What is Luana in Hawaiian?
Luana is Luana in Hawaiian, said loo-AH-nah. This is a recorded form rather than an invented one: it is how the name was written in Hawaiian-language newspapers, church records, and family Bibles from the 1800s onward.
How Luana became Luana
When the first Hawaiian alphabet was printed in 1826 it was fixed at thirteen letters, the five vowels and h, k, l, m, n, p, w, plus the ʻokina. Every foreign name had to be written with those letters and no others, so Hawaiians wrote what they heard, swapping each missing sound for the nearest one the language had.
Luana came through untouched. Every letter in it is already a Hawaiian letter, so there was nothing to swap and nothing to add, which is why the English and Hawaiian spellings match.
Luana as a Hawaiian name
Luana is not only a borrowed spelling. It reads as Hawaiian in its own right, meaning “content, relaxed, to enjoy oneself”, and it is given as a girl's name in Hawaiʻi today. Its own page has the full meaning, the word it is built from, and names that go with it.
How to say Luana
Say it loo-AH-nah. Hawaiian vowels never change value: a is “ah”, e is “eh”, i is “ee”, o is “oh”, u is “oo”. Every vowel is sounded, so there are as many syllables as there are vowels or vowel pairs. The pronunciation guide covers the whole system.