Editing Hawaiian language (section)

===Written Hawaiian===

In 1820, [[Protestant]] [[missionaries]] from [[New England]] arrived in Hawaiʻi, and in a few years converted the chiefs to [[Congregational church|Congregational]] Protestantism, who in turn converted their subjects. To the missionaries, the thorough Christianization of the kingdom necessitated a complete translation of the Bible to Hawaiian, a previously unwritten language, and therefore the creation of a standard spelling that should be as easy to master as possible. The orthography created by the missionaries was so straightforward that literacy spread very quickly among the adult population; at the same time, the Mission set more and more schools for children.

[[File:Ka Lama Hawaii.gif|thumb|Headline from May 16, 1834, issue of newspaper published by [[Lorrin Andrews]] and students at [[Lahainaluna]] School]]
In 1834, the first Hawaiian-language newspapers were published by missionaries working with locals. The missionaries also played a significant role in publishing a vocabulary (1836),<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Andrews|1836}}</ref> grammar (1854),<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Elbert|1954}}</ref> and dictionary (1865)<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Andrews|1865}}</ref> of Hawaiian. The Hawaiian Bible was fully completed in 1839; by then, the Mission had such a wide-reaching school network that, when in 1840 it handed it over to the Hawaiian government, the Hawaiian Legislature mandated compulsory state-funded education for all children under 14 years of age, including girls, twelve years before any similar [[Compulsory education#United States|compulsory education]] law was enacted for the first time in any of the United States.<ref>Fernández Asensio (2019:14–15)</ref>

Literacy in Hawaiian was so widespread that in 1842 a law mandated that people born after 1819 had to be literate to be allowed to marry. In his ''Report to the Legislature'' for the year 1853 [[Richard Armstrong (Hawaii missionary)|Richard Armstrong]], the minister of Public Instruction, bragged that 75% of the adult population could read.<ref>Fernández Asensio (2019:15)</ref> Use of the language among the general population might have peaked around 1881. Even so, some people worried, as early as 1854, that the language was "soon destined to extinction."<ref>quoted in {{Harvcoltxt|Schütz|1994|pp=269–270}}</ref>

When Hawaiian King [[Kalākaua|David Kalākaua]] took a trip around the world, he brought his native language with him. When his wife, Queen [[Kapiʻolani]], and his sister, Princess (later Queen) [[Liliʻuokalani]], took a trip across North America and on to the British Isles, in 1887, Liliʻuokalani's composition "[[Aloha ʻOe]]" was already a famous song in the U.S.<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Carter|1996|pp=7, 169}} example 138, quoting McGuire</ref>