Hawaiian · ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi

About Hawaiian

Language family

Austronesian, Polynesian branch

Where it's spoken

The Hawaiian Islands

Speakers

a critically endangered language with only a few thousand fully fluent speakers, now growing through immersion schooling

Hawaiian is part of the Polynesian branch of Austronesian, related to Māori, Tahitian, and Samoan through a shared ancestor spoken by Pacific voyagers over a thousand years ago. It has one of the smallest sound inventories of any language, with just eight consonants and five vowels. Near-extinction after decades of suppression in schools was reversed starting in the 1980s through Hawaiian-medium immersion preschools ('Aha Pūnana Leo), now credited with rebuilding a new generation of fluent speakers.