Residents of Hawai'i exhibit a great deal of variation in their pronunciation of place names that have a Hawaiian origin. Using wordlist data, we investigate whether the phonetic realization of Hawaiian place names is linked to speaker ethnicity (i.e., whether the speaker has Native Hawaiian ancestry) and/or language background (i.e., whether the speaker speaks Hawaiian). We focus on two linguistic variables: the glottal stop, which is phonemic in Hawaiian, and the realization of the vowel /o/. The results provide evidence that both factors are linked with which phonetic variants are used; speakers who are Native Hawaiian and speakers who can speak at least some Hawaiian produce more Hawaiian-like realizations of the place names compared with other speakers in the study. We