Alphabetic order differs from the normal Latin order in that the vowels come first, then the consonants. The current official Hawaiian alphabet consists of thirteen letters: five vowels (Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu) and eight consonants (Hh, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Pp, Ww, 'okina). The macron, or kahako, was used to differentiate between short and long vowels. It wasn't until 1864 that the 'okina became a recognized letter of the Hawaiian alphabet.Īs early as 1821, one of the missionaries, Hiram Bingham, was using macrons in making handwritten transcriptions of Hawaiian vowels. In publishing the Hawaiian bible, they used the 'okina to distinguish ko'u ('my') from kou ('your'). As early as 1823, the missionaries made limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet. V was dropped, W was keptĭue to words with different meanings being spelled alike, use of the glottal stop became necessary. In 1826, the developers voted to eliminate some of the letters which represented functionally redundant interchangeable letters, enabling the Hawaiian alphabet to approach the ideal state of one-symbol-one-sound, and thereby optimizing the ease with which people could teach and learn the reading and writing of Hawaiian. The original alphabet included five vowels and twelve consonants:Ī, B, D, E, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, T, U, V, W By July 1823, they had begun using the phrase 'Hawaiian Language.' The actual writing system was developed by American Protestant missionaries on January 7, 1822. In his report, he wrote the name of the islands as 'Owhyhee' or 'Owhyee'. In 1778, British explorer James Cook made the first reported European discovery of Hawaii.

Official hawaiian okina