The Hawaiian Alphabet: 13 Letters and How They Work

The Hawaiian alphabet has 13 letters: 5 vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 8 consonants (H, K, L, M, N, P, W, and the ʻokina). It is one of the smallest alphabets of any language in the world. The limited set of letters explains why Hawaiian words look so different from English: every syllable ends in a vowel, consonant clusters do not exist, and borrowed foreign words are adapted into forms the alphabet can produce.

The 13 letters

The five vowels are the same as English: A, E, I, O, U. The seven traditional consonants are: H, K, L, M, N, P, W. The eighth consonant is the ʻokina (ʻ), a glottal stop that functions as a consonant in Hawaiian orthography. In some older sources the Hawaiian alphabet is listed as having 12 letters, with the ʻokina treated as a punctuation mark rather than a letter; modern Hawaiian language standards count it as a letter.

Notable absences: there is no B, C, D, F, G, J, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, or Z. This is why Hawaiʻi sounds so different from English when spoken correctly, and why the spelling looks unexpected to English speakers. Hawaiʻi itself contains only vowels and three consonants: H, W, and the ʻokina.

Vowel sounds

Hawaiian vowels are pronounced similarly to Spanish or Italian vowels, not like English vowels. Each vowel has one consistent sound: A as in "father," E as in "hey," I as in "machine," O as in "open," U as in "tune." They do not shift or reduce to schwa sounds the way English vowels do. Every vowel in every Hawaiian word is sounded clearly.

Vowel pairs (diphthongs) produce combined sounds. Ai sounds like "eye." Au sounds like "ow" in "how." Ei sounds like "ay." Ou sounds like "oh." Oi is similar to English "oy." See the full guide to Hawaiian pronunciation for detailed examples.

The ʻokina and kahakō

Two diacritical marks are essential to written Hawaiian. The ʻokina (ʻ) looks like an opening single quotation mark (not an apostrophe) and marks a glottal stop: a brief catch in the throat between syllables, like the pause in the middle of "uh-oh." It changes meaning: hawaii (a place name when written with the ʻokina as Hawaiʻi) versus hawaii without the ʻokina would be a different word or a mispronunciation.

The kahakō (macron, the bar over a vowel: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) indicates a lengthened vowel sound. It also changes meaning: kāne (man, or the god Kāne) versus kane without the macron produces a shorter, different sound. In modern Hawaiian language education, both marks are considered essential to correct writing. Many older signs and texts in Hawaii omit them, which is an artifact of the period when the marks were not standardized in common use.

History of the written language

Before the arrival of American Protestant missionaries in 1820, Hawaiian was an oral language with no writing system. For centuries, knowledge (genealogies, navigation techniques, medicinal practices, historical accounts, religious traditions) was preserved through memory and passed down through specialized training in chant, story, and ceremony. Missionaries, working with Native Hawaiian scholars including David Malo (who became one of the first Native Hawaiian historians), Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia, and others, developed a written alphabet based on the sounds of Hawaiian as they heard them. The first printed Hawaiian-language text appeared in 1822, and by 1825 the first Hawaiian-language newspaper (Ka Lama Hawaii) was published.

The literacy rate in Hawaii by the 1830s-1840s was extraordinary: some historians estimate that 75-90% of the Hawaiian population could read and write in Hawaiian, a rate higher than most European countries and the United States mainland at the time. This was achieved through mission schools, but also through Hawaiian community eagerness to learn the new technology of writing. Hawaiian-language newspapers ran continuously from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, publishing more than 125,000 pages of history, literature, genealogy, news, letters, poetry, and advertisements. These constitute an irreplaceable archive of pre- and post-contact Hawaiian knowledge, much of which would have been lost if not recorded in print.

Many Hawaiian-language newspapers are now digitized and accessible through the Papakilo Database maintained by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and through the University of Hawaiʻi's digitization projects. Researchers continue to discover new information in these texts, which include firsthand accounts of the 1819 abolition of the kapu system, the 1820s arrival of missionaries, the 1848 Great Mahele land division, the 1893 overthrow, and countless everyday details of life across the 19th century. The missionaries who created the alphabet had a complex and contested legacy. They facilitated cultural transformation that many Hawaiians did not seek. But the written language they helped create became the vehicle through which Hawaiian oral traditions, genealogies, and knowledge were preserved in a form that survived the near-extinction of the Hawaiian language in the 20th century.