WI: Spanish Hawaii

[Angel Blaise]

From a thread about Spanish Hawaii:

Interesting to speculate how a Spanish Hawaii would have evolved. I's reasonable to imagine the Hawaiian monarchy would have been supplanted by Spanish colonial administration of some kind, and local cultures sublimated into some sort of mixed spanish-native catholic hodge-podge like the Phillipines. Spanish ownership of Hawaii may have continued into the late 1800's. If we don't butterfly away the Spanish-American War, it would be very reasonable to assume the US would seize the islands. I suspect might would not lead to a statehood track, because there would not be the local anglo planters to form a ready-made american political elite. Rather, Hawaii might be treated as an essentially much more "foreign" place more like Cuba, the Phillipines, or Guam - some sort of protectorate with permanent leases on Pearl Harbor, perhap ultimately independence or permanent territorial status.

So, now, let's go with a POD, altough it may seem very unlikely.
Let's say in the late 1600's While Going from Acapulco to Manilla, some of the Manilla galleons are blown off Course, and stumble across the Islands.

So if something like this were to happen, how would it affect history? (As for the POD, 17th century is fine, but 16th century would work too if it's at all plausible.)

Would Hawaii retain Spanish as a spoken language, a Spanish-Hawaiian Creole, or perhaps something like a Hawaiian version of Chamorro? If a Creole or Chamorro-like language, how would it look? How would the phonologies of the Spanish of the time and Hawaiian interact? Would voiced consonants merge with their voiceless counterparts or remain distinct? Would sounds like /s/ and ch /tʃ/ make it into the language? Might /tʃ/ become /ts/ as it did in Chamorro? Would /ʃ/ (and /ʒ/ if it was still distinct at the time) become /x/ or /h/ as it did in the rest of the Spanish speaking world, or could it be preserved?

How close to its modern self did Hawaiian look at the time? If we compare Hawaiian to Proto-Polynesian, might some of the changes Hawaiian underwent also affect any Spanish words in the Creole/Chamorro-like language? For example, might Spanish /t/ and /k/ merge, or could /k/ become a glottal stop /ʔ/ as it did in Hawaiian? (One idea is to have /k/ become /ʔ/ while /t/ becomes /k/, then have the voiced stops devoice, making /d/ into /t/, thus recreating the distinction between /t/ and /k/ while also having /ʔ/.)

Assuming minimum butterflies, how different would the world turn out with a (temporarily) Spanish Hawaii? What would this world's Hawaii look like in the current day? Might English become an official language in the islands alongside the Creole and Hawaiian due to American (or maybe British) influence? Could the same standards of living as OTL Hawaii be reached given this alternate history?

 

[ronaldo]

I would assume that we would not have Mexican-American war or Spanish-American war so after the independence of Mexico, Mexico became a power and if it established the Mexican Hawaii

 

[Captain Jack]

I would assume that we would not have Mexican-American war or Spanish-American war so after the independence of Mexico, Mexico became a power and if it established the Mexican Hawaii

It seems unlikley that Mexico would retain rule over Hawaii post-independence. In political terms, Hawaii will probably be retained under Spanish rule after the loss of the American colonies much as the Philippines were. If nothing else, Mexico has more important internal problems what with figuring out a workable for of goverment, dealing with conflicts between Liberals and Conservatives, between rival caudilos, and guarding against Spanish attacks from Cuba.

As for the linguistic aspect, I'm afraid I only have a pretty basic edcation in linguistics so I can't be of much help there.

 

[Angel Blaise]

I wonder what would happen to consonant clusters with L or R as the second element? Clusters with L swapped out their L for an I /j/ in Italian, and that is the theory as to how they became ll in Spanish and ch in Portuguese as well, but these changes happened long before this time period. Is it impossible to assume L could become /j/ again? Or would L becoming /w/ be more likely? What would R become? Or would both simply be dropped? Perhaps vowels would be inserted to break up the clusters? I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, and also on less linguistic, more general effects this timeline would have on the world.