Last updated: 2020-06-03
Background
Language family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Central-Eastern / Eastern Malayo-Polynesian / Oceanic / Central-Eastern Oceanic / Remote Oceanic / Central Pacific / East Fijian-Polynesian / Nuclear / East / Central / Marquesic
- Hawaiian is spoken throughout the Hawaiian Islands, located in the Pacific Ocean.
- Hawaiian contains many borrowings from English. Some loanwords are not fully adapted to fit Hawaiian’s phonological system, retaining sounds that do not exist in native Hawaiian words (Jones 2018, 107).
Phonology
Consonants
|
|
Place of Articulation
|
|
Manner of Articulation
|
Labial
|
Alveolar
|
Velar
|
Glottal
|
|
Stops
|
p
|
|
k
|
ʔ
|
|
Fricatives
|
v
|
|
|
h
|
|
Nasals
|
m
|
n
|
|
|
|
Liquids
|
|
l
|
|
|
Vowels
- Vowel length is contrastive in Hawaiian (Elbert and Pūkui 1986, 14). In the orthography, long vowels are indicated with a macron ⟨¯⟩.
- According to Jones (2018), Hawaiian may have diphthongs. This is uncertain because some speakers separate the vowels (p. 110). For this reason, diphthongs are not accounted for here.
- The possible short-vowel diphthongs are: /ai/, /ae/, /au/, /ao/, /ei/, /eu/, /iu/, /oi/, and /ou/.
- The possible long-vowel diphthongs are: /aːe/, /aːi/, /aːo/, /aːu/, /eːi/, and /oːu/.
|
|
Front
|
Central
|
Back
|
|
High
|
i
|
|
u
|
|
Mid
|
e
|
|
o
|
|
Low
|
|
a
|
|
Alphabet
|
Grapheme
|
Phoneme
|
|
a
|
/a/
|
|
e
|
/e/
|
|
h
|
/h/
|
|
i
|
/i/
|
|
k
|
/k/
|
|
l
|
/l/
|
|
m
|
/m/
|
|
n
|
/n/
|
|
o
|
/o/
|
|
p
|
/p/
|
|
u
|
/u/
|
|
w
|
/v/
|
|
ʻ
|
/ʔ/
|
Lenition Rules
- /h/ deletes intervocalically (Lavoie 1996, 287).
- In a few instances /k/ may debuccalize to /ʔ/ (Elbert and Pūkui 1986, 12).
Misc. Rules
- /k/ varies freely with /t/ (Jones 2018, 105–6). Because most sources don’t indicate /t/ as being part of the phonemic inventory, I have chosen to transcribe ⟨k⟩ as /k/. Similarly, /p/ varies freely with [b], /w/ with [v], and /l/ with [d] and [r].
- The glottal stop is predictably found before utterance-initial /a/, /e/, and /i/ (Elbert and Pūkui 1986, 10).
References
Elbert, Samuel H, and Mary Kawena Pūkui. 1986. Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English; English-Hawaiian. University of Hawaii.
Jones, Oiwi Parker. 2018. “Hawaiian.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 48 (1). CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS EDINBURGH BLDG, SHAFTESBURY RD, CB2 8RU CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND: 103–15.
Lavoie, Lisa M. 1996. “Consonant Strength: Results of a Data Base Development Project.” Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 11: 269–316.