Last Friday, we had a particular class about Hawaiian
culture with a nice teacher from that place. She shared with us many aspects
about Hawaii and what is to be a Hawaiian. Some topics she spoke were about
education, lifestyle, language, music, history and social problems. However, I
would like to write a little bit about one of them; the language that people
speaks in the island.
We already know that Hawaiian (or ʻOlelo Hawaiʻi) is a Polynesian language
that is still spoken by the inhabitants in the state. Hawaii is part of The
United States since 1959 and it has Hawaiian and English as their official
languages but this native language was dying some decades ago. Fortunately, the
government education program in the island stimulated the study and use of the Hawaiian
language in schools, in music, in government offices, in the courts and many other
aspects of society. In 1990, the U.S government established a policy
recognizing the right of Hawaii to preserve, use and support its language.
The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters; the vowels:
a, e, i, o and u and the consonants: h, k, l, m, n, p and w. It’s the shortest
alphabet in the world and the same words can mean different things according to
the context. For example, the word “Aloha” means “Hello”, “Good-bye” and “I
love you”. The following is a short list of a basic Hawaiian vocabulary:
- Mahalo:Thank you.
- Pehea ‘oe?: How are you?
- Maikaʻi, a ʻo ʻoe?: Fine, and you?
- Pomaikaʻi!: Good luck.
- Hōʻolu: Please.
- E kala mai iaʻu!: Excuse me / Sorry.
- E kala mai iaʻu!: Cheers!
Personally, I really like Hawaii culture, people from there have interesting traditions, values and beliefs. Hawaiian language is unique and beautiful and I hope it never disappears. To conclude I want to share a song from the Disney Movie “Lilo & Stitch” with Hawaiian lyrics. This movie is part of my childhood and I think I will never forget this phrase:
"'Ohana" means "family." "Family" means "no one
gets left behind."
By Emma Echeverría ♥
It's really complicated hawaiian language, because sometimes they had to mix their language with others languages (e.g. English)to talk with each other.
ReplyDeleteAnd the last part about family was interesting. I liked that.
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ReplyDeletealthouhg hawaiians seems to be a complex lenguage , it should not ve difficulto for us ( spanisj native speakers) to learn , mostly beacuse we have almost the same sounds an almost the same phonetics ... but what´s difficult about it is how they mix the vowels , sometime there are three or more vowels together , which sometime is very difficult to understand
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