http://faroutliers.files.wordpress.com/ ... iwords.jpg
http://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/research/Wor ... iccolo.pdf
The struggle for the revitalization of the Hawaiian language, although valuable and necessary, has
so far either neglected or insufficiently taken into account one important issue: the existence of various
dialects of Hawaiian. The aim of the present study is to characterize the vowels of two of these
dialects, Ni‘ihauan and the University of Hawai‘i (UH), on the basis of phonetic evidence. The first
dialect is a natural continuation of the variety spoken on the island of Ni‘ihau, in that the Hawaiian
language was never banned there, as opposed to the rest of the islands, where it was. The latter dialect
evolved from that spoken on the Big Island. Although both dialects have native and non-native
speakers, most of the speakers of UH Hawaiian are non non-native speakers whose first language is
English. The present study compares the pronunciation of Hawaiian vowels by a native speaker of the
Ni‘ihauan dialect with that of a fluent (but non-native) speaker of UH Hawaiian whose first language is
English. Phonetic charts of the vowels of both varieties of the language are compared to show the
possible influence of English on the UH form