40 Fun Facts About Hawaiian Language

Which Hawaiian word for 'quick' did Ward Cunningham borrow in 1995 to name his user-editable website?

Wiki came to Ward Cunningham from the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a bus that runs between terminals at Honolulu's airport. He preferred it to calling his invention 'quick-web'.

Which small instrument, based on Portuguese immigrants' guitars, has a Hawaiian name meaning 'jumping flea'?

Ukulele roughly translates as 'jumping flea', perhaps for the way a player's fingers leap across the strings. It grew out of the machete and other small Portuguese guitars in the 1880s.

Hawaii's state fish, the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa, has a Hawaiian name describing a snout like which animal's?

A pig is the animal in the name, which means 'triggerfish with a snout like a pig'. The reef triggerfish even grunts like one when someone holds it.

Mele Kalikimaka, the title of a 1950 Bing Crosby recording, is the Hawaiian way of saying which English phrase?

Merry Christmas becomes Mele Kalikimaka because Hawaiian has no R or S sound and never lets two consonants sit side by side. L and K stand in, and extra syllables fill the gaps.

How many letters are in the modern Hawaiian alphabet, which American missionaries trimmed down in 1826?

13 letters are all that written Hawaiian needs, and one of them stands for the glottal stop. The first printed version of 1822 had more, including B, D, R and V.

On which small island off the southwest coast of Kauaʻi is Hawaiian still the language of daily life?

Niʻihau is the only place in the world where Hawaiian is the first language and English a foreign one. Its people keep their own dialect, which rarely adopts the new words coined by a university committee.

Which Hawaiian word for family, relatives by blood or by choice, did Disney's Lilo & Stitch popularise in 2002?

ʻOhana covers relatives by blood, adoption or choice. In Hawaii property listings an 'ʻohana unit' is a second dwelling on the same lot, built to house a relative.

Which fish, also sold as dorado or dolphinfish, is best known by a Hawaiian name meaning 'very strong'?

Mahi-mahi doubles the word mahi, 'strong', a trick Hawaiian uses to intensify a meaning. The fish is unrelated to dolphins, though 'dolphin' was once its traditional English name.

Geologists around the world use the Hawaiian words ʻaʻā and pāhoehoe to describe two types of what?

Lava with a rough, rubbly crust is ʻaʻā, while pāhoehoe is smooth and ropy. Geologist Clarence Dutton introduced both Hawaiian words as technical terms.

Which British explorer's crew first wrote down the island name Hawaii in 1778, spelling it 'Owhyhee'?

James Cook and his crew heard ʻO Hawaiʻi, a phrase meaning 'this is Hawaiʻi', and wrote the opening O as part of the name. They made the same slip with Tahiti, recording it as Otaheite.

Which raw fish dish takes its name from a Hawaiian verb meaning to slice or cut crosswise into pieces?

Poke means 'to slice' or 'cut crosswise into pieces', which is how the raw fish is prepared before it is tossed in sauce. In Hawaii a 'poke bowl' simply means the fish served over cooked rice.

Which Disney film was re-recorded in Hawaiian in 2018, with Auliʻi Cravalho returning to voice its heroine?

Moana premiered in Hawaiian on June 10, 2018, and copies were later given free to schools across the state. Nicole Scherzinger also returned to voice the heroine's mother, Sina.

The internet company Akamai, which began as a 1998 MIT contest entry, is named after the Hawaiian word for what?

Clever, or more loosely 'cool', is what akamai means in Hawaiian. Co-founder Daniel Lewin looked the word up after a colleague suggested it.

The Hawaiian feast called a lūʻau is named after the young leaves of which plant, stewed in coconut milk?

Taro leaves, called lūʻau, go into a stew with octopus or chicken, and the dish lent its name to the whole party. Older Hawaiian words for a feast are pāʻina and ʻahaʻaina.

Which of these languages is a close relative of Hawaiian within the Polynesian family?

Māori is close enough that a Hawaiian band touring New Zealand in 1911 was reported to converse easily with its speakers. The Māori word roa, 'long', is simply loa in Hawaiian.

What is the everyday local name for Hawaiʻi Creole English, which more residents speak than Hawaiian itself?

Pidgin took shape on 19th-century sugarcane plantations, where Native Hawaiians and immigrant workers needed a shared tongue. Despite the name, linguists class it as a full creole language.

What is the Hawaiian name for the apostrophe-like letter that marks a glottal stop in words such as Hawaiʻi?

ʻOkina combines ʻoki, 'cut', with an ending like the English '-ing'. An older name for it was ʻuʻina, 'snap', and early missionary printers sometimes wrote it as a plain apostrophe.

People in Hawaii often give directions with the Hawaiian word 'makai', which points toward what?

The sea is where makai points, because kai is the Hawaiian word for it. Its opposite is mauka, and locals drop both words into everyday English.

Kamaʻāina, the Hawaiian word for a local resident who qualifies for discounts, literally means what?

Child of the land is the literal sense of kamaʻāina, and the word applies whatever a person's ancestry. Shops and hotels offer a 'kamaʻāina rate' to anyone with a local ID.

Which volcano on the island of Maui has a Hawaiian name that means 'house of the sun'?

Haleakalā means 'house of the sun'. In Hawaiian legend the demigod Māui's grandmother lived in its crater and helped him capture the sun, forcing it to cross the sky more slowly.

Mauna Kea, the highest point in the Hawaiian Islands, has a name that is usually translated as what?

White mountain refers to the snow that caps the summit in season. In Hawaiian tradition the peak is also Mauna a Wākea, the mountain of the sky father Wākea.

Which Honolulu beach district has a Hawaiian name that means 'spouting fresh water'?

Waikīkī means 'spouting fresh water', probably after the springs and streams that fed wetlands behind the shore. In the 1800s it was a retreat for Hawaiian royalty, who surfed there on early longboards.

The name of Honolulu, the capital of the state of Hawaii, is usually translated from Hawaiian as what?

Sheltered harbor, or 'calm port', is the usual translation. The same roots turn up across the Pacific: Whangaruru, near the tip of New Zealand's North Island, is a matching name.

Which Hawaiian word, seen on 'keep out' signs, is a cousin of the Polynesian word that gave English 'taboo'?

Kapu rules once barred Hawaiian men and women from eating together. King Kamehameha II ended the system in 1819 by sitting down to a meal with women.

Which Hawaiian word means thanks or gratitude, as well as admiration, praise and respect?

Mahalo may be a newer way of saying thanks than it looks. An 1865 Hawaiian wordbook lists the word but gives no Hawaiian term for gratitude, and early visitors reported that there was none.

Which song did the future Queen Liliʻuokalani of Hawaii write around 1878 after a horseback trip on Oʻahu?

Aloha ʻOe, 'farewell to thee', was inspired by a parting embrace she saw at a ranch, and her companions hummed the tune on the ride back to Honolulu. It became her most famous song.

Which Hawaiian word for a person who is not Native Hawaiian is now applied mainly to white people?

Haole technically means anyone foreign rather than local. A popular fable breaks the word into parts meaning 'without breath'.

The loose, brightly patterned Hawaiian dress called the muʻumuʻu has a name that means what in Hawaiian?

Cut off describes the original garment, which lacked the high yoke and long sleeves of the formal holokū. It began as a plain cotton undergarment that doubled as a housedress and swimsuit.

Which Hawaiian word for a woman has also become surfing slang for a female surfer?

Wahine means a woman or a wife in Hawaiian, and at the card table it is also the word for the queen. It descends from an ancient Polynesian root, fafine.

What does the name of the Pūnana Leo preschools, opened on Kauaʻi in 1984 to revive Hawaiian, mean in English?

Language nest is the usual translation, though the two words literally say 'voice nest'. The first school opened illegally, because teaching through Hawaiian was still restricted by law.

Which letter, treated as interchangeable with K, did missionaries vote out of the Hawaiian alphabet in 1826?

T lost the vote to K because speakers used the two sounds interchangeably in the same words. Missionaries had found T more common at the Kauaʻi end of the island chain and K at the Hawaiʻi Island end.

Protestant missionaries from which part of the United States reached Hawaii in 1820 and devised its alphabet?

New England backed the mission after a Hawaiian teenager, ʻŌpūkahaʻia, sailed there and studied at a mission school in Connecticut. He also briefed the missionaries on his language before they left.

Which short-lived government in Honolulu passed the 1896 law making English the only language of school teaching?

The Republic of Hawaii passed the law, Act 57, after the overthrow of the monarchy. Hawaiian did not return as a teaching language in public schools until 1987, a gap of 91 years.

Hawaii's state bird, a goose found only in the islands, is known by which Hawaiian name that echoes its soft call?

Nēnē imitates the goose's soft call. Hunting and introduced predators cut the population to just 30 birds by 1952, and breeding in captivity, some of it in Britain, helped it recover.

Under an 1842 law of the Hawaiian Kingdom, people born after 1819 had to be able to read before doing what?

Marry only if literate: the rule shows how fast reading spread once Hawaiian had a simple spelling system. By 1853 the minister of public instruction boasted that 75% of adults could read.

Mary Kawena Pukui, punished at school for speaking Hawaiian, later co-wrote which landmark 1957 book?

A dictionary, written with Samuel Elbert, became the standard reference and opened an era of renewed attention to Hawaiian. As a girl she had been given only bread and water at lunch for speaking it.

Which part of a basic sentence normally comes first in Hawaiian, a word order unlike that of English?

The verb leads a basic Hawaiian sentence, followed by the subject and then the object. Describing words trail as well, which is why the language calls itself ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, 'language Hawaiian'.

What does a kahakō, the short line printed above some letters in Hawaiian words like Mānoa, tell a reader?

The vowel is long, or 'doubled', wherever the mark appears. Missionaries asked their sponsor back home for type with the marks, but it arrived in the wrong size, so they could not print them.

Which Hawaiian city hosts Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani, a university college that teaches entirely in Hawaiian?

Hilo's college trains teachers for Hawaiian-medium schools and awards degrees up to a doctorate. Its approach, known as the 'Hilo model', has been imitated by the Cherokee immersion programme.

Hale Paʻi, a mission print shop on Maui, produced the first what to be printed west of the Rocky Mountains?

Newspaper printing began there in 1834, the year the first Hawaiian-language papers appeared, produced by missionaries working with locals. The shop is a small coral-and-timber building at Lahainaluna school.