Hawaiian language

Hawaiian (autoglottony: ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, native to the Hawaiian Islands. Along with English, it is the official language of the State of Hawaii.

Hawaiian belongs to the group of Polynesian languages, along with languages such as Tahitian, Samoan, Maori, and Rapanui, and is much more distantly related to Indonesian, Malagasy, Tagalog, and the indigenous languages of Taiwan.

History

Hawaiian derives from the language brought to the islands between the 1st and 2nd centuries by Polynesian settlers from the Society Islands.

For several centuries, it was the only language used in the Hawaiian Islands and was only spoken there. The arrival of European explorers in the 18th century led to the islands speaking other languages, while at the same time making it possible for islanders and their language to leave for other lands. In the 19th century, Hawaiians suffered a sharp decline in their population due to diseases newly introduced by immigrants; In addition to the death of its speakers, a teaching rule was enacted in 1885 stating that instruction would be in English only.

By the early 20th century, on six of the seven inhabited islands in the archipelago, the language had been largely displaced by English, and the number of Hawaiian speakers amounted to less than 0.1% of the state's population. However, things are different on Niʻihau Island, as its inhabitants have remained isolated and almost exclusively use their local version of Hawaiian.

Starting in the year 1900, the number of native speakers decreased from 37,000 to about 1,000. Many of them are people over 70 years old. There is no agreement on the reasons for this decrease. Some consider the main cause to be neglect by their native speakers: it is thought that many of them encouraged their children to learn English and even stopped speaking Hawaiian so that the children would not learn it. Meanwhile, others insist that it was due to events beyond the control of the speakers, because the government made the language illegal, at the same time that its use was punished in schools, or that the general prejudice against the kanakas (natives) was a factor that discouraged its use.

In more recent decades there have been efforts to promote the language. There are language immersion schools for families who want their children to make the language last. The local public radio station features a segment titled Hawaiian Word of the Day; In addition, the Sunday editions of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, one of Honolulu's two largest newspapers, carry a short article called Kauakukalahale written entirely in Hawaiian by a student.

There is some tension between those who wanted to revive a more "purer," Hawaiian, in the manner spoken in the early 19th century, and those who grew up speaking modified colloquial Hawaiian, influenced by more of a century of contact with English and Hawaiian pidgin. Since this local language is a creole language derived mainly from English and only partially influenced by Hawaiian itself, in addition to other languages that were spoken in the Pacific region and Asia.

It is the language that gave rise to the Wikipedia word wiki, which means “fast”.

Writing

Hawaiian is written with a variant of the Latin alphabet, called ka pī‘āpā Hawai‘i. It was developed by American missionaries during the 1820s.

The letters have the same value as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but everyday language is not restricted to these 13 phones. For example, the phonemes [t] and [k] are allophones of /k/.

The symbol ', called 'Okina, is used to represent the glottal stop that has phonemic value (represented by ʔ in the IPA). This pause is a remnant of consonants that have stopped being pronounced. For example, formerly the first person dual was /maːlua/, then the l stopped being pronounced, but instead of disappearing all traces of it, the glottal stop remained, being pronounced /maːʔua/ and later changed to /maːʔua/. It is not spelled "mā`ua", but the pronunciation /maːʔua/ is preserved among some speakers.

The length of vowels is marked by a macron, called kahakō. The macron does not represent prosodic stress, but because of the stress rules in Hawaiian, a long vowel is always stressed.

Phonology and phonetics

Hawaiian is notable for its reduced set of phonemes, as is the case in other Polynesian languages. In addition to the variation between [t] and [k], there is also variation between [r] and [l], between [v] and [w] and between [b] and [p]; These sounds are usually represented by l, w and p respectively, due to the influence of the spellings that the missionaries who first wrote the language decided to use.

Consonants

The following table shows the consonantal phonemes of Hawaiian:

Vowels

The following is a table of vowel phonemes:

Possible diphthongs are iu, ei, eu, oi, ou, ai, au, ae, and ao.

Syllabic structure

The syllable structure of Hawaiian, like that of many other Polynesian languages, can only be (C)V(V), that is, every syllable is made up of a vowel that can be accompanied by a consonant, another vowel, or For both. The initial consonant of a word can be a glottal stop. For example, a difference is made between /alo/ "front, face" and /ʔalo/ "evade". Despite not allowing the presence of consonants at the end of the syllable, many words taken from other languages do have them.

Niʻihau

The island of Niʻihau, southwest of Kaua'i, is the only one where the entire population (about 160 people) speak Hawaiian as their first language. Reasons for its entrenchment include that the island has been privately owned since 1872 and outsiders are rarely allowed to visit; in addition, the owners of the island have encouraged the maintenance of the language and the inhabitants of Niʻihau themselves have made an effort to preserve it.

In Niʻihau there are three ways of speaking Hawaiian:

• an imitation and adaptation of the Hawaiian "standard" of the rest of the islands;
• a Ni‘ihau dialect that is significantly different from the previous one and has many palatalizations, as well as differences in diptongation and the elevation and elision of vowels; and
• a special way to speak among the Niihauans that is inintelligible to the speakers of other forms of Hawaiian.

Most also speak English as a second language.