Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Hawaiian language
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Written Hawaiian=== In 1820, [[Protestant]] [[missionaries]] from [[New England]] arrived in Hawaiʻi, and in a few years converted the chiefs to [[Congregational church|Congregational]] Protestantism, who in turn converted their subjects. To the missionaries, the thorough Christianization of the kingdom necessitated a complete translation of the Bible to Hawaiian, a previously unwritten language, and therefore the creation of a standard spelling that should be as easy to master as possible. The orthography created by the missionaries was so straightforward that literacy spread very quickly among the adult population; at the same time, the Mission set more and more schools for children. [[File:Ka Lama Hawaii.gif|thumb|Headline from May 16, 1834, issue of newspaper published by [[Lorrin Andrews]] and students at [[Lahainaluna]] School]] In 1834, the first Hawaiian-language newspapers were published by missionaries working with locals. The missionaries also played a significant role in publishing a vocabulary (1836),<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Andrews|1836}}</ref> grammar (1854),<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Elbert|1954}}</ref> and dictionary (1865)<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Andrews|1865}}</ref> of Hawaiian. The Hawaiian Bible was fully completed in 1839; by then, the Mission had such a wide-reaching school network that, when in 1840 it handed it over to the Hawaiian government, the Hawaiian Legislature mandated compulsory state-funded education for all children under 14 years of age, including girls, twelve years before any similar [[Compulsory education#United States|compulsory education]] law was enacted for the first time in any of the United States.<ref>Fernández Asensio (2019:14–15)</ref> Literacy in Hawaiian was so widespread that in 1842 a law mandated that people born after 1819 had to be literate to be allowed to marry. In his ''Report to the Legislature'' for the year 1853 [[Richard Armstrong (Hawaii missionary)|Richard Armstrong]], the minister of Public Instruction, bragged that 75% of the adult population could read.<ref>Fernández Asensio (2019:15)</ref> Use of the language among the general population might have peaked around 1881. Even so, some people worried, as early as 1854, that the language was "soon destined to extinction."<ref>quoted in {{Harvcoltxt|Schütz|1994|pp=269–270}}</ref> When Hawaiian King [[Kalākaua|David Kalākaua]] took a trip around the world, he brought his native language with him. When his wife, Queen [[Kapiʻolani]], and his sister, Princess (later Queen) [[Liliʻuokalani]], took a trip across North America and on to the British Isles, in 1887, Liliʻuokalani's composition "[[Aloha ʻOe]]" was already a famous song in the U.S.<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Carter|1996|pp=7, 169}} example 138, quoting McGuire</ref>
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)