Pidgin Hawaiian (or Hawaii Plantation Pidgin) is a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from s ...

spoken in

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only stat ...

, which draws most of its

vocabulary A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...

from the

Hawaiian language Hawaiian (', ) is a Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language o ...

and could have been influenced by other

s of the

Pacific The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

region, such as

Maritime Polynesian Pidgin Maritime Polynesian Pidgin was a Polynesian-based pidgin that was the main contact language for European exploratory and whaling expeditions to the Pacific before the establishment of pidgin English Pidgin English is a non-specific name used ...

. Emerging in the mid-nineteenth century, it was spoken mainly by

immigrants Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...

to Hawaii, and mostly died out in the early twentieth century, but is still spoken in some communities, especially on the Big Island. Like all pidgins, Pidgin Hawaiian was a fairly rudimentary language, used for immediate communicative purposes by people of diverse language backgrounds, but who were mainly from

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, south-eastern region of Asia, consistin ...

countries such as the

Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...

and

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. As Hawaiian was the main language of the islands in the nineteenth century, most words came from this

Polynesia Polynesia () "many" and νῆσος () "island"), to, Polinisia; mi, Porinihia; haw, Polenekia; fj, Polinisia; sm, Polenisia; rar, Porinetia; ty, Pōrīnetia; tvl, Polenisia; tkl, Polenihia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of ...

n language, though many others contributed to its formation. In the 1890s and afterwards, the increased spread of

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

favoured the use of an English-based pidgin instead, which, once nativized as the

first language A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongu ...

of children, developed into a creole which today is misleadingly called

Hawaiian Pidgin Hawaiian Pidgin (alternately, Hawaiʻi Creole English or HCE, known locally as Pidgin) is an English-based creole language spoken in Hawaiʻi. An estimated 600,000 residents of Hawaii speak Hawaiian Pidgin natively and 400,000 speak it as a seco ...

. This variety has also been influenced by Pidgin Hawaiian; for example in its use of the

grammatical In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular variety (linguistics), speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the go ...

marker ''pau''. ''Henry kokoe pau paina, wau hele on'' (Pidgin Hawaiian) 'After Henry had eaten dinner, I went.' ''Jesus pau teach all dis kine story''. (Hawaiian Creole)'' Da Jesus Book'' (2000: 43), quoted in Siegel (2008: 81). 'Jesus finished teaching all these kinds of stories.'

Footnotes

References

* Hawaiian language Hawaiian {{CPacific-lang-stub

See also

Footnotes

References