Speech rhythm

The combination of full vowels rather than schwa and secondary stress in nonprimary-stressed syllables means that syllables in Hawai‘i Creole tend to have more equal prominence in terms of loudness and duration than syllables in English. There is also greater stress than in English on function words, such as articles, prepositions, modals, and preverbal tense and aspect markers. Therefore, Hawai‘i Creole is usually classified as a syllable-timed language, rather than a stress-timed language such as English (Vanderslice and Pierson 1967).

At the same time, syllables or words may be extended or drawled for emphasis, as in (7):