I’m in American and I’ve never seen it spelled Katelyn, but I’ve met several Caitlins.
ETA: Looks like Katelyn broke the top 100 in the 2010s, but Caitlin didn’t.
ETA again: Looks like it depends on the decade, since both names bounce up and down. In the 90s, I think Kaitlin was more popular than both, but all three were in the top 100.
Even though Irish is doing better than Hawaiian, it still isnt doing very well. A hundred years of compulsory instruction in schools has produced ever shrinking numbers who are actually fluent in it, as distinct from those who have some half-remembered acquaintance with it.
The revival of Irish in the late 19th/early 20th c. was bound up with reviving nationalism. Using it was a way of expressing opposition to English governance. With the English (mostly) gone there was less reason to put effort into acquiring it.
Caitlín in Irish is pronounced much closer to “Kathleen,” its 19th-century anglicization, than “Kate Lynn,” which is a spelling pronunciation. In Irish, that’s the correct spelling.
In America, in English, the name is usually pronounced where the first syllable rhymes with “Kate,” and it’s spelled in a bewildering variety of ways. In my experience, many people with the name have no idea how its etymon is pronounced in Irish.
But really, they’re two different names that are historically connected, part of the greater Katherine / Caterina family.
The state did in fact make English and Hawaiian co-official languages. I must have known that at some point but I forgot it. It was ratified as part of a constitutional amendment in 1978 that reads, in part, "English and Hawaiian shall be the official languages of Hawaii, except that Hawaiian shall be required for public acts and transactions only as provided by law. "
Well, let’s not forget the big disconnect here, that Caitlin in Ireland is pronounced very close to Cathleen, whereas Katelyn here in the US is just Kate-Lynn. Sorry for the IPA illiteracy.
Hawaiian is known for having very few consonant phonemes – eight: /p, k ~ t, ʔ, h, m, n, l, w ~ v/. It is notable that Hawaiian has allophonic variation^ of [t] with [k], [w] with [v], and (in some dialects) [l] with [n]. The [t]–[k] variation is quite unusual among the world’s languages, and is likely a product both of the small number of consonants in Hawaiian, and the recent shift of historical *t to modern [t]–[k], after historical *k had shifted to [ʔ]^^.
^allophonic variation: broadly when a language regularly permits two or more different sounds to ‘play the same role’ in words without a change in meaning. English examples exist, but may be too much of a digression to explain in a footnote.
^^[ʔ] is a consonant called the glottal stop – the ‘catch in the throat’ in the middle of English ‘uh-oh’).
There is the problem right there. They should have made Hawaiian authoritative, promoted media and schools in Hawaiian, mandated it for basic public education and fluency in it for various jobs, etc. Or, at the very least, made it so Hawaiian can be used in daily life without prejudice compared to English.
In Ireland (also in Scotland and Wales), it’s not just a question of legal status, or of schooling alone. It’s about using the language in broadcasting (across a wide range of programme genres, from news to soaps to light entertainment), and active support for a whole range of cultural activities using the language - festivals, libraries, theatre and so on.
I’ve been to pubs in County Cork where only Irish is spoken, even in private conversations. That’s a level of individual commitment necessary to keep a minority language from going extinct. In other parts of Ireland, people will forget most of the Irish they were taught as soon as they leave school.
During the Covid lockdown, I did an online course in basic Irish Gaelic, and towards the end they included this short about an enthusiastic Chinese visitor who’s really put his heart and soul into learning the language, only to find he’d have to travel further to make much use of it:
Yes, alas part of the problem is that by the time they got around to doing this in their constitution, the fraction of people with an actual commitment and interest had diminished too far to make it worth the expense and effort from the POV of the majority of voters in Hawaii to make it a mandatory standard.
Already at the time of the original US takeover in the 1890s the kingdom had become de facto an American client state a decade prior; less than one third of the population was Native Hawaiian, already outnumbered by a large influx of Asian labor since the sugarcane trade expanded, and positions of economic/power elite had become dominated by anglophones, mostly first-generation Americans and local allies educated in Anglophone missionary schools. So there was no solid institutional base for retention of Hawaiian in education or the formal economy.
Contrast that in Ireland the Irish, however opressed, never became a minority in their own land so even with the widespread adoption of English as the language of common use, the identity of the community remained primarily Irish so once there was the power to do so there was the will to use the tools of state to lift up and restore the native tongue. Even so, Gaelic is still a minority language in Ireland.
One of the things to bear in mind, as I have seen it touched in more than one of the OPs language threads, is that acting or not to expand or not expand or to privilege one language or another is an expression of the collective will of the community and especially when it comes to formal education, of its political structures and ruling groups. If they want to, they do; if they do not want to, they don’t until/unless persuaded otherwise.