Hawaiian Language | Britannica

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Bible translation

• In biblical literature: Non-European versions

  >Hawaiian and Low Malay in 1835. By 1854 the whole Bible had appeared in all but the last of these languages as well as in Rarotonga (1851).

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Polynesian languages

• In Austronesian languages: Size and geographic scope

  …Solomon Islands in Melanesia, and Hawaiian.

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• In Austronesian languages: Polynesian languages

  Maori and Hawaiian, two Eastern Polynesian languages that are separated by some 5,000 miles of sea, appear to be about as closely related as Dutch and German. The closest external relatives of the Polynesian languages are Fijian and Rotuman, a non-Polynesian language spoken by a physically Polynesian…

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• In Austronesian languages: Size of phoneme inventory

  Hawaiian has the second smallest inventory of phonemes, or distinctive sounds, of any known language, with just eight consonants (p, k, ‘ [glottal stop], m, n, l, h, and w) and five vowels (a, e, i, o, and u).

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usage

• In Hawaii: Population composition

  …of Hawaii are English and Hawaiian. In the early 1990s the Hawaiian language was all but extinct, spoken by only a handful of Native Hawaiians. However, a program that established Hawaiian-language immersion schools created a new generation of Hawaiian speakers, and instruction in Hawaiian is now offered from kindergarten through…

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