Hawaiian only has 8 consonants—What happens when it borrows words with other sounds?

The Hawaiian¹ language only has 8 consonant sounds (phonemes), making it one of the smallest consonant inventories of any language in the world. (The smallest consonant inventory goes to Rotokas with only 6!) (Gordon 2016: 44)

Consonant inventory for Hawaiian. (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology > Consonants)

By comparison, most dialects of English have 24 consonants, Mandarin is typically analyzed as having 19 consonants, and Spanish has around 18 depending on the dialect. The average number of consonants in a language is 22.8 (Gordon 2016: 44), so Hawaiian’s 8 is pretty small!

So what do Hawaiian speakers do when they borrow words that have foreign sounds?

First, most of the consonants get converted to /k/. The /k/ sound does a lot of heavy lifting in Hawaiian. Since the only other stop consonants in the language are /p/ and /ʔ/, any stop consonant that isn’t a bilabial or glottal stop can function as /k/—even [t]! The Hawaiian language doesn’t distinguish between [k] and [t]—they are functionally the same sound. So makua ‘parent’ might be pronounced as either [makua] or [matua] with no functional difference. Speakers recognize it as the word makua either way. Certain dialects will pronounce /k/ as [t] more frequently than other dialects, which prefer a [k] pronunciation, but it’s all considered the same phoneme. (Wikipedia: Hawaiian phonology)

The result is that all the English sounds /s z ʃ ʒ t d tʃ dʒ g/ are converted to /k/ when borrowed into Hawaiian. Here are some examples:²

• truck → kalaka

• blessing → pelekine

• speak → kapika

• rabbit → lāpaki

You may already know another famous borrowing: Mele Kalikimaka for English ‘Merry Christmas’, as sung by Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters: