin 1997:3). The measurement of genetic relationship is expressed as a percentage (Lyovin 1997:8; Schütz 1994:331–333). For example, Hawaiian and English have 0 cognates in the 200–word list, so they are 0% genetically related. By contrast, Hawaiian and Tahitian have about 152 cognates in the list, so they are estimated as being 76% genetically related (Schütz 1994:333 citing Elbert), according to the lexicostatistical method (152 ÷ 200 = .76). The comparative method is a technique developed by linguists to determine whether or not two or more languages are genetically related, and if they are, the historical nature of the relationships (Lyovin 1997:1–12; Schütz 1994:332–335). For a given meaning, the words of the languages are compared (Lyovin 1997:2–3). Linguists observe: (1) identical sounds, (2) similar sounds, and (3) dissimilar sounds, in corresponding positions in the words (Lyovin 1997:3, 11–12). In this method, the definition of "identical" is clear, but those of "similar" and "dissimilar" are based on phonological criteria which require professional training to be fully understood, and which can vary in the contexts of different languages. Basically, a sound's phonetic manner and place of articulation, and its phonological features, are the main factors considered in investigating its status as "similar" or "dissimilar" to other sounds in a particular context. When linguists find in compared languages that compared words of the same or similar meaning contain sounds which correspond to one another, and find that these same sound correspondences recur regularly in most, or in many, of the comparable words of the languages, then the usual conclusion is that the languages are genetically related (Lyovin 1997:2; Schütz 1994:324–325). In both methods, it is very important to exclude loan words from the analysis (Lyovin 1997:3–5, 8, 10). The following table, Decimal Numbers, provides a limited data set for ten meanings. The Proto Austronesian (PAN) forms are from . The asterisk ( Note 1. For the number "10", the Tongan form in the table is part of the word "ten". The Hawaiian form is part of the word "ten days". Application of the lexicostatistical method to the data in the table will show the four languages to be related to one another, with Tagalog having 100% cognacy with PAN, while Hawaiian and Tongan have 100% cognacy with each other, but 90% with Tagalog and PAN. This is because the forms for each number are cognates, except the Hawaiian and Tongan words for the number "1", which are cognate with each other, but not with Tagalog and PAN. When the full set of 200 meanings is used, the percentages will be much lower. For example, Elbert found Hawaiian and Tongan to have 49% (98 ÷ 200) shared cognacy (Schütz 1994:333). This points out the importance of data-set size for this method — less data, cruder result; more data, better result. Application of the comparative method will show partly different genetic relationships. It will point out sound changes (Lyovin 1997:8–12), such as: (1) the loss of all PAN word-final consonants in Tongan and Hawaiian; (2) lowering of PAN to Tagalog in word-final syllables; (3) retention of PAN in word-initial and word-medial position in Tagalog and Tongan, but shift to in Hawaiian; (4) retention of PAN in Tagalog, but shift to in Tongan and in Hawaiian. This method will recognize sound change The forms in the table show that the Austronesian vowels tend to be relatively stable, while the consonants are relatively volatile. It's also notable that the Hawaiian words for "5" and "8" have remained essentially unchanged for 6000 years. Before 1820 Hawaiian originated as the Marquesan or Tahitian of the era 1000 A.D., when the Polynesian speakers of that language made the first Polynesian discovery of Hawaii and colonized the archipelago, establishing permanent settlements. Upon the permanent separation of those Polynesian colonists from their foreign homelands, their language began to gradually change, thereby developing into one that is distinct from the centuries old Marquesan or Tahitian. Before 1000 A.D., the language was various stages of Proto Polynesian. Going back farther in time and space, the language is that of the Philippine Islands, and it is ultimately descended from an ancient Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan about 6000 years ago. The geographically most distant relative of Hawaiian is Malagasy, spoken on the big island (Madagascar) off the east coast of Africa, nearly at the opposite point on the globe from Hawaii. The old Marquesan or Tahitian developed into Hawaiian in isolation from the rest of the world, for approximately 700 to 800 years. In 1778 A.D., British explorer James Cook made the first European discovery of Hawaii, and that marked a new phase in the development and use of Hawaiian. During that period, up to 1820, Hawaiian began to take form as a written language, but largely restricted to isolated names and words, and word lists collected by explorers and travellers. 1820 to 1887 1834 to 1948 The increase in human travel to and from Hawaii during the 19th century was the means by which a number of diseases arrived, and potentially fatal ones, such as smallpox, influenza, and leprosy, killed large numbers of native speakers of Hawaiian. Meanwhile, native speakers of other languages, especially English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Ilokano, continued to immigrate to Hawaii. As a result, the actual number, as well as the percentage, of native speakers of Hawaiian in the local population decreased sharply, and continued to fall. As the status of Hawaiian dropped, the status of English in Hawaii rose. In 1885, 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). 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). There has been some controversy over the reasons for this decline. One school of thought claims that 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. Another school of thought insists either that the government made the language illegal, or that schools punished the use of Hawaiian, or that general prejudice against Hawaiians (kanakas) discouraged the use of the language. (See below, "Banning" of Hawaiian) A new dictionary was published in 1957, a new grammar in 1979, and new second-language textbooks in 1951, 1965, 1977, and 1989. Master's theses and doctoral dissertations on specific facets of Hawaiian appeared in 1951, 1975, 1976, and 1996. "Banning" of Hawaiian The law cited as banning the Hawaiian language is identified as Act 57, sec. 30 of the 1896 Laws of the Republic of Hawaii: The English Language shall be the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools, provided that where it is desired that another language shall be taught in addition to the English language, such instruction may be authorized by the Department, either by its rules, the curriculum of the school, or by direct order in any particular instance. Any schools that shall not conform to the provisions of this section shall not be recognized by the Department. signed June 8 A.D., 1896 Sanford B. Dole, President of the Republic of Hawaii This law established English as the main medium of instruction for the government-recognized schools, but it did not ban nor make illegal the Hawaiian language in other contexts. The law specifically provided for teaching languages "in addition to the English language". Hawaiian-language newspapers were published for over a hundred years, right through the period of the supposed ban. Pukui & Elbert (1986:572) list fourteen Hawaiian newspapers. According to them, the newspapers entitled Ka Lama Hawaii and Ke Kumu Hawaii began publishing in 1834, and the one called Ka Hoku o Hawaii ceased publication in 1948. The longest run was that of Ka Nupepa Kuokoa: about 66 years, from 1861 to 1927. 1949 to present In 1949, the legislature of the Territory of Hawaii commissioned Mary Pukui and Samuel Elbert to write a new dictionary of Hawaiian, either revising the Andrews-Parker work, or starting from scratch (Schütz 1994:230). Pukui and Elbert took a middle course, using what they could from the Andrews dictionary, but making certain improvements and additions that were more significant than a minor revision. The dictionary they produced, in 1957, introduced an era of gradual increase in attention to the language (and culture). Efforts to promote the language have increased in recent decades. Hawaiian-language "immersion" schools are now open to children whose families want to introduce Hawaiian language for future generations (Warner 1996). The local NPR station features a short segment titled "Hawaiian word of the day" and a Hawaiian language news broadcast. 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 teachers, students, and community members. Today, on six of the seven inhabited islands, Hawaiian is largely displaced by English, and the number of native speakers of Hawaiian is under 0.1% of the state-wide population. Even so, Hawaiian is not an endangered language and never has been. This is because the native speakers of Hawaiian who live on the island named Niihau have remained fairly isolated and have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively (Lyovin 1997:258) (See below, Niihau.) Niihau (Ni{{okina}}ihau) Niihau is the only area in the world where Hawaiian is the first language and English is a foreign language. Because of many sufficiently marked variations, Niihau people, when visiting or living in Honolulu, substitute the Oahu dialect sic for their own — apparently easy to do — saying that otherwise people in Honolulu have trouble understanding them. Niihau people speak very rapidly; many vowels and entire syllables are dropped or whispered. (Elbert & Pukui 1979:23) The island named ''Ni{{okina}}ihau'', off the southwest coast of Kauai (Kauai), is the one island where Hawaiian is still spoken by the entire population as the language of daily life (Lyovin 1997:258). Reasons for the persistence include: Native speakers of Niihau Hawaiian have three distinct modes of speaking Hawaiian: The last mode of speaking may be further restricted to a certain subset of Niihauans, and is rarely even overheard by non-Niihauans. In addition to being able to speak Hawaiian in different ways, most Niihauans can speak English too. Elbert & Pukui (1979:23) wrote that "variations in Hawaiian dialects have not been systematically studied", and that "the dialect of Niihau is the most aberrant and the one most in need of study". They recognized that Niihauans can speak Hawaiian in substantially different ways. Their statements are based in part on some specific observations made by Newbrand (1951). (See below, Processes, under Phonology.) Orthography (writing system) The Hawaiian alphabet, ka pīāpā Hawaii, is a variety of the Latin alphabet. The Hawaiian alphabetical order has all of the vowels before the consonants (Schütz 1994:217, 223), as in the following chart. Origin This writing system was developed by American Protestant missionaries during 1820–1826 (Schütz 1994:98–133). It was the first thing they ever printed in Hawaii, on January 7th 1822, and it originally included the consonants B, D, R, T, and V, in addition to the current ones (H, K, L, M, N, P, W), and it had F, G, S, and Y, for "spelling foreign words". The initial printing also showed the five vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U) and seven of the short diphthongs (AE, AI, AO, AU, EI, EU, OU) (Schütz 1994:110 Plate 7.1). In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant allophones (called "interchangeable letters"), thereby enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-sound, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian (Schütz 1994:122–126, 173–174). For example, instead of spelling one and the same word as pule, bule, pure, and bure (because of interchangeable p/b and l/r), the word is spelled only as pule. However, hundreds of words were very rapidly borrowed into Hawaiian from English, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syrian, and Chaldean (Lyovin 1997:259; Schütz 1994:223; Elbert & Pukui 1979:27, 31–32). Although these loan words were necessarily Hawaiianized, they often retained some of their "non-Hawaiian letters" in their published forms. For example, Brazil fully Hawaiianized is Palakila, but retaining "foreign letters" it is Barazila (Pukui & Elbert 1986:406). Another example is Gibraltar, written as Kipalaleka or Gibaraleta (Pukui & Elbert 1986:450). While and are not regarded as Hawaiian sounds, , , and were represented in the original alphabet, so the letters (b, r, and t) for the latter are not truly "non-Hawaiian" or "foreign", even though their post–1826 use in published matter generally marked words of foreign origin. Glottal stop Main article: {{okina}}okina A modern Hawaiian name for the symbol (a letter) which represents the glottal stop is okina (oki "cut" plus -na "-ing") (Pukui & Elbert 1986:257, 281, 451). It was formerly known as uina ("snap") (Schütz 1994:146; Elbert & Pukui 1979:11). It can be written as , with the Unicode hex value 02BB (decimal 699), which does not always have the correct appearance because it is not supported in some fonts/browsers. It is alternatively written as an opening single quote ‘ with the Unicode hex value 2018 (decimal 8216), which appears either as a left-leaning quote or a quote with greater thickness at the bottom than at the top. It can look like a very small "6" with the circle filled in black. For examples of the okina consider the Hawaiian words Hawaii and Oahu (simply Hawaii and Oahu in English orthography). In Hawaiian, these words can be pronounced and , and can be written with an okina where the glottal stop is pronounced (Pukui & Elbert 1986:62, 275). (In English, the glottal stop is omitted, or is replaced by a non-phonemic glide, resulting in or , and or . Note that the latter two are essentially identical in sound.) As early as 1823, the missionaries made some limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop (Schütz 1994:143), but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. In publishing the Hawaiian Bible, they used it to distinguish kou "my" from kou "your" (Elbert & Pukui 1979:11). In 1864, W.D. Alexander published a grammar of Hawaiian in which he made it clear that the glottal stop (calling it "guttural break") is definitely a true consonant of the Hawaiian language (Schütz 1994:144–145). He wrote it using an apostrophe. In 1922, the Andrews-Parker dictionary of Hawaiian made limited use of the opening single quote symbol, called "reversed apostrophe" or "inverse comma", to represent the glottal stop (Schütz 1994:139–141). Subsequent dictionaries have preferred to use that symbol. Today, many native speakers of Hawaiian do not bother, in general, to write any symbol for the glottal stop. Its use is advocated mainly among students and teachers of Hawaiian as a second language, and among linguists (Schütz 1994:146–148). Macron A modern Hawaiian name for the symbol (not a letter) which is the macron is kahakō (kaha "mark" plus kō "long") (Pukui & Elbert 1986:109, 110, 156, 478). It was formerly known as mekona (Hawaiianization of macron). It can be written as a diacritical mark which looks like a hyphen or dash written above a vowel, i.e., ā ē ī ō ū, and Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū. It is used to show that the marked vowel is a "double", or "geminate", or "long" vowel, in phonemic terms (Elbert & Pukui 1979:14–15). As early as 1821, at least one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons (and breves) in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels (Schütz 1994:139, 399). The missionaries specifically requested their sponsor in Boston to send them some type (fonts) with accented vowel characters, including vowels with macrons, but the sponsor made only one response and sent the wrong font size (pica instead of small pica) (Schütz 1994:139–141). Thus, they could not print ā, ē, ī, ō, nor ū (at the right size), even though they wanted to. Pronunciation In general, each Hawaiian letter represents the sound value of the same letter in the IPA alphabet. Due to extensive allophony, however, if one were to converse in Hawaiian with only 13 phones, the result would sound definitely foreign to the ear of a native speaker. See Phonology, below, for details on the ranges of actual allophones used. The letter , the okina, does not have any IPA value because it is not an IPA symbol. The IPA symbol for glottal stop is (Elbert & Pukui 1979:11). Since the Hawaiian letter stands for the IPA symbol , in effect, the phonetic value of is (Lyovin 1997:259). The macron, or kahakō, is not a letter, and its use to indicate allophony is not an IPA convention (the IPA symbol for gemination is ). The kahakō has no sound of its own, and is not used alone. Although it marks phonemic vowel length in Hawaiian, long vowels are not always pronounced long by native speakers of Hawaiian in actual Hawaiian communication (Elbert & Pukui 1979:14–15). The macron does not represent stress, although under the rules for assigning stress in Hawaiian, a long vowel will always receive stress (Pukui & Elbert 1986:xvii–xviii; Elbert & Pukui 1979:14, 20–21). Phonology Hawaiian is known for having very few consonant phonemes — eight. It is notable that Hawaiian has free variation of with (Schütz 1994:113, 125), with (Schütz 1994:115; Elbert & Pukui 1979:22–25; Kinney 1956; Newbrand 1951), with (Schütz 1994:116–118), and with (Schütz 1994:119–122). The -with- variation is quite unusual among the world's languages. The eight Hawaiian consonant phonemes are . Hawaiian has either 5 or 25 vowel phonemes, depending on how you treat the long vowels and diphthongs (Lyovin 1997:259). If the long vowels and diphthongs are treated as two-phoneme sequences, then the total of vowel phonemes is five. But if the long vowels and diphthongs are treated as separate, unit phonemes, then the total of vowel phonemes is 25. The short vowel phonemes are . If you count long vowels separately, they are . If you count diphthongs separately, they are . There is some allophonic variation of the vowels, but it is nowhere near as dramatic as that of the consonants. Hawaiian syllable structure is (C)V or (C)D. All CV syllables occur except for wū (Pukui & Elbert 1986:1–386 see Hawaiian headwords), and wu occurs only in two words borrowed from English (Schütz 1994:29 note 4; Pukui & Elbert 1986:386). As shown by Schütz (Lyovin 1997:259; Pukui & Elbert 1986:xvii–xviii; Elbert & Pukui 1979:16–18), Hawaiian word-stress is predictable in words of one to four syllables, but not in words of five or more syllables. Hawaiian phonological processes include palatalization and deletion of consonants, and raising, diphthongization, deletion, and compensatory lengthening of vowels (Elbert & Pukui 1979:22–25; Kinney 1956). Phonological reduction (or "decay") of consonant phonemes during the historical development of the language has resulted in the phonemic Hawaiian glottal stop (Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, 1891 page 12, quoted in Schütz 1994:134; Carter 1996:373). Ultimate loss (deletion) of intervocalic consonant phonemes has resulted in Hawaiian long vowels and diphthongs (Lyovin 1997:268; Carter 1996:373; Pukui & Elbert 1986:164, 167; Elbert & Pukui 1979:107–108). Consonants Monophthongs Diphthongs See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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