Hawaiian is a Polynesian language and a member of the Austronesian language family. It has three dialects: Hawaiian Pidgin, Kauaʻi, and Hilo. Hawaiian has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with other Polynesian languages, such as Marquesan (41.2%), Tahitian (37.5%), Samoan (25.5%), and Tongan (6.4%). It is also related to Rapa Nui, the language of Easter Island. Hawaiian is a remarkably beautiful language with thousands of names for wind, rain, the sea, mountains, and cloud formations. For example, “Hoʻomalumalu” means “sheltering cloud” and “Hoʻoweliweli” means “threatening cloud,” while “Kūkalahale” is the wind and rain in Honolulu and “Kaiāulu” is a gentle trade-wind breeze. For most of its history, there was no form of written Hawaiian except for petroglyph symbols. In 1820, Protestant missionaries arriving in Hawaiʻi wanted to translate the Bible into Hawaiian, which resulted in the creation of the modern Hawaiian alphabet (ka pīʻāpā Hawaiʻi) in Latin script. All Hawaiian words end in vowels, and every consonant must be followed by a vowel. In 1896, the Republic of Hawai’i banned Hawaiian in schools and discouraged speaking it everywhere else. By 1985, there were only 32 children who spoke the language and by 2001, less than 0.1% of the population were native speakers. Linguists worried that Hawaiian would not survive. Fortunately, in the late 1980s, a small group of Hawaiian families committed to reviving the language through immersion schools, offering instruction in college, and speaking it at home. By 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey reported that approximately 24,000 residents of Hawai’i identified Hawaiian as their primary language. While this is excellent progress, it is still only a small fraction of the 1.4 million population.