English and Hawai'ian are the official state languages. At one time, the number of Hawai'ian speakers had greatly diminished, but a tremendous renaissance of Hawai'ian culture has taken place over the past generation or two: Today, thousands of people study the Hawai'ian language and other aspects of Hawai'ian culture, and there is even a K-12 Hawai'ian immersion school system within the the public statewide Department of Education.

Hawai'ian is closely related to the other major Polynesian dialects: Tahitian, Maori, Marquesan, Rarotongan, Samoan and Tongan. Although it is not necessarily mutually intelligible with these other dialects, many Hawai'ian words and grammatical concepts are identical or nearly identical with the other dialects.

Hawai'ian is also sometimes recognized around the world as the language with the fewest letters in its alphabet: a, e, i, o, u, h, k, l, m, n, p, w — 12 in all, although there's actually another consonant sound, the glottal stop [such as in the middle of the English slang term huh-uh, meaning 'no' and sometimes spelled uh-uh], sometimes represented by the 'okina or inverted apostrophe.

Most Polynesian languages, including Hawai'ian, also have longer sounding vowels, sometimes marked with a bar or macron above the letter [here with a European-style umlaut, since most computers do not normally include macron options] or what the Hawai'ians call a kahakö. These should not be confused with the bar or macron that is used to differentiate an English "long" vowel from a "short" vowel, as in the words "hate" and "hat," respectively.

Hawai'ian words with lengthened vowels have different meanings than their counterparts with regular vowels: For example, kala is a type of fish, kalä means 'the sun,' while kälä means 'dollar' or 'money.' English vowels can also be lengthened in pronunciation, but that just changes the emphasis and not the meaning of the word.

A pronunciation problem has arisen over the years because when early Christian missionaries first devised the Hawai'ian alphabet, almost everyone spoke the language and so they often did not indicate the inverted apostrophe for the 'okina or the macron bar of the kahakö in writing: Native speakers already understood the difference, say, between kala and kälä by context.

As the years went by and the number of Hawai'ian language speakers greatly diminished, however, many people didn't know about the 'okina sound or long vowels. For example, Kaua'i became Kauai (as in 'cow-eye') and O'ahu became Oahu. Along with the rest of the Hawai'ian renaissance, people and institutions such as media and government are becoming more sensitive to including the 'okina and kahakö in written Hawai'ian; so don't be surprised to see both Waikiki and Waikïkï or Lanai and Läna'i...and try to pronounce them in the old Hawai'ian way.