Aloha!

When British explorer James Cook made the first known European expedition to the Hawaiian islands in 1778, he spelled the islands’ name as both “Owhyhee” and “Owhyee.” At this time, Hawaiian was purely an oral language; its written form wasn’t formalized until American missionary Elisha Loomis printed a primer titled simply The Alphabet in 1822. This written alphabet initially consisted of 21 letters before being standardized in 1826, although four of the original letters (F, G, S, and Y) were included only for the purpose of spelling foreign words. Other letters — B, R, T, and V — were removed because they were considered interchangeable with existing letters.

By 1834, Hawaii’s literacy rate was estimated to be between 90% and 95%, one of the highest in the world at the time. However,  the Hawaiian language declined in usage after 1896, when Act 57 of the Laws of the Republic of Hawaii made English the language of instruction for all schools, after which schoolchildren were sometimes even punished for speaking Hawaiian. The language has seen a resurgence since the 1970s, with several groups working toward preserving it.