Acceso usuarios
Matthias Brenzinger, Patrick Heinrich
Some 40 years ago, language transmission in Hawai‘i was interrupted among Hawaiians across all islands with the sole exception of language maintenance among a small community on the tiny, isolated Ni‘ihau Island. Today, Hawaiian has returned as spoken and written medium with some 5000–7000 new speakers. The present paper provides an up-to-date account of the sociolinguistic situation in Hawai‘i, and depicts the language ecological environment which allows for language revival in order to analyze how language revitalization differs from language revival. While language revitalization may happen in very different language ecologies, the revival of a no longer spoken language occurs only in late modern societies. The regaining of domains in language revival, i.e. once all domains had been lost, requires very different approaches than revitalization efforts. In Hawai'i, language revival is realized through networks and members of the language revival network use Hawaiian in all domains. The main objective of this network is to establish and maintain a Hawaiian-speaking environment and to produce new native speakers of Hawaiian.
