Qualla: College of Hawaiian Language

College of Hawaiian Language: Introduction

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vreed, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1983, fewer than two thousand people in Hawaii spoke Hawaiian as a native language. Fewer than fifty of them were under the age of eighteen. The math was terminal: within a generation, the language that had named every mountain, bay, and wind current in the islands would exist only in dictionaries and old recordings. That it did not die is one of the most remarkable language rescues in modern history, and the institution at the center of that rescue sits on a hillside in Hilo, overlooking the bay where Polynesian voyagers once landed.

Image: Vreed | CC BY-SA 3.0

College of Hawaiian Language: The Silencing

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vreed, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hawaiian was not dying of natural causes. In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii passed Act 57, an English-only law that banned Hawaiian as the medium of instruction in publicly funded schools. Children caught speaking their own language at school faced physical punishment. The policy w...

Image: Vreed | CC BY-SA 3.0

College of Hawaiian Language: The Nests

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vreed, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rescue began with children. In 1983, a group of Native Hawaiian parents who wanted their children to speak Hawaiian as their first language formed 'Aha Punana Leo - the Language Nest Corporation. Modeled partly on Maori language nests in New Zealand, the Hawaiian immersion pr...

Image: Vreed | CC BY-SA 3.0

College of Hawaiian Language: A College Built on Revival

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vreed, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikolani - the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo - was founded in 1997, named for Ruth Ke'elikolani, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian princess known for her devotion to Hawaiian cultural traditions. Its motto captures the stakes: "'O...

Image: Vreed | CC BY-SA 3.0

College of Hawaiian Language: From Fifty Speakers to a Living Tongue

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vreed, CC BY-SA 3.0. The numbers tell a story of recovery that few linguists would have predicted. A handful of children in the first immersion classes of the 1980s has grown to more than 2,500 students enrolled annually across eleven preschool and twenty-one immersion and charter school sites throug...

Image: Vreed | CC BY-SA 3.0