What language is spoken in Kauai?

English runs every transaction on Kauai, from the rental-car counters at Līhuʻe Airport to the shave ice window in Hanapēpē, but Hawaiian is harder. The state constitution made it co-official in 1978, and it names nearly every road, beach and town you will drive past on Kaumualiʻi Highway, using an alphabet of 13 letters where every vowel gets voiced. Kapaʻa is kah-PAH-ah. Līhuʻe is lee-HOO-ay, three syllables, never 'lee-hoo'. The ʻokina, the backwards apostrophe in Poʻipū, is a glottal stop, the catch in the middle of 'uh-oh', and the kahakō, the bar over a vowel in Nā Pali, stretches that vowel. Locals in Princeville forgive a mangled name. Still, a visitor who says Hanalei as hah-nah-LAY, all four vowels intact, tends to get a warmer nod at the Hanalei Dolphin fish counter than one who says 'Hanna-lie'.

Stand in line at a plate-lunch counter in Līhuʻe, with the sweet smoke of huli huli chicken drifting across the parking lot, and you will hear Hawaiʻi Creole English, which everyone calls Pidgin. The US Census Bureau listed it as a language in 2015, and it grew out of plantations like Kōloa, where commercial sugar started in 1835, borrowing from Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, Ilocano and Cantonese. Its questions often fall in pitch at the end, a sound you notice within a day. Do not try to speak it. A visitor trying 'howzit, brah' at a Waimea gas station sounds like a caricature, and the clerk will switch to standard English anyway. Learn to understand three expressions: 'pau' means finished, so 'pau hana' is after-work drinks; 'da kine' stands in for any word the speaker cannot recall; and 'broke da mouth' means delicious, which you will hear about the tart, custardy lilikoʻi chiffon pie at Hamura Saimin in Līhuʻe.

Four Hawaiian words do real work on Kauai. Mauka means toward the mountains and makai means toward the sea, so when a Hanalei local giving directions reaches for those two rather than left and right, there is a reason: on an island with one ring road, they are more precise. Kāne (men) and wahine (women) label restroom doors at beach parks and restaurants from Poʻipū to Kapaʻa, and every week they catch out jet-lagged first-timers standing outside with sandy feet. Kamaʻāina means a resident. A 'kamaʻāina rate' on a Kōloa menu board or a tour price list requires a Hawaiʻi ID, so do not ask for it. Mahalo means thank you. The word stamped on Kauai trash bins is a thank-you, not the Hawaiian word for garbage, a mix-up that tour drivers on the Wailua River run hear every week.

Hawaiian is still a first language on the Westside. Families from Niʻihau, the privately owned island about 17 miles off Kauai's west coast, settled in Kekaha and Waimea, and Ke Kula Niʻihau o Kekaha teaches in that dialect. At Ishihara Market in Waimea you might hear it spoken fast and soft, with a 't' where standard Hawaiian has a 'k'. Skip the Hawaiian phrasebook: visitors on Kauai need Hawaiian for reading place names and signs, not for conversation, and the free Ulukau dictionary at wehewehe.org gives the pronunciation of any name on your itinerary, from Haʻena to Kīlauea.