06/29/2026
Mahalo e Larry Kimura and others that helped and continue to grow our language
Fewer than 50 children on Earth still spoke Hawaiian as their first language. Almost every single one of them lived on one tiny private island called Niʻihau.
The man who refused to let it end there turns 80 today.
Larry Kimura was born in Waimea on June 29, 1946. His father came from Hiroshima and spoke Japanese. His mother was Hawaiian, raised in a house that lived and breathed Hawaiian. To their five kids, both of them spoke only English.
That was the deal back then. In 1896, three years after the United States helped overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom, Hawaii made it ILLEGAL to teach school in Hawaiian. Children caught speaking their own language got slapped across the mouth by the teacher.
So a whole generation of parents stopped passing it down. Not because they were ashamed. Because they were protecting their kids from what had been done to them.
Larry grew up around Hawaiian cowboys and a grandmother who still spoke it every day. At Kamehameha boarding school, he signed up for the one Hawaiian language class on offer. By the second week almost everyone had quit. Six students stayed. He was one of them.
He started mailing his letters home written in Hawaiian. His grandmother was stunned. This grandson, this quiet boy, was into Hawaiian, and she never knew.
Then Larry did the math nobody else wanted to do.
The only people who still spoke Hawaiian as their first language were old. He counted maybe 2,000 of them left in the entire island chain, most in their 60s and 70s. And every single year, there were fewer.
So in 1972 he started a radio show and called it Ka Leo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian voice. One by one, he sat the last fluent kupuna down in front of a microphone and recorded them. Not reciting. Just talking. Their stories. Their jokes. Their words for things no dictionary had ever bothered to write down.
He was racing them. He knew it.
They were in their 70s. Then their 80s. Then they began to die.
By the time he finally stopped, Larry Kimura had 525 hours of tape. The largest recording of spoken Hawaiian EVER made. Almost every voice on it is gone now.
He could not keep the speakers alive. So he made sure their voices would outlive them.
But here is what those 525 hours were really for.
In 1983, with fewer than 50 fluent children left in the world, Larry and a small group of teachers built something that sounded insane. A preschool where the only language allowed was the dying one. Three and four-year-olds. Learning to speak from the recorded voices of the dead.
The kupuna on those tapes never met those children. But the children learned to speak from them anyway. Every elder he recorded got to teach one more generation, long after they were gone.
Every family here has the older one who understood every word of Hawaiian but was too afraid to say it out loud. Today their great-grandchildren answer the phone in it.
In 1986 they forced the state to make Hawaiian legal in classrooms again. Now you can go from preschool all the way to a doctorate without ever leaving the language. More than 18,000 people speak it at home. It climbed there from fewer than 50 children.
He says the hardest part was never the grammar. It was convincing people of one quiet thing. There is nothing wrong with being Hawaiian. There is nothing wrong with being who you are.
The kids who left the islands learn it now from a screen, 3,000 miles away. The ones who moved away can still come home to it.
In 2019, when scientists captured the first photograph of a black hole in history, they asked Larry to name it. He called it Pōwehi, the deep and unending source of creation. The language America outlawed in 1896 now names something 55 million light-years from here.
Fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian the year Larry Kimura started. Today there are little kids who correct his grammar.
He turns 80 today, still at his desk, still inventing new Hawaiian words for things that did not exist when he was a boy.
A language does not die when its last speaker does. It dies when the last person stops fighting for it.
He never stopped.
