Hawaiian

Hawaiian is the Polynesian language of the Hawaiian Islands, sibling to Maori, Tahitian and Samoan within the Austronesian family, and before contact it carried one of the richest oral literatures of Oceania entirely without writing. Its monument is the Kumulipo, a cosmogonic genealogical chant of more than two thousand lines, composed for a high chief and recited by trained specialists, which unfolds the origin of the world from the deep darkness, Po, through the emergence of coral, fish, birds, plants and people, binding the chiefly line into the genealogy of the cosmos itself.

Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch, translated the Kumulipo into English during and after her imprisonment, publishing it in 1897. Around such court chants stood the wider ecology of sacred speech, pule, prayer addressed to the great gods Kane, Ku, Lono and Kanaloa and to family guardians, the aumakua, mele hula, the chants that hula embodies, and the specialist knowledge of kahuna, the trained experts of temple rite, healing and navigation. Hawaiian belief in the power of the word itself, expressed in the saying that in language there is life and in language there is death, made accurate recitation a sacred discipline long before literacy arrived with the missionaries in 1820.

Nineteenth century Hawaii became one of the most literate nations on earth in its own language, with a flourishing Hawaiian press and a Bible translation completed in 1839, but the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 was followed in 1896 by a law making English the medium of school instruction, and within two generations the language had nearly died. Children were punished for speaking Hawaiian at school, and by the 1980s fewer than fifty children were being raised in the language outside the isolated island of Niihau. The revival that followed is now a model studied worldwide.

Hawaiian was made an official language of the State of Hawaii in 1978, and in 1984 the first Punana Leo language nest preschool opened, adapting a Maori model, followed by immersion schooling through university level, Hawaiian language broadcasting, and a new generation of native speakers. The sacred register revived with the vernacular. Hula schools chant their mele with renewed attention to old texts, protocols of chant and response open public gatherings, and voyaging canoes such as Hokulea carry ceremonies in Hawaiian across the Pacific. The language remains endangered, but its trajectory has reversed, and its prayers, genealogies and chants are again being composed, not merely preserved.