Probably about 1000 AD Polynesian sailors settled the Hawaiian Islands, thus establishing the northern apex of the Polynesian triangle, an area in the Pacific, running from New Zealand to Hawai'i, down to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and back to New Zealand, settled by Polynesian peoples. In 1778 British explorer James Cook discovered (from the western viewpoint) the Hawaiian Islands. Forty-some years later, in 1820, Congregational missionaries from New England went to what had become, under King Kamehameha I, the Kingdom of Hawai'i, then ruled by Liholiho, also known as King Kamehameha II. One of the first orders of business for the missionaries was a translation of the Bible into the Hawaiian language. For that they needed to construct a writing system for Hawaiian.
The system the constructed was more than serviceable. Under the Kingdom of Hawai'i not only was the missionaries' translation of the Bible published, but newspapers were published, as well as books, many in translation from western languages. I have seen it claimed that the Kingdom of Hawai'i was, in the period prior to the overthrow of the Kingdom in 1893, one of the most literate nations then on earth.
After the overthrow of the kingdom, largely by members of a wealthy western immigrant community, the new government petitioned for annexation by the United States. At first the United States government, considering the overthrow of the Kingdom illegal, refused, so the Republic of Hawaii was established. A few years later, the Spanish-American war convinced the U.S. Government that a presence in the mid-pacific would be useful, so they reconsidered, and in 1898 the Republic of Hawaii was annexed as a U.S. territory. Hopes by some to quickly become a state were not realized, and Hawaii did not become a state until 1959.
The written language of the missionaries, well suited for native speakers, has been found to have two flaws for those less-fluent. The first, and most serious, is that in spoken Hawaiian the glottal stop is a common consonant, and is used to distinguish many words. The other, less serious, is that spoken Hawaiian distinguishes vowel lengths, short and long. The orthography of the missionaries distinguished neither. So in the 1950's there was developed a new orthography that shows these distinctions, marking the glottal stop with the apostrophe or apostrophe-like, symbol ‘ (called the
‘okina in Hawaiian), and marking long vowels with a macron (called a
kahakō in Hawaiian). This glottal stop symbol is the apostrophe in the word "Hawai'i". It is a nice, although accidental, feature that the word
‘okina has an ‘okina and the word
kahakō has a kahikō.
The Bible quote above is in the old spelling; it distinguishes neither. In the first line the words there written
ai ai, for example, are different words; in the new orthography this would be written
‘ai ai. The first, with the
‘okina, means "eat" (and "food" letter in the same line), and the second, without the
‘okina, is a grammatical marker used generally in relative clauses (although it's exact meaning is a subject of debate among linguists).
It is not always easy to transcribe the old spelling to the new; there is, for example, a continuing debate about whether in a certain grammatical construction the word written in the old spelling as simple "o" is the subject marked
‘o or a possessive, now written
o. Emily Hawkins at the University of Hawai'i, in a paper
Relative Clauses in Hawaiian, says that "[i]n respelling old stories, the determination of whether
o is correctly written an
‘o, the nominative marker, or the possessive
o is often done according to grammatical theories of the editor."
Largely as a result of western rule and influence, the Hawaiian language has largely slipped away. Today there are few people left who are native speakers of Hawaiian, but there are currently attempts under way to preserve the Hawaiian language as a living entity.
Hawaiian as a first language has, as mentioned above, largely died out. There is a small community of about 200 on the island of Ni'ihau, the smallest and most western of the eight main islands, which still speaks Hawaiian as a first language, but Ni'ihau Hawaiian is considered to be significantly different from the "classical" Hawaiian spoken by the educated population of the Kingdom, which was based largely on the Hawaiian spoken on the Big Island of Hawai'i. The few remaining speakers of Hawaiian on the other islands, who find Ni'ihau Hawaiian hard to understand, are mostly old, and most have used English as their primary language for years, and are thus do not speak, or are not considered to speak, "pure" Hawaiian with the fluency of true native speakers, and their Hawaiian is generally considered to be "corrupted" by English. Thus the attempt to restore it as a living language has become largely an attempt to reconstruct Hawaiian as it was spoken at the time of the Kingdom. This modern reconstructed language, forming a dialect different that that spoken by the few remaining native speakers, is sometimes referred to as "university Hawaiian". But this is the dialect that is being taught today, it is expected to become the dominant form of Hawai’i in the future.
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