At what point does a language cease being a living thing? When does it become an endangered species and then drift into extinction, a word-fossil studied only by scholars?

This is the sort of thing Ku Kahakalau worries about.

One Hawaiian translation of her first name is "standing upright." A founder of the Native Hawaiian Charter School Alliance and creator of the Kanu o ka ‘Aina Learning ‘Ohana program in Wai­mea, which mixes Hawaii cultural education with community and family outreach, "standing upright" is pretty accurate.

An internationally acknowledged expert in language education, Kahakalau is someone other educators pay attention to. And when they do, they have a good time.

"Ku! She’s a fire starter!" marveled Puakea Nogelmeier of the University of Hawaii’s Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language. "She’s able to initiate such energy in education and culture and language, and I totally admire both her and her product. She gets people enthused and on board."

The Learning ‘Ohana program is, by all accounts, a success, yet Kahakalau still frets. A passionate and driven scholar of indigenous education programs — she’s off to a conference in Jamaica this week to deliver a paper on the subject — she believes that cultural education is often delivered piecemeal and disjointed.

"There’s so much emphasis on words and grammar, on the ‘proper’ ways of putting the words together, that basic communication gets lost," she said. "Why does anyone learn another language? For pleasure, if you’re going to be traveling there, or for business. They are languages for getting by. Either way, you get very little background on the culture the language grew out of, when they’re inseparable.

"You want to hear Hawaiian? You’re usually advised to go to a tourist luau. Hawaiian-language instruction is geared toward helping visitors pronounce ‘mahalo’ correctly. We need to create places where Hawaiian is not only spoken, but used."

Growing up in Europe as the daughter of a jazz musician who played bass for a German big band, Kahakalau (whose sister is singer Robi Kahakalau) did not learn Hawaiian until her late teens, at the dawn of the "Hawaiian Renaissance."

Three decades later, she said, only a small percentage of Hawaiians can speak the language.

At one point Hawaiians were the most literate people on the planet; then, as Hawaii was absorbed into American culture, children were mainstreamed into English. Hawaiian began to make a comeback as a result of the cultural revival, and for a time Hawaiian immersion programs and language kupuna became a fixture in local schools.

But education-funding cutbacks and federal basic-learning requirements have put a damper on Hawaiian-language learning, according to Kahakalau.

She said it’s a myth in the United States that learning a language is hard. It’s not if it’s part of your life. "In Hawaii those who learn the language then know who they are, as Hawaiians and citizens," she said. "It benefits everybody when lives are in balance."

Kahakalau is working with Web designers to begin online implementation of her language-teaching concepts. They are awaiting results of grant proposals, but even if no money is forthcoming, Kahakalau said, they’ll press forward. It’s that important to her.

"We have to create programs that teach," she said. "The Internet, YouTube — every family has someone who’s tech-savvy. Usually the kids! Use games that are interactive, and you learn by playing the game, and you win by playing the game."

The Web program title is "Ku-A-Kanaka," and it translates roughly as "standing up as a Hawaiian." Sounds about right.