By the 1890s, the largest ethnic population in hawaii was

The original Hawaiians were highly skilled in fishing and farming. By the late 18th century their society had evolved into a complex one with a rigid system of laws set down by chiefs and priests. They worshipped and feared a group of gods not unlike the ancient Greek deities of Mount Olympus in character and power.

The arrival of foreigners to Hawaii began after British Capt. James Cook came upon the islands in 1778. During the ensuing four decades, European and American explorers, adventurers, trappers, and whalers stopped for fresh supplies at the Hawaiian Islands—contact that would have a profound effect on the islanders. Not the least of these effects was the introduction of diseases from both the East and the West against which the islanders, theretofore virtually disease-free, had no natural immunities. Venereal disease, cholera, measles, and tuberculosis all contributed to the decimation of the native peoples, whose population fell from approximately 300,000 to fewer than 40,000 by the 1890s, little more than a century later.

The collapse of the population, coupled with the impact of outside cultures, most likely caused crisis in Hawaiian society and sparked social and political change. Most notably, Hawaiians, led by members of the royal family, overthrew the complex kapu (taboo) system of laws and punishments in 1819. Loss of faith in the old gods, intense curiosity about the ways of people of the United States and Europe, and avid interest in learning to read and write brought about a swift adoption of Christianity on the part of many Hawaiians. The first group of Christian missionaries arrived from the United States in 1820, and by the mid-19th century Hawaii was largely a Christian kingdom, with a small but significant European and American population.

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Since that time the ethnic and religious makeup of Hawaii has undergone dramatic change. As the number of Native Hawaiians declined, other ethnic groups arrived, mainly to work on the plantations. Contract labourers came first from China, then from Japan, the Azores, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Korea. They were joined by immigrants from the U.S. mainland, Europe, and elsewhere in the Pacific. Over the course of two centuries, people from all over the world had settled in Hawaii, creating a multiethnic society. Each group brought its own customs, languages, and religions into the Hawaiian way of life, broadening it far beyond its Polynesian cultural origins. The descendants of these later settlers now far outnumber the descendants of the original Hawaiians. There is also a continuous influx and outflow of military personnel and their dependents as a result of Hawaii’s importance as a base for all branches of the U.S. armed forces.

The two official languages of Hawaii are English and Hawaiian. In the early 1990s the Hawaiian language was all but extinct, spoken by only a handful of Native Hawaiians. However, a program that established Hawaiian-language immersion schools created a new generation of Hawaiian speakers, and instruction in Hawaiian is now offered from kindergarten through the graduate school level. The language also lives on in place-names and street names and in songs. Most Hawaiian residents can also speak what has come to be called Hawaiian Creole English. Commonly referred to as pidgin, Hawaiian Creole English is a dialect of English created by children in the multilingual environment of Hawaiian plantation camps. Hawaiian Creole English has been used increasingly in Hawaiian fiction, poetry, and drama.

With a continued influx of Asian immigrants as well as tourists from Asia, notably from Japan, Hawaii has remained multilingual. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and several major Filipino languages are widely spoken, and it is not uncommon to see signage in these languages. The largest religious groups are Roman Catholics and Protestants. There are, however, small but important groups of Buddhists and of adherents of other Asian religions.