Writing System: Hawaiian had no written form before Western contact. Its alphabet, ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi, is based on the Latin script and was developed by American Protestant missionaries between 1820 and 1826. It has 13 letters: the five vowels a, e, i, o, u and the eight consonants h, k, l, m, n, p, w and the ʻokina (ʻ), which represents a glottal stop. A macron called the kahakō marks long vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū). The ʻokina and kahakō can change the meaning of a word, as in koʻu “my” and kou “your”.
Grammar: Hawaiian is an analytic language with verb-subject-object word order. Verbs do not change form; instead, short particles placed around the verb show tense, aspect and mood, such as ua for a completed action and ke … nei for an action happening now. Nouns take the articles ka or ke in the singular and nā in the plural, and adjectives follow the noun, as in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, literally “language Hawaiian”. Pronouns distinguish singular, dual and plural, and have separate forms for “we” that include or exclude the listener. Possession falls into two classes, marked by a and o, depending on the relationship between the possessor and what is possessed.
Phonology: Hawaiian has one of the smallest sound inventories of any language, with only eight consonants: /p, k, ʔ, h, m, n, l, w/. The sound written k can be pronounced as [k] or [t], with [t] heard especially in the Niʻihau dialect, and w can be pronounced as [w] or [v]. There are five vowels, each of which can be short or long, plus a number of diphthongs. Syllables consist of a single vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel, so every word ends in a vowel and no two consonants ever occur together.
Lexicon: Most Hawaiian vocabulary is inherited from Polynesian and has clear relatives in languages such as Māori, Tahitian and Samoan. The language is especially rich in terms for the natural world, with a great many names for particular winds, rains, clouds and parts of the sea. Hundreds of words were borrowed in the 19th century, mainly from English, and reshaped to fit Hawaiian sounds; Brazil, for example, became Palakila. Today the Hawaiian Lexicon Committee (Kōmike Huaʻōlelo Hou) coins new words for modern concepts such as “computer” and “cell phone”.
