Skip to content

Web-Enhanced Article: Glottal Goofs


Signs of Identity, Signs of Discord: Glottal Goofs and the Green Grocer’s Glottal in Debates on Hawaiian Orthography.
Suzanne Romaine

Merton College, Oxford University

This article discusses some aspects of the campaign of Hawaiian language activists to promote the “correct” spelling of Hawaiian names on public signs in Hawai‘i, as well as to insist on the pronunciation of names according to Hawaiian rather than English norms. The issues of correct spelling and correct pronunciation are intertwined in complex ways with differing oral and literate traditions that exist not just between Hawaiian speakers and speakers of local varieties of English, but also between older and newer norms for writing and speaking Hawaiian.

Sign photos

Kaupakuea Homestead Road: the history of a glottal goof

Links

Please note: These pages contain Unicode symbols that may not display correctly on older web browsers. In order to view these characters, you will need a browser that supports Unicode (such as Internet Explorer 4.01 or later or Netscape Navigator 4.03 or later).


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.