Marcel Lutece



Marcel Lutece

Term Paper

History of the English Language

Prof. John Roy

JOHN D ROY 

Hawaiian Pidgin English – from Hawaiian Pidgin to Creole; Social and Political Factors in its Evolution

The evolution of what is commonly called “Hawaiian Pidgin” ( HPC ) has undoubtedly been a thoroughly complex process, still ongoing up to the present. HPC originated from the combination of a pre-existing pidgin ( Hawaiian pidgin ) with at least four other significant language groups ( Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and English, among others ). In the midst of this development, marked by dynamic immigration waves which contoured the newly-forming pidgin, the territory of Hawaii endured an upheaval and overturning of its dominant social and political hierarchy, severely impacting the evolution of the language and making it an increasingly important social and political caste marker, which it had been only in a minor way to this time. What had originated as a form of practical communication in the sugar cane, pineapple and rice fields, primarily of Oahu, soon became a determiner of social class and a political tool for social warfare. Concurrently however, the Hawaiian Pidgin was increasingly viewed as a source of cultural pride for its adherents, even as one’s primary ownership of it threatened to relegate them to the lower rungs of Hawaiian society. The political conflict is still ongoing, and this paper will look at the major points of development of HPC, including important syntactical and phonological identifiers, as well as the significant political and social factors that have shaped this language.

The earliest known period of enduring contact between Hawaii and the West occurred around the turn of the 19th c., when the Hawaiian Islands served as a stopping over point for the trading of furs between China and the U.S. West Coast. A small number of Europeans became settlers on the islands, and small numbers of Hawaiians worked on the ships and interacted with the European crews (( this is cited as one piece of evidence for the theory of diffusion of CEC ( Caribbean English Creole ) components to Hawaii, which will be discussed later )) ( Roberts 3 ). Over the next thirty years, whaling and other trades increased the contact between foreigners and the indigenous Hawaiian population, and a sharing of the Hawaiian and English languages occurred, assisting in the formation of the original Hawaiian Pidgin, which existed prior to the Asian influx and impact on the language ( Ferguson and Heath 83 ). This interaction; however, also brought diseases which decimated the native Hawaiian population from between 200,000 and 1,000,000 in the 1780’s, to 88,000 by 1843 ( Sakoda and Siegel 3 ). A significantly greater influence on the transmission of English into Hawaii was accomplished by the Protestant Missionaries, whose emphasis was spreading the scriptures to indigenous people in their own language. The Protestants created a phonetic alphabet to enable the writing of the spoken Hawaiian language and set up schools to teach reading and writing. By 1839, the bible had been translated into Hawaiian, and most government documents were written in Hawaiian until the mid 1870’s, when English started to become the more prevalent government language ( Ferguson and Heath 83 ). In the 1850’s, rice was already being harvested in Hawaii and shipped to California and the Western states, yet it was at this time that investment was made into sugar cane, hence the need for workers to labor in the fields. It is estimated that between 1850 and 1876, over 2,000 Chinese laborers, mostly Southern Chinese, came to work on Oahu, later to be followed by large numbers of Portuguese and even larger numbers of Japanese and Pilipinos starting in the 1880’s ( Sakoda and Siegel 4,5 ). In the 1850’s the Hawaiians were still ruling the islands and therefore orders were given in Hawaiian. The problem was that both the English-speaking overseers and the Chinese ( and Japanese ) fieldworkers did not understand Hawaiian fluently, thus it can be asserted that the first pidgin was a Pidgin Hawaiian and not a Pidgin English. Roberts, Sakoda and Siegel cite as primary evidence the fact that the largest contribution of vocabulary to Hawaiian Pidgin is from the Hawaiian language, and it was after this initial Hawaiian pidgin was established that English emerged as the lexifier ( re-lexifier ) of Hawaiian Pidgin ( Roberts 9 ) ( Reinecke and Tokimasa 56 ).

Pidgin Hawaiian differed from authentic Hawaiian in several important ways. One change was the deletion of the apostrophe ( called the okina in Hawaiian ). Because of difficulties with pronunciation and an emphasis of practical communication over the stylistic elements of ( to the Chinese, Portuguese, Americans… ) a foreign language difficult to master, words such as Hawai’i became merely Hawaii; Me’le Kali’ki’maka ( Merry Christmas ) became Mele Kalikimaka and etc. In certain cases, the omission of the okina was accompanied by a change in the meaning of the word. The word pi’i mai, which means ‘to climb towards a certain direction’ in Hawaiian, was reduced to mean ‘to come’, and simplified to ‘pii mai’ in the newly formed pidgin ( Sakoda and Siegel 5 ), further signifying the transition from a singular cultural language with developed subtleties of sound and meaning, to a practical integration / borrowing of the simplest forms which would enable basic communication. In the above mentioned cases, it is not clear if the omission of the okina accounted for the change of meaning in these and other Hawaiian words, or if the change in meaning simply accompanied the omission, one having no relationship to the other. In addition, words were borrowed from other languages in the Pidgin Hawaiian, such as the word fish from Engish, except that it was hawaiianized to ‘pihi’; other examples include kau kau ( to eat ) being altered by the Chinese to become ‘chow chow’ ( Reinecke and Tokimasa 57 ).

The general point of alteration from Hawaiian to English language dominance is associated with the year 1875, when the Reciprocity Treaty was signed between Hawaii and the United States. This led to freer trade and an influx of both American population and American investment in Hawaii. The number of Hawaiians had decreased to about 50,000, while the number of English schools increased and American consolidation of power began to emerge ( Sakoda and Siegel 6 ). Shortly after this time period, the evolution of the big five ( trustees who would eventually take control of Hawaii’s banking and agriculture sectors through interlocking directorates ) began to take shape ( Tamura 433 ). In the 1880’s, the numbers of Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese families began to increase, mostly as field workers. By this time; however, the English language was replacing Hawaiian on the plantations, and these new immigrants effectively began the next phase change toward the HPC, by assimilating the previously developed Hawaiian Pidgin, along with English words and phrases. Sakoda and Siegel cite two examples to illustrate this fusion ( English words are underlined ):

Oe no tumach holoholo, hausu stop, mama nana ( ‘you no too-much travel-round, house stop, mother look.’ ), meaning ‘Don’t go out so much. Stay home and take care of your mother.

( Bickerton and Wilson, qtd. by Sakoda and Siegel 7 ).

Mi no pilikia but nuinui hanaha nanuinui kala. ( ‘Me no trouble but plenty work, plenty money.’ ), meaning ‘I’m not troublesome, but I’m making a lot of money.’

( Roberts, qtd. by Sakoda and Siegel 7 )

From these two examples, Sakoda and Siegel elaborate on the emergence of syntactic and grammatical structures which would endure into the modern HPC:

1. ‘too much’, meaning a lot of / very ; this phrase would also come to mean ‘irritating / annoying’ in HPC. ( 7 ) ( ex. ‘He too much; he no stop bodda everybody, eh’, meaning: ‘He’s so annoying that he never stops bothering people.’ This can be used to depict the present or the recent past in modern HPC.

2. ‘no’, representing one of the main negative markers ( not, no, nevah, no mo / more ) which retain their use in HPC. ( 7, 80-84 ) ( Odo 234 ) An example would be: ‘He no mo money, cause he spend ‘em any kine.’ ( He doesn’t have any money, because he spends it any way [ non-selectively] ).

3. In these two examples, the overriding concept of efficiency is evident, as the necessary subjects, verbs, objects and the occasional coordinating conjunction are employed, but nothing extraneous exists beyond conveying the base meaning of the sentences.

From the examples above, it can be observed that the sentence structure and parts of speech were still in flux, though this would gradually change over the next 20 years, first with the increasing standardization of plantation terms, and eventually with the expansion of a more practical standardized language into the general public domain.

An interesting example of a lexical term relating to field work is ‘hapai ko’, a Japanese-Hawaiian compound where ‘hapai’ ( pregnant, in Hawaiian ) and ‘ko’ ( cane, in Japanese ), form the compound meaning ‘to haul or carry a large amount of sugar cane’. The term was later expanded to mean ‘carrying a heavy load’ in everyday usage (Quisquirin*1 ).

*1 – Bryan Quisquirin was interviewed by telephone in order to gain additional accounts of the development of the language. Quisquirin is a member of The Hawaiian Historical Society and The Philipine Historical Society. He has contributed to the tracing of Hawaiian genealogical history by researching church records as far back as the 1700’s.

Even more interesting examples are onomatopoeia compounds, such as chica-chica, referring to walking across a cane field at night when it is very quiet ( the word being the approximation of the sound one makes while doing this ). This term came to mean more generally someone who can be heard walking down a quiet street, who would not normally be heard. The terms ‘widi-widi’ and ‘wa-wa’, respectively, refer to the sounds believed to be made from cane- field workers riding down the flues ( constructed water channels, which were used to transport sugar-cane bundles from higher inland areas to lower elevations as a means of transport ) ( Quisquirin ).

At the turn of the century, several events intersected which led to the establishment of Hawaiian Pidgin English ( HPE ) as an established language. Firstly, there was the emergence of relatively fixed sentence structures among the pidgin speakers, with these forms expanding into the general populations, not merely relegated to the plantations ( as mentioned ). Second, it is noted by Sakoda and Siegel that at this time, the first generation of Japanese children began learning HPE from their classmates to the extent that they spoke this language more than they spoke their native language ( 7 ). Though it is clear that different communities still spoke differing varieties of HPE, depending on what their native language was, the assimilation of this language by the school-aged children would have had a standardizing / leveling effect on the pidgin spoken as a whole. This is one of the reasons Derek Bickerton ( 1981 ) asserts for his theory of Language Bioprogram Hypothesis ( LBH ), versus that of Diffusion, as asserted by Goodman ( 1985 ) and others ( Roberts 1,2,4 ). Bickerton assesses that if these children are learning more of their newly evolving pidgin everyday and therefore distancing themselves from the forms of their parents, how can it be argued that that what was passed down to their parents ( in terms of structure; commonalities with CEC ) are being passed on to them, when their development is divergent from the structures of their parents ( Sebba 176,177 ). Bickerton, as quoted by Singh, states that as opposed to the children learning a polished language from their parents, :

“[In HPE, they ],have, instead, something which may be quite adequate for emergency use, but that which is quite unfit to serve as anyone’s primary tongue; which by reason of its variability, does not present even the little it offers in a form that would permit anyone to learn it ; and which the parent, with the best will in the world, cannot teach, since that parent knows no more of the language than the child ( and will pretty soon know less ). Everywhere else in the world it goes without saying that the parent knows more language than the child; here, if the child is to have an adequate language, he must speedily outstrip the knowledge of the parent.”

( Bickerton, qtd. by Singh – 55 ).

Singh then concludes Bickerton’s view by asserting: “They therefore turned the insufficient linguistic input they received into a fully-fledged language ( a creole ), by ‘running it through’ an innate system universal to us all: the language bio-program.” (55).

Several prominent features of HPE ( from the first decade of the twentieth century ) which have endured into HCE include the use of ‘mo’’ as an intensifier ( mo’ fast = faster; mo’ good = better ), no mo’ = there isn’t any ( No mo’ food in da fridge, a? = There isn’t any more food in the fridge, is there? ), no can = can’t; and ‘like’ expressing want, as in ‘He like go, but she no gon let um’.’,where ‘no gon = not going to, and ‘um’ can represent the third person conjugation in the singular ( he, she, it, ) and ‘them’. ( Sakoda and Siegel 7, 80-84 ). These very important forms have remained constant up to the present time in the more basilectic side of the creolization continuum of Hawaii

When the second generation of Portuguese and Chinese began to appear ( remember that first generation Japanese corresponds roughly to second generation Chinese and Portuguese due to the approximate 20 year lapse in mass immigration ). Since the parents of this had learned HPE as children, this was now their first language which they taught to their children in a relatively stable form, hence rendering HPE a Creole for the first time ( Tamura 434 ). It is assessed that sometime between 1910 and 1920 was approximately when this official establishment took place. It was approximately a decade later when statistics show that ‘Pidgin English’, or HPC, became the language spoken by a majority of Hawaiians ( Roberts ).

It is at this point possible then, to view the main aspects of Hawaiian Pidgin Creole in their developed form, although it would be erroneous to posit that this form is final, as the Creole is fluid and changing until the modern day. Sakoda and Seigel cite several enduring features which differentiate the modern Creole from its predecessor, namely that “the Creole did not have variation in pronunciation that was caused by influences from other languages in the pidgin.” ( 11). Three distinct grammatical features are: the use of ‘never’ or ‘nevah’ to indicate something had not happened yet ( He never wen go ride da bike ); the word ‘stay’ indicating continuous action ( She stay at da mall, or he stay grinding ( eating ) at Boy’s house ), and ‘for’ as a replacement for ‘to’ ( ‘He go for punch ‘em, and da buggah wen run’ = ‘He went to punch the other guy, and / but the other guy ran away ). As mentioned previously, two of the above three sentences also illustrate the word ‘wen’ used as an auxiliary participle to render to present verb in the past tense. Given the Chinese system of inflexion where the verb is always in the present tense, one could assess that this form may have developed from this or a similar system in the development of the Creole.

In looking at the contributions of the major groups to the vocabulary of HPC, it seems not so much a question of who was more prevalent in numbers or active / aggressive in impacting the language formation from the plantations of Hawaii, but who happened to be there at the right time. As Sakoda and Siegel explain “Even though the Japanese were by far the largest immigrant group, their language appears to have had little effect on the structure of pidgin” ( 13 ). The authors above quote Reinecke as asserting “The first large immigration of Japanese did not occur until 1888, when the Hawaiian, Chinese and Portuguese between them had pretty well fixed the form of the “pidgin” [ English] spoken on plantations.” (13). The Hawaiians are credited with contributing the greatest number of words and conventions to HPC, with the Chinese and Portuguese also adding significantly (( though Reinecke seems to disagree ( Reinecke and Tomasa 57 ), placing the Japanese second for their enduring food nomenclature and crediting the Chinese with only having added two items [ ‘paikee’ –chinese man and ‘chow chow’ – to eat ] to the Creole )), the Japanese are credited with having developed the sentence structure PP-S-V, where the verb is placed at the end of the sentence where a subject, verb and prepositional phrase exist ( Quisquirin ). He maintains that as early as 1868, although the Japanese were present on Hawaiian plantations in relatively small numbers, their language was the most inflexible of any other group ( their verbs placed at the ending of sentences ), with the present Chinese structure much like Latin with respect to verb placement ( the verb and other parts of speech can be interchanged and the meaning of the sentence does not ). Therefore, in order to create swift and practical communication, the structure was facilitated as described above. Modern sentences such as: ‘Aye, to the mall, you guys like go?’ and ‘At Jill’s house tomorrow night, wat time we gon eat?’ are constructions created through Japanese language sentence structure.

The full story of Hawaiian Pidgin Creole cannot be told without detailing the political forces which set the Hawaiian people at odds with their language, and in ambivalent and proud support of it at the same time. Eileen Tamura narrates that:

“Arthur L. Dean, former president of the University of Hawai’i and then vice-president of the sugar company Alexander and Baldwin and chairman of the Territorial Board of Education, admitted in 1936 that the establishment of Standard schools was a way to separate children of different cultural and economic groups” ( 437 ).

Coinciding with the 1920’s, when HPC had become the most prevalent spoken language in the islands, the interlocking directorate known as “the big five”, who controlled the banking, agriculture and political functions of Hawaii, set in motion a series of laws intended to create an effective caste system benefiting those who were favored ( white Europeans ) and creating an underclass of those who were not, namely immigrants and native Hawaiians. The vehicle employed to accomplish this was the barrier of Standard American English ( Tamura 433,434,435 ).

Though the European population in Hawaii was only 8% in 1920 ( Tamura 433 ), the most powerful of them had managed to orchestrate the overthrow of Queen Lilioukalani in 1893, then lobbied for annexation to the United States. It was through this status of Hawaii as a US territory that the “big five” was able to run their empire on the backs of the unskilled immigrant laborers. In 1920, a massive sugar plantation strike over low wages and poor working conditions was fervently supported by the Japanese newspapers, as well as the Japanese and other teachers in the public school system. According to Tamura, the directorate and others feared that they would lose their power as Japanese currently comprised 42% of the Hawaiian population and 55% of the plantation workers. Thus the hostilities provided a catalyst for a series of actions against both the ‘foreign language’ of HPC in the Hawaii Public School System and all non-English newspapers throughout the islands ( 440 ).

Coinciding with and playing upon anti-foreign sentiment which had developed on the mainland during WW I, a bill was introduced in 1921 which would have required all foreign newspapers to publish English translations of anything which they printed. The intent was to put all non-English newspapers out of commission, as the costs of a double printing would have been too high for the publishers to continue. Because this law would have impacted Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and all religious newspapers, there was adequate public opposition to effectively countermand the implementation of this law ( Tamura 441 ). The Public School System; however, was not as fortunate. Starting in 1920, Tamura details how efforts to dismiss and subjugate speakers of HPC ( both teachers and students ) would continue to the modern era. By the mid-1920’s, oral English examinations were given as a requirement for aspiring teachers to graduate from Normal school. Within two years of this, Normal schools began testing students in oral SAE and openly rejecting those who failed to pass the tests. What was especially crippling is that students who did not meet SAE expectations were not allowed to go to school, effectively creating an expanding underclass of plantation workers and other manual laborers on the basis of their imperfect English. There were also outright attempts to ban any schools which did not teach SAE. Though these laws were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1927 ( Tamura 435-437 ).

Starting in 1924, special SAE only schools were created in Honolulu and one each on the other islands, affording safe haven for European parents who “feared their children would learn Hawai’i Creole English if sent to regular public schools” ( Tamura, 436 ). For the remainder of the century, the bias expressed against HPC would ebb and flow with the social currents of the mainland. Conditions were particularly tough during and after World War II, but then eased with the liberalism that swept the Western world in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In 1987, there was another attempt to legislate the banning of HPC from the schools, coinciding with the “English only movement in the Western US during this time; though once again this attempt was met with strong opposition, and a ceremonial weaker law urging the teaching of SAE was passed ( 450 ).

It is in this wide-ranging context that Tamura analyzes the effect of this bias on the speakers of the language itself. The clear equation of SAE with success and HPC as a second class language created an elitist attitude which was adopted by ‘locals’ and European Hawaiians alike by the middle of the century. Though the SAE only Standard schools were eventually closed in 1960, attendees ( of any ancestry ) overwhelmingly associated themselves with superiority over the general population, as reflected in a survey taken in 1945 ( Tamura, 437 ). In this way, the politicization of language has created both an acrolectic and a basilectic effect on the Creole continuum. Certain students will strive to perfect their SAE in the hopes of achieving success, but in the process, isolate themselves from their communities of origin. The perception that someone has ‘turned their back’ on their heritage and ancestry, especially in Hawaii, is a powerful binding mechanism which has pulled many people in the opposite direction, shunning SAE as a tool of the oppressor and oppressive class. This dichotomy is observed to the present day, with the general population of downtown Honolulu, Kaneohe, and Wailua ( North Shore – east; very wealthy ) speaking almost perfect English ( though with characteristic local intonation and slight accent, representing the acrolect of doctors, lawyers and government officials and affiliates ). On the North Shore East and Western coast of Oahu; however ( Kahuku, Hauula Waianae, Nanakuli…), you still gon fin’ people who tok li’ dat, an if you try come hybolic wit’dem’, dey gon tell you, eh fo sur you like beef, eh ( You’ll still find people who speak like that [ as illustrated ], and if you become conceited / arrogant with them [ over the superiority of your speech ], they’ll become offended and want to fight with you ). On the island of Oahu, the mesolect would be represented by the southern areas ( Waipahu, Pearl City, Aiea, and inland around Millilani ( see table II map ). The Creole also necessarily corresponds to income level, with the wealthiest levels representing the extreme acrolect and the poorest areas , the extreme basilect. Given the politics which have been described, this is not so much a result of a naturally occurring system of stratification, but an unfortunately willful and prevalent actions which seem to exist within most Creoles throughout the world.

Table 1 – Selected HPC Vocabulary

1. English words whose meanings / parts of speech have changed in HPC:

a. lawnmower – from a noun to a verb ( ex. I gon lawnmower da grass. )

b. panty – a sissy / weakling – ( ex. Eh, even da wahines can beat ‘em up; he one real panty, eh. ).

c. Shame – noun to verb (ex. When you wen tell his mada, you wen go shame him ).

d. Off – used as a verb (ex. Aye, you like off da light so we can sleep? ).

2. English words where form and sometimes meaning have changed:

a. cockaroach ( noun to verb ) – to steal or sneak away with ( ex. -- You buggah, you wen go cockaroach my wallet, eh. ).

b. brah – brother

c. mento – psychologically disturbed

d. nuff – enough

e. laters – ‘see you later’ ( Eh, laters brah, I gone ).

3. Compounds derived from English, though not found in Standard English

a. bolohead – bald ( ‘bolo’=bald + head )

b. chicken skin – goosebumps

c. stink eye – dirty / angry look

d. talk story – relax and talk casually

4. Selected vocabulary from contributing languages other than English:

a. akamai – smart ( Hawaiian )

b. keiki – a child ( Hawaiian )

c. ohana – family ( Hawaiian )

d. pau – finished ( Hawaiian )

e. chi-chi’s – breasts ( Japanese )

f. daikon – white radish ( Japanese )

g. bento – box lunch ( Japanese )

h. obake – ghost ( Japanese )

i. babooz – idiot; dolt ( Portuguese )

j. lavalava – a wrap / sarong ( Samoan )

k. malassada – a sweet / sugared doughnut dessert ( Portuguese )

l. paikee – Chinese man ( Chinese )

m. li hing mui – salty / tangy dried fruit ( Chinese )

5. Blended Compounds – made up of English and other languages:

a. onolicious – delicious . tasty ( Hawaiian: ‘ono’ ( tasty ) + delicious )

b. hele on – move on / hurry up ( Hawaiian: ‘hele’ ( to go, move ) + on )

c. poi dog – mixed breed dog ( Hawaiian: ‘poi’ ( pounded taro root ) + dog )

d. hulihuli chicken – chicken roasted while turning on a spit ( Hawaiian: huli = to turn ( note the double word acting as an intensifier ).

* ( All word derivations and meanings taken from Sakoda and Siegel; Odo, and Reinecke and Tokimasa ).

Table II – Map of Oahu

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Works Cited

Ferguson, Charles, and Shirley B. Heath, Eds. Language In The USA. England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Odo, Carol. “English Patterns in Hawaii” American Speech, Vol. 45, No. 3 / 4. Autumn – Winter, 1970: pp.234-239.

Quisquirin, Bryan. Personal interview. 18. May 2007.

Reinecke, John, and Aiko Tokimasa. “The English Dialect of Hawaii” American Speech, Vol. 9, No. 1. Feb. 1934. pp. 48-58.

Roberts, Sarah, “The Role of Diffusion in the Genesis of Hawaiian Creole” Language, Vol.74, No. 1. March 1998. pp.1-39.

Sakoda, Kent, and Jeff Siegel, Pidgin Grammar – An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawai’i. Hawaii, Bess Press , Inc. 2003.

Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages Pidgins And Creoles. Great Britain. Antony Rowe Ltd. 1997.

Singh, Ishtla. Pidgins and Creoles An Introduction. Great Britain. Arnold Pub. 2000.

Tamura, Eileen. “Power, Status, and Hawai’i Creole English: An Example of Linguistic Intolerance in American History” The Pacific Historical Review Vol.65, No. 3. August 1996. pp. 431-454.

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