Talk:Hawaiian language
From Hawaiian; should be (selectively) merged in here:
The Hawai‘ian language, with English, is an official language of the State of Hawai‘i. It has only a small number of sounds. Many Polynesian languages are similar. In old Hawaiian, there was no difference between /t/ and /k/ - this is very unusual.
Hawai‘ian is a in the Austronesian language family. In this family are also Sāmoan, Māori, Fijian, and other languages from Polynesia.
Hawaiian is a language in danger. On most of the islands, people today speak English and not Hawaiian every day. Only the island Ni‘ihau uses Hawaiian every day, because it is a private island, and not all people are allowed to visit it. Starting around 1900, the number of first-language speakers of Hawaiian went down from 37,000 to 1,000; half of the Hawaiian speakers today are now 70 to 80 years old.
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