Hawaiian Alphabet and Spelling

In these and future notes, I will use normal quotation marks like “these” for English words, but Hawaiian words will be enclosed like this: «ʻokina». This helps the ʻokina to be visible at the start.

“Hawaiian Pidgin English” / Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) / “Pidgin”

I wrote a “Brief History of Pidgin English” and put it on ʻŌlelo Online. If you are interested, you can read it here: Hawaiian Pidgin English: A Brief History.

Amazingly enough, we still have many words from Hawaiian language still in use in Hawaiian Creole English today. You should know them all as future Hawaiian language speakers! There are also some sentence patterns based in Hawaiian grammar, as well as intonational and other prosodical patterns, but we will leave those for another day.

In the list below are a few words to get you started, with their meanings in HCE. For a more complete list (containing 126 Hawaiian words commonly found in Pidgin English today) see A Glossary of Hawaiian Words in Hawaiian Pidgin English.

* You should use «ʻēlemu» as a Hawaiian speaker to refer to the rear-end of a person; Pidgin has changed the meaning of ʻōkole to refer to both the ʻēlemu and/or the ʻōkole.

Letters and Sounds in Hawaiian

Written alphabetical letters are simply “picture” representations of sounds.

Each symbol (“letter”) has a name along with a sound which it represents. For example, English letter “G” which is named “gee” and sounds like /g/. The names of each letter are what we recite when we recite an alphabet.

We use the same letters to write Hawaiian as we do English although this is a subset of the English with only 12 letters chosen by the Bostonian missionaries in the 1820s plus one additional character (letter) that we don’t use in English which is the ʻokina (glottal-stop), added formally in the second half of the 1900s. We will learn more about the ʻokina later on in this lesson.

Although the letters are the same, the names of the letters in the Hawaiian alphabet are different from English, and the pronunciation is also a little different at times. We will go over this later in the lesson.

In English, sometimes we have two or three letters in combination which represent one single sound (for example the letters “gh” in “laugh” which sound like /f/; or the letters “ck” which sound like /k/ in “check”); we do not have this in Hawaiian. You pronounce every vowel and consonant as they come along in the word. This makes learning to read and write Hawaiian much easier than English or most other languages.

In the mid-1990s, I stumbled upon a set of microfilm images at UH Hilo showing correspondence written by Protestant missionaries to each other about the various sounds they were hearing in Hawaiian and which letters they should chose to represent those sounds. It is unfortunate that I have not been able to find those microfilms since that time. It was amazing to see that some of the letters were chosen by voting between the missionaries (for example “R” vs “L”, and “T” vs “K”); the Catholic missionaries had their own preferences (including “T”, “R”, and “V”). In the end, the accepted spelling that we use still today comes from the former group and their associates.

Hawaiian Vowels

symbol	A — a	E — e	I — i	O — o	U — u
name	ʻā	ʻē	ʻī	ʻō	ʻū
sound	/a/	/e/	/i/	/o/	/u/

The vowels are “pure” and so you shouldn’t change the shape of your mouth when you say the name of each one. After you stop the sound of /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, or /u/, then you can move your mouth to the next vowel. When you have a vowel at the end of a phrase or sentence, be sure to stop the sound of your voice before you relax your mouth and change its shape.

When we pronounce the sounds together in words, we try to remember that the vowel sounds are the same no matter where they appear in a word. (This is unlike English where the same letter can have many different pronunciations, even in the same word. e.g., “o” in potato)

Practice

Hawaiian Consonants

In very simplified terms, consonants are formed by creating an obstruction or partial obstruction of the airflow with some part of the mouth, lips, tongue, teeth, etc so that the sound coming from the voicebox is modified (versus vowels which generally come out without such restrictions).

We have to be cognizant of how our mouths create these consonant sounds in order to properly create the Hawaiian sounds which are different at times from the English, as previously mentioned.

H, K, L, M, N, P, W, and ʻ (which is the ʻokina) are the Hawaiian consonants.

symbol	H — h	K — k	L — l	M — m	N — n	P — p	W — w	ʻ
name	hē	kē	lā	mū	nū	pī	wē	ʻokina
sound	/h/	/k/	/l/	/m/	/n/	/p/	/w/ or /v/	/ʔ/ (glottal stop)

H: essentially the same as in English

K: this is not quite the same as English. Experiment pronouncing /k/ and /g/. What is the difference? For the Hawaiian consonant “k”, try to make the sound of /k/ with a little /g/ in it. Example words: «kakapila» (bulldozer, from Eng. “caterpillar”); «keiki» (child). You want to have as little air coming out of your mouth as possible when learning to sound out the letter “k”.

L: this consonant should not be pronounced as often in American English where the tongue is really curled up and air escapes the sides of the tongue when the /L/ is in the middle of a word (eg. how some folks say “really”). Keep the tip of the tongue right behind the top front teeth, almost in the same place as /d/ or single flapped /r/ sound. Listen carefully to good examples of spoken Hawaiian to learn this sound.

Regarding the name «Hilo»: Kaliko says that “Heddo” was the spelling used in some of the old journals of the first European visitors to Hawaiʻi. This perhaps shows us that writers thought they heard a /d/ (“dd”) sound rather than “r” or “L”. See the example below (note also other spellings of place names using English spelling practices familiar to the writer).

H.M.S. “BLONDE” ARRIVES AT HILO, HAWAII

May 3, 1825. Made the S.E. point of Owhyee, and at 12 got close in with the land, which afforded us a pleasant contrast to the Galapagos Islands lately left. Here green slopes were seen beautifully interspersed with trees, and in many places along the coast, rows of coco-nuts with leaning bushy tops. The country in this part rose inland with a gentle ascent, and did not appear to us much intersected by deep ravines.

By 2 o’clock p.m. we hove too off Heddo Bay, and lowered two of the ship’s boats, one for the surveyor and his assistant, and the other for the master to go in shore to try soundings in order to ascertain whether we could return here to refit the vessel after depositing the bodies of the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands at the seat of government at Woahoo.

Extract from With Lord Byron at the Sandwich Islands in 1825 (James Macrae’s diary)

M: as in English

N: as in English

P: the /p/ sound is essentially as in English, but add a bit of /b/ to it. Kaliko says try comparing /p/ and /b/ yourself; note the difference in how much air is released when you make those sounds. Try to keep the air to a minimum for a nice Hawaiian /p/ sound. Example: «Pepeʻekeo»

W: this can either be a /w/ or a /v/ kind of sound. The general trend is that the more southerly islands use a /v/ sound and the more northerly (such as Kauaʻi and Niʻihau) will use the /w/ sound. Either way, just make sure you are not letting too much air come out of your mouth as you say them. In old writings, you will sometimes see words spelled using the letter “w” to represent the sound as heard by English-speaking ears. For example, «nauwe» (which is now spelled “naue”) meaning “to move oneself along”. It can never be pronounced “nauve”.

ʻ: the ʻokina (glottal-stop, or also called «ʻuʻina» in Hawaiian) is not really a significant sound in English, meaning we have them all over the place, but we don’t pay much attention to them; and adding them into a word (or removing them) generally doesn’t change the meaning of the word. One word in which the glottal-stop does make a difference in English, however, is “uh-oh” (if you drop something for example). Try saying it with and without the ʻokina and you will find that the ʻokina is necessary for the word to sound “correct”. uh-oh => ʻuhʻoh

The ʻokina is actually a consonant and is represented by what looks like a single open-quote mark. In linguistics, it is most often represented by what looks like a question mark without its dot (ʔ). As mentioned in class, the ʻokina as a written letter is just as valid any other such as “m”, “p”, or “w”: it has its own space in the line of letters in a word. It is not an accent character which simply sits above a letter which it modifies (eg. the accent over the first “e” in “étoile”)

Practice W and ʻOkina

HAWAIʻI, WAʻA, ʻEWA

Interestingly, the only word written in modern Hawaiian spelling in which the “w” is never pronounced as a /w/ sound is ʻEwa. It is always /v/. Kaliko jokingly says, “Newa ewa say ʻEwa” (all spoken as a /w/ sound) – thanks to ʻukulele master Byron Yasui who wrote a song about that and sang it for us in the Beamer family at Aloha Music Camp on Molokaʻi around 2005.

Interesting Aside: Sound Changes over Time in Polynesia

In ancient times in Hawaiʻi, the ʻokina was a /k/ sound. All of those ancient /k/ sounds became ʻokina many hundreds of years ago and are still that way today.

Also, the ancient /t/ sound has now become a /k/ in Hawaiian. The /t/ to /k/ shift was still in progress when the first European and American visitors arrived here in Hawaiʻi. It was the Bostonian missionaries, once again, who decided to represent both the /t/ and /k/ sounds with the letter “k” which is the reason everyone uses /k/ today. The exception to this are the Niʻihau Hawaiian language speakers who continue to use a fantastic mix of “t” and “k”!

Other Polynesian languages show us how the sounds have changed. Some examples follow:

Old Hawaiian / Polynesian	Modern Hawaiian	Meaning
puaka	puaʻa	pig
Havaiki	Hawaiʻi	a place name, ancient homeland
Tamehameha	Kamehameha	the name of at least two aliʻi we know of
Tahiti	Kahiki	place name; foreign land
maitaʻi*	maikaʻi	good

*the word «maitaʻi» is Tahitian for “good”; this is where the drink name “maitai” came from, as English speakers ignore the ʻokina as previously mentioned.

The Kahakō, or “Macron”

The line you see above some vowels is called a “macron” in English, or «kahakō» in Hawaiian. You can only use them above vowels in Hawaiian. When you see a kahakō, simply lengthen the vowel a little. It can be up to 2x as long as the non-kahakō vowel.

Kīlauea	kī.lau.ea
Hāmākua	hā.mā.kua
Kaʻū	ka.ʻū
Haʻikū	haʻi.kū
Waikīkī	wai.kī.kī
Poʻipū	poʻi.pū

Reading Practice

You will learn the correct pronunciation and significance of the kahakō over the next few lessons. For now, some reading practice is in order!

Below is a short excerpt from a great little Hawaiian book written by Rev. Richards at Lahainaluna Seminary about foreign four-footed animals from 1834. It is titled, «He Mooolelo No Na Holoholona Wawae Eha» (He Moʻoʻōlelo No Nā Holoholona Wāwae ʻEhā in modern spelling, meaning “a story about the four-footed animals”).

There is a recording of it for you to listen to and mimic on the free reading practice page No Ke Kāmelopadi #1.

No ke Kāmelopadi (Māhele 1)

Note: pronounce the “d” like a combination of a /t/ and a /d/.

Ua kapa ʻia kēia lio he kāmelopadi, no ka mea, ua like iki ia me ke kāmelo, a ua kikokiko e like me ka leopadi; no laila, ua kapa ʻia ma muli o ia mau mea ʻelua.

ʻAʻole i like kona ʻano me kekahi lio ʻē. Ua like kona mau wāwae a me nā kapuaʻi me ko ka dia (kia). Ua like kona ʻāʻī me ko ka lio maoli, a ua like kekahi ʻano o kona poʻo me ko ka lio; ʻelua ona pepeiao hao pōkole. Ua pōkole kona kino; ua kiʻekiʻe loa ke poʻo, a kū pololei ka ʻāʻī i luna, ua kiʻekiʻe ke kino ma mua, a haʻahaʻa ma hope; e piʻi nō ke kua mai ka huelo a i ka ʻāʻī e like me ka ʻaoʻao o ka hale. Ua pōkole kona huelo, a ma ka wēlau he puʻu lauoho. No ke kiʻekiʻe o kona poʻohiwi a no ka lōʻihi a me ke kū pono ʻana o kona ʻāʻī, ua kupanaha ia lio.

Show the English translation

Translation: This animal is called a “cameleopard” because it is a little like the camel and it is spotted like the leopard; therefore it is named due to those two things.

Its characteristics are not like any other foreign quadruped. Its legs/feet and hooves are like those of the deer. Its neck is like that of a horse, and some aspects of its head are like those of the horse. It has two short horns. Its body is short; its head is very high, and the neck stands straight up, and the front of the body is high while the rear is lower; the back rises from the tail to the neck like the side of a house*. Its tail is short, and on the end is a tuft of hair. Due to the height of its shoulders and the length and upright nature of its neck, this quadruped is quite amazing.

*Hawaiian house style

Aloha nui a hui hou kākou! Lots of aloha until we meet again!

ʻŌlelo Online Virtual Classroom · kumu Kaliko Beamer-Trapp · Lesson revision 3 (February 2025)