Niihau dialect

The Hawaiian language and its dialects (including Niihau) are a part of the Austronesian languages, which are a group of languages spoken throughout Oceania, Southeast Asia and other parts of the world.[1] It specifically belongs to the Polynesian subbranch, which also includes languages such as Samoan, Tongan, Tahitian and Marquesan.[2]

In the past, Kauaʻi spoke the same dialect as Niihau did. However, due to American suppression of Hawaiian, the dialect only survived in Niihau, where the language wasn't suppressed.

Today, the families with ancestry in Niihau who now live on westside Kauaʻi use the same dialect as that spoken on Niihau, but some speakers refer to the speakers of the dialect outside of Niihau as speakers of Olelo Kauai.

Unlike the Hawaiian taught in schools, the Niihau dialect is the only variant of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi that maintains the free variation between /r/ and /l/, in addition to /t/ and /k/.

Like the Hawaiian taught in universities, Olelo Niihau has five short and five long vowels, plus diphthongs.

Niihau retains the five pure vowels characteristic of Hawaiian with few changes. The short vowels are /u, i, o, e, a/, and the long vowels, if they are considered separate phonemes rather than simply sequences of like vowels, are /uː, iː, oː, eː, aː/. When stressed, short /e/ and /a/ have been described as becoming [ɛ] and [ɐ], while when unstressed they are [e] and [ə] . Parker Jones (2017), however, did not find a reduction of /a/ to [ə] in the phonetic analysis of a young speaker from Hilo, Hawaiʻi; so there is at least some variation in how /a/ is realised.[3] /e/ also tends to become [ɛ] next to /l/, /n/, and another [ɛ], as in Pele [pɛlɛ]. Some grammatical particles vary between short and long vowels. These include a and o "of", ma "at", na and no "for". Between a back vowel /o/ or /u/ and a following non-back vowel (/a e i/), there is an epenthetic [w], which is generally not written. Between a front vowel /e/ or /i/ and a following non-front vowel (/a o u/), there is an epenthetic [j] (a y sound), which is never written.

The short-vowel diphthongs are /iu, ou, oi, eu, ei, au, ai, ao, ae/. In all except perhaps /iu/, these are falling diphthongs. However, they are not as tightly bound as the diphthongs of English, and may be considered vowel sequences.[3] (The second vowel in such sequences may receive the stress, but in such cases it is not counted as a diphthong.) In fast speech, /ai/ tends to [ei] and /au/ tends to [ou], conflating these diphthongs with /ei/ and /ou/.

There are only a limited number of vowels which may follow long vowels, and some authors treat these sequences as diphthongs as well: /oːu, eːi, aːu, aːi, aːo, aːe/.

Niihau dialect preserves both /t/ and /r/ sounds, which have morphed into /k/ and /l/ sounds in Standard Hawaiian.[4][5] This is because when missionaries created the Hawaiian alphabet, they heard /t/ and /r/ as /k/ and /l/. Meanwhile, these phonological changes did not affect the inhabitants of Niihau, who were more isolated from the rest of Hawaii.

An example of this change can be found in the word “teacher”, where its “kumu” in Standard Hawaiian as opposed to “tumu” in Niihau dialect.