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. and students at
Lahainaluna School 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.
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. 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." 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.
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. Moreover, the law specifically provided for teaching languages "in addition to the English language", reducing Hawaiian to the status of an extra language, subject to approval by the department. Hawaiian was not taught initially in any school, including the all-Hawaiian
Kamehameha Schools. This is largely because when these schools were founded, like Kamehameha Schools founded in 1887 (nine years before this law), Hawaiian was being spoken in the home. Once this law was enacted, individuals at these institutions took it upon themselves to enforce a ban on Hawaiian. Beginning in 1900,
Mary Kawena Pukui, who was later the co-author of the Hawaiian–English Dictionary, was punished for speaking Hawaiian by being rapped on the forehead, allowed to eat only bread and water for lunch, and denied home visits on holidays.
Winona Beamer was expelled from Kamehameha Schools in 1937 for chanting Hawaiian. Due in part to this systemic suppression of the language after the overthrow, Hawaiian is still considered a critically endangered language. However, informal coercion to drop Hawaiian would not have worked by itself. Just as important was the fact that, in the same period, native Hawaiians were becoming a minority in their own land on account of the growing influx of foreign labourers and their children. Whereas in 1890 pure Hawaiian students made 56% of school enrollment, in 1900 their numbers were down to 32% and, in 1910, to 16.9%. At the same time, Hawaiians were very prone to intermarriage: the number of "Part-Hawaiian" students (i.e., children of mixed White-Hawaiian marriages) grew from 1573 in 1890 to 3718 in 1910. 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. Language revitalization and Hawaiian culture has seen a major revival since the
Hawaiian renaissance in the 1970s. Forming in 1983, the
ʻAha Pūnana Leo, meaning "language nest" in Hawaiian, opened its first center in 1984. It was a privately funded Hawaiian preschool program that invited native Hawaiian elders to speak to children in Hawaiian every day. Efforts to promote the language have increased in recent decades. Hawaiian-language "immersion" schools are now open to children whose families want to reintroduce the Hawaiian language for future generations. The
Aha Pūnana Leo's Hawaiian language preschools in
Hilo, Hawaii, have received international recognition. The local
National Public Radio station features a short segment titled "Hawaiian word of the day" and a Hawaiian language news broadcast.
Honolulu television station
KGMB ran a weekly Hawaiian language program,
Āhai Ōlelo Ola, as recently as 2010. Additionally, the Sunday editions of the
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, the largest newspaper in Hawaii, feature a brief article called
Kauakukalahale written entirely in Hawaiian by teachers, students, and community members. Today, the number of native speakers of Hawaiian, which was under 0.1% of the statewide population in 1997, has risen to 2,000, out of 24,000 total who are fluent in the language, according to the US 2011 census. On six of the seven permanently inhabited islands, Hawaiian has been largely displaced by English, but on
Niihau, native speakers of Hawaiian have remained fairly isolated and have continued to use Hawaiian almost exclusively. A 2016 state government estimate states that only 18,000 residents of the state claim to speak Hawaiian at home.
Niʻihau The isolated island of
Niʻihau, located off the southwest coast of
Kauaʻi, is the one island where Hawaiian (more specifically a local dialect of Hawaiian known as
Niʻihau dialect) is still spoken as the language of daily life. == Hawaiian in schools ==