Hawaiian only has 8 consonants—What happens when it borrows words with other sounds?

The Hawaiian language only has 8 consonants. So how does it deal with sounds in words borrowed from other languages?

Hawaiian only has 8 consonants—What happens when it borrows words with other sounds?
Photo by Karsten Winegeart / Unsplash

The Hawaiian language only has 8 consonant sounds (phonemes), making it one of the smallest consonant inventories of any language in the world. (The smallest consonant inventory goes to Rotokas with only 6!) (Gordon 2016: 44)

Consonant inventory for Hawaiian. (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology > Consonants)
☝️
Since this article is written in English, I use the conventional English name and spelling for the language, Hawaiian, rather than Hawai’ian with an apostrophe/ʻokina representing a glottal stop. Speakers themselves call the language ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (literally ‘Hawaiian language’). See Haspelmath (2017) for more details about language names in linguistics.

By comparison, most dialects of English have 24 consonants, Mandarin is typically analyzed as having 19 consonants, and Spanish has around 18 depending on the dialect. The average number of consonants in a language is 22.8 (Gordon 2016: 44), so Hawaiian’s 8 is pretty small!

So what do Hawaiian speakers do when they borrow words that have foreign sounds?

Prefer a video version of this post? Watch here!

First, most of the consonants get converted to /k/. The /k/ sound does a lot of heavy lifting in Hawaiian. Since the only other stop consonants in the language are /p/ and /ʔ/, any stop consonant that isn’t a bilabial or glottal stop can function as /k/—even [t]! The Hawaiian language doesn’t distinguish between [k] and [t]—they are functionally the same sound. So makua ‘parent’ might be pronounced as either [makua] or [matua] with no functional difference. Speakers recognize it as the word makua either way. Certain dialects will pronounce /k/ as [t] more frequently than other dialects, which prefer a [k] pronunciation, but it’s all considered the same phoneme. (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology)

The result is that all the English sounds /s z ʃ ʒ t d tʃ dʒ g/ are converted to /k/ when borrowed into Hawaiian. Here are some examples:

English Hawaiian
truck kalaka
blessing pelekine
speak kapika
rabbit lāpaki
💡
Some of the examples of borrowings in this article are taken from the Autumn 2024 issue of Babel magazine, specifically the article, “A clash of symbols: Special [k]” by Dom Watt & Jane Setter (pp. 34–35). Get your own subscription to Babel here. Any remaining examples were taken from Jones (2009).

You may already know another famous borrowing: Mele Kalikimaka for English ‘Merry Christmas’, as sung by Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters:

Similar variation occurs with /w/ and /l/: speakers freely pronounce /w/ as either [w] or [v], and /l/ as either [l], [ɾ], or [ɹ]. So when an English word gets borrowed with one of these sounds, they get normalized to /w/ or /l/. Some examples:

English Hawaiian
beaver piwa
acre ʻakele
ginger kinika
🌠
When different sounds are perceived as the same sound in a language, they are said to be allophones of the same phoneme. One sound might be perceived as a full phoneme in one language, and able to change the meanings of words, but be a mere allophone in others. For example, English does not distinguish between aspirated [tʰ] and unaspirated [t]—both are perceived as the phoneme /t/. The Thai language, however, considers those to be separate sounds that can change the meanings of words.

Hawaiian syllables are also strictly either consonant-vowel (CV) or just a vowel (V). Syllables cannot end in a consonant. So in borrowed words, clusters of more than one consonant are either broken apart or simplified into a single consonant, while syllable-final consonants are either given an extra vowel or deleted entirely (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology):

English Hawaiian
bill pila
island ʻailana
scraper kalepa
🌠
Rules about how sounds are allowed to be arranged in words and syllables in a language are called phonotactics. For example, the phoneme /ŋ/ in English may occur at the ends of syllables (like ring /ɹɪŋ/) but not the beginning of syllables.

Knowing all this, now you can see how all the following English words got borrowed into Hawaiian as kini (which also happens to be the native Hawaiian word for ‘multitude’).

  • gin
  • tin
  • king
  • kin
  • zinc
  • guinea
  • Jean
  • Jane
  • Jenny

Lastly, even though Hawaiian may not distinguish between many of the sounds that exist in English, it does have one sound that English doesn’t—the glottal stop /ʔ/. English speakers certainly produce this sound quite a lot, but only in non-meaningful (subphonemic) ways:

  • It’s the catch in the throat in the middle of the phrase uh-oh [ˈʔʌ.ʔoᶷ].
  • In many dialects speakers can pronounce /t/s as glottal stops (most famously Australians when they pronounce “a bottle of water”).
  • English speakers naturally insert a glottal stop at the beginning of words that start with a vowel: am is pronounced [ʔæm], and is pronounced [ʔænd], etc. (This is amusingly called the glottal attack or hard attack. 👅⚔️)

All these uses occur even though the glottal stop isn’t meaningful in English and speakers don’t hear it as a distinct phoneme.

But Hawaiian speakers can hear it, so it gets included in borrowed words. Canny readers may have noticed that the Hawaiian borrowing for ‘island’ above started with a glottal stop, for example. In the same way, the Hawaiian word in each of the following examples starts with a glottal stop because the English word starts with a vowel.

English Hawaiian
acre ʻakele
anchor ʻanakā
empire ʻemepaea

Of course, there are exceptions to all of these rules. Occasionally words will be borrowed with their foreign consonants in tact (savana ‘savanna’; mōchī ‘mochi’), or will retain their consonant clusters (kristo ‘Christ’), but for the most part words are assimilated to the Hawaiian sound system.

Now that you have a grasp of how borrowings work in Hawaiian, can you guess what English word was borrowed into Hawaiian as Kapalakiko? I’ll leave the answer at the very bottom of the page. ⬇️

📖 Further Reading

📑 References

  • Gordon, Matthew K. 2016. Phonological typology (Oxford Surveys in Phonology & Phonetics 1). Oxford University Press. (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
  • Haspelmath, Martin. 2017. Some principles for language names. Language Documentation & Conservation 11: 81–93. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24725
  • Jones, ‘Ōiwi Parker. 2009. Loanwords in Hawaiian. In Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri (eds.), Loanwords in the World’s Languages, 771–789. Walter de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110218442.771. (Amazon | Bookshop.org)
  • Watt, Dom & Jane Setter. 2024. “A clash of symbols: Special [k]”. Babel: The Language Magazine 48 (Autumn): 34–35. https://babelzine.co.uk/
💡
The Amazon and Bookshop.org links on this site are affiliate links, which means that I earn a small commission from those companies for purchases made through them (at no extra cost to you).

If you'd like to support Linguistic Discovery, purchasing through these links is a great way to do so! I greatly appreciate your support!

Check out my entire Amazon storefront here.
Answer: The Hawaiian word Kapalakiko comes from the English name San Francisco.