E Ola Ka 'Olelo Hawai'i

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker. That was the fate of Hawaiian, until a group of second-language learners put up a fight and declared, "E Ola Ka 'Olelo Hawai'i" (The Hawaiian Language Shall Live!!!)

Transcript

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0:00.0	The man credited with keeping the Hawaiian language from dying.
0:04.0	Oh, Larry Kimura.
0:05.7	You're not grow up speaking that language.
0:08.3	Larry Kimura grew up in Hawaii speaking English.
0:11.9	His dad was from Japan.
0:13.3	His mom was native Hawaiian.
0:15.4	Both of my parents never used their first language with us, their children,
0:20.9	except they would...
0:21.8	Larry says, even though everything around him was pushing him to forget his Hawaiian roots,
0:27.9	as a kid in the 1950s,
0:30.1	he was trying to push back.
0:31.5	He's 73 now and he was reminiscing about all this with his younger brother.
0:35.3	He said, we used to go and watch the cowboy and Indian shows at our local theater
0:40.4	and you would be cheering for the Indians.
0:43.5	And I said, yes, and I remember when we played cowboy and Indian,
0:47.6	I always wanted to be the Indian.
0:49.8	You were just always drawn to the more indigenous side of you.
0:53.4	Yes, yes.
0:54.2	It was kind of weird to me to think that...
0:59.0	Hawaiian was so...
1:03.2	ignored.
1:05.6	Because that was part of who we are.
	...

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