For Larry Kimura, language is more than the nouns, verbs and object markers.
“We’re talking about [the] way a people behave and a way a people live their lives,” he said. ”… Language is important, very key, very vital in offering you a better way of living.”
Kimura, a professor of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, is often called the godfather of the Hawaiian language revitalization movement. He was "instrumental in the conceptualization and realization of core programs created in the 1980s that brought Hawaiian language to the spotlight,” his university bio notes.
Kimura was a member of ‘Aha Pūnana Leo founding team and its first president. He says ‘Aha Pūnana Leo — the first Hawaiian medium preschool which now has a number of locations across the Islands — helped initiate the establishment of Hawaiian immersion programs within the state Department of Education.
He also was a producer and coordinator of Ka Leo Hawai‘i, a radio show that ran from 1972 to 1988, where Kimura interviewed individuals across the Islands who were among the last traditional native speakers of the language, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi; a founding director of Hale Kuamo‘o Hawaiian Language Center at UH-Hilo’s College of Hawaiian Language, Ka Haka ‘Ula o Ke‘elikōlani; helped develop culture-based education programs at what is now known as ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center; lead of Kaniʻāina, a digital voice collection of Native Hawaiian speakers, and more, according to his biography.
Early life
Kimura was raised in the Hawai‘i Island community of Waimea, in a Japanese and Hawaiian family.
His father was a native speaker of Japanese and his mother was a native speaker of the Hawaiian language. His maternal grandfather was monolingual and only spoke Hawaiian, Kimura said, while his maternal grandmother, whose first and preferred language was Hawaiian, spoke little English.
“But by the time we came, and there were four of us, things had changed a lot, and one major impact was the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.”
Although the bombing took place before he was born in 1946, Kimura said it affected the “social and political situation” of their upbringing. The ideal promoted at that time was to become an American, and to do so, you needed to speak English, he said.
Kimura said he heard both the Hawaiian and Japanese languages spoken daily, “but we were always, always reminded that we needed to speak good English in order to get ahead in this world.”
He later attended Kamehameha Schools on O‘ahu, which offered a several weeks-long enrichment course in the Hawaiian language during his eighth-grade year. But when he was in high school, Kimura said Hawaiian language was offered as an elective course.
He took the class through his 10th-, 11th- and 12th-grade years. Kimura said the class “made me become fluent enough to begin to write to my grandmother in Hawaiian because I was a boarder in Honolulu.”
“That’s how my grandmother discovered, I guess, ‘oh, this mo‘opuna, this little grandson, is into Hawaiian. She never knew that I was always interested in Hawaiian.”
A brief history
According to a history shared by the state Department of Education, Hawaiian was the main language used in Hawai‘i’s public education system when it was established by King Kamehameha III in 1840.
But English eventually became the medium of instruction, and three years after the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, teaching and learning in Hawaiian was banned in public education, the DOE website states.
“Many Hawaiian elders have told of being punished for speaking Hawaiian at school. Hawaiian language would not be heard in schools for the next four generations,” the website notes.
Hawaiian was made an official language of the state in 1978.
The state Legislature voted to remove the 90-year ban in 1986, and the ʻAha Pūnana Leo website notes that in 1987, it worked with the DOE to “develop curriculum for the first elementary indigenous language immersion classes in the U.S.“ The first kaiapuni schools, or Hawaiian language immersion schools, were established that year at Keaukaha Elementary in Hilo and Waiau Elementary in Pearl City, the site states.
In 2019, UH-Hilo launched Kaniʻāina, or “Voices of the Land,” a digital, spoken-language repository that includes recordings of Ka Leo Hawai‘i.
At the turn of the 19th century, the Kani‘āina website notes that Hawaiian was the predominant language in Hawaii, but by 1985, fewer than 50 children were Native speakers.
Kimura estimates that there were fewer than 2,000 Native speakers in the early 1970s, most of whom were in their senior years, but census estimates show more than 25,000 people now speak Hawaiian at home, he says.
Kimura says he knows how valuable the Hawaiian language is.
“It is unique to a people, like all the languages of the world are unique to a people, and all the languages of the world have not only a uniqueness, but value and … beauty, a way of living life on earth. … The word for Hawaiian is kanaka, which is just a person, a human being, making ourselves, humankind better for what we are.”
But work to perpetuate the language continues.
Kimura, for example, has given Hawaiian names to astronomical discoveries made in Hawaii.
That includes the first black hole to ever be photographed, which was detected with the help of telescopes on Maunakea. Called Pōwehi, or "embellished dark source of unending creation," the name was sourced from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant, according to a 2019 announcement from UH.
In October 2023, it also was announced that UH-Hilo would lead a three-university consortium that was awarded a five-year, $6.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a National Native American Language Resource Center. This is the first award of its kind to “lead, advocate for and implement training and resource development for indigenous language education pathways in the U.S.,” the university said at that time. Kimura told Aloha State Daily that representatives from various endangered languages will meet with an advisory committee in March.
Stephanie Salmons can be reached at stephanie@alohastatedaily.com.
