Is pronunciation even important in Hawaiian?

Anoai kakou,

I’m pretty good at imitating facial expressions and accents. It has everything to do with my childhood. We used to watch a lot of movies and someone always had a video camera. Most of my siblings can quote movies spot-on and recreate popular character voices we saw on the tv.

Maybe that’s why I was able to catch on to the subtle differences in the way native speakers spoke/speak Hawaiian as compared to 2nd language speakers. Have you picked up on some of those differences in pronunciation?

I quickly learned that pronunciation is a major part of a language. Same as in English, sometimes the way we “read” a word, out loud or in our minds, is very different from the way that word is actually pronounced. For example, how would you pronounce “read”? Depending on the context it could be pronounced “read” like the color red, or “read” like a lone reed in a pond. If you only ever saw the word written and never heard it said in different ways you wouldn’t know how to pronounce it. 

This month, we will talk about reasons that pronunciation is important, and a few common mispronunciations. This comes up a lot in my emails and social media DMs. So these emails will be my response. 

Tell me, what word do you hear mispronounced the most?

Owau iho no,

Malu

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