Building the Spoken Language Repository

Myoung-Ja Hwa, Justin Kalaniali‘i Stoleson, and Larry Kimura (left to right) are part of a group of scholars digitizing Kimura’s 1970s radio show Ka Leo Hawai’i for online listening. Image courtesy of Kaniʻāina. Photograph by Clara Hagan.

From 1972–1988 Native Hawaiian language activist and University of Hawai’i at Hilo professor Larry Kimura broadcast Ka Leo Hawaiʻi. This radio show, which quickly moved from a bi-weekly, 30-minute format to a weekly one-hour engagement, interviewed Native Hawaiian elders in the Hawaiian language. At a time when the Hawaiian language was in danger of dying out altogether, the show was seen as a significant validation of the language and the Hawaiian way of life. Forty years later, these audio recordings are an invaluable resource. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ and the National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages program, Keiki Kawaiʻaeʻa and partners at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo and the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa have created Kaniʻāina, or Voices of the Land—an online bilingual digital repository for these recordings, ensuring they are preserved and accessible now and in the future.

According to Kawaiʻaeʻa, though the Hawaiian language has experienced a resurgence since the 1980s thanks to activists like Kimura, as few as 20 truly fluent native elder speakers are left. Virtually all other Hawaiian speakers learned it as a second language, often in school. By digitizing and transcribing approximately 550 hours of these Native Hawaiian language recordings, Kawaiʻaeʻa and her partners are ensuring that the nuances of expressiveness, word choice, and intonation that are so hard to capture when learning a second language are preserved—as are the life histories documented by the interviews.

The old 7-inch reels of the Ka Leo Hawai‘i radio show are shown here archived in a temperature-controlled room inside the library at Hale‘ōlelo, the College of Hawaiian Language. Image courtesy of Kaniʻāina. Photograph by Clara Hagan.

Ultimately, the Kaniʻāina digital repository will host more than 1000 hours of recordings. As part of the grant, Kawaiʻaeʻa and her partners are creating the tools and procedures to crowdsource transcriptions. For now, the site hosts more than 350 recordings and 50 transcripts. It is used by Hawaiian teachers and students, as well as family members of those interviewed for the program.