ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language, is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian family and the native language of the Hawaiian Islands. It is closely related to Marquesan, Tahitian and Māori. Since 1978 it has been an official language of the State of Hawaiʻi alongside English.
In the 19th century Hawaiian was the language of government, schools and a thriving press in the Hawaiian Kingdom, and most adults could read and write it. After the overthrow of the monarchy, an 1896 law made English the only language of instruction in schools, and children were punished for speaking Hawaiian. The language was not used again as a medium of instruction in public schools until 1987. By the 1980s fewer than 50 fluent speakers were under the age of 18, and the small, isolated island of Niʻihau was the only place where Hawaiian remained the language of daily life.
Revitalization grew out of the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. In 1984 the ʻAha Pūnana Leo opened the first Hawaiian-language immersion preschool, where elders spoke only Hawaiian to the children, and immersion schools from kindergarten to high school followed. The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo now offers master’s and doctoral degrees taught in Hawaiian, and its approach has become a model for other Indigenous language programs.
Today there are about 2,000 native speakers and roughly 24,000 people in all who speak Hawaiian fluently, most of whom learned it as a second language. A 2016 state estimate found about 18,000 people speaking it at home. Despite this growth, UNESCO still classifies Hawaiian as critically endangered.
