In the Hawaiian language, the “W” is pronounced as a “V”. Thus, those in the know use the native-Hawaiian pronounciation “Havai’i”. I was watching a couple of old black and white films, a Charlie Chan film from the 30s and a Humphry Bogart film from the 40s, and in each film the word Hawaii is mentioned and is pronounced using the V sound. I imagine it was standard at the time, I could be wrong. So when did the haoles begin using the W sound?
also it seems lately they added the ’ symbol to the name in a lot of places. I never used to see that .
Purely spit-balling, but, perhaps WWII and the influx of military folks from all over the US passing through there? The huh-why-ee pronounciation seems very 'Murican.
Huh. I’ve been saying it wrong all my life. Will have to try to correct that.
Tourist: "How do you pronounce ‘Hawaii’?
Hawaiian: “Ha-vy-ee”
Tourist: “Thank you”
Hawaiian: “You’re velcome.”
Pure speculation here, but I would guess that, until World War 2, people rarely used the word unless they had actually been there, and learned the correct pronunciation.
After the war, it became a desirable tourist destination. Lots more people were aware of it, but they saw it in print more often than they heard it spoken, and they mangled the pronunciation.
The earlier spelling of the name is Owyhee. So it seems English speakers have always pronounced it with a W.
The thing is, Hawaiian does not have distinct /v/ and /w/ sounds. I expect the two English sounds map to a single Hawaiian phoneme, so either pronunciation is right.
When I saw the thread title, I thought you were talking about a more recent pronunciation change.
When I was a kid back in the 1970s and '80s, the pronunciation I usually heard was: huh-why or hə’wai
But today you usually hear all three syllables: huh-wahy-ee
In recent years, you are also more likely to see it spelled as Hawai’i (instead of the still more-common spelling of Hawaii). This likely goes along with the change in pronunciation.
The Cambridge Dictionary has a British English pronunciation and an American English pronunciation. Interestingly, the British English one is same as the American pronunciation from the 1970s.
When I lived in Hawaii in the 70’s, most people (both haoles and locals) seemed pretty laid back about the pronunciation of “Hawaii”. Today, with the emphasis on “cultural awareness”, many individuals (and TV newscasters) go out of there way to pronounce the word in the more traditional way.
The word “Tokyo” might have gone through the same WWII change. Before the war few people used it in their day to day conversations. During the war and up to today, non-Japanese people continue to pronounce “Tokyo” with three syllables. It really has only two. “Toe-key-o” is wrong. It should be pronounced more like “Toe-keyo” Try to combine the two sounds into one “Key-o, keyo”. “Toe keyo”.
I think it’s a cultural trend of the last two or three decades, related to the movements that have reinstated traditional native placenames for Denali (rather than Mt. McKinley), and has pushed for Mt. Rainier to again be known as Tahoma.
Native Hawai’ans began to make more noise about not having their native placenames cooked down into the slurry of American English. The National Park Service, among others, responded by restoring the okina and macrons to Hawai’an placenames—including O’ahu and Hawai’i itself.
I was wondering this myself. The wife and I lived here from 1991-94 and again from 2016-current. I swear we hear the V much more often than before, although we did hear it some back then too.
W is not always pronounced as V though. For example, you never, EVER hear Vaikiki. Wai with the W sound means water, so there are exceptions. (“Waikiki” means “spouting water.”) Waipahu, a sizable community here in Oahu, is always pronounced with a W.
Non-Japanese people… of certain linguistic backgrounds. In Spanish, Tokio has two syllables whether you spell it como Dios manda or the English way.
Toke yo.
There is a town called Owyhee in Oregon. Also, the Owyhee River and Owyhee Canyonlands. The River was named first, probably after a couple of Hawaiians who were killed by Natives during an exploration of the area.
It was pronounced with three syllables on all the news reports when Hawaii became a state (with a “w” sound). Evidently, folk etymology started going into effect to change it to two, so the apostrophe was added as a guide.
When I was there in 1965, they were pronouncing it “Ha-WAI-ee.”
Tök jó!
Yes, to me, “toke yo” sounds like the perfect way to explain it. (Though I still make a syllable break before the vowel “o” and consonant “k”). “Toe-keyo” still looks like “Toe-key-oh” to me.
This thread is the first time I recall seeing the name with the " ’ " between the two iis. As for the pronunciation, either one seems fine to me, but I’m betting the farther you get from Hawaii in the US (I’m on the east coast of the US), the more you hear it pronounced with the “W” sound in the middle. That’s absolutely still how I hear it pronounced.* Of course, I heard an elderly woman report that her son vacationed in Huh-Wai-Yer not long ago. I suspect she also pronounces Wash as Warsh.
- Hearing people go out of their way to pronounce it with a “V” sound reminds me of people who make a point of pronouncing the car brand Volkswagen as Folks-Vah-Gen, like they grew up in Germany. Sometimes being understood is more important than pronunciation authenticity.
It’s not an apostrophe. It’s called ʻokina and it’s not a punctuation mark; it’s a letter unto itself. In some character sets the closest approximation is an apostrophe, but it’s really not the same. It represents the glottal stop, the sound in the middle of uh-oh or the Cockney pronunciation of bottle.
The rule of thumb I heard growing up was that if the word started with the W, it wasn’t pronounced as a V, but if it was anywhere else in a Hawaiian name or word, it was.
But there are exceptions all over the place. The quasi-royal name Kawananakoa, for instance, does not pronounce the W as V.
I’d long wondered how those Hawaiians had gotten to far eastern Oregon. Then recently I learned that the Hudson’s Bay Company had brought in a number of kanakas to work at their HQ at Fort Vancouver. There apparently also Hawaiian workers in California during the gold rush and even earlier.