Talk:Hawaiʻi

I'm not sure if the apostrophe spelling is official in English.

In Hawaiian, the glottal stop ('okina) is written with the left-single-quote: Hawai`i - but this character doesn't work in links in Wiktionary. Unicode has also come up with a better character - since Unicode classifies each character as a letter, symbol, punctuation, etc. In Unicode, ' and ` are classed as punctuation which means they will not always behave the way one expects. Unicode also provides ʻ which is classed as a letter and is therefore unambiguous. It will never look like a grave accent or a backtick either. Unfortunately it's only in a few fonts, but Arial Unicode MS is one of them. With this we can write Hawaiʻi.

You can read all about it here:

So far I've avoided the 'okina in English but I've been using the Unicode character in my articles in Hawaiian and Tahitian.

Perhaps this is only relevant for Hawaiian and not for English, but it's worth knowing. &mdash; Hippietrail 01:15, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't know if it's official either, but I do know it is common in English. There's a long discussion of it in w:Talk:Hawaii.
 * One sensible position to take would be that the English word pronounced with /-ji/ is spelled Hawaii and the English word pronounced with /ʔi/ (or spelled by pedants) is spelled Hawaiʻi; this would be similar to Zurich (English) vs. Zürich (German/pedantic).
 * As for what glyph to use in general... I have a feeling that the apostrophe is the normal spelling of the ʻokina in English—mainly because English (non–Hawaiʻian-speaking) people don't know what ʻokina is sposta look like. I suppose we have a duty to be correct though.. which may involve a lot of redirects, especially for words from Hawaiʻi borrowed into English. —Muke Tever 03:25, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)