Language Revitalization Explored in Student Documentary

During the spring of 2018, the UH Hilo Performing Arts department developed a bi-lingual touring production for children. It included three short plays that utilized a Pidgin-speaking narrator (Hawaiʻi Creole English) and Hawaiian-speaking characters. The production involved students at all levels of Hawaiian language ability: from native speakers who learned Hawaiian as their first language, to those who had no prior exposure to the language. The project was a two-fold experiment. The first goal was to see how much new Hawaiian vocabulary the audiences of school children would retain after watching the plays. The second goal was to see how much Hawaiian language the actors would retain through the process of rehearsal and performance. The production, called ʻEkolu, is a small part of the language revitalization efforts in Hawaiʻi. UH Hilo student Zoe Whitney began an Independent Study project documenting the process of putting ʻEkolu together; but she soon began to notice parallels between the language revitalization efforts in Hawaiʻi and similar efforts to save indigenous languages in other parts of the world. When she was accepted into a study-abroad program, Zoe took her research to a global scale. The final product of her efforts is a documentary that examines the use of theatre as a tool in the revitalization efforts for three different indigenous languages: Hawaiian, Sámi, and Yiddish. The results of her year-long study are compiled in her documentary, ʻEkolu: 3 Theatres, 3 Languages, 3 Movements.