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How Similar is Hawaiian to Tahitian and Marquesan?

In this post we’re going to look at how similar three Polynesian languages are: Hawaiian, Tahitian, and Marquesan.

In the recent Langfocus video on The Hawaiian language, I mentioned that the original population of Hawai’i are thought to have migrated there in two waves, first from the Marquesas Islands, and later from Tahiti.

I also briefly mentioned that Modern Hawaiian, Tahitian, and Marquesan are quite similar to each other and gave the following mini-list of cognates:

Hawaiian Tahitian Marquesan cognate words

Sound differences

Some words are the same, like manu meaning “bird” and mea meaning “thing.” Others are closer than they appear in writing, like the words for woman: wahine in Hawaiian, vehine in Marquesan, and vahine in Tahitian. The “w” in the Hawaiian word is generally pronounced [v], though that depends on the dialect of Hawaiian as well as on the phonetic environment (the sounds that appear next to the “w”).

Others display regular sound correspondences between the three languages. By looking at the words for “canoe” and “fish” you might think that “k” in Marquesan corresponds to a glottal stop in Hawaiian and Tahitian, and you would be right! For example, the 2nd person singular subject pronoun (“you” in English) is koe in Marquesan. In Hawaiian and Tahitian it’s ʻoe.

That doesn’t mean there are no Ks in Hawaiian. There are, but they correspond with T in Marquesan and Tahitian. For example, the first person plural inclusive subject pronoun (“we” including the listener) is kākou in Hawaiian. In Tahitian it’s tātou, and in Marquesan it’s tatou. But the “k” in Hawaiian can be pronounced as either [t] or [k] depending on the accent of the speaker, or at least historically that was the case. It was spelt “k” by Europeans who created the Hawaiian writing system, as they chose only one letter for each phoneme that had multiple pronunciations. So, accounting for the possible [t] pronunciation in Hawaiian, these words are all basically the same. And being aware of such corresponding sounds can help speakers or learners of one language understand one of the others.

Vocabulary

Of course there are many differences in vocabulary as well. One figure I’ve seen is 76% lexical similarity between Hawaiian and Tahitiain. One figure I’ve seen for Hawaiian and Marquesan is 70%. Lexical similarity data usually needs to be taken with a grain of salt, because there are different ways of measuring it, but the general idea seems clear: there are a lot of similar words, but a fair number of different ones too.

Grammar

In terms of word order and grammar they are quite similar as well. Here’s a sentence meaning “You two ate the fish”.

Tahitian: ꞋUa ꞌamu ꞌōrua i te iꞌa.
Hawaiian: Ua ‘ai ‘olua i ka i’a.
Marquesan: Ua kai koʻua i te ika.

The first word ua (or ‘ua with a glottal stop in Tahitian) is the perfective aspect marker in all three languages that shows that the action is complete. Next we see the verbs meaning “eat”. The Hawaiian and Marquesan verbs are cognates, with one of the sound correspondences we looked at earlier.

In Tahitian there’s a different word ‘amu. The next words are dual pronouns meaning “you two”, and are all cognates. L in Hawaiian corresponds with R in Tahitian, and with a glottal stop in Marquesan.

And the K at the beginning of the Marquesan word koʻua becomes a glottal stop in the other two languages. These two sound differences make this word resemble the other two a lot less, but if you are aware of the changes you can at least decipher the word when reading. It’s also worth noting that all three languages have dual pronouns to begin with.

The direct object marker is the same (i) in each of the three languages. The definite article is te in Tahitian and Marquesan, but ka in Hawaiian. Remember that K in Hawaiian corresponds to T in the others, but the Hawaiian definite article also has two forms (ka and ke) depending on the sound that comes next. Tahitian and Marquesan only have one form.

We could keep going and going, but you see the point. There is a tremendous amount of similarity between the three languages, and a little bit of knowledge of the regular differences between them can help the speaker of one make sense of the others.