The Hawaiian Alphabet

The Hawaiian alphabet is a writing system developed in Hawaii. Missionaries in the early nineteenth century adapted it from the English alphabet to print a Bible in a language Hawaiians could understand.

The Hawaiian alphabet consists of only 12 letters: H, K, L, M, N, P, and W. There are five vowels and seven consonants in the original Hawaiian language. Additionally, it includes a character known as the ‘okina,’ which, interestingly, starts with the letter’ o.’ In Hawaiian, a word can end with any of the five vowels.

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