Historical and sociolinguistic background

Contact and immigration

The Hawaiian Islands were populated by Polynesians some time between 200 and 400 AD. The first Europeans to visit the islands were Captain Cook and his crew in 1778. At that time the native Hawaiian population numbered somewhere between 200,000 and a million. Contact with outsiders increased when Hawai‘i became a stopover in the fur trade between China and the west coast of North America, and then a centre for the sandalwood trade and the whaling industry. During this time the foreign population in Hawai‘i increased while the indigenous population decreased drastically because of introduced disease. In 1848 there were only approximately 88,000 Hawaiians left.

In 1835, the first sugarcane plantation was established, and the expanding sugar industry led to the importation of labourers from many countries. About 2,000 Chinese plantation labourers arrived from 1852 to 1876, and more than 37,000 from 1877 to 1897. The majority were speakers of dialects of Cantonese Yue and Hakka, spoken in southern China. Approximately 2,450 labourers from other Pacific islands were imported from 1877 to 1887 – most from Kiribati (then the Gilbert Islands) but at least 550 from Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides), and some from Rotuma (currently part of Fiji), New Ireland and Bougainville (parts of Papua New Guinea) and Santa Cruz (Solomon Islands).

More than 10,000 Portuguese workers were brought in from 1878 to 1887 and another 13,000 from 1906 to 1913. Nearly all of these were from the Madeira and Azores islands. Indentured laborers also came from continental Europe: 615 Scandinavians (mostly from Norway) in 1881 and 1,052 Germans between 1882 and 1885.

Steady Japanese indentured migration began in 1884, and by 1924 over 200,000 Japanese had arrived in Hawai‘i. Migration from the Philippines began in 1907, and by 1930 over 100,000 Filipinos had come to Hawai‘i. Other significant numbers of immigrants included 5,203 from Puerto Rico (1900−1901), 7,843 from Korea (1903−1905), approximately 3,000 from Russia (1906−1912) and about 2,000 from Spain (1907−1913).