How to Anglicise a Country: The Strange Story of Hawaii

In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant hosted the first ever state visit to the United States by a foreign head of state. King David Kalakaua was a chubby, jovial man (he also legalised hula dancing) who spoke fluent English, but this set him apart from the majority of his subjects. At the time, relatively few Hawaiians outside the bustling new port of Honolulu spoke anything but Hawaiian. Two generations later, few would speak anything but English. Hawaiian is a member of the peripatetic <a href="https://medium.com/@sjquillen/the-family-of-a-thousand-languages-part-i-out-of-formosa-c86c5bab9e69" rel="noopener">Austronesian language family</a>, whose seafaring speakers have colonised islands as far-flung as Indonesia, the Philippines, New Zealand, most of the Pacific, and even Madagascar. It grew up in isolation since the first Hawaiians somehow ended up on the remote islands sometime in the Middle Ages. Like its cousins, it is a relatively simple, pleasant tongue, consisting of only five vowel sounds and eight consonants. <a href="https://sjquillen.medium.com/how-to-anglicise-a-country-the-strange-story-of-hawaii-e0a8172a7f0e">Click Here</a>