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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.
One of the main focuses of Hawaiian-medium schools is to teach the form and structure of the Hawaiian language by modeling sentences as a "pepeke", meaning squid in Hawaiian. [66] In this case the pepeke is a metaphor that features the body of a squid with the three essential parts: the poʻo (head), the ʻawe (tentacles) and the piko (where ...
The ancestors of modern Polynesians were Lapita navigators, who settled in the Tonga and Samoa areas about 3,000 years ago. Linguists and archaeologists estimate that this first population went through common development during about 1000 years, giving rise to Proto-Polynesian , the linguistic ancestor of all modern Polynesian languages.
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.
Mauna Kea (/ ˌ m ɔː n ə ˈ k eɪ ə, ˌ m aʊ n ə-/, [6] Hawaiian: [ˈmɐwnə ˈkɛjə]; abbreviation for Mauna a Wākea) [7] is a dormant shield volcano on the island of Hawaiʻi. [8] Its peak is 4,207.3 m (13,803 ft) above sea level, making it the highest point in Hawaii and the island with the second highest high point, behind New Guinea, the world's largest tropical island with ...
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]
The area occupied by speakers of these languages includes Polynesia, as well as much of Melanesia and Micronesia. Though covering a vast area, Oceanic languages are spoken by only two million people. The largest individual Oceanic languages are Eastern Fijian with over 600,000 speakers, and Samoan with an estimated 400,000 speakers.