Hawaiian alphabet and written language
Alfabeto y escritura del hawaiano
- Date
- 1822 · confidence high
- Place
- Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
- Credited to
- Protestant missionaries (Hiram Bingham) with Hawaiian teachers
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
An adaptation of the Latin alphabet to Hawaiian, with about 12 letters and the ʻokina apostrophe, first printed in 1822 and standardised in 1826. Within a few decades literacy among Hawaiians reached very high levels.
Hawaiian had petroglyphs but no writing. The spelling was fixed in 1826; the ʻokina and kahakō were added in the 20th century. The orthography was debated among the missionaries.
What it led to
- 19th-century Hawaiian press and literature
- mass literacy and Hawaiian-medium schools
- the basis of the language revival in the 20th century