Orthography

There is no standard orthography for Hawai‘i Creole. In both popular literature and the New Testament translation, various etymological orthographies are used, based on the conventional spelling of English. An autonomous phonemic orthography, designed by Carol Odo (Bickerton and Odo 1976), is normally used by linguists, and on rare occasions in other contexts, such as in the printed program of the “Wat, Bada yu?” conference held in 1999 on “Hawai‘i Creole, local identities and strategies for multicultural learning”. (Also, Lee Tonouchi uses the Odo orthography in one short story; Da Word).

In the Odo orthography, the consonants are represented by their IPA equivalents except for the following:

The simple vowels, diphthongs and the R-colored vowel are represented by the following orthographic symbols: