Do You Speak Hawaiian English?

Have you ever heard about Hawaiian English or Hawaiian Creole English? Have you ever gone there? Feeling excited after watching VOA’s coverage about the culture in Hawaii, especially their own language, I start doing a little library research from books and scholarly journals about it. Hawaiian English is spoken by over 600,000 people in the present time from more than a million population on the island. The history from pidgin into creole, the development, and the existence are written based on researches have been done by several scholars.

The Hawai’i Creole English(HCE) is developed through the era of war, slavery, immigration, and plantation in many parts of the world. Many Europeans settle colonies to evolve plantations for crops. Under these conditions, pidgins and creoles are used as the communication tools between local people and colonists as well as immigrants from different nations. Sometimes it is used for specific purposes, for political and negotiation settings. The need of communication instrument leads to the birth of pidgin in Hawaii at that time and spreads the variety of languages from immigrants.

Many linguists realize that the phenomenon of pidgins and creoles are not considered as the broken or wrong versions of languages. They believe that they are the new languages and not to be misunderstood about their identity.

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The creolization of Hawaiian pidgin creates the fascinating zone of the research. Since HCE is still alive, many possibilities can happen in the middle of the language spread around the world. HCE have its own sounds, vocabularies, and grammar rules which make it unique and be the symbol of Hawaiian culture although they are formed from different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds

Hawaii, located thousand miles southwest of California, has a great society and communal land system. In the beginning era of plantation, they speak the language in ethnic groups in mixed urban areas. Although it is usually called as Pidgin, the mixture of English, European and Asian languages, and also local languages make this pidgin a main symbol of the culture in Hawaii. Hawaiian people are proud to speak HCE in their daily life, while the lexifier of HCE is mainly English. The involvements of other languages are also included such as Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, etc. Normally, this is the frequently spoken language among people on the islands. People there speak Hawaiian creole in informal ocassions, to their family and friends, in neighborhood conversations. However, English and HCE are the official languages in Hawaiian formal schools and local goverment as the medium of formal instruction and communications

The development of Hawaiian pidgin starts in the eighteenth century when the pidgin comes to English in schools and decreases in gradual replacement of plantation era. They are treated as separate languages. Increases in immigration and Intermarriage with other races also influence the transformation of Hawaiian pidgin into a creole since they speak English only in formal occasions. Hawaiian children grow up with the ability to speak Hawaiian pidgin or HCE as their first language.

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The fundamental characteristic of HCE can be sighted from its pronunciation and grammar. In HCE, there is no [th] sounds. HCE substitutes it with [t] or [d] sounds. The application of non-rhotic sound is also available in HCE. For example, the word ‘think and ‘father’ are pronounced as tink and fada. The word ‘car’ and ‘letter’ are pronounced as kah and letta. From the grammatical aspect, HCE uses wen (went) in front of the verb to express past tense. Vocabularies such as aloha (hello), mahalo (thank you), and ukulele (small four-stringed guitar) are common for us recently.

In the surrounding of the negative issues and social paradigms, however, HCE develops from time to time. Hawaiian people will say “mahalofor not smoking” instead of “thank you for not smoking”. Public announcement, TV shows, radio shows, advertisements, even popular books and literatures are also written in HCE there nowadays. HCE becomes the identity of Hawaiian people and they promote it to everybody who visits Hawaii. Everybody who arrives there can realize how rich the Hawaiian culture is and get a great inspiration about how to keep our culture alive, especially in Indonesia.This is only a small part of my research paper and the conclusion will be drawn later on. I hope I can go there someday to observe further, or maybe learn Hawaiian English in the future.

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Description of Terms

Pidgin: A  simplified form of a language, used for communication between people in a society.

Creole: A language developed from pidgin and comes into the existence.

Non-rhotic: When 'r' in the end of a word is not pronounced.

References

Drager, K. (2012). Pidgin and Hawai'i English: An Overview. International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication , 1, 61-73.

Goodman, M. (1999). On the Origin of Hawaiian Creole English: A Rejoinder to Roberts. Language , 72 (2), 347-349.

Holm, J. (2004). An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mesthrie, R, Swann, J, Leap, W.L. (2000). Introducing Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ohama, M.L, Gotay, CC, Pagano, I.S, Boles , L, Craven, D.O. (2000). Evaluations of Hawaii Creole English and Standard English. Journal of Language and Social Psychology (19), 357-377.

Tsuzaki, S. (1968). Common Hawaiian Words and Phrases Used in English. Journal of English Linguistics (2), 78-85.