Language documentation is increasingly seen as a collaborative process, engaging community members as active participants. Collaborative research produces better documentation that is valuable for both the academic community and the speakers. However, in many communities, speakers and language advocates lack the skills necessary to fully engage in…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

Apart from a handful of studies (e.g., Kinney 1956), linguists know little about what variation exists in Hawaiian and what factors constrain the variation. In this paper, we present an analysis of phonetic variation in the word "keia," meaning "this," examining the social, linguistic, and probabilistic factors that constrain…

Intergenerational transmission, the ultimate goal of language revitalization efforts, can only be achieved by (re)establishing the conditions under which an imperiled language can be acquired by the community's children. This paper presents a tutorial survey of several key points relating to language acquisition and maintenance in children,…

Some 40 years ago, language transmission in Hawai'i was interrupted among Hawaiians across all islands with the sole exception of language maintenance among a small community on the tiny, isolated Ni'ihau Island. Today, Hawaiian has returned as spoken and written medium with some 5000-7000 new speakers. The present paper provides an up-to-date…

August 21, 2009, marks the 50th anniversary of the entry of the 50th state into the United States of America. All the states have their stories, but as a string of islands in the vast Pacific Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from any other land mass, Hawai'i has a story that is unique in many ways. Consider, for example, that Hawai'i has two official…

In the early 1980s, the Hawaiian language had reached its low point with fewer than 50 native speakers of Hawaiian under the age of 18. Outside of the Ni'ihau community, a small group of families in Honolulu and Hilo were raising their children through Hawaiian. This article shares the perspectives of three pioneering families of the Hawaiian…

The article discusses the small group of Hawaiian students who grow up as native Hawaiian speakers but are being taught in programs that do not support the continued development of their native language. Suggestions for creating effective additive bilingual education programs are presented. (SM)

Reviews American educational policy and indigenous language loss, the importance of language revitalization, and various models of language-immersion studies. A case study reports on Papahana Kaiapuni, the Hawaiian language immersion program established in 1987. This program is an example of a native community's efforts to revitalize its language.…