Indigenous languages · in preparation

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi — the Hawaiian Language

The language of the Kānaka Maoli — a kingdom’s language of state, law and print that fell to some fifty fluent children within living memory, and the one track in this programme that has walked the whole arc back: language nests, K–12 laboratory schools, a teacher-licensing program taught through the language itself, and the world’s first Indigenous-language PhD.

In preparation — in partnership with the Hawaiian people’s own speakers, the Kānaka Maoli. The goal is the whole collection in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi: every book to read and to hear, here and in the school. Nothing is published until they have guided and reviewed it.

The language

ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi — “the Hawaiian language” — is written in the Latin alphabet with two marks that are letters, not decorations: the ʻokina (ʻ), a consonant marking the glottal stop, and the kahakō, the macron marking a long vowel. Both change meaning, and both belong to the language’s own modern standard orthography, settled by the language’s authorities in the twentieth century. The missionary alphabet of 1826 printed neither mark, which is why nineteenth-century texts — including the Baibala — look bare. The language is Polynesian: its closest kin are Marquesan and Tahitian, with Māori and Samoan as cousins in the same voyaging family. Its homeland is the Hawaiian archipelago, and its people are the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians). The variety of Niʻihau — the one island where Hawaiian never stopped being the language of the home — carries its own dialect features and is treasured by the movement as the unbroken stream.

In the nineteenth century this was a kingdom’s language of state, law, and print. Under Kamehameha III, from 1840, Hawaiian was the primary language of the public education system; the Baibala stood in homes as the family’s reading book, and a flourishing Hawaiian-language newspaper press (the nūpepa archive) made the kingdom broadly literate in its own tongue. The 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom was followed in 1896 by a law making English “the medium and basis of all instruction in public and private schools”; Hawaiian-medium schooling was extinguished for nearly ninety years. By the early 1980s the language had fallen to roughly 2,000 native speakers, nearly all elderly — and outside Niʻihau, only about fifty fluent children under eighteen remained. The turn began in 1978, when the Constitutional Convention made Hawaiian an official language of the State of Hawaiʻi alongside English and mandated a state Hawaiian education program; the school-language ban was repealed in 1986; the public Kaiapuni immersion program began in September 1987; the first immersion class in over a century graduated from high school in 1999; and the first master’s degree completed entirely in Hawaiian was awarded at UH Hilo in 2002.

Counts of speakers today differ by what is counted, and this doorway reports the range rather than a single shining number: a 2016 state report counted 18,610 people speaking ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi at home; broader estimates run to roughly 24,000 with some level of the language; fluent speakers — overwhelmingly new speakers made by the schools — are estimated in the 5,000–10,000 range; those who grew up with it as a first language number only in the hundreds, most from Niʻihau. UNESCO still classifies Hawaiian as critically endangered, because home transmission outside Niʻihau remains the exception. Native Hawaiians’ political position differs from the other nations in this programme: there is no federally recognized tribal government; the language is carried by the people’s own nonprofits and educational institutions under a state constitutional mandate. The partnership discipline of this doorway applies in full.

Their own teachers

The revival’s engine is the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, the nonprofit founded in 1983 by seven Hawaiian-language advocates — Kauanoe Kamanā, William “Pila” Wilson, and their colleagues — on the model of Aotearoa’s Māori Te Kōhanga Reo “language nests”. Its Pūnana Leo (“language nest”) preschools began at Kekaha, Kauaʻi, in September 1984, staffed by speakers from Niʻihau; as of 2023 the network counts thirteen Pūnana Leo preschools on five islands, and ʻAha Pūnana Leo co-administers three Hawaiian-medium K–12 public laboratory schools together with Ka Haka ʻUla (below) and the Hawaiʻi Department of Education. The public system runs its own arm in parallel: the DOE’s Kula Kaiapuni immersion program (first classes September 1987) now enrols roughly 2,600 students statewide, inside the constitutional frame above.

The summit of the whole track stands here. Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo — established 1997, named for Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani — is described by the University of Hawaiʻi as the first college in the world to offer higher education in an Indigenous language. Its ladder: a B.A. in Hawaiian Language and a B.A. in Hawaiian Studies; an M.A. in Indigenous Language and Culture Education; the Kahuawaiola Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Teacher Education — the first teacher-licensing program taught through an Indigenous language in the United States; and the PhD in Hawaiian and Indigenous Language and Culture Revitalization — the first doctorate in the world specific to Indigenous language and culture revitalization. Its Hawaiian Language Center, Hale Kuamoʻo, carries its curriculum-development and new-vocabulary work. At UH Mānoa, Hawaiian language has been taught since 1921; the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language offers four years of language study, a B.A. and an M.A. in Hawaiian — including a track training teachers for Hawaiian-medium schools — and its projects include the Hoʻolaupaʻi Hawaiian newspaper archive. Translator training as a named credential: none found — translation is practised at the highest level in this ecosystem (the Baibala Project, lexicon work, newspaper translation) rather than credentialed as a standalone program.

Recovered reading

One recovered book stands here: KINOHI, the Book of Genesis in Hawaiian, from the Baibala Hemolele. The whole Baibala of 1839 stands in this programme’s record — the entire Bible was produced at Honolulu in 1837–39, and Ephraim Clark’s revision of 1868 is its classic text — and the first book standing here is Genesis in that 1868 revised text, as reprinted by the American Bible Society in 1908: complete in 50 chapters and 1,533 verses, printed without ʻokina or kahakō, exactly as the edition prints it. It is the people’s own book, recovered and set here exactly as it was printed — not a Sacred Name edition; the collection’s own edition in this language waits for the partnership. Read KINOHI — Genesis in Hawaiian (1868 revised text)

An open invitation

This door stands open by invitation. If you are a speaker, teacher, or language keeper of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, or you carry its authority, this programme asks to work with you — to be guided, corrected, and reviewed by the people whose language this is. In this collection the holy names are never invented: what the Creator is called in a language is for its own speakers to give, and the spelling of every text is theirs to settle. Write to the publisher at [email protected].

The doors named here are the people’s own: the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, which runs the Pūnana Leo network and co-administers the Hawaiian-medium laboratory schools, and Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language at UH Hilo, which trains the language’s teachers and scholars and holds its doctorate. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs and Kamehameha Schools stand as the nation’s wider institutions.

To hear it

When ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi opens here, it will be heard as well as read — in its own voice, spoken and recorded by Hawaiian speakers. Until then this door is silent in Hawaiian on purpose: the first voice heard in it should be the people’s own.

The other doors

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