As most visitors don't know how to pronounce many of the Hawaiian words, especially the names of town and places, this page is designed to give you some assistance. Hopefully, this will help you to pronounce commonly used words more like a local.

The Hawaiian language doesn't have as many letters as does the western alphabet. You will also notice words with what looks like a backwards apostrophe separating syllables: `. This is known as an "okina" and is a glottal stop. This is basically a stop in your breathing, starting again with the next syllable. It is almost like a separate word rather than an additional syllable to the word.

An example of this is the word Hawai`i. It is not pronounced "Hah wye ee" as in commonly presumed. There is a break after the second syllable, so that it is correctly pronounced "Hah wye`Ee". One other note about this word: you may hear it with the 'w' pronounced as a 'v'. This is entirely correct as the letter 'w' is usually pronounced as a 'v' if it isn't the beginning or ending letter of a word. Thus, it sounds like "Hah vye`Ee". Another note, all words end in a vowel.

Here are some examples of pronunciation for you to use:

The Plantsman would recommend that you go to my Great Maui Links page and take the link to KPOA radio and listen live with RealPlayer to get more of an idea of how many of these words are pronounced. I wish you well in this endeavor.

The Plantsman

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Created Aloha Friday, July 7, 2000