Ēwelei’ula Wong has just spent the morning surfing. She’ll eat a bite and soon return to sliding on the white roller of Kewalos, a steep wave that breaks in front of Honolulu. The 19-year-old young woman, who has just returned from Australia, is trying to carve out a place for herself on the surfing world cup circuit. His goal is twofold: to excel at the sport invented by his ancestors — he’e nalu, “glide on the waves” — and become an ambassador of her mother tongue, Hawaiian. “For me, surfing and my language are inseparable, they define my identity,” she says through the sound of the break.
As a young child, Ēwelei’ula fell into both pots. At two months old, his parents took him on a surfboard. And at home, they spoke Hawaiian. However, it was not their native language: the two native Hawaiians learned their idiom at university, and then adopted it at home. Ēwelei’ula’s grandparents don’t know Hawaiian — before the 1970s, the language was met with disdain and indifference. “My great-grandfather was the last one to speak Hawaiian fluently in the family,” says the surfer. “It is now our kuleana, our responsibility, to perpetuate the language and traditions of our ancestors. »
School immersion
History therefore goes backwards. A new generation of speakers is revitalizing Hawaiian. They are still few in number: around 20,000 people, including a small minority of native speakers like Ēwelei’ula. However, the language is gaining ground here and there: on social networks, on the radio, in certain magazines, during university events. We don’t hear it unexpectedly at the beach, given the rarity of those who speak it, but it is becoming normalized in a sphere of public life: school. This year, nearly 2,400 primary and secondary students are attending full Hawaiian language immersion schools, 50% more than ten years ago.
In the heart of the Pālolo Valley, children play in the courtyard of the Ānuenue (“rainbow”) immersion school. A half-Hawaiian, half-English hubbub is heard. It’s the penultimate day of school. T’hom Wieting, a little seven-year-old blonde, is going to join her father, who has come to pick her up on foot. Two years ago, she knew nothing of Hawaiian; she now speaks it fluently. Her parents, who arrived from the continental United States more than 20 years ago, wanted to offer their daughter a second language that would anchor her in her archipelago.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” says his mother, Julia Wieting, a linguist who knows eight languages. “The Hawaiian language will anchor its identity in this place. She will know where she lives, and where she comes from. My goal is for her to have the tools to speak to the communities she wants to be a part of. » On her knees, T’hom curls up into a ball, embarrassed by the presence of the journalist in her living room. She shyly whispers her three favorite words in Hawaiian: le’ema (“unicorn”), lokomaika’i (“goodwill”, “generosity”, “kindness”) and kaiapuni (“immersion”). “This language has one of the most restricted sound systems in the world, with only 14 sounds,” explains M.me Wieting. As a result, each word means different things at once. Their meaning depends a lot on the context. »
Most children in Ānuenue do not speak Hawaiian at home. They learn the language with images, songs, and by imitating their teachers. If T’hom wishes, she can attend this school until the end of secondary school. As children get older, immersion classes become empty, however. Ēwelei’ula Wong, who also attended such a school, was part of a cohort of only four students at the end of high school.
Poetic names
The Hawaiian language, which landed from Polynesian canoes around the year 1000, evolved to perfectly match its host land. His botanical, marine and agricultural vocabulary is full of depth. Plants and animals have poetic names, such as humuhumunukunukuāpua’a, or “pig-snouted fish”. “The Hawaiian language is very different from English,” explains environmentalist Kawika Winter, 47. “In English (or French), “pêcher” means to catch fish. In Hawaiian, lawai’a refers to a reciprocal relationship with the ocean. Before you take, you have to make sure you give,” explains the man who learned Hawaiian as an adult.
After centuries of isolation, Hawaii saw the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778. The floodgates of the vast world opened. In the 1820s, Protestant missionaries created the written Hawaiian language. They wanted the local population, numbering more than 100,000, to read the Bible. Very quickly, Hawaiians became avid readers. By 1834, more than 90 percent of them could read—a higher proportion than in the United States. “Everyone wanted to read, everyone wanted to write,” says Kapaia’ala Earle, an archivist at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, dedicated to Hawaii’s natural and cultural history.
Mr. Earle, a young man of 25, welcomes The duty in a wing of the museum decorated with magnificent woodwork. He delved into the institution’s archives to pull out some old newspapers. A copy of the Ka Lama Hawai’i (“the Hawaiian light”) from 1834 shows an exotic animal, newly introduced to the archipelago, unknown to the local population: he lio, for “horse”. “The first newspapers did not only provide local news. We also printed international news, stories, laws, genealogies,” explains Mr. Earle, who is working to digitize the 90,000 newspaper pages lying in the reserves. of the museum.
This yellowed paper bears witness to a time when the Hawaiians had a kingdom vibrant with the sounds of their own language. Towards the end of the 19th centurye century, English nevertheless exerted a strong attraction. “Many Hawaiian parents chose to send their children to English school so that they could interact with the sailors and business people who arrived in the islands,” said Mr. Earle, who is pursuing a master’s degree in the language. Hawaiian in the education system.
Ban then rebirth
In 1893, the kingdom fell when anti-royalist insurgents, most of them American citizens, overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani. Three years later, a law banned the vernacular language in schools. The people continued to speak their language, but they were disappearing demographically, caught up in the infectious diseases of the Old World and faced with the massive immigration of Asian workers. In 1920, Hawaiians made up less than 10% of the archipelago’s 256,000 inhabitants. There ‘ōlelo hawai’i (“Hawaiian language”) was fading.
Then came the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s. Activists took pride in the traditions of their ancestors, including the hula (traditional dance), songs and language, of which only a handful of speakers remained. In 1978, Hawaiian was granted official language status, along with English. In the 1980s, daycares and then immersion schools opened their doors. In 1987, a committee (Kōmike Hua’ōlelo) was trained to enrich and modernize the vocabulary. These efforts saved the language from extinction, but did not allow it to once again become a major language in Hawaii. It is now the seventh language spoken at home.
“The current situation is a mirror of the 19the century, when monarchs tried to make English and Hawaiian coexist. We are still far from getting there. That said, it is crucial to preserve the Hawaiian language, because only this language allows us to understand Hawaii,” said Kapaia’ala Earle, also a native speaker. As with most of the 320,000 native Hawaiians in the archipelago, his origins are multiple: his mother is Hawaiian and his father comes from Michigan. “Ironically, it was my father who wanted to raise us in Hawaiian,” he says. He had learned the language at university, and he had fallen in love with it. » Hawaiian is now a “normal language” for Kapaia’ala, a language he hopes to one day pass on to his children.