Hawaiian

How the missionaries fixed the alphabet

The missionaries worked on the spelling from 1820 to 1826 and printed the alphabet on 7 January 1822, the first thing they printed in the islands. It began with B, D, R, T and V beside today's consonants. In 1826 they voted to drop letters for sounds that speakers used interchangeably, so one word stopped being written pule, bule, pure and bure and became pule. The glottal stop later got a letter of its own, the ʻokina, from ʻoki, cut. Newspapers in Hawaiian appeared from 1834, the whole Bible in 1839, a grammar in 1854 and a dictionary in 1865.

King Kamehameha III issued the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840. A law of 1842 required anyone born after 1819 to be literate before marrying.

Why Hawaiian was pushed out of the schools

After the monarchy was overthrown, Act 57 of the Republic of Hawaii made English the medium of instruction in all public and private schools in 1896. The law did not ban Hawaiian, but children heard speaking it at school, even in the playground, were disciplined, sometimes physically. Hawaiian did not return as a medium of instruction in public schools until 1987, 91 years later. Native Hawaiians were also becoming a minority: pure Hawaiian pupils made up 56% of school enrolment in 1890 and 16.9% in 1910.

Who brought the language back

In 1949 the territorial legislature commissioned Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Hoyt Elbert to write a new dictionary, which appeared in 1957. The ʻAha Pūnana Leo, language nest, formed in 1983 and opened its first preschool in 1984 with elders speaking Hawaiian to the children every day. The College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo now teaches entirely in Hawaiian, and immersion schools teach sentence structure through the pepeke, the squid, whose head, tentacles and centre stand for predicate, object and subject. The 2011 census figures count 2,000 native speakers among 24,000 fluent ones.