[1] These fiction and nonfiction narratives were exclusively oral at first, but began to be disseminated through writing in the 1800s after the development of the written Hawaiian language.
The word moʻolelo is a compound, formed from moʻo (a series or succession) and ʻōlelo (spoken language).
Features of traditional moʻolelo include kaona[3] (a Hawaiian rhetorical device involving allusion, puns, and metaphor,[4] translated as "underlying meaning") and the use of cultural imagery such as kalo.
This system was used by the native Hawaiians to preserve more oral literature in native-language writing than almost any other colonized indigenous people.
This caused several generations of Native Hawaiians to grow up without knowledge of the language, making them unable to read moʻolelo that had not been translated into English.