Fire Next Time: Compare development of Hawaiian/Black English over 25 years.

Thu Dec 9 15:53:20 UTC 2004

>>From the issue dated December 10, 2004
CHRONICLE ON HIGHER EDUCATION

  Talking a Language Back From the Brink Hawaiian professors band together
to revive the islands' dying native tongue

Audio clips: Listen to Hawaiian chants from a traditional hula class, and
to parts of a Hawaiian 101 class (Audio clips require Quicktime player)

Text: Basics of speaking Hawaiian

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

(NEWS RELEASE FROM) Hilo, Hawaii

On the first day of "Hawaiian Studies 474,"  a dozen students line up just
inside a classroom doorway, open their mouths in unison, and breathe life
into an ailing culture. Under a bank of fluorescent lights, young men and
women wearing T-shirts and shorts chant an old Hawaiian poem asking
permission to enter a place of learning.

"Kunihi ka mauna i ka la'i e," they intone without stopping for breath,
voices blending in a melody that hovers around a single ancient note.
Kalena Silva, a professor of Hawaiian language and studies at the
University of Hawaii at Hilo, asks his students to repeat the entrance
poem several times before he chants a response, ending in a drawn-out
tremolo that fades to silence. Then he begins his traditional-hula class,
starting with a lecture on the history of the dance.

As he asks questions, tells jokes, and keeps the students engaged, not a
word of English passes his lips. This upper-level course, like others
offered by the department, is taught entirely in the Hawaiian language. In
the early 1970s, when Mr. Silva was in college, he could not have taken a
class like this one. The University of Hawaii-Manoa, which he attended,
treated Hawaiian as a foreign language, and a relatively unpopular one at
that. Few professors and even fewer students had any fluency in the
state's native tongue.

State law actually prohibited teachers from using Hawaiian as the
classroom language in elementary and secondary school -- a holdover from
the colonial rules imposed by Americans after they wrested control of the
islands from the original Polynesian inhabitants in 1893. That law and the
cultural dominance of the United States nearly succeeded in killing off
the native language. But over the past 25 years, Mr. Silva and a trio of
other professors at Hilo have given Hawaiian a second chance. Since their
days together in college, Mr. Silva and his friends have made it their
mission to resuscitate the language and the culture.

Along the way, they have established language- immersion schools reaching
from pre-kindergarten all the way through to a master's degree. They have
testified before Congress, changed state laws, and are now establishing
the country's first doctoral program in indigenous languages. And they
have created a small but burgeoning community of fluent Hawaiian speakers,
some of whom are becoming the next generation of educators. "It's been an
inspiration to a lot of other groups in the United States," says Suzanne
Romaine, a professor of English at the University of Oxford, in England,
who has studied threatened languages.  Representatives of the Blackfoot
nation and other American Indian groups have visited Hilo to study the
college's programs. When the Hawaiian professors started their work, only
32 people under the age of 18 spoke the language at home. Now some 2,000
children are enrolled in Hawaiian-immersion schools, and as many as 6,000
people have some fluency in the language. "It's now secured a foothold,"
Ms. Romaine, who has advised the Hilo professors on their doctoral-
program proposal. "I don't think anybody would have predicted that
possibility 30 or 40 years ago."

The Spam Invasion

Through much of the 20th century, native Hawaiian culture was spiraling
downward. American sugar- plantation owners, who had overthrown the
sovereign Hawaiian nation at the turn of the 20th century, suppressed the
native language so successfully that few people born after 1920 spoke
Hawaiian at home.  Then World War II brought thousands of American GI's to
the islands, and with them came a tsunami of cultural influences that
drowned out the existing heritage.  Spam became a staple on Hawaiian
tables. By the 1960s, many Hawaiians in the newly minted state -- which
spells its name Hawai'i -- were looking outside the islands for an
identity. "It wasn't a prideful thing to be Hawaiian," says Clayton Hee, a
state senator who was in high school with Mr. Silva. "I'm half Chinese,
and when I was younger, if anybody asked me, I would say I was
Chinese-Hawaiian."

Mr. Hee and Mr. Silva attended an elite private academy called the
Kamehameha School, which is financed by a bequest from a Hawaiian princess
descended from King Kamehameha. The school accepted only students with
native Hawaiian ancestry. Despite its namesake, though, the academy did
not encourage students to study the language of Kamehameha. Mr. Hee took
Spanish there. But Mr. Silva was drawn to a course in Hawaiian because he
wanted to connect with his grandmother and others of her generation.
"There was a lot of aloha -- warmth and love," he says. "The way they
interacted was so beautiful, and I wanted to be like that."

Later, at the University of Hawaii, Mr. Silva studied the language under
Larry L. Kimura, who had graduated from Kamehameha a few years ahead of
him. Later another graduate of the school, Kauanoe Kamana, arrived on the
Manoa campus, on the island of O'ahu.  She also became a student of Mr.
Kimura's. The cadre from Kamehameha formed a lasting bond.  Now, Mr.
Silva, Mr. Kimura, and Ms. Kamana are all faculty members in the College
of Hawaiian Language, at the state university system's Hilo campus, on the
Big Island of Hawaii. A fourth professor in the college, William (Pila)
Wilson, also studied Hawaiian under Mr. Kimura on the Manoa campus and
later married Ms. Kamana.

Together in the 1970s, the four started a revolution by reaching toward
the past. At the time, most students of Hawaiian were learning it for
quiet academic purposes:  so they could comb through documents from the
unified Hawaiian kingdom of the 1800s and read the many Hawaiian-language
newspapers that sprang up during that time. But Mr. Kimura and his
students had a different, more vocal, idea. "The main contribution that
they made is to get people to think this could be a viable language to
serve your everyday needs," says Kerry Laiana Wong, an acting assistant
professor of Hawaiian language on the Manoa campus. "They tried to make it
a living language again. That's where the movement, at least in the
language, really got its impetus."

Family Values

At the dinner table, it's clear that the Hilo professors have made their
point. Mr. Wilson, Mr. Silva, and Ms. Kamana are so used to conversing in
Hawaiian that they laugh when they hear one another talk during a meal
with a mainlander.  "It's really strange to speak English with these
people,"  says Mr. Wilson, who grew up in Honolulu in a family that hailed
from Kansas. Mr. Wilson was hired by Hilo in the late 1970s to set up a
B.A. program in Hawaiian studies. As part of the hire, he stipulated that
upper-level courses in the program would be taught entirely in Hawaiian.

>>From classroom to bedroom, he brought those lessonshome. After Mr. Wilson
>married Ms. Kamana, they started using Hawaiian as their primary language
before the birth of their first child, in 1981. "You make the decision to
do it,"  she explains. After rearing their son in Hawaiian at home, they
faced a challenge when it was time for preschool and they couldn't find
any where Hawaiian was spoken. So, out of necessity, they banded together
with other families and started their own.

Along with their friends and colleagues, Ms. Kamana and Mr. Wilson set up
a nonprofit corporation, the 'Aha Punana Leo (language-nest gathering), in
1983 to run Hawaiian-language preschools. They based their program on a
successful one pioneered by Maori activists in New Zealand. The nonprofit
group created its first preschool, on the island of Kaua'i, to serve a
small community of Hawaiian speakers from the nearby island of Ni'ihau.
That privately owned island has a population of some 200 people, who, to
this day, use Hawaiian as their first language. The second Punana Leo, in
Hilo, attracted families like that of Mr. Wilson and Ms.  Kamana,
second-language learners rearing their children in Hawaiian.

When it was time for their son to enter kindergarten, Ms. Kamana and Mr.
Wilson started one of those, too, without authorization from the state. (A
longstanding Hawaiian law prohibited educators from teaching in the native
language.) They were prepared to go to jail for their actions. But they
managed to get the law changed and to establish a full elementary school.
Then came a laboratory school for middle and high school, called Nawahi,
which is run jointly by their college, the nonprofit corporation, and the
state department of education.

Their efforts extend far beyond the usual activities of college
professors. "We had to train the teachers and change the law," says Mr.
Wilson. "We had to make the curricular materials, and we even had to
create words for things that hadn't existed in the lives of the older
people."  They brought Hawaiian into the modern world by inventing words
such as huna hohoki, for neutron, and wikio, for video.

Sink or Speak

On the first day of school this year Ms. Kamana, who serves as principal
of Nawahi, lined up more than 100 students to greet Mr. Silva and a
visitor. The children stood at attention, arms straight down at their
sides, chanting a Hawaiian poem together. Those students are but a small
fraction of the nearly 2,000 children enrolled in Hawaiian-immersion
programs around the state. From the modest beginning of one preschool, 20
years ago, the list has grown to include more than a dozen private
preschools and 20 Hawaiian-immersion schools, all using materials
developed by the Hilo college.

Many other students enter the language stream at the university level. In
a section of Hawaiian 101 at Hilo, Haunani Bernardino leads her 20
students at a gallop through their first week of instruction. Every action
is a teachable moment. When someone sneezes, she asks, "How do we say,
'Bless you?'" The class calls out in chorus, "E ola." The path these
students are taking is much easier now than it was a generation ago, when
Mr. Wilson and his cohorts faced countless roadblocks.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Wilson learned that he was breaking the law by
setting up immersion schools, so he took the matter to the state capital.
There he spoke with Mr. Hee, a former student, who at the time was serving
in the State House of Representatives. Together they led an effort that by
1986 repealed the law. Since that success, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hee have
joined forces many times to plow through the state bureaucracy in order to
start other immersion programs, the Hawaiian- language college, and the
master's-degree program.

Mr. Wilson's efforts haven't stopped at the state's borders.  In 1990 he
and others at the Hawaiian-language college worked with Sen. Daniel K.
Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, to help draft the Native American Language
Act, which supports efforts to preserve the indigenous languages of the
United States. Last month he visited the senator in Washington, D.C., to
drum up support for S 575, an amendment to the act, which would help
export the language-immersion program used in Hawaii to other regions of
the United States where indigenous languages are vanishing. The effort was
unsuccessful this term, but Mr. Wilson will try again next session.

Campus Rivalry

Now Mr. Wilson is back in Hawaii, asking for more from the state. The
Hawaiian-language college this year submitted a proposal to start a
doctoral program in Hawaiian and indigenous-language studies, which would
be the first of its kind anywhere in the world, says Oxford's Ms. Romaine.
One branch of the program would focus on Hawaiian, while another would
cater to scholars and educators from other cultures who want to learn how
to revitalize or study threatened languages elsewhere. "There is a need
for this because now there's a great deal of interest in the problem of
language extinction and language revitalization around the world, and
there isn't any place where people can go to receive training," says Ms.
Romaine, who might play a role in the program.

Once again, Mr. Wilson's former student, Mr. Hee, is in a position to
help. Last month he was re-elected to the State Senate, where he will
serve as chairman of the higher-education committee, which oversees the
University of Hawaii System. The Board of Regents met in October and
approved the plan in concept, as long as there is sufficient coordination
between Hilo and the flagship Manoa campus, which houses all of the
university's current doctoral programs.

There is a bit of a rivalry between the two campuses when it comes to
teaching the Hawaiian language.  Although it has more students and more
faculty members, Manoa is a step behind Hilo and is now trying to
establish its own master's program in Hawaiian-language studies. Some
professors at Manoa have wondered whether Hilo has sufficient
qualifications to run a graduate program.  They note that Mr. Silva and
Mr. Wilson have the only Ph.D.'s in the faculty of the Hawaiian-language
college there.

Mr. Wilson responds that it's a Catch-22 of sorts.  "Since there are no
graduate degrees in our area, it's a problem," he says. "We fought really
strongly to ensure that the hiring in our program would be based on actual
knowledge of Hawaiian language and culture." The college can point to some
recent academic successes.  It has turned out four graduates with master's
degrees in Hawaiian language. And Mr. Silva is editing a two-year-old
journal of Hawaiian-language sources, called Ka Ho'Oilina,"  which is
translated as The Legacy.

"We're finally at the graduate level, at the truly academic level," says
Mr. Silva. Hawaiians have watched for decades as non-native scholars
studied Hawaiian historical documents indirectly through translations. But
now, students fluent in the language are starting to mine the hundreds of
thousands of historical sources written in Hawaiian. "We are able to look
at Hawaiian cultural material in our own language," he says. "It gives us
added weight and insight into this material."

Nonetheless, the academic advances are only a small step toward the
professors' main goal of bringing Hawaiian back into people's lives. "I'm
looking forward to a time -- I'm not sure I'll see it in my lifetime --
when there is a large enough community of speakers" to sustain the
language, says Mr. Silva, while driving on the outskirts of Hilo.
Linguists estimate that it might take as many as 100,000 speakers to put
Hawaiian on that solid a foundation. Only about 5,000 or 6,000 speak the
language now, but schools and colleges are training more every year, says
Mr. Silva as he pulls into the parking lot at Nawahi, where faculty
members and students are, day by day, resurrecting the language of
Kamehameha.

"We're not there yet," Mr. Silva says. "But maybe in 50 years."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
HAWAIIAN 101

Hawaiian is part of a family of eastern Polynesian languages and is
closely related to the languages of Tahiti, Easter Island, and the
Marquesas Islands. It also shares many similarities with the Maori
language of New Zealand natives. When American missionaries arrived in
Hawaii in the 1820s, they established a spelling system consisting of five
vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and seven consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W).
Spelling:

Modern Hawaiian includes two features not present in English.  An 'okino,
written as a single open quotation mark, represents a glottal stop, which
is made by closing off the back of the throat as in the English expression
"uh-oh." A second feature, the kahako, is an accent bar over vowels that
are elongated.

Pronunciation:

Vowels are pronounced separately unless they form the complex vowel sounds
known as diphthongs, such as "au,"  which sounds like "ou," and "oi," as
in "choice." Stress in Hawaiian words falls on the diphthong or on the
vowel with the kahako. If a word has neither, the stress falls on the
penultimate syllable.

Common mistakes:

aloha (ah-LOH-ha): Accent falls on the syllable
"loh" instead of others.

Hawai'i (ha-VIE ee or ha-WHY ee):
The correct spelling uses an 'okino.

Ma'noa (MAH-NO-ah): The kahako over the first
"a" elongates that vowel, and the second syllable
 is stressed.

mu'umu'u (moo oo-MOO oo): a type of dress,
often mispronounced as "moo-moo."

O'ahu (o AH hoo): The glottal stop is often left out.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Hawaiian Chants: Running Time: 50 seconds

At the start of each session of his traditional hula class,
Kalena Silva has his students chant a mele or poem
asking permission to enter a place of learning and
then he responds with a chant.

The entrance poem begins "Kunihi ka mauna i ka la'i e."
It means "The mountain Wai'ale'ale stands steep in the
calm above the place called Wailua." According to
Mr. Silva, director of the College of Hawaiian Language

at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, "Mt. Wai'ale'ale is used
here as a metaphor to express the chanter's wish to make
an ascent, no matter how difficult, to a higher level of
understanding and knowledge."

Hawaiian 101 Class: Running Time: 2:19

Haunani Bernardino, an associate professor in the
Hawaiian language college at the University of Hawaii
at Hilo, leads her Hawaiian 101 class through some
basic pronunciation rules.

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Section: The Faculty
Volume 51, Issue 16, Page A8

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