Hawaiian and its Morphological Typology

Status of the Language

Hawaiian or otherwise known as ’Olelo Hawai’i Makuahine is a language that is spoken on the Hawai’i Islands. It is the statutory provincial language in State of Hawai’i and it is used in all domains alongside English. Yet according to the UNESCO Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger, the language is considered to be “critically endangered”.

Why so?

Well, in 1778 James Cook came in contact with the local population of the islands. Since then, the native population has decimated significantly through contact with foreigners and their diseases. Gradually, English-based creole and then English itself replaced Hawaiian to the verge of extinction where in the 1980s only 50 children could be considered speakers of the language. Later however, the Hawaiian-language revitalisation movement ensured that Hawaiian is used in all domains of the society: young speakers were trained in immersion courses so that old and middle-aged speakers would have active use.

Lexical roots and grammatical morphemes

In general, lexical roots in Hawaiian are free whereas grammatical morphemes are both, free and bound. To illustrate this point, we can use ke, a marker of the present tense that is free and is followed by a verb and a Ø-demonstrative like in ke kali nei au ‘I am waiting’. An example of a bound grammatical morpheme in this language would be a plural marker u- like in u-haele ‘to go’ from the following sentence e aho e u-haele kāua ‘it is better for us to go’.

Affixes (prefixes, suffixes and other patterns)

The majority of affixes in Hawaiian occur with noun verbs which are understood as verbs that do not have any nominalisers yet function as nouns. Overall, there are more prefixes than suffixes. Prefixes include such examples like a causative/simulative prefix hā– which is the most common one and is used just like in the following example liu ‘to turn’, hā-liu ‘to cause to turn’. Another fairly widespread prefix would be aka- which means ‘carefully’ or ‘slowly’ as in ai ‘to eat’ and aka-ai ‘to eat slowly’. When talking about suffixes, then these serve as nominalizers, passive/imperative markers or even transitivizers. Among them the most common is -na as in papā ‘to sound’ and papā-na ‘sounding’. While languages generally have affixes which include prefixes and suffixes, Hawaiian, in addition to them, also has an infix which is used to lengthen the third vowel from the final one in ten kinship terms. For example makua ‘parent’ and mākua ‘parents’.

Clitics and their functions

Hawaiian proper names more often than not begin with ka or ke, a definite article but also a clitic that is pronounced as part of what follows it like Kamehameha, a name of the king of the Hawaiian Islands. Other instances of clitics include directional verbs of saying, for example, pane ‘reply’ or nīnau ‘question’. Simple directionals include aku ‘away’ or mai ‘to me’ and a’e ‘nearby’ that are often followed by lā ‘there (far)’ or by –la as an enclitic as in ‘ī a’ela ‘oia ‘he said to someone nearby’.

Reduplication

The last characteristic of Hawaiian is reduplication, in simpler terms repetition of a part or parts of a word. There are 7 types of full (complete) or partial reduplication. First is the complete reduplication that includes the repetition of the word like ‘aki in ‘aki-‘aki ‘to bite, constant snapping’. Second is considered to be the reduplication of the first syllable is the second type and can be illustrated with the following example lele in lelele ‘to bounce; to beat swiftly’; Reduplication of all but the first syllable is thought to be the next point on the list. Such an example like āhole in āhole-hole ‘an endemic fish; young stage of the fish’ gives an idea of what the process looks like. Double reduplication of the first syllable or first two phonemes of the first syllable with an example like hiki, hi-hi-hiki ‘come, reach; to come or go (many people)’. Then comes the reduplication of the first two phonemes of the first syllable with its example like pau in pa–pau ‘finished; deeply engaged, to devote oneself’. The two last processes are called just like the already mentioned second and third processes but here the peculiarity is in the shortening of long vowels in the base. For example, kālai like in kala–kalai ‘carve, cut; cut a little at a time and unahi as in una–unahi ‘scales of a fish, to scale; to scale, to fish’. Monolingualism in Iceland – Icelandic Language Planning I

References

Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig. 2021. “Hawaiian”. Ethnologue: Languages of the World < https://www.ethnologue.com/ language/haw> (accessed July 20, 2021).

Elbert, Samuel H. and Mary K. Pukui. 1979. Hawaiian Grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Jones, ‘Ōiwi P. 2018. “Hawaiian”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 48: 103–115.

Schütz, Albert J. 1994. The Voices of Eden: A History of Hawaiian Language Studies. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Picture Source: https://www.onhisowntrip.com/hawaii-in-fifteen-pictures/