Hawaiian name

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A Hawaiian name is a name in the Hawaiian language. Such names are popular not only in Hawaiian families, but also among other residents of Hawaii, and even in the United States mainland among both non-native and native Hawaiians.

Contents

Meanings of Names

Genuine Hawaiian names are unisex. Their meanings are often symbolic. Mist and coolness symbolize happiness in a warm climate. Lei means a child, because a beloved child is carried like a lei on the parent's shoulders. Lei is also the word for "gift". A child can also be a flower or a bud, regardless of its sex. Modern parents tend to be more prosaic, calling a child a child, as in Keikilani and Kamalani, in which keiki and kama both mean "child".

For many Hawaiian words, the ʻokina (glottal stop) and kahakō (macron to denote a long vowel) are important to the meaning of a word. They are often ignored in English texts, or ʻokina are added where they don't belong. The name list includes warnings about the worst misspellings that can change the meaning of a name into something unpleasant.

History of Namegiving

Old Hawaiians coined a new name for each child, with careful thought of its meaning. Children could be named after relatives, but names were not copied from other families. Surnames did not exist. In 1860 Kamehameha IV signed the Act to Regulate Names. Hawaiians were to take their father's given name as a surname, and all children born henceforth were to receive a Christian, i.e. English, given name. Hawaiian names were transferred into middle names. The law was not repealed until 1967.

After the annexation of Hawaii to the U.S., knowledge of the Hawaiian language deteriorated. Grandparents could give traditional names to the next two generations, but a baby born into a Hawaiian family in the 2000s is very unlikely to have any native speaker relatives. The English-speaking environment creates a pressure to melt Hawaiian names into the Western naming system, as an established set of phonemes chosen for their pleasant exotic sound rather than their meaning. Phonetic renderings of Western names, such as Malia and Keoni, have become names in their own right. The film industry produces pseudo-Hawaiian names, from Aloma of the South Seas (1926) to Lilo & Stitch (2002).

Popularity surveys

This information is based on a survey of Hawaiian given names of persons born in 1900–1989 and 2000–2005, from obituaries in Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin 1994–2004, and samples of births and marriages on [[Oʻahu]] in Honolulu Star-Bulletin 2000–2005. It's a small sample with an uneven age distribution, and centered on Oʻahu. But no one else seems to have researched the subject at all.

The 3,750 persons in the survey had a total of 1,996 different names. 418 of these names had eight or more syllables (up to 44). The proportion of long names was diminishing but it took an upward turn in 2000–2005. Hawaiian names occur as middle names until the 1960s. Even today, middle names outnumber first names by four to one. A minority of parents have started giving nothing but Hawaiian names to their children. In births registered on Oʻahu 2001–2002, about 25% of girls and 15% of boys received at least one Hawaiian name.

Many favorite names a hundred years ago, like Kealoha, Kalei, Leialoha, and Keonaona, were popular with both sexes. Today, the trendiest names are different for girls and boys. 31% of women but only 11% of men had names ending in -lani (heaven), -o-ka-lani (of Heaven), -o-nā-lani (of the heavens) or -mai-ka-lani (from Heaven), a recent innovation. 46% of men but only 33% of women had names beginning with the definite article Ka-/Ke-.

Leilani was the absolute favorite name for women in this survey. Other popular women's names included:

Kalani was a reasonably popular men's name in all age groups. Other popular names for men included:

The numbers in parentheses after each entry below tell how many times the name appeared in the survey (f = female, per 2039; m = male, per 1711). All names with at least 3 bearers are included. (-) means that the name did not appear at all.

The Social Security Administration gives out annual lists of the top hundred names for boys and girls in the State of Hawaii, starting from the year 1960. They are based on first names while a Hawaiian name usually comes second. A few Hawaiian names make it into these lists every year and they are all noted in the entries below.

List of common Hawaiian names

This list is meant for names borne by at least three real Hawaiian persons, not for name suggestions or assumed names. To help to understand the meaning of the names, words are separated by hyphens. The hyphens should not be used in ordinary text.

A

E

H

I

Ka

Ke

Ki, Ko, Ku

L

M

N

O

P

U

W

References

External links

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