Hawaii's Language

Vowels and Consonants:

Hawaiian is seen as a very vowel-oriented language. Only eight consonant phonemes are used. These sounds are the following: [m], [n], [p], [k], [h], [l], [w], and [?]. The [?] sound is the glottal stop, which is written as its own letter in Hawaiian - a letter that resembles an English apostrophe.

All Hawaiian words end in vowels, and even though there are only five vowel letters in the language, they are used in complex ways that create a wide variety of sounds. All vowels have a short and a long sound. In addition, there are nine short vowel diphthongs and six long vowel diphthongs.

Syntax

Unlike English, which is a subject-verb-object language, Hawaiian is a verb-subject-object language. The only exception relates to sentences that are in the negative mood (example: "She won't study." In this case, Hawaiian uses the same subject-verb language order that English uses.).

Noun Usage

Some of the more complicated aspects of the English language are handled in a more straightforward manner in Hawaiian. Nouns do not change their form in the Hawaiian language to express number like they do in English. Instead, the article performs this function.

In addition, Hawaiian does not use grammatical gender (he, she).

Links to more information about the Hawaiian Language

http://www.geocities.com/~olelo/hltableofcontents.html

http://www.aloha-hawaii.com/hawaii/native+tongue/

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hawaiian.htm