Hawaiian language
From Wikinfo
Hawaiian is the ancestral language of the indigenous people of Hawai'i, the Hawaiians, a Polynesian people. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the State of Hawaii. It is notable for having a small phoneme inventory (see Hawaiian alphabet, below), like many of its Polynesian cousins. Especially notable is the fact that it lacks the phoneme /t/, one of only a few languages to lack such a phoneme.
Hawaiian is a member of the Austronesian language family, related to Samoan, Maori, Fijian, and other languages spoken throughout Polynesia, and more distantly to some Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean languages.
Hawaiian is a critically endangered language. Since 1900 the number of first language speakers of Hawaiian has fallen from 37,000 to 1,000, and half of these are in their seventies or eighties (see Ethnologue report below for citations). Interest in the language among the peoples of the Hawaiian Islands has increased in recent decades.
On most of the Hawaiian islands, Hawaiian has been displaced by English and is no longer widely used as the daily language of communication. The exception to this is Ni'ihau which, because it is a privately owned island, still uses Hawaiian in daily communications.
Hawaiian influenced Hawaiian Pidgin and Hawaiian Creole.
See also:
Hawaiian alphabet
The Hawaiian alphabet, called ka pī‘āpā Hawai‘i in Hawaiian, is a variety of the Roman alphabet created in the 19th century and used to write the Hawaiian language. It consists of 12 letters and a symbol, making it one of the shortest alphabets in the world (Rotokas alphabet has one letter fewer, the [[Pirah� language]] two fewer). Its inventory consists of the consonants /p/, /k/, /`/ or /'/ (glottal stop or ‘okina, sometimes written as an opening single quote ‘), /m/, /n/, /w/ (sometimes rendered as [v]), /l/, /h/ and the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/. The macron, called a kahakō in Hawaiian, both extends a vowel sound and indicates a stressed syllable.
For example, the word "Hawaii" in its proper form appears as Hawai'i; and Oahu is O'ahu.
There are 162 possible syllables in Hawaiian, the fewest of any language.
External links
- Ethnologue report for Hawaiian
- The Hawaiian Language Website
- Information and a resource link on Hawaiian.
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Hawaiian language" http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language August 6, 2003
