Sounding Native: The Role of Blending in Authentic Hawaiian

Aloha e ko'u poe heluhelu,

Something that most teachers of Hawaiian don’t know of or don’t talk about is blending. It is essential to developing authentic sounding Hawaiian found among Native speakers. The ONLY way you’re going to develop this, is if you listen to them.

The written form of Hawaiian made in the early 1820’s was not an accurate representation of spoken Hawaiian. If you take a listen to Native speakers like Grace and Henry Young and compare them to 2nd language speakers today, you'll see many differences. A major difference is this blending that I mentioned. For example:

E hele mai ana lakou i ka hale—Are they gong come to the house?

A native speaker would say this sentence with each word blending into the other without any pause or break. Along with that, the “e” at the beginning and the “i” before “ka hale” is often dropped. 

A 2nd language speaker will pronounce and over enunciate every letter and word. Also, the word “ana” is often spoken with a glottal stop here, which is a common mistake. 

We all learned our first language by listening and then developing our speech. It was in school where we learned grammar to elevate our language ability. Learning Hawaiian today is completely backwards. There is such an over emphasis on literacy (reading and writing) that the skills of listening and speaking are put on the back burner. This is completely backwards and not intuitive to how we all acquired our first language.

I strongly advise you to start listening to native speakers. If you have already begun, increase the frequency! As I always say, “Who you listen to is who you will sound like.”

Challenge:

If you are struggling blending, maybe send a recording of your voice pronouncing a word or saying a phrase and I'll give you feedback.

Me ka leo paipai,

Malu