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Niʻihau dialect (Standard Hawaiian: ʻŌlelo Niʻihau, Niʻihau: Olelo Matuahine, lit. 'mother tongue') is a dialect of the Hawaiian language spoken on the island of Niʻihau, more specifically in its only settlement Puʻuwai, and on the island of Kauaʻi, specifically near Kekaha, where descendants of families from Niʻihau now live.
Niʻihau is the only island where Hawaiian is spoken as a primary language. [40] Oral tradition maintains that the Niʻihau dialect is closer to the Hawaiian register spoken during the time of contact with Europeans; there is linguistic evidence to support this claim, such as the pronunciation of k as /t/. [41] English is the second language.
Hawaiian has thousands of words for elements of the natural world. According to the Hawaiian Electronic Library, there are thousands of names for different types of wind, rain, parts of the sea, peaks of mountains, and sky formations, demonstrating the importance of the natural world to Hawaiian culture.
The famous Hawaiian greeting aloha corresponds to Māori aroha, "love, tender emotion". Similarly, the Hawaiian word for kava is ʻawa . Similarities in basic vocabulary may allow speakers from different island groups to achieve a significant degree of understanding of each other's speech.
Watahomigie et al. poses that the use of /β/ is attributed to older generations of Hualapai dialect speakers, [9] and Edwin Kozlowski notes that in the Hualapai dialect, [v] is weakened to [β] in weak-stressed syllables. Thus, the underlying form /v-ul/ "to ride" surfaces as [βəʔul]. [10] Long and short vowels are contrastive in the language.
The Marquesas dialects are perhaps the source of the oldest Hawaiian speech which is overlaid by Tahitian-variety speech, as Hawaiian oral histories would suggest. The earliest varieties of New Zealand Māori speech may have had multiple sources from around central Eastern Polynesia, as Māori oral histories would suggest.
However, many locals view Hawaiian Pidgin as a dialect. [34] Other linguists argue that this "standard" form of the language is also a dialect. Based on this definition, a language is primarily the "standard" form of the language, but also an umbrella term used to encapsulate the "inferior" dialects of that language. [35]
There are also creoles formed from the interaction of Malay or the colonial languages with indigenous languages, such as Tok Pisin, Bislama, Pijin, various Malay trade and creole languages, Samoan Plantation Pidgin, Hawaiian Pidgin, Norfuk, Pitkern, [3] and Unserdeutsch