Outside the state, few people know that all Hawaii residents are not Hawaiians. For years, "The Associated Press Stylebook" and libel manual, a guide commonly used by newspapers around the country, said there was no difference.

That has changed.

The AP has informed its member organizations of an update to the stylebook on the use of the term "Hawaiian." From now on, Hawaiians will be used only to describe members of the ethnic group indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands. "Hawaii resident" or "islander" describes anyone who lives in the state.

Previously, "Hawaiians" could be used to describe residents of Hawaii.

Through the work of our diligent ancestors in the 19th-century and their foreign advisers, today's aboriginal Hawaiians by blood, the `Oiwi, are Hawaiian by nationality. In this context, the term Hawaiian does not define an ethnicity or a cultural group. Neither does it define the descendants of the first human settlers in these islands exclusively. Instead, Hawaiian, without an adjective that modifies the meaning of the noun to indicate race or ancestry, simply identifies the citizenry of the country Hawai`i. It is here that historicism and presentism dovetail. The nationality is political. The ethnicity is not. The Hawaiian kingdom's majority population of nationals was and is of `Oiwi descent. From 1842 on the term Hawaiian meant "of the nation of Hawai`i." This included people of European (English, French, German, Swiss) ethnicity and Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) descent who became subjects of the Hawaiian Crown by denization or birth. After Hawai`i became a member of the international community as a recognized nation state, all such individuals were Hawaiian nationals, particularly phrased given the government's structure: Hawaiian kingdom subjects, abbreviated to Hawaiian.