What’s in a consonant? How missionaries changed Hawaiian

 The language Hawaiians speak today is not their ancestors’ ‘ōlelo 

© Copyright Stephen Shender 2025

Thanks to “Chief of War,” Jason Momoa’s nine-part series streaming on Apple TV+, a wide viewing audience is learning about the Hawaiian Islands’ unification and the founding of the Kingdom of Hawaii for the first time, notably from the Hawaiians’ point of view and in their language. But the series’ Hawaiian characters are not speaking the ‘ōlelo (Hawaiian language) of Hawaiians in the late-18th century, when “Chief of War” takes place.

Hawaiians had a rich oral tradition but no written language prior to 1820, when the first Congregationalist missionaries arrived from Massachusetts. After gaining fluency in Hawaiian and converting influential chiefs and chiefesses to their brand of Protestantism, the missionaries set out to spread the Word to the up-to-then unlettered masses by teaching them to read it in their own language. To this end, the missionaries embarked on a six-year project to develop a Hawaiian-language lexicon for a Hawaiian-language Bible.

They quickly ran into a problem, however. The Hawaiians’ spoken language was too complex for the written language the missionaries wanted to create. First off, the Hawaiians used too many interchangeable and potentially confusing consonants—B and P; L, R, and D; K, T, and D; W and V.

For example, consider the last pair of consonants, W and V. As the missionaries presumably heard them say it, Hawaiians interchanged “v” for “w” in “Hawaii,” pronouncing it “ha-vy-ee," which they still do. Meanwhile, the missionaries would have heard Hawaiian word for woman pronounced as wahine, which does not rhyme with “machine.” Oops, Hawaiian vowels are pesky. The “i” is pronounced “ee” and instead of being silent, the final “e” is pronounced “eh.” And wahine is pronounced wah-hee-neh.

If they’d come up with their own written lexicon, the Hawaiians likely would’ve kept and interchanged the  “v” and “w.” Moreover, the old Hawaiians actually pronounced “Hawaii” “oh-vy-ee.” The consonant-loving missionaries were loath to start any word with a vowel, thus “o” had to go.

To simplify their Hawaiian-language lexicon, and perhaps to reduce the printing costs of Hawaiian Bibles, the missionaries dropped the interchangeable consonants B, R, D, and V, leaving the Hawaiians with P, L, K, and W. Hawaiian as the missionaries wrote it and 19th-century Hawaiians learned to read and write it—becoming the world’s most literate people at the time—is the Hawaiian we mostly hear today.

The British naval explorer Capt. James Cook, who “discovered” (stumbled across) the Hawaiian Islands in 1778-79, heard Hawaiian and wrote it in his journals as Hawaiians spoke it. For example, Cook wrote of a Hawaiian ruler named “Terryaboo” (Teh-ree-ya-boo), and a subchief named “Tamahamaha” (Ta-mah-hah-mah-ha). In the missionaries’ lexicon, “t” becomes “k” and “r” becomes “l”, “Terryaboo” becomes Kalani‘ōpu‘u (Kah-lah-nee-oh-pu-u), and “Tamahamaha” becomes Kamehameha (Ka-meh-ha-meh-ha). Kamehameha is, of course, the Hawaiian who united the Hawaiian Islands and became the Islands’ first king; Kalani‘ōpu‘u was his uncle and ruler of the Big Island when Cook arrived. Turns out, Cook got Hawaiians’ names right—to a T.

I was deep into the first draft of Once There Was Fire, my novel about the life of Kamehameha and the unification of the Hawaiian Islands, before I learned from a park ranger at the Big Island’s Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park that missionaries had altered the Hawaiians’ language. (Hōnaunau is a must-see stop on any Big Island historical tour.) I approached the ranger, told him about my novel, and asked him if I needed to change all the characters’ names. To my relief he assured me that today’s Hawaiian is what it is and not to worry about it.

That said, I’ll leave off with one caveat for viewers of “Chief of War”: The true (pre-missionary) name of the series’ hero wasn’t Ka‘iana; it was Ta‘iana.

Postscript: What’s in a name?

If you’re wondering why the Hawaiians are called “Hawaiians,” speak “Hawaiian,” or why their island chain is named the “Hawaiian Islands,” or America’s 50th state is called “Hawaii,” look for the answer to Kamehameha (AKA, The Conqueror), who united the islands. Kamehameha was born on the island of Hawai‘i (the Big Island) and began his successful campaign to unify (subjugate) all the other islands there. If Kamehameha had hailed from Maui, or if his fiercest enemy—Kahekili, the ruler of Maui—had conquered all the islands instead of  Kamehameha, the chain would likely be identified on today’s maps as the “Maui Islands,” the islanders would be “Mauians,” and their language would be “Mauian.”

Before the Hawaiian Islands were called the Hawaiian Islands, they were known as the “Sandwich Islands,” thanks to their aforesaid “discoverer,” Captain Cook. Cook named the islands after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, an English nobleman who had the brilliant idea of slapping a piece of meat between two slices of bread. Hawaiians called their islands the Sandwich Islands until 1840, when the preamble to the Kingdom’s first constitution referred to the archipelago as the Hawaiian Islands. And they’ve been the Hawaiian Islands ever since.