The 1826 vote that deleted sounds

The first printed Hawaiian alphabet, set by missionary printer Elisha Loomis in 1822, was much bigger — it included B, D, R, T, V and letters kept only for foreign words. But the missionaries noticed that Hawaiians used several of these interchangeably: the same word might be heard with a B or a P, an L or an R, a K or a T.

So in 1826 the committee did something almost no alphabet has a record of: they voted. They kept P and dropped B; kept L and dropped R and D; kept K and dropped T and D; kept W and dropped V. The goal was one symbol per sound — which is why, today, Hawaiian is almost perfectly phonetic and has no silent letters at all.

The ʻokina: the letter that arrived late

The eighth consonant is the strangest. The ʻokina marks a glottal stop — the tiny catch in the throat in “uh-oh” — and to a Hawaiian ear it is as real as a K or an M. The missionaries first used a plain apostrophe for it around 1823 but did not treat it as a letter; it was only recognised as a true letter of the alphabet in 1864.

Leaving it out is not a typo — it is a spelling mistake that changes the word. This is why the place name is properly written Hawaiʻi, with an ʻokina before the last i, and why so many printed signs that drop it are, strictly, misspelling the islands. The macron, or kahakō, came later still, marking the long vowels that the early alphabet ignored.

Where did Hawaiian come from — and is it the same as Māori?

Hawaiian is not the same as Māori, but they are close enough that their speakers can recognise each other’s words. Both are Polynesian languages, carried across the largest ocean on Earth by the greatest navigators in human history. Roughly 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, voyagers in double-hulled canoes spread out from a homeland in the central Pacific, reaching Hawaiʻi to the north, Aotearoa (New Zealand) to the south-west, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to the east — the three corners of the “Polynesian Triangle”. Each settled island’s language drifted from the common ancestor, but slowly and regularly.

That regularity is what the cousin game above shows. Where Hawaiian has a K, Māori and Tongan often have a T; where Hawaiian has an L, Māori has an R; where Hawaiian has an H, Māori has WH and Samoan an F. So Hawaiian lani is Māori rangi (sky); Hawaiian hale is Māori whare and Samoan fale (house); Hawaiian kapu is Māori and Tongan tapu — the sacred-and-forbidden word that English borrowed, via Captain Cook, as taboo. When Cook’s crew first heard Hawaiian in 1778, they immediately noticed it sounded like the Tahitian and Māori they already knew.

The darker turn came after Hawaiian got its tidy alphabet. Within a decade of 1826, literacy in the kingdom was among the highest in the world, and over a hundred Hawaiian-language newspapers were printed in the following century. Then in 1898 the United States annexed Hawaiʻi, and Hawaiian was banned from schools. Within a few generations the language that nearly everyone on the islands had read and written was down to a few hundred fluent native speakers, most of them elderly.

What saved it was preschools. In the 1980s, families started the Pūnana Leo — “language nest” immersion schools, modelled partly on a Māori revival doing the same thing in New Zealand. Today Hawaiian is an official state language again, taught from those nests up through university. The 13-letter alphabet that a committee trimmed down in 1826 turned out to be the thing simple enough to teach a whole population to read — twice.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Standard references on the modern 13-letter Hawaiian alphabet (ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi): 5 vowels, 8 consonants including the ʻokina.
• History of the 1822 Loomis primer and the 1826 missionary vote dropping B, D, R, T and V; the ʻokina recognised as a letter in 1864; the later kahakō.
• ʻokina minimal pairs (paʻa / paa, koʻu / kou) showing it is a meaning-bearing consonant.
• Polynesian language family and regular sound correspondences (K↔T, L↔R, H↔WH↔F); “taboo” from kapu / tapu via Cook (1778).
• 1898 US annexation and the school ban; the 1980s Pūnana Leo immersion revival and Hawaiian as an official state language.

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