The Hawaiian Alphabet Has Only 13 Letters

The melodic, vowel-rich sound of the Hawaiian language (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi) presented a unique challenge for American missionaries in the early 1820s. Tasked with creating a written form of the language to translate religious texts, they listened carefully to its distinct sounds, or phonemes. They adapted the Latin script they knew but only included letters for the sounds that were actually present in speech. This resulted in an incredibly efficient system using just five vowels and seven consonants: H, K, L, M, N, P, and W.

The alphabet is completed by an eighth consonant, the ‘okina (ʻ), a glottal stop that represents a brief pause, similar to the catch in your throat when saying "uh-oh." This character is crucial, as its presence or absence can completely change a word's meaning. This limited set of phonetic building blocks means that Hawaiian words are often long and feature many vowels, such as in the name of the state fish, humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa. While not a letter, the kahakō, a macron placed over a vowel to lengthen its sound, adds another layer of phonetic precision to this remarkably concise and effective alphabet.