Hawaii

Although massive immigration from Asia and the US mainland since the mid-19th century has effectively diluted the native population, the Hawaiian lexical legacy in English is conspicuous. Newcomers soon add to their vocabulary aloha (love, good-bye), haole (white foreigner), malihini (newcomer), lanai (porch), tapa (bark cloth), mahimahi (a kind of fish), ukulele, muumuu, and the common directional terms mauka (toward the mountains) and makai (toward the sea), customarily used instead of "north," "east," "west," and "south." Native place-names are numerous—Waikiki, Hawaii, Honolulu, Mauna Kea, and Molokai for example.

Most native-born residents of Hawaiian ancestry speak one of several varieties of Hawaiian pidgin, a lingua franca incorporating elements of Hawaiian, English, and other Asian and Pacific languages. In 2000, 73.4 % (down from 75.2% in 1990) of Hawaiians five years old or older spoke only English at home.

The following table gives selected statistics from the 2000 census for language spoken at home by persons five years old and over. The category "Other Pacific Island languages" includes Chamorro, Hawaiian, Ilocano, Indonesian, and Samoan. The category "Other Indo-European languages" includes Albanian, Gaelic, Lithuanian, and Rumanian.