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This paper provides an acoustic phonetic description of Hawai‘i English vowels. The data comprise wordlist tokens produced by twenty-three speakers (twelve males and eleven females) and spontaneous speech tokens produced by ten of those speakers. Analysis of these vowel tokens shows that while there are similarities between Hawai‘i English and other dialects, the particular combination of vowel realizations in Hawai‘i English is unique to this dialect. Additionally, there are characteristics of the Hawai‘i English vowel system that are not found in other English dialects. These findings suggest that Hawai‘i English is a unique regional variety that warrants further description.

Hawai‘i Creole (ISO 639-3 hwc) and Hawai‘i English (HE) are speech varieties spoken by local residents of the Hawaiian Islands. Three native speakers of HWC, seven native speakers of HE, and three native speakers of Hawaiian (ISO 639-3 haw) were recorded speaking in casual interviews, participating in map tasks, and saying phonetically controlled sentences. Analysis focused on utterances containing the high (or rise) plus steep fall contour, which is not found in Mainstream American English but is often used for continuations and polar questions in HWC, HE, and Hawaiian (Vanderslice & Pierson 1967, Anderson 2003, Murphy 2013). Results for all three speech varieties showed alignment of F0 minimums with lexically stressed syllables at the end of an intonation phrase, with F0 peaks occurring on immediately preceding syllables. All three speech varieties show a preponderance of this steep drop in continuations and polar questions, confirming the idea that this is a feature borrowed from Hawaiian (Bickerton and Wilson 1987, Anderson 2003.)

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