ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi — the Hawaiian language — has a small sound inventory for a living language: 13 phonemes, with 8 consonants (p, k, ʻ, h, m, n, l, w) and 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u), each of which can be short or long. Its orthography uses the glottal stop ʻokina and the long-vowel mark kahakō.
Its small phoneme inventory produces many vowel-rich words, including humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa (the reef triggerfish, Hawaiʻi's state fish), pāhoehoe and ʻaʻā (smooth and jagged lava — both terms borrowed into geology worldwide), and aloha, which can mean hello, goodbye, love, and compassion.
Hawaiian descends from Proto-Polynesian, brought by voyagers from the Marquesas and Society Islands. High-precision radiocarbon dating has pushed that arrival far later than older textbooks assumed — current estimates cluster between roughly AD 1000 and 1300, so barely a thousand years ago. The closest living relatives are Marquesan, Tahitian, and Māori, and the historical correspondences are so regular that a Māori speaker can often guess a Hawaiian cognate at a glance (Māori tangata ↔ Hawaiian kanaka, "person"; Māori whetū ↔ Hawaiian hōkū, "star").
Then came the collapse. The 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the 1898 U.S. annexation set off a generation of cultural repression. In 1896 the Republic of Hawaiʻi passed Act 57, requiring English as the sole medium of instruction in schools. Children caught speaking Hawaiian were physically punished. By 1980, fewer than 2,000 native speakers remained, almost all elderly. Linguists wrote it off as moribund.
Inspired by Māori Kōhanga Reo ("language nests") in New Zealand, educators including Larry Kimura, William H. "Pila" Wilson, and Kauanoe Kamanā founded ʻAha Pūnana Leo in 1983 — Hawaiian-only preschools where elders spoke Hawaiian to toddlers. In 1986, the 90-year ban on Hawaiian-medium schooling was repealed. By 1987 the first Kula Kaiapuni Hawaiian-immersion public schools opened. The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo's Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani college now offers PhD coursework conducted entirely in Hawaiian, the first such program for an Indigenous language in the United States.
A 2016 State of Hawaiʻi report counted ~18,400 people speaking Hawaiian at home; by 2024 the Office of Hawaiian Affairs put that figure at 27,338 — a rise of nearly 50% in under a decade, with roughly 33,000 Hawaiian speakers at home nationwide. For the first time in over a century, the language has children as native speakers again. The phoneme inventory is still 13. The future, however, has expanded immeasurably.