
The island name was first written in English in 1778 by British explorer James Cook and his crew members. The Hawaiian language takes its name from the largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, Hawaii ( Hawaiʻi in the Hawaiian language). The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters: five vowels: a e i o u (each with a long pronunciation and a short one) and eight consonants: he ke la mu nu pi we ʻokina (a glottal stop). Pidgin eventually made its way off the plantation and into the greater community, where it is still used to this day. Hawaiian and immigrant laborers as well as the white luna, or overseers, found a way to communicate amongst themselves. Born from the increase of immigrants from Japan, China, Puerto Rico, Korea, Portugal, Spain and the Philippines, the pidgin creole language was a necessity in the plantations. Some linguists, as well as many locals, argue that Hawaiian Pidgin is a dialect of American English. Ī creole language, Hawaiian Pidgin (or Hawaii Creole English, HCE), is more commonly spoken in Hawaiʻi than Hawaiian. However, the language is still classified as critically endangered by UNESCO. The first students to start in immersion preschool have now graduated from college and many are fluent Hawaiian speakers. Public Hawaiian-language immersion preschools called Pūnana Leo were established in 1984 other immersion schools followed soon after that. Nevertheless, from around 1949 to the present day, there has been a gradual increase in attention to and promotion of the language. Linguists were unsure if Hawaiian and other endangered languages would survive. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to less than 0.1% of the statewide population. English essentially displaced Hawaiian on six of seven inhabited islands. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually decreased during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii established English as the official language in schools. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 18. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the US state of Hawaii. Hawaiian ( ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, pronounced ) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed.


For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Hawaiian is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
