In the Hawaiian language, Hawaiian Creole English is called 'ʻōlelo paʻi ʻai', which literally means 'pounding-taro language'. This makes Hawaiian a serious challenge for non-heritage speakers. And to make matters worse, Hawaiians are notorious for their artful speech and literature full of subtleties, puns, and purposeful ambiguities. Grammatically, however, it is hardly a breeze.

Phonetically it is very easy for English speakers to learn as we have every sound in our repertoire already, although we’re not accustomed to using glottal stops in the middle of words, as in the word “Hawai’i” itself. Hawaiian is a beautiful language, with almost no consonant clusters (that means no consonants can be next to each other) except in some borrowed words, and lots of repeating syllables (lulu, kuku, haha). If you have learned any Indonesian or Malay, you’ll recognize a few words here and there, like i’a (ikan in Indonesian, meaning fish) and elima (lima in Indonesian, meaning five). The language that originally came over in canoes (canoes!!!) from the nearest islands (the Marquesas Islands, and later Tahiti) were Austronesian. The years in which the US, Spain, Russia, Japan, and a few other parties vied for possession of this resource-rich and strategically-placed island were filled with violence, backstabbing, and corruption, and the US doesn’t come out looking very righteous.īut one small upside to Hawaii’s strategic positioning was a linguistic one. Since my husband and I live in Korea, and my parents and sister live in California, this Christmas we decided to convene smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on an American island called Hawaii (or, as the Koreans might call it, the American Jeju 😉 ).īefore our trip I figured I had better bone up on Hawaiian history…we don’t exactly dwell on it in our American history classes, and for good reason.

Pidgin to da max words