What is the sound of silence?
That’s the question that linguistics researchers set out to answer in a new study of the Hawaiian language, or ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.
They wondered: how do fluent speakers pronounce the ʻokina when it comes at the beginning of a word?
Two of the scientists from New York University spoke with HPR's Maddie Bender about the new research: Lisa Davidson is a professor, and Kevin Roon is a research scientist.
Davidson studies ʻokina, also known as a glottal stop. Unlike most sounds, it's not made with the tongue, lips, or teeth. Rather, your vocal folds create the pause in a phrase like “uh oh.”
She told HPR that when looking at today's speakers of the revitalized language, there is likely to be an effect from the community.
“We were wondering how sounds that are unique to ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi are produced and whether they are affected by English, by what we might assume would be coming from English versus what is unique to the language, and that was the point of this particular study,” Davidson said.
She added that they could not find any research in any other languages on the sound of the glottal stop or the ʻokina as a consonant at the beginning of a word.
Roon explained that since you can't really talk about the sound of the glottal stop, they examined the effects on the vowel that follows.
"We're just looking at how the acoustics of the first vowel differ in words and utterances that start with ʻokina and those that don't,” he said. The researchers found the sound to be vulnerable because it is subtle.
"It's very hard for, say, speakers of English to distinguish these, especially the beginning of an utterance when it does or doesn't start with ʻokina," Roon said. "So if that's also true for the Hawaiian speakers, then you would think quite possibly that it's too hard to tell the difference, and they don't bother, but they do. We actually found quite a robust difference across the two kinds of utterances.”
The pair's study focuses on the perception of words that begin with an ʻokina or not. Their hypothesis supports that speakers will be able to tell the difference between them.
“This will also hopefully give us a better sense of what the really important aspects, acoustic properties of the utterances are, and that's something that's very easy to look at,” Roon said. “If somebody's trying to learn ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, and they can record themselves speaking, and they can look at what they're doing. If they're having particular trouble with it, then there's a very quantitative way to look at whether what you're doing is closer or further away from what the target is."
Davidson hopes that part of their project can be utilized to help build resources for those who want to learn more about the sound structure of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.
This story aired on The Conversation on May 28, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
