June 8, 2005 - Hawaiian Language, Part 1

Today on Wordmaster, Rosanne Skirble travels a long distance in the United States for a lesson in an endangered language.

It took a lot longer for the islands' original settlers to get here. Those Polynesian mariners sailed their double-hulled canoes from the South Pacific to these ancient volcanic islands hundreds of years before the Europeans arrived.

Ms. Basham, for whom Hawaiian is a second language, points out that Hawaiian has a really tiny alphabet, just 12 letters: five vowels, seven consonants and a backwards apostrophe called an okina that works as a consonant.