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Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, pronounced [ʔoːˈlɛlo həˈvɐjʔi]) [7] is a Polynesian language and critically endangered language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaiʻi, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed.
Hawaiian has only eight consonant phonemes: /p, k ⁓ t, ʔ, h, m, n, l ⁓ ɾ, w ⁓ v/. There is allophonic variation of [k] with [t], [w] with [v], and [l] with [ɾ]. The [t] – [k] variation is highly unusual among the world's languages. Hawaiian has either 5 or 25 vowel phonemes, depending on how long vowels and diphthongs are analyzed ...
The Hawaiian language has about 2,000 native speakers, about 0.15% of the total population. [192] According to the United States Census, there were more than 24,000 total speakers of the language in Hawaii in 2006–2008. [193] Hawaiian is a Polynesian member of the Austronesian language family. [192]
This page was last edited on 13 November 2020, at 09:58 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
Hawaiian is a predominantly verb–subject–object language. However, word order is flexible, and the emphatic word can be placed first in the sentence. [1]: p28 Hawaiian largely avoids subordinate clauses, [1]: p.27 and often uses a possessive construction instead.
The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of 13 letters: five vowels (A a, E e, I i, O o, and U u) and eight consonants (H h, K k, L l, M m, N n, P p, W w, and ʻ). [2] Alphabetic order differs from the normal Latin order in that the vowels come first, then the consonants.
The Hawaiian language and its dialects (including Niʻihau) are a part of the Austronesian languages, which are a group of languages spoken throughout Oceania, Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. [2] It specifically belongs to the Polynesian subbranch, which also includes languages such as Samoan, Tongan, Tahitian and Marquesan. [3]
The contemporary classification of the Polynesian languages began with certain observations by Andrew Pawley in 1966 based on shared innovations in phonology, vocabulary and grammar showing that the East Polynesian languages were more closely related to Samoan than they were to Tongan, calling Tongan and its nearby relative Niuean "Tongic" and ...