What language is spoken in Honolulu?

English is the working language of Honolulu. You will not struggle to order a plate lunch on Kapahulu Avenue or ask for directions at the Ala Moana Center information desk. Hawaii became the 50th US state in 1959, and English has dominated commerce since the plantation era of the 1880s. But Hawaiian is the co-official state language, revived from near-extinction after the 1978 state constitutional convention mandated its preservation. Around 18,600 people speak Hawaiian at home across the islands, according to the 2020 US Census. The practical effect for visitors is that Hawaiian vocabulary saturates daily life in Honolulu. Signs at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport say 'Aloha' and 'Mahalo.' Your hotel calls the balcony a lānai. The appetizer section on menus at Duke's Waikiki says pūpū. None of this requires study, but knowing the words saves you from blankly staring at a sign that reads 'Keiki Menu' when you want the children's options.

The most useful Hawaiian you'll pick up is directional. Honolulu residents use mauka (toward the mountains, the Koʻolau Range) and makai (toward the ocean) instead of north and south. A bartender at Maui Brewing Co. in Waikīkī might tell you the restroom is 'makai side, past the bar.' Road signs along Ala Moana Boulevard point you mauka or makai at intersections. Diamond Head and ʻEwa (roughly westward, toward the Pearl Harbor side) form the other directional axis. This system sounds confusing for about 2 hours. Then it clicks, because you can always see either the green ridgeline of the Koʻolau or the Pacific. Locals also use 'town' for downtown Honolulu and 'country' for the North Shore, about 35 miles away. If someone tells you a place is 'up in Mānoa,' they mean the valley neighborhood 3 miles north of Waikīkī where afternoon rain falls almost daily and the air smells like wet plumeria.

Hawaiian Pidgin is the third language you'll hear, and it tends to catch mainland Americans off guard. Pidgin developed on sugar plantations in the late 1800s when workers from Japan, the Philippines, Portugal, and China needed a shared way to communicate. Today it's a full creole language with its own grammar, not broken English. 'Da kine' means roughly 'the thing' or 'whatchamacallit.' 'Brah' is the universal form of address. 'Broke da mouth' means the food is extraordinarily good, and you'll hear it at Rainbow Drive-In on Kapahulu Avenue when someone bites into a gravy-soaked loco moco. 'Pau hana' means after work, the local name for happy hour. 'Shoots' means OK or sounds good. At Zippy's on King Street, Pidgin is the natural register among regulars. At the Hyatt Regency front desk on Kalākaua Avenue, staff switch to standard English immediately.

Japanese is the most commonly heard non-English language in Waikīkī, a legacy of decades of Japanese tourism that currently brings over 1.5 million visitors per year to Hawaii. Menus at Marukame Udon on Kūhiō Avenue are bilingual English-Japanese. ATMs at ABC Stores offer Japanese-language interfaces. Hotel front desks at the Hilton Hawaiian Village keep multilingual phrase cards in Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. Korean signage lines Keeaumoku Street, where you'll smell galbi grilling from 6 or 7 Korean barbecue spots within a 4-block stretch. Filipino, both Tagalog and Ilocano, is spoken widely in residential Waipahu and Kalihi, about 10 miles west of Waikīkī, but rarely surfaces in the tourist corridor between Diamond Head and Ala Moana.